This morning I covered a lot of ground riding around the urban core of Springfield and taking pictures for a class project. Not a class I’m teaching. A class I’m taking (PLN271). I’m an “inputter” (i.e. my primary strength is collecting information), and I have always enjoyed being a college student. The project is about [...]
Want to see a sneer of disgust cross the face of your average, suburban Springfieldian? Just mention anything European. I’ve been accused — in public meetings even — of wanting to force Americans to live like Europeans. And “like Europeans” is always spoken in derision by the folks who accuse me. Well, their accusations are [...]
In my last installment of this series I said we’d need to “build it first” in order to attract people downtown (and to the urban core) to shop, play, learn, and live. Today I saw something like this idea in action. We have a new downtown market at the most prominent intersection — Walnut and South [...]
I’ve mentioned the coming improvements to the Springfield bicycle route system that will be paid for with the CIP tax. The improvements include route number signs and sharrows. The City also has plans for a new project called The Link — an exciting plan to link existing and new greenway trails into a coherent transportation [...]
I swear I’m not making this up. The following is a snippet of conversation I heard at the Mudshouse. The interlocutors were high school kids: Kid 1: “There’s just too much sprawl here.” Kid 2: “Yeah, not enough density.” Kid 3: “It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to live here anyway.” How do we make [...]
Yesterday’s transportation committee meeting for the new city/OTO strategic plan focused on writing a vision statement. I’ve done this kind of work before, and it is usually painful (partly because I’ve usually done vision writing stuff with fellow academics). But yesterday’s exercise was remarkably invigorating and productive. We enjoy a great deal of consensus on [...]
Much has been written about the health benefits of burning calories instead of carbon to transport ourselves. This also happens to be one of the important components to Blue Zones — areas of the world in which people live longer, healthier lives. The premise of Blue Zones is: identify the optimal lifestyle of longevity and [...]
Image via Wikipedia One of the participants at the last transportation committee meeting tried to patiently explain to me that the reason people want to move to southwest Missouri is to have that house-on-three-acres lifestyle. This is part of what explains why Christian County is growing so fast. The towns of Nixa and Ozark offer [...]
We spent much of our time in vision exercises during the strategic plan transportation committee meeting yesterday. Our goal was to imagine what role transportation should play in creating the kind of community we want to live in by 2035 (when I’ll be 78 years old). We did an overall visioning exercise and a series [...]
Dr. Donald Shoup wrote a book called The High Cost of Free Parking in which he argued that too many American cities just give away their most valuable real estate in the form of free parking spaces. The usual cry from business owners in response is: “But we’ll drive away customers if we charge for [...]
Chestnut Expressway cuts east-west through the middle of Springfield’s urban core as I’m defining it. It is a 4-lane, 40-mph loop for I-44. It’s very well designed to move cars and trucks across Springfield giving these vehicles easy access to the urban core — especially downtown, OTC, MSU, and Drury. And that’s the problem with [...]
I’ve just started reading an interesting book by David Owen entitled Green Metropolis. I discovered it on this list of the top ten urban planning/design books published in 2009. (Note that David Byrne’s book tops the list.) The premise of Owen’s book is that dense, urban living is greener living. A big part of the [...]
I’m on board with the Google Springfield thing. Join the Facebook page! Technorati Tags: urban design, urban development
Found on (SF) Streets Blog: LaHood mentions “livable communities,” which I understand to include densely-populated urban areas with mixed-use development where walking, bicycling, and public transportation is the norm. See the beginning of my urban challenge series below. Technorati Tags: bicycle advocacy, bicycle politics, cycling, sustainability, urban design, urban development
“What is striking about biking is not that it solves any particular problem but, instead, that is it part of the solution to several.” — J. Harry Wray We have several problems in Springfield. You can begin to survey our problems — or challenges — by reading Springfield’s Competitive Assessment. Another snapshot of our community [...]
