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Engineering Safer Drivers
Hat tip to reader Anne McLaughlin who forwards a couple of links about things that make streets safer by influencing driver behavior. We’ve discussed here before the interesting fact that serious bicycle accidents have remained relatively constant here in Portland at the same time that the amount of cycling is increasing sharply. This study suggests…
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Vancouver: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
This morning’s Tribune has a summary of last week’s Metro-sponsored trip to Vancouver, B.C. The article highlights a lot of Vancouver’s achievements, but there’s one bit of ugly that hasn’t been remarked on. Traffic speeds. In the neighborhood business districts we visited the speeds were routinely 50kph (30mph) and the streets were generally engineered so…
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Festival Streets
There’s a nice piece in the Daily Journal of Commerce today about the improvements to 3rd and 4th Avenues. One highlight is the “festival street” design: But the gems of the project are the Northwest Davis and Flanders “festival streets,” designed and detailed by project urban designer Lloyd Lindley. The streets have no curbs -granite…
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Where You Put the Cars Helps
I’m in Vancouver, B.C. today with a group from Metro studying how they have made their regional centers work. They’ve achieved a lot more density than we have in their centers. Here’s a streetscape photo from one of their centers, a place roughly equivalent to Beaverton or Gresham. You can see that there’s a lot…
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Sidewalk (Dis)Order
Aggressive panhandling and other ‘sidewalk fear-factor behaviors’ have been brought up on this site before. Gordon Price just posted an interesting perspective on the experience in Vancouver on his Price Tags blog. Here’s an excerpt: What was happening in the West End was a failure of government to maintain social order. And that could happen…