News, Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Slow Walking for Slow Down London
Slow Down London is a lovely little project which encourages Londoners to slow down and look at the speed of life. One aspect is the Slow Club, an 8 week course with tasks to be done and Sunday’s was a slow walk around the Kyoto Gardens in London’s Holland Park. A delight for the eye and a wake-up to the senses
Downtown hotel-condo tower to feature low-rent housing
A recently approved tower near King St. W. and Spadina Ave. will contain something no other building in Toronto has: a floor of affordable housing built expressly for tenants who work in the building.
The Mountain Plaza Mall and the Centre Mall — where seniors routinely congregated for coffee, walked in climate-controlled comfort and enjoyed one-stop shopping — were converted to outdoor, car-centric, big-box plazas.
The Science of Casual Connections
David Bollier reviews the book: “Consequential Strangers aggregates a diverse sociological literature to show just how valuable our casual social contacts truly are. For example, studies show that people with a rich web of relationships are less likely to come down with colds — presumably because it strengthens our immune system. People who lack close community ties are more likely to die nine years earlier than those with more extensive social connections. For women, it’s 2.8 times more likely; for men, 2.3 times more likely. We are nurtured and fortified by our social connections, however casual.”
Culture Zohn: Eero Saarinen Shaped the Future
Architect Eero Saarinen–whose work today sometimes looks unapologetically modern, even contemporary, and glam in a Mad Men-y slashJetsons kind of way, and at other times faintly historical, did not have the unqualified admiration of his fellow architects, even those who were presumably acolytes in his firm.
Timelinks wants to take you down to the pyramid city
Hume: Silence on pedestrians’ deaths deafening
With the number of pedestrians killed by vehicles climbing to nine this month, an unfortunate message is being sent: Walk at your peril
Car-friendly suburban streets can be deadly for pedestrians
Wide lanes and sweeping curves encourage speed and make people out for a walk more vulnerable
The new library: ‘not just about books anymore’
Across Canada, public libraries are now bustling, wired community hubs – with booming circulation and tech-heavy inventory
t’s not the only reason Toronto’s public library system just had its busiest year ever, but it helped: A bar opened last fall in the downtown reference library.
The canteen in the branch’s new 16,000-square-foot “salon” serves wine and spirits while opera stars, celebrity chefs and baseball executives deliver talks that compete with the best of the city’s cultural event circuit.
Toronto’s salon is just one example of the innovations attracting new patrons to the modern library, a place that has gone from silent biblio-temple to wired town square.
Is 3/50 the new 350?
The power of congestion pricing and bus rapid transit
the book Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive Twenty-first Century
by Sam Staley and Adrian Moore that I mentioned back in November as well as a book put out a few years ago called 21st Century Highways: Innovative Solutions to America’s Transportation Needs
by Wendell Cox, Alan Pisarski and Ronald Utt. Staley and Moore’s book Mobility First was an excellent read! I am sure you will really like it. I can assure you that these authors are very much on the same page as you and I.
They argue for more limited access highway capacity and the use of variable tolling (where the toll increase as use increases) and electronic toll collection (”open road tolling”) both to generate revenue for building and maintaining new capacity and to control excess traffic loads. Indeed, they cite a very interesting statistic involving the use of variable tolling on the SR 91 Freeway in Southern California. That roadway, which I personally traveled on back in 1997, has 4 or 5 free lanes and two variable toll lanes on the far left side in each direction. According to the statistic they cited, the two variable-priced toll lanes (which are rarely congested) move as many cars in a day as the 4 or 5 free and often congested lanes. If these statistics are even remotely accurate, it makes a whole lot of sense to use variable tolling whenever new capacity is added.
Free Transit Opens in Baltimore
Charm City Circulator consists of 21 hybrid electric buses running seven days a week. The first line, the Orange Route, launched Jan. 11 and eventually will be joined by two other lines. When all is said and done, the Circulator will connect landmarks like the Inner Harbor and the John Hopkins hospital complex to the city center and surrounding neighborhoods.
Perhaps more significantly, it will provide a link to other forms of transit, including trains, light rail, buses and water taxis.”
Other cities have been forced to cut similar free services due to budget issues, but Baltimore is hoping the investment in transit will provide an economic boon to businesses in the area.
Cities for Cycling Embrace European Street Designs
the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey had some sobering news about bicycling: Only about half of 1 percent of Americans bike to work. A number of city planners are seeing that statistic as evidence that some more radical bicycling strategies are in order. It’s time to think beyond bike lanes, they say, and start using bike-only traffic signals, traffic-protected “cycle-tracks,” and other street designs that are common in European cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where up to 40 percent of all trips are made on two wheels.
Don’t Call It ‘The Bus’
Cities across the country are experimenting with free “shuttles” that circulate people through top destinations and have a unique brand to take away the stigma of riding the bus.
Improving City Services Through Technology
“Most city government agencies tend to gather their own data in parallel, and they rarely share information with each other. This can make life frustrating for city residents trying to access city services. Can cities can use technology to be smarter?”
Through the example of arranging a special trash pickup, this info graphic shows how city departments can pool information and enable betters communications to more efficiently fulfill service requests.
US Public Transit Riders Save $9,200 a Year Compared to Drivers
It looks like public transportation is a better investment than we thought–the average American who takes public transit saves a staggering $9,240 a year. Which is, of course, a handsome chunk of change. The finding comes from a recent study by the American Public Transportation Association, which compiled the average costs of parking, gas, and tolls each year. They’ve come up with a comprehensive savings report that shows how much a rider saves in the 20 top cities for public transit–find out how much you’re saving in your city.
UK Parliament Calls for Mandatory Food Waste Collection
Food waste in the United Kingdom is a major problem, amounting to 5.3 million tonnes and an estimated ?12 billion annually.
It’s a problem big enough that a Parliamentary committee has recommended a serious plan to address it: initiating mandatory food waste pickups and banning such organic materials in the landfill.
Such a landfill ban is already under consideration for 2020, but a recent report from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) committee recommends the slightly more aggressive date of 2015.
College may do encore in core
MAYOR’S STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS: Fanshawe is looking at options to expand its downtown presence with its art-related programs
E-cars? How about producing streetcars?
Trying to sell the idea of public transportation at an auto show is like trying to sell knickers at a nudist camp
One doubter is Jan-Welm Bierman, an engineer and professor at the automotive institute of Germany’s RWTH Aachen University. At last fall’s Stuttgart Auto Show, Mr. Bierman was a panelist at a seminar called “The Future of the Automobile.” While his colleagues touted the benefits of electric vehicles
, he broke ranks. Hold on, he said: “What cities need is public transport or they will drown in vehicles.”
The audience went silent for a moment (I was there). Trying to sell the idea of public transportation at an auto show is like trying to sell knickers at a nudist camp. But Mr. Bierman had a point. Electric cars might be better for the environment (assuming fleets of coal-fired generating plants don’t have to be built to supply power to recharge millions of cars). They are not better for cities.
Older brains make good use of ‘useless’ information
Toronto - A new study has found promising evidence that the older brain’s weakened ability to filter out irrelevant information may actually give aging adults a memory advantage over their younger counterparts.
How Can We Foster Zero-Car Households?
Today on the Streetsblog Network, a fascinating look at the top 50 “low-car cities” in the United States — that is, cities in which a high proportion of households do not own a car at all. Human Transit’s Jarrett Walker digs into a list (from Wikipedia) of the US cities with populations over 100,000 with the highest percentage of zero-car households.
Plenty of Spaces, but “Nowhere to Park”
“There’s nowhere to park.” That’s what a lot of drivers think, even when there is parking available very nearby — say, on the upper level of a parking garage. This disjunct between perception and reality, which can lead to municipalities overbuilding parking facilities that end up standing empty, is the topic of an intriguing post today from Tom Vanderbilt, on How We Drive.
Post Feedback
As always, Mark - Great articles!
It’s too bad it’s taken so many pedestrian fatalities to shine a light on the mobility issues in Toronto, but at least (it seems) that somebody is noticing. Will it get any better? Probably not…
PS: 3/50 for Windsor!
I’m all for the 3/50 plan for Windsor too!
Also the Nowhere to Park discussion going on around the University. Leaving out the value for money issue (what were student’s promised for their money), I am having a hard time being sympathetic with their cries of circling the campus for 30 - 35 minutes looking for parking. There are three transit routes going to the University and heaps of parking and it is not anymore dangerous to walk from Lebel or other lots under the bridge to campus than it is for the students going to the Assumption High School.
This same “entitlement” to park is what is hurting downtown. If the 19-22 year olds believe that about the University then they also believe it about downtown.