Here comes the Bike Boulevard.
You may have noticed construction on some of Columbia’s central city streets lately. It’s likely you’re seeing the work being completed on the new MKT-Parkade Bike Boulevard. What is a bike boulevard you ask? Good question! According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, “bicycle boulevards are streets with low motorized traffic volumes and […]
Read MoreAttack of the Birds
Last week, Jonathan Sessions and I were walking through the streets of Ann Arbor, Michigan with a group of other professionals from the Columbia Chamber of Commerce’s yearly Leadership Visit when Jonathan looked up from his phone and said, “There’s a nest nearby.” We dashed across the street and snagged the last two Birds. Moments […]
Read MoreOn the Merits of Roundabouts
I grew up in Orange, California, a city that decided to forgo the traditional town square in favor of a circle. The Orange Circle is a two-lane roundabout surrounding a park and a fountain that was funded, I kid you not, back in 1886 through local bake sales. Every teenager in town learned to drive […]
Read MorePop-Up Bike Lanes
Standing along Pine Street in St. Louis, watching a pop-up bike lane in action, I struck up a conversation with a 64-year-old MetroBus driver about bicycles. As a kid, he would ride through the streets of downtown St. Louis balancing on his handlebars. His antics landed him in the hospital more than once. “I gave […]
Read MoreStreet Fight
If you hear a voice that says that you can’t transform a street, by all means transform that street, and that voice will be silenced. — Janette Sadik-Khan (@JSadikKhan) February 28, 2017
Read MoreCity Shots
Doing transit right in Orange County. A photo posted by Carrie Gartner (@carriegartner) on Dec 23, 2016 at 8:22pm PST
Read MoreCrowdsourcing Traffic Studies
As my organization prepares to create a corridor plan, I’m spending much of my time surveying the street and benchmarking current conditions. At some point we’ll have to think about measuring traffic counts but I find the current technology a bit limiting. The old-fashioned approach involved throwing a sensor across the road to count cars. That’s […]
Read MoreWhat makes a street pedestrian friendly?
Vox had a great photo essay on how people used streets at the turn of the last century. It was an interesting follow up to their article on the history of jaywalking and further illustrated how the public street is now seen as primarily a thoroughfare for car traffic. Before cars were so ubiquitous, “city streets […]
Read MorePlay Streets
On a recent post about restoring the downtown street grid, Matt Boehner, planner for our city’s Parks and Recreation Department, had a great comment about reclaiming streets. Without a doubt, the default use of streets has become cars and any other use is considered an exception to that rule. (In fact, Vox recently had a […]
Read MoreRestoring the Street Grid
Austin is adding nine new streets to their downtown, restoring the street grid and fixing what is called a “transportation dead zone.” According to the Austin American Statesman: (Director of the Downtown Austin Alliance Charlie) Betts noted that adding streets reverses what has been a sporadic trend of the downtown grid losing pieces of streets over […]
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