Sublime

The first step to understanding how parking works is to get a grasp of how much it costs and who pays for it. Because it is so plentiful and often free to use, it is easy to imagine that it costs very little. But this is not the case. The cheapest urban parking space in America, an 8½-by-18-foot piece of asphalt on relatively worthless land, costs

Victor Gruen’s The Heart of Our Cities

First: The computer model is only as good as its inputs, and there’s nothing easier than tweaking the inputs to get the outcome you want. When we were working in Oklahoma City, the local traffic engineer’s “Synchro” computer model said that our pro-pedestrian proposals would cause gridlock. So we borrowed that engineer’s computer model and handed i

In situations where the degree of crowding can be determined freely, the upper limit for an acceptable density in streets and on sidewalks with two-way pedestrian traffic appears to be around 10 to 15 pedestrians per minute per meter (3 ft.) street width. This corresponds to a pedestrian flow of some one hundred people per minute in a 10-meter-wide

A study published in 2014 analyzed the density, connectivity, and layout of street networks in twenty-four California cities and related them to local health outcomes. It found that more compact and connected street networks, which promote walking and cycling, were associated with lower levels of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Other studies

The combination of a basic, easily understandable grid system, together with purposely irregular streets dropped in where the grid is too large for good city functioning, could be, I think, a distinctive and most

New Haven’s efforts to replace old neighborhoods with brutally modern architecture received national attention, and won many design awards, but by the late 1960s they had largely failed because they concentrated poverty, isolated residents