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May 21, 2009The Alliance for Biking & Walking Works the Bike Caucus BY DAVE SNYDER The Alliance for Biking & Walking, a national coalition of advocacy organizations, is working the Congressional Bike Caucus. The Caucus represents a majority of members who support an increased federal role in promoting bicycling as a solution to our nation's transportation crisis, not to mention our health and environmental crises.In the attached letter from the Bike Caucus Chair, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Portland, OR), you'll see what the national bike movement is up to. The...
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May 20, 2009How Will Shoreline Cities Respond to Sea Level Rise? BY JULIE KIM Just wanted to point your attention to the Bay Conservation Development Commission's upcoming design competition. The jury is seeking ideas inspired by "the common characteristics of estuaries" to prepare and adapt shoreline cities to the challenges of sea level rise. Entries will be displayed in the Ferry Building on July 14-19. Designers: still time to enter your proposal! Here's an excerpt from the competition brief:Some techniques for dealing with sea level rise are fairly...
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May 19, 2009It's Amazing What Four (Big, Bright Orange) Letters Can Do BY JULIE KIM We've been stealthily—until today—working away in our new building at 654 Mission Street to get ready for the grand opening of the Urban Center next week. Now there's no mistaking where we've been hiding out!
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May 19, 2009Market Street Draft Study Released BY DAVE SNYDER The Transportation Authority today released the draft Strategic Analysis Report on "Transportation Options for a Better Market Street." SPUR has long considered potential improvements to Market Street, and advised the Transportation Authority on the scope of this SAR. We urged the agency to be bold, but positive. That is, we emphasized that a study of Market Street ought to focus on the goals first before proposing solutions such as banning car traffic. We cited five goals:-...
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May 13, 2009When Urbanism and Accessibility Aren’t in Step BY MARY DAVIS Accessibility for persons with disabilities, New Urbanist planners and architects will tell you, is an important principle. Still, other New Urbanist principles can come into conflict with accessibility; or, at least, they often clash with interpretations of the Americans With Disabilities Act, or with accessibility as defined by disability-rights advocates. Take February’s “Lifelong Communities” charette in Atlanta, at which Congress for the New Urbanism co-founder Andres...
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May 13, 2009Bunkers of the Recession BY MARY DAVIS To the litany of statistics bearing out the severity of this recession, add one more: the number of Americans who moved between March 2008 and March 2009 was just 35.2 million, the lowest total in 47 years – and back in 1962, there were 120 million fewer Americans. Such relative stability might be viewed as a good thing for neighborhoods besieged by foreclosures, or cities suffering from long-term economic decline (not to mention the effect on the environment). But, economists point out,...
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May 13, 2009Greening Towers in a Park BY MARY DAVIS Toronto, Ontario, is, by any measure, one of North America’s greenest and most sustainable cities. It is also, by some accounts, the continent’s densest metropolis – but this is due in large part to the hundreds upon hundreds of “slab” highrises that sprouted across its outer neighborhoods in the postwar era. While Toronto’s “commie blocs,” as they’ve been derisively dubbed, provide the sort of residential density necessary to support...
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May 13, 2009When Modernism was Futuristic What did modernist planning and architecture look like from the perspective of the modernist? It was progressive, forward-thinking—and may have had more in common with contemporary planning than we'd care to admit. A 1959 time capsule recently unearthed in Burbank included these predictions by a local city planner: in 50 years, seven of every eight residents would be living in garden apartments made of plastic, and incorporated into mixed-use complexes; and a “rapid monorail...
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May 13, 2009No Siesta for High Speed Rail in Spain Since the Madrid-Barcelona leg of Spain’s AVE high-speed rail system opened last year, air travel in the corridor has been cut by half. But bullet trains aren’t just changing the ways Spaniards get around: according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, they are literally uniting the country, and revitalizing rural areas. Spaniards historically have been reluctant to travel, but “the AVE has radically changed [the younger] generation’s attitude,” a professor...
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May 6, 2009SPUR Seeks to Improve the SFMTA Budget SPUR's Transportation Policy Director today will tell the Board of Supervisors that the SFMTA budget approved by the SFMTA Board last week does not do enough to maintain quality transit service in these tight budget times. The SFMTA is leaving too much on the table in the form of new revenue and cost savings, at least $20 million of budget space that could be used to stave off cuts that will reduce the system's improving reliability.
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