This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Committee on the Environment and Regional and Urban Design Committee .
-------------------------------------------
Urban Design and Transportation - A City for People Instead of Cars
The really effective solutions for our transportation quagmire (i.e. demand for mobility is growing much faster than the resources to build traditional transportation supply systems) come from essentially doing the opposite of what is the predictable response and has been done for decades. Not building more transportation capacity but reducing demand. Shifting from quantity to quality. Not faster and further, more lane-miles, more riders. Instead, enjoyable shorter trips, fewer of them, social interaction, observation and awareness, doubling up or tripling the purpose. Biking for getting places, seeing things and exercise. More surface streetcars and light rail than subway to meet people, read something or simply look around. Less rat and more human. Just a dream?
The answers don't lie where we expect it, they are outside the box. Turns out, the city is the best answer for our transportation woes we ever had. Congestion and all. The very place the last few generations were busy fleeing from, creating the transportation conundrum in the process.
The big re-think has already begun.
Urban designers and planners who bemoaned how the seemingly hard science of intersection design, signal warrants, capacity calculations and the grades of intersection performance ("this intersection performs at level F!") trumped the much less quantitative criteria of urban design every time are now asked to "make places". Memorable, identifiable, unique instead of interchangeable and cookie cutter.
Architects and urban designers trained on parking as the beginning and end of every project they designed because the size and scale of development was defined by the local parking codes are asked to design one of a kind living spaces. Turn old mills and factories into lofts. Instead of asking how many cars can fit based on the formulas, how are the "sight-lines", the street access, where are the turn-lanes and "deceleration lanes" where the "stacking space" designers are now asked to create vistas, green roofs, pocket parks, community and beer gardens, maybe a Zip Car spot, bike parking and showers for the riders. A new world opens up, one where the code has parking caps instead of minimums, where whole sections of town don't require parking, where developers look back to their last development, see the empty parking spaces and groan, if I only hadn't built all this parking!
This world where design is fun again, it is emerging right in front of us. Sure, to some it may still sound like a dream rather than reality, but those are the trends.
Read more:
http://archplanbaltimore.blogspot.com/2013/03/urban-design-and-transportation.html -------------------------------------------
Klaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
-------------------------------------------