CNU is overhauling and enlarging its database of new urbanist projects. It will standardize a variety of factors so that the projects' statistics can be useful for academic and professional research. It's a Herculean task, and achieving even 10% of the vision will be mighty impressive!

CNU expanding database for new urbanist projects

Amid a shift to a new website platform, CNU seeks to establish a comprehensive database of new urbanist developments to be used by academics, professionals, and students.

cnu.org

Got a new paper out today... "Urban areas with lower commute mode share by car and, to a lesser extent, lower VMT are most strongly associated with lower per capita transportation fatality rates." (and it's open access if you are the type of person who wants to read a research paper)

What drives urban transportation safety? Exploring the role of modal composition and travel exposure

Purpose. Past urban transportation safety efforts have largely focused on controlling road user behavior through tactics such as speed management and separating users in space and time. This research ...

doi.org

Read this blog post for a short, simple introduction to "the 4X rule." It has a critical impact on residential redevelopment, and even more so on affordability and affordable housing.

Payton Chung 🏳️‍🌈@westnorth.com · 5d ago

Life is messy. So is redevelopment. In "a successful city district", "Some of the old buildings, year by year, are replaced by new ones - or rehabilitated to a degree equivalent to replacement. Over the years there is, therefore, constantly a mixture of buildings of many ages and types. This is,…

Steuteville's plan is radical in the context of car-dependent neighborhood plans - our current dominant trend. For decades, surveys have consistently found 45-55% of home buyers want mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods. Yet some developers, officials, and financiers act as if 95% want car-dependent.

A village starts with a street plan

A town near me is looking to build a mixed-use waterfront village—a street plan could be the key to achieving that goal.

cnu.org

This unusual study finds that the garden-city-type street network - a "historically defined design paradigm" - has a sizable impact on neighborhood sustainability in the US. At the link is a press release, an elegant graphic summary, and a preprint of the published paper. 1/6

Drawn Apart - Livable City Lab

At Yale Livable City Lab we use large geospatial datasets and new technologies to study how the design and planning or urban environments impact human behavior and sustainability.

livablecitylab.yale.edu

This excellent, sophisticated study illuminates a blind spot in traffic-safety research. We've known for many years that the more driving one does, the more crash risk one is exposed to. Now we can learn some of the details and nuances behind that relationship. 1/2

Wes Marshall@wesmars.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If we really want to improve road safety, our new paper finds we need to stop taking exposure to motor vehicle kinetic energy as a given...

Still frame from the General Motors promotional film "Streamlines" (1936).

Warren Wells, AICP@warrenjwells.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Nothing says Caltrans' vision of "The Future of California's Freeways" like a *triple decker* interchange. bsky.app/profile/infr...

Zhou observed that most measures of regional accessibility are built on unrealistic assumptions about business hours, transit operating hours, and personal working hours. She developed an alternative measure that combined smartphone GPS records with operating hours info. 1/2

The Overhead Wire@theoverheadwire.com · 3mo ago

Wednesday's Most Read # 1 - Price Ph.D. student develops new way to measure urban accessibility link.theoverheadwire.com/hycef @uscprice.bsky.social @geoffboeing.com

Quote: "industrial and mixed land use categories were collapsed to achieve better fitting models." But even if they had been separated, results might have been similar. High traffic loads on collectors and arterials seem to overwhelm the positive psychological aspects of a mixed-use downtown.

Peter Norton@norton.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Seth LaJeunesse @sethlaj.bsky.social, Paul Ryus, Wesley Kumfer, Sirisha Kothuri, and Krista Nordback: Among pedestrians, stress symptoms are greatest when “walking in proximity to collector and arterial streets and in areas with industrial and mixed (e.g. offices, retail, residential) land uses.”

"for the most part, Portland is truly a socialist paradise–if you are a car. You get to live rent free on the city streets. ... the city should charge those who use the streets, especially for storing their cars." And study Donald Shoup on how to navigate political challenges to that policy.

City Observatory@cityobservatory.bsky.social · 4mo ago

How should Portland pay for streets? Let's not tax houses to subsidize cars, OK? A gas tax, and better yet, a comprehensive system of charging for parking everywhere in the city is a much smarter...

I appreciate the discussion of traffic safety metrics. However, I disagree that deaths/vehicle-mile is useful in some cases. That's because the way it handles speed is inherently flawed and leads to absurd results. 1/6 @wesmars.bsky.social

David Zipper@davidzipper.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"Measuring deaths per mile driven is like measuring deaths per cigarette smoked." From the new episode of @lookbothwayspod.bsky.social, out later this week on all podcast platforms.

Recently Steuteville's advocacy for well connected street networks has become more frequent and insistent. He's argued good networks support safety, walkability, efficiency, timely improvement, and more. I wholeheartedly support and agree with his attention to this theme. @cnunewurbanism.bsky.social

Learning from the planners of old

Street networks. Just Do It.

cnu.org

How many street intersections do you see in this figure? I published an article recently in Transactions in GIS (open-access: buff.ly/TZoFrrf) and its first sentence sums it up: "Counting is hard." Hear me out... It really is!

Steuteville writes, "The idea that we can create many genuine Complete Streets without establishing better street networks is pure fantasy." I agree, because car-oriented street networks concentrate traffic on wide, fast arterials, which are difficult or impossible to make pedestrian friendly. 1/2

Congress for the New Urbanism@cnunewurbanism.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Today on Public Square: "How could Complete Streets policies be more effective?" The Complete Streets movement has largely failed in practice, but a focus on networks and context could make it more effective. #CompleteStreets www.cnu.org/publicsquare...

Many histories make vague references to the blistering growth of US streetcar systems. But until now, a nationwide quantitative accounting of system growth has not been available. It also includes peak year of system extent by state and city, along with analysis of temporal patterns. Well done!

David M Levinson ⁂@transportist.org · 6mo ago

ICYMI: Streetcar and Interurban Deployment in the United States: 1894-1926

Breaking news on Public Square: "HOPE VI reduced intergenerational poverty." A remarkable new Harvard study shows the benefits of mixed-income housing in high-poverty areas, using design based on New Urbanist principles. #HOPEVI #NewUrbanism #Housing www.cnu.org/publicsquare...

HOPE VI reduced intergenerational poverty

A remarkable new Harvard study shows the benefits of mixed-income housing in high-poverty areas, using design based on New Urbanist principles.

cnu.org

An excellent essay that makes several strong points. I was familiar with the deadheading point, but I hadn't considered it in terms of safety. The final point about local and federal policy is vital. Alternatives are quicker and cheaper to accomplish, and localities should be enabled to use them.

David Zipper@davidzipper.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Sorry, but triumphant claims about autonomous vehicle safety are wildly exaggerated. It's an open question whether today’s self-driving cars are any safer than those driven by humans. And if reducing crashes is the goal, that isn’t even the right question. My deep dive, in Bloomberg 🧵

Congratulations to participants and winners of CNU Mid-Atlantic's Single-Stair Design Competition. All entries are now online for free download. The excellent entries show some of the features that single-stair buildings can offer more easily than "double-loaded corridor" buildings. 1/2

Reminder that registration for this design competition opens today -- 3 March 2025.

Laurence Aurbach@laurbach.bsky.social · last yr.

CNU's Mid-Atlantic Chapter is sponsoring a Single-Stair Building Design Competition for infill sites in Baltimore. All mid-Atlantic residents and students may participate. Registration is open from March 3 to April 11. Winners will get cash prizes and publicity at the awards ceremony.

CNU's Mid-Atlantic Chapter is sponsoring a Single-Stair Building Design Competition for infill sites in Baltimore. All mid-Atlantic residents and students may participate. Registration is open from March 3 to April 11. Winners will get cash prizes and publicity at the awards ceremony.

Boston has announced it will upgrade traffic signals throughout the city to give priority to buses. The system tracks and anticipates bus positions, and adjusts traffic signals in real time, to minimize delay at intersections.

Faster bus commutes in Boston? That’s the goal with coming traffic signal upgrades. - The Boston Globe

Buses traveling through the experimental intersections along the Allston corridor spent, on average, 21 percent less time waiting at red lights, according to the T.

bostonglobe.com

And the answer is: not much. Increasing a zoning limit from 7 dwellings per acre to 12 du/ac would not cause parking demand to exceed supply. On all the blocks that were studied, a majority of parking spaces were unused. @citybeautiful.nebula.tv

Findings Press@findingspress.org · 2y ago

Amos, Dave. 2025. “Will Increasing Residential Density Decrease Parking Availability? A Method for Practitioners.” Findings, January. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.128202

Today Adam Millard-Ball and I are releasing a massive dataset, detailing our work over a number of years to characterize local street network connectivity around the planet. (1/4) Open article, open data, open source. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Science-fiction author and industrial-design theorist Bruce Sterling writes about the YouTube maker Laura Kampf. His essay is part fan letter, part theoretical grappling, and part aimless philosophical musing. It intersects with urban design where it discusses interventions in the public realm.

Some Public Limits of Everyday Weirdness (2025)

A year ago, here on Medium, I resolved to do more repair work around the family house. If my results seemed rather “weird,” I decided not…

bruces.medium.com

This paper blends historical narrative and quantitative analysis to reveal how Tokyo became "a paragon of street-network connectivity." Authors were Felix Vazquez, Adam Millard-Ball, Christopher Barrington-Leigh (profcpbl.bsky.social) 1/6

Urban development & street-network sprawl in Tokyo

This paper uses Tokyo, Japan as a case study to explore the processes of urban development and sprawl through the lenses of street connectivity and historical development. Tokyo is a highly connect...

tandfonline.com

This study analyzes street-network patterns in all the world's urban areas. It investigates the design and development factors that affect transport CO2 emissions. Better-connected street networks, and street networks with straighter travel routes, are generally linked to lower CO2 emissions. 1/6

Urban street network design and transport-related greenhouse gas emissions around the world

This study estimates the relationships between street network characteristics and transport-sector CO2 emissions across every urban area in the world …

sciencedirect.com

The overall width of roadways has a major effect on crash risk, but that effect is too often overlooked or dismissed in safety research. This study is the largest analysis of the topic to date, covering 49,000 pedestrian crossings in Paris, San Francisco, and Irvine, California. 1/

Multiscale Analysis of Pedestrian Crossing Distance

Crossing distance is considered a factor in both pedestrian safety and behavior. However, it has seldom been quantified within or across entire cities or related to walking outcomes. Combining data...

tandfonline.com