Road Design
What Is a Road Diet?
A road diet ‘trims down’ multilane roadways by reallocating street space to uses other than car traffic, improving safety for pedestrians, encouraging multimodal travel, and enhancing overall livability.
What Is a Woonerf?
The woonerf, a type of road design that encourages multimodal transportation and blends pedestrian and vehicle space, was born as a reaction to the car-centric development that began dominating American and European city planning in the mid-twentieth century.
Louisiana Road Safety Plan Highlights Impaired Driving, Reckless Behavior
The plan focuses traffic safety efforts on distracted and impaired driving, seatbelt wearing, and speeding, with a small nod to infrastructural factors.
Touring One of the U.S.’s Best Biking Cities: Minneapolis
The latest Streetfilms release offers an in-person, on-bike tour of Minneapolis.
Walkability Scores Don’t Tell the Whole Story
A new report concludes that common ‘walkability’ measures don’t account for many barriers faced by pedestrians, such as environmental factors and policing.
What Is Automobile Dependency?
Automobile dependency is a term used to describe households who must rely on private vehicles for everyday transportation, often due to a lack of safe pedestrian infrastructure, ineffective or absent public transit options, and sprawl.
Three Concepts for a Pennsylvania Avenue Makeover
The Pennsylvania Avenue Initiative seeks to redesign the capital’s most famous thoroughfare to include more park space and pedestrian amenities.
Opinion: U.S. Must Prioritize Safety for Non-Drivers
The rise in cyclist and pedestrian deaths in the United States points to preventable failures in road design and regulations.
What Is VMT?
A measure of the demand for vehicle travel on public roadways, VMT provides a metric for evaluating the potential impact of road projects and developments and could become an increasingly useful tool for assessing road usage taxes.
Why a Complete Streets Makeover Went Awry in Philadelphia
The city pulled the plug on a proposed street redesign after community groups criticized the public engagement process for not listening to all local voices.
Seattle Rule Change Makes it Easier to Add Crosswalks
Rather than looking at current pedestrian counts, the city will use a newly developed set of 'pedestrian generators' to evaluate the need for new painted crosswalks.
What Is Car-Centric Planning?
'Car-centric planning' refers to urban planning that privileges the private automobile as a primary transportation mode, often to the exclusion of people who walk, bike, or use public transit.
Outdated State and Federal Road Design Rules Hinder Freeway Removal
Although some cities are in favor of removing or reducing urban freeways in favor of more walkable spaces, guidelines like the 11-year-old MUTCD still encourage a 'throughput at all costs' mentality.
Road Design Still Privileges Cars
Author Jeff Speck discusses the progress made since he first wrote Walkable City–and how far we still have to go to build streets that are safe for all.
Illinois Traffic Deaths Up by 10% Over 2020
Officials point to speeding and reckless driving as causes for the increase in fatal crashes.
Opinion: U.S. Traffic Deaths are a Regulatory Failure
One writer argues that rules that prioritize driver safety and ignore pedestrian infrastructure have led to a sharp increase in fatalities on U.S. roads.
Uber's Self-Driving Cars Couldn’t Detect People Outside of Crosswalks
The National Transportation Safety Board has released documents related to the Tempe, Arizona, crash that killed a person, highlighting what went wrong with the driverless technology.
Walking in Phoenix Can Mean Taking Your Life in Your Hands
Phoenix's roads are the most dangerous in the state for pedestrians, but the city is taking little action to make them safer.
The Sad State of Traffic Safety
A feature article at the major local daily newspaper in Houston tackles traffic safety and puts the onus on engineers, police, and politicians to come to terms with the destruction they've wrought.
The State with the Worst Drivers…
A new study from Quote Wizard finds Utah and Rhode Island have the worst and best drivers, respectively.
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
Caltrans
Smith Gee Studio
Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS)
City of Grandview
Harvard GSD Executive Education
Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commissions
Salt Lake City
NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
