Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Urban Design

German Town Chooses Human Interaction Over Traffic Signals

By Aaron Naparstek | Sep 14, 2007 | 8 Comments

Driving (carefully) with Dutch "shared space" guru and traffic engineer Hans Monderman. While battles rage here in New York City over signs and markings and the segregation of the public right-of-way for different types of users, yet another Northern European town is ditching its traffic control devices altogether. Spiegel reports that as of September 12, […]

A Gehl Dispatch From Down Under

By Brad Aaron | Sep 13, 2007 | 2 Comments

We reported yesterday that noted Danish urbanist Jan Gehl will soon be surveying New York streets with an eye toward improving them for human use. Gehl has been working in Sydney, Australia as of late, and an essay he wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald offers insight into what he may be looking for here in […]

DOT Launches Gehl Street Survey Project

By Brad Aaron | Sep 12, 2007 | 12 Comments

The New York City Department of Transportation has retained Danish urbanist Jan Gehl’s firm to evaluate city streets and other public spaces. Streetsblog first reported this development as a possibility back in June, when we interviewed Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. Not long after, we got word that Gehl had been hired by the city as a […]

Bike & Ped Improvements Slated for Manhattan Bridge Approach

By Sarah Goodyear | Aug 27, 2007 | 18 Comments

DOT plans to build a physically-separated two-way bike lane on this one block stretch of Canal Street at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. The project also includes pedestrian safety fixes. The Manhattan approach to the Manhattan Bridge, where Chinatown and the Lower East Side come together in a jumble, has long presented one of […]

Transit-Oriented America, Part 3: Three More Cities

By Aaron Donovan | Aug 22, 2007 | 30 Comments

Part 3 in a series on rail and transit-only travel across the United States focuses on the final three cities of our journey. Part 2 looked at the first three and Part 1 presented an overview of our travel. San Francisco Fully restored streetcars, cable cars, buses with and without pantographs, submerged and at-grade light rail, a […]

Pay Phones May Be a Bad Call for City

By Sarah Goodyear | Aug 17, 2007 | 14 Comments

An article in today’s New York Times looks at the city’s most prominent — and profitable — form of street furniture, the pay telephone: The phone kiosks generate $62 million in advertising revenue annually — and last year the city got $13.7 million of the take, triple what it pulled in from calls. Over all, […]

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