Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Urban Design

Playable Cities Are Livable Cities

By Tanya Snyder | Jun 19, 2015 | 2 Comments

Play is so important to kids’ physical, mental, and social development that the United Nations considers it a human right. But not all cities fulfill these rights equally. What the nonprofit KaBOOM! calls a playful or playable city, others might call simply a kid-friendly city. While suburbs get most of the glory for having space to play, […]

Shared Space: The Case for a Little Healthy Chaos on City Streets

By Dick van Veen | Nov 17, 2014 | 33 Comments

Dick van Veen is a Dutch architect and engineer at consultancy company Mobycon. This post originally appeared on the blog of The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. Imagine yourself in a small town enjoying a coffee next to what looks like a public […]

Sign of the Times: Protected Bike Lanes Pop Up in Lego Book

By Michael Andersen | Nov 13, 2014 | 5 Comments

Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. “Let me publish the textbooks of a nation and I care not who writes its songs or makes its laws,” the 19th century entrepreneur D.C. Heath supposedly said. The movement to spread […]

Lousy Neighborhoods, Not Lax Zoning, Make Sunbelt Houses Cheaper

By Ben Ross | Oct 31, 2014 | 9 Comments

The middle class is getting priced out of liberal cities, while red-state urban areas remain affordable. Does that mean our cities should be less like tightly regulated San Francisco and more like permissive Houston? It’s a common argument — but it doesn’t fit the facts. To start with, Houston is hardly a paradise of deregulation. In practice, local experts explain, […]

Talking Headways Podcast: That Indie Flick You Were Looking For

By Tanya Snyder | Oct 30, 2014 | 3 Comments

If you’re a Netflix member, you’re part of the downfall of the brick-and-mortar video store. There are all kinds of reasons to be sad about that, but we look at its implications for urbanism and transportation. Besides, now where will you find esoteric foreign films to impress your friends? There are reasons to believe a few hardy indie-shop […]

Will Montgomery County Botch the Streets in a Model Suburban Retrofit?

By Tanya Snyder | Oct 1, 2014 | 6 Comments

Four years ago, White Flint, a neighborhood of North Bethesda, Maryland, most known for its shopping mall, caught the attention of urbanists around the nation with a proposal to reimagine car-oriented suburban streets as a walkable, mixed-use, transit-oriented neighborhood. Montgomery County adopted a plan for the town that would narrow its wide arterial roadways and […]

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