Livable Streets

Grist recently produced a list of the world's 15 greenest cities. Streetsblog favorites Copenhagen, Curitiba, London, and Bogotá all made the grade. StreetFilms' posterchild Portland captured the number two spot right behind geothermal-powered Reykjavik, Iceland. San Francisco and Austin were the only other U.S. cities to make the list with Chicago meriting runner-up status.

With apologies for my carbon footprint, I recently returned from a working tour of eight cities Down Under. The trip included an invitation to Melbourne to work with the staff of the city's successful new public space development, Federation Square, and to help lead a Placemaking training course that included many city staff, local developers and "place managers." In the process, I had the opportunity to learn a few things relevant to my hometown, New York City.

The Urbanist Musketeers: Alex Garvin, Jan Gehl and Fred Kent in Copenhagen, Denmark, Sept. 30, 2006.

Tonight, you are invited to a planning meeting to prepare for the previously discussed parking spot squat in New York City as a part of Park(ing) Day 2007. If you want to get involved, this is the place to be. Let's show those San Franciscans who's boss. 

As if USA Today featuring the "Complete Streets" movement on its front page weren't enough to make one realize that walking is the biggest new way to earn your "green" points, a cool web site, Walk Score, rates the walkability of any location in the United States on a 0-100 scale. Based on the number of retail businesses and amenities near an address, this site analyzes how frequently one is likely to need to drive in the daily course of life. The closer things are to the places you're likely to need, the better your score. Finally, a site that attempts to quantify the economic, environmental and social benefits of living in a city.

The results are in on one of urban designer and "shared space" proponent Ben Hamilton-Baillie's London projects. Kensington High Street is twice as safe now that all of the traffic engineering "safety features" are gone. The Standard reports:

StreetFilms' Clarence Eckerson has been in Davis, California the last few days, filming one of the premier bicycling cities in the United States. Clarence has a preliminary report and some photos up on the web site with a StreetFilm yet to come. It's worth a quick look.

Luc Nadal of the Institute for Transportation Development Policy sends along these photos showing some of the exciting new things happening on Parisian streets these days.

Nobody knows whether the convoluted and difficult congestion pricing "deal" reached by political leaders yesterday will actually result in anything. The deal is complex even by Albany standards. A few things, however, are clear: