Christchurch's push to become a premier cycling city is gaining momentum with ambitious plans for separating cyclists and motorists on busy routes. Ambitious new guidelines for the design of cycling facilities in Christchurch have been approved by the city council's environment and infrastructure committee and should get approval from the full council this month. The guidelines map out how new cycleways should look and come as the council considers imposing a $20 levy on ratepayers to help pay for the proposed $70 million network. Research was done around the country and overseas before drawing up the guidelines, which are designed to ensure that network takes advantage of international best practice.
They recommend that major cycleways in busy urban areas should feature Copenhagen-style separated cycle paths and Dutch-style intersections with corner islands that keep cyclists and vehicles separate. In residential areas, the guidelines recommend the council use simple measures such as lower speeds, traffic restraints, way-finding, crossing treatments and landscaping to create neighbourhood greenways that are friendly for walking and cycling. Read more: Christchurch Cycleways Design Guidelines Approved | Stuff.co.nz
Counters, pumps and repair stations won’t get more people on bikes. Worse, they may reinforce the tribalism (“Woot! 2000 on the counter! One Less Car! One Less Car!”) and techno-fetishism (“Dude, are those DT-Swiss X470 29ers?”) which undermines normalcy in public perception and the desired mass modal shift. Read more: Sit Up Vancouver | Counters, pumps, repair stations and real cycling infrastructure
DAVID WITTY There continue to be a number of national and international initiatives focusing upon the well-being of urban citizens and urban environments.
Recently, Canadian Gov. Gen. David Johnston has promoted Smart and Caring Communities. Healthy communities has been a topic on local, national and international agendas for a number of years, and Compassionate Communities has recently emerged as a topic in international conversations.
While each of these movements offers significant insight into the varied aspects that affect the well-being of society in general and cities in particular, there is a parallel concept that captures the collective notions of those initiatives and brings a broader range of factors into the discussion of cities: that emerging global conversation is called Successful Cities.
"A car is like your mother-in-law: you have to have good relationship with her but she cannot command your life." Jaime Lerner @2013ltwyouth
— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) April 29, 2013
The Prairie & Territories Chapter and BC Committee of the Canadian Urban Transit Association presents Leading the Way - Youth Summit on Sustainable Transportation May 10 - 12, 2013. Calgary, Alberta University of Calgary
Howard BlacksonIt appears that process/policy-based Urban Planning, which primarily regulates private land, is morphing into regulatory/place-based Urban Designers responsible for addressing social issues (public health, social equity), economic issues (cost of services, return on infrastructure investments), and environmental issues (from natural land preservation to development that improve our quality-of-life). As generalists, Urban Designers implement tactical interventions, long- and short-term planning, mobility, architecture, engineering, and environmental plans. Their 3-dimensional, human-scaled perspective facilitates a break from more conventional, 2-dimensional, top-down, Land Use-based planning of the past and moves us towards cultivating more livable places. Read more: The Future of Municipal Planning 02: Learning from Success | PlaceMakers
The 21st century city stands poised to play a critical role as a great problem solver and generator of prosperity. We are discovering that only dense cities can reduce our heavy environmental footprint and address the devastating progress of climate change. We are figuring out how to get more out of less, drawing on their inherent capacity to solve multiple problems laterally, not one at a time. And we are embracing Jane Jacobs’ profound insight that cities are not mechanical constructs, but ‘organized complexity’ better understood by analogy with the science of living organisms. But here’s the rub: while this new way of seeing the city is widely shared, we often find that we have inherited systems on auto-pilot that were designed to produce a very different kind of urban world. Read more at: Urban Design Review - UPDATE // CITY GOVERNMENT FOR THE NEW URBAN WORLD
