#ForewordFriday: Urban Transformations Edition

Cities across the globe have been designed with a primary goal of moving people around quickly—and the costs are becoming ever more apparent. The consequences are measured in smoggy air basins, sprawling suburbs, a failure to stem traffic congestion, and 1.25 million traffic fatalities each year. It is clear that change is needed. Instead of planning primarily for mobility, our cities should recalibrate planning and design to focus on the safety, health, and access of people in them.

President Trump’s proposed budget would be a disaster for cities

Linda Bailey, Executive Director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) issued the following statement in response to the White House’s 2018 budget blueprint. President Trump’s proposed budget would be a disaster for cities and their transportation systems, gutting three of the most valuable Federal programs for cities across the country.
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Watch This: Global Street Design Webinar

Island Press teamed up with the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) to present two webinars on December 12 spotlighting the Global Street Design Guide. Each session offered an overview of the Guide plus two case studies highlighting best practices in street and public space design.

Peter Newman's Resilient Cities: The Sustainable Transport City

The agenda for cities of the future is to have more sustainable transport options available so that a city can indeed reduce its traffic whilst reducing its greenhouse gases 50 percent by 2050 (the global agenda set through the International Panel on Climate Change). For many cities the reduction of car use is not yet on the agenda apart from seeing it as an obviously good thing to do. Unfortunately for most cities traffic growth has been continuous and appears to be unstoppable. 

8 Ways China is ‘Winning’ on Transportation

As Donald Trump likes to say, “China is beating us on everything.” While that’s a debatable proposition, there is one area where China is far ahead of the United States, and that’s in resilient transportation systems.

Letting Buses Compete

For years now cities worldwide have been talking about policies to reduce car use, especially in peak periods. These policies have proven about as popular with politicians and the general population as a cold shower in winter or a frontal lobotomy.

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