Showing posts with label Strong Towns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Strong Towns. Show all posts

Friday, June 14, 2019

@StrongTowns Curbside Chat Video
Why Traditional Development Wins

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Tuesday, July 26, 2016

From Strong Towns —
The shopping mall death spiral

As an indicator species in this great auto-oriented paradigm we've created, the shopping mall is in what one industry insider calls, "a death spiral." This dinosaur of another age is finding it hard to exist amid an ecosystem that has more nimble, adaptable competition. Read more: The Shopping Mall Death Spiral — Strong Towns
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Thursday, May 12, 2016

Nanaimo: it's time we
had the Strong Towns conversation

Toby Dougherty, City Manager of Hays KS: Early last year my staff and I conducted a comprehensive fiscal analysis of the city using Strong Towns tactics and attitudes. The result was a bit of a paradigm shift as we were tasked with pointing out that, what most people saw as an asset--new growth--could be viewed as a liability. It was quite a wakeup call and not received well by everyone. The exercise also resulted in a much better understanding of our finances, what drives revenues and what drives costs. After the initial rollout to the City Commission, they asked that I do everything possible to inform the public. The intent of the document was to have something to handout when I spoke to the Rotary, Kiwanis, Optimists, Chamber lunch…

 
Read more: Presenting the Hays Document — Strong Towns
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Sunday, December 6, 2015

From Business in Vancouver —
Traditional infrastructure funding
throws money down the sewer

PETER LADNER Amid all the excitement about the Christmas bounty of infrastructure spending coming at us from our deficit-happy new federal government, it’s a good time to ask how we got ourselves into this infrastructure hole. 
Charles Marohn, the Republican civil engineer behind the U.S. Strong Towns movement, has an answer. He likens traditional suburban development to a Ponzi scheme. Tax revenues from low-density development don’t come near paying for maintenance and depreciation on costly infrastructure. He estimates suburban property taxes bring in only $0.04 to $0.65 for every dollar of liability. So cities embrace new developments to keep their cash flowing, or they go into debt, or both. At every stage, they pile on future liabilities.
“When people say we’re living beyond our means, they’re usually talking about a 40-inch TV instead of a 20-inch TV,” Marohn told Time magazine. “This is like pennies compared to the dollars we’ve spent on the way we’ve arranged ourselves across the landscape.” Municipal servicing costs in low-density sprawl can be 2.5 times those in compact, high-density neighbourhoods. Read more: Traditional infrastructure funding throws money down the sewer | Economy | Business in Vancouver

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Monday, June 1, 2015

From SFU Continuing Studies —
Strong Towns' Charles Marohn Curbside Chat


In October 2013, SFU hosted an urban planning lecture featuring Charles Marohn. The lecture was part of a series on Minnesota, a state that shares more than a border with Canada. 
Marohn is the co-founder and president of Strong Towns, and a professional engineer who is passionate about planning and small towns. He brings a civil-engineering perspective that results in original ideas such as the "stroad," a street/road hybrid that manages to be both expensive and unproductive. He's a fiscal conservative who makes his case effectively to a small-government audience as much as to urban planners and engineers.
This lecture was sponsored by TransLink, the City of Surrey, and SFU Urban Studies. It requires an hour of your time but if you're interested in cities you won't spend a more rewarding hour this week: 

 The Minnesota Series: Original Thinking from the American Midwest - YouTube
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Thursday, April 23, 2015

Tragic irony—our wide streets allow us to quickly respond to collisions caused by our wide streets @StrongTowns

A tragic irony: Our wide streets allow us to quickly respond to the collisions caused by our wide streets.

Posted by Strong Towns on Thursday, April 23, 2015
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Tuesday, January 6, 2015

"No New Roads"
— @clmarohn @StrongTowns

Post by Strong Towns.
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Wednesday, December 3, 2014

From StrongTowns.org —
Just another pedestrian killed

CHARLES MAROHN I’m fed up with people being killed because my profession contains a bunch of dogmatic idiots. I’m sure the response of some will be: But Chuck, the driver was drunk, this isn’t the engineer’s fault. Ridiculous. If I had a $100 for every time I heard an engineer recommend some stupid tree removal or curve widening because “some drunk is going to come through here and get killed” I would be fully funding Strong Towns with the interest off my latent wealth. We consider the drunk when it suits our purposes -- the free flow of traffic -- and ignore them when it doesn't. That's the sign of a broken moral compass.
The right thing to do here is pretty obvious: SLOW DOWN THE CARS! When you enter into an urban environment, the expectation must be that travel speeds are very slow (I think a 20 mph design speed is too fast – 15 mph would be the top in my opinion) because we need to FORGIVE the common mistakes of humans, both in their cars and out. In a complex urban environment, the only way to do that is to slow down the speed of travel. We must lower the cost of a mistake. Read more: JUST ANOTHER PEDESTRIAN KILLED
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Monday, October 6, 2014

Remind me — Why do we fight to get
big box retail? @StrongTowns

Post by Strong Towns.
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