Thursday, March 30, 2017

Sunday, March 19, 2017

From ArchDaily —
4 Important Things to Consider When Designing Streets For People, Not Just Cars


Go to any medieval European city and you will see what streets looked like before the advent of the car: lovely, small narrow lanes, intimate, and undisputedly human-scale. We have very few cities in the US where you can find streets like this. For the most part what you see is streets that have been designed with the car in mind—at a large scale for a fast speed. In my native San Francisco, we are making the streets safer for walking and biking by widening sidewalks, turning car lanes into bike lanes, and slowing down the cars. We are working with the streets we have; a typical San Francisco street is anywhere from 60 to 80 feet (18 to 24 meters) wide, as compared with a medieval, pre-car street which is more like 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 meters) wide... Read more: 4 Important Things to Consider When Designing Streets For People, Not Just Cars | ArchDaily

Friday, March 17, 2017

From Vox — Superblocks: How Barcelona
is taking city streets back from cars

From Connecting Dots . . .
Ten Principles of Great Transit Planning

Some work I’ve been undertaking over the past couple weeks related to a prairie community got me thinking about what the “laws” or principles of transit planning might be. By this I don’t mean the principles of good transit service design: the best practices for designing route networks, schedules, infrastructure, their accompanying plans and so on.  Instead, I’m talking about the pithy statements that act as guides to the practice of transit planning itself... Read more: Ten Principles of Great Transit Planning - Connecting Dots . . .
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Thursday, March 16, 2017

So, Nanaimo what's Hamilton doing with their waterfront redevelopment?



From the City of Hamilton's website: Hamilton's waterfront lands are owned and controlled by the City of Hamilton. We are taking great strides to ensure the lands are available and development-ready for private-sector investment. These investment opportunities include mixed-use residential and commercial developments. With these opportunities we hope to increase the use of the area for both residents and businesses. More at Investment in the Waterfront

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Wednesday, March 15, 2017

The case for moving ahead now on
our South Downtown Waterfront Lands

The case for making a start now on the development of our downtown waterfront lands. The recent referendum has shown broad public support for the careful, sensitive development of this site, and we should take advantage of that goodwill to put things in motion. You could say that we have already made a start with the South Downtown Waterfront Initiative’s Vision and Guiding Principles.  
Any proposal, this one included, should recognize and honour the complexities and realities of the site. They are:
1. Adherence to the Downtown Waterfront Initiative’s Vision and Guiding Principles.
2. The Treaty and land claims rights of the Snuneymuxw First Nation.
3. The access rights of Seaspan and the Island Corridor Foundation.
4. The role the private sector, the market, will have to play in its future.
However each and all of these are eventually satisfied the site will require infrastructure. We should act now to begin work on this infrastructure. It needn’t (shouldn’t) wait for every use and design “i" to be dotted.  
Creation of a magnificent public plaza on the waterfront should proceed immediately. A serviced short block urban street grid should be built and building lots subdivided. These would allow for investors large and small, local and national or off-shore to bring fresh ideas and capital to the site all within the guidelines established by the SDWI. City owned serviced lots could be set aside for favourable long term leases to non-profits and co-ops for non-market and social housing. Others set aside to be ceded to the Snuneymuxw as a portion, along with the Federal Government, of Treaty and land claims settlements.
There is huge value latent in the site which belongs to people of Nanaimo. Right now it’s a large underused site the value of which is mostly in its potential. We should create that value by doing what only the City can do: develop its infrastructure. Revenues would be generated as portions were carefully and strategically sold. This would go a long way in paying for the improvements. It's also essential the foot ferry, if it ever comes to be, docks on these waterfront lands in close proximity to other uses, not on the remote Port Authority's cruise ship pier. 
Take a look at the work done by a landscape architecture from like  PWL Partnership Landscape Architects in Vancouver. PWL principal Derek Lee has worked here as a consultant to Parks and Rec. (Picture: New West Pier Park)
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