Search Results

This chapter assesses the role of transportation and street environments in people's lives and how reliance on the automobile has shaped the United States and other parts of the world. The century-long evolution into a car-dependent culture has had its benefits in terms of commerce and regional mobility, but has also had devastating effects on people's health and safety. Rather than discuss the negative impacts of cars on air pollution, the chapter focuses on the place-based health impacts of reducing people's reliance on the automobile by increasing the walkability of areas and expanding access to public transit. Younger adults are increasingly ambivalent about whether they should even own a car and are moving to cities in search of more efficient and human-scale mobility options. These options include having access to a street network with safe and efficient pedestrian and bike infrastructures as well as public-transit options. Meanwhile, public officials in numerous cities are talking about the benefits of expanded transit systems and walkable street grids to encourage more active lifestyles and attract tourists, families, and entrepreneurs who are tired of traffic congestion and car commuting and interested in a lively street experience that is not simply seen from behind a windshield. The chapter then highlights case studies showing how new place-based transportation and streetscape changes can be a tool for improving health and safety.

Many official smart growth inspired Canadian plans limit sprawl by mixing land uses, transportation modes, jobs and residents to create compact, transit-oriented, multi-functional, intensification centres enriched with amenities and highly designed public spaces. However, these intensification strategies, built on new or expanded public transit systems at metropolitan, regional and local planning scales, face challenges amid the 2020 pandemic. Recovery from the combined COVID-19-induced loss of commercial activity in intensification centres and confidence in public transit could take years, and combined with an increased reliance on private vehicles, could undo decades of planning efforts at shifting unsustainable land use-transportation dynamics. This chapter proposes as an alternative, or complementary, intensification approach, a pedestrian-oriented development (POD) model inspired by the ‘15-minute city’ being considered across the world.

Here two applications of graph theory are considered. The first is devoted to pedestrian safety, and the focus is on pedestrian safety in urban areas with respect to pedestrian-vehicle crashes. In particular, an algorithm for automated construction of a graph model for pavement networks is discussed. Then, an algorithm for finding a user-optimal path in a given pavement network is presented. This algorithm is based on three criteria: path safety, distance, and path complexity. The second part of this chapter is devoted to optimizing the placement of charging stations for electric vehicles in road networks. The placement of charging stations in road networks is modelled as a multiple domination problem on reachability graphs. This model takes into account a threshold for the remaining battery charge and provides some minimal choice for a travel direction to recharge the battery. Experimental evaluation and simulations for the proposed facility location model are given for real road networks of the cities of Boston and Dublin.

This chapter discusses the battle for safety on the streets, and the eventual mobilization of those promoting a new social construction of the street for the motor age. The chapter looks at pedestrian rights as well as motorist rights. The most restrictive pedestrians’ rights was that all travelers had equal rights on the highway, whereas the motorists claim on the street was very difficult to ascertain. Other aspects that were taken into consideration with regards to safety was the discovery and reinvention of jaywalking and the notion of jay drivers. The rest of the chapter discusses the battles that would ensue over the issue of who should be on the street, motorists or pedestrians, and how this war helped in further developing proper safety controls and regulations.

This chapter looks at the problems brought in by traffic congestion thought to have been created by population density and the concentration of business in small central districts. With the chief patrons of regulation being the chambers of commerce, deconcentration of business districts was not an option, so congestion needed to be eased without a reduction in population density. Leading expert on street traffic, Miller McClintock, stated that deconcentration was the main cause of traffic congestion. Engineers used traffic surveys to work out the causes of congestion. One solution was to clear the sidewalks of all obstacles in order to create space for pedestrians. Also, around this time the first traffic light system was used. However due to its system of simultaneous signal changes, efficiency was yet to be achieved. The chapter goes on to discuss other avenues through which traffic congestion was tackled, such as parking measures.

This chapter moves from maps as vehicles of critical analysis to platforms for imagining and discussing new spatial practice. Theories of social cognition offer that institutional change is created through new paradigms becoming normalized through a society-wide process of spreading ideas by seeing the practices of exemplars and those within our social networks. This chapter explores the possibility of using the map as a medium of such social paradigm change. The chapter presents the case of an original proposal that was developed and presented by invitation to the Ho Chi Minh City planning department for a tourist pedestrian path that would incorporate sidewalk vending into the experience. While international tourism has been one of the rationales for sidewalk clearance policies, this chapter shows how visual strategies of data and argumentation were used to engage a surprisingly enthusiastic reception by HCMC’s urban planning, transportation, and tourism bureaus to an alternative paradigm where sidewalk life is conceptualized as an asset to manage rather than as a problem to clear.

This chapter defines mobility in Canada and other Western countries as the ability to move between different activity sites, which tends to decrease past 65 years old for all modes of transportation. It discusses seniors' mobility that is characterized by a decrease in the number of trips and distances travelled to reach those activity sites and worsened by the loss of their driving licence. It also describes walking as an alternative mode of travel to nearby destinations and its promotion is a way to perpetuate seniors' socialization and greater autonomy. The chapter looks at a recent article on accessibility to retail activities in Spain that highlighted the importance of taking into account seniors in mobility planning. It emphasizes that the encouragement to walk should be based on an assessment of the safety and comfort of built urban environments in order to better document the adequacy between the walking environment and the needs and travel habits of elderly pedestrians.

This chapter focuses on the opening of the Holland Tunnel. Made nervous by predictions of disaster, the tunnel commissioners had decided to delay opening the Holland Tunnel for vehicular traffic until 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, November 13, 1927. Pedestrians, however, were allowed to walk through the tunnels from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 12. New Jersey tunnel commission secretary E. Morgan Barradale estimated that approximately fifty thousand people from New Jersey walked through the tunnels, and another twenty to twenty-five thousand from New York passed through before the tunnels were closed to pedestrians at 7 p.m. During the first twenty-four hours of the tunnel being opened to vehicular traffic, 52,285 vehicles passed through, most of them passenger cars. On March 19, 1931, Holland Tunnel traffic reached thirty-five million, far ahead of projections made when it opened. After nearly two and a half years of operation, the tunnel had proved that long vehicular tunnels could be safely ventilated. The payments made by the Port Authority to the two states also demonstrated the project's financial success, while the traffic counts indicated the need for an additional tunnel (or tunnels) under the Hudson River.

This chapter provides an overview of the fundamental constitutional rights that inform the study of race, ethnicity, and policing; the socio-legal background in which these rights are embedded; and the conditions under which judicial and legislative bodies take to protect them. It contends that the U.S. Supreme Court has been ineffectual in establishing a clear standard on the impermissible role of race as the sole determinant of reasonable suspicion. When coupled with decisions that have expanded the scope of police discretion, these failures make racially biased policing legally invisible in the absence of direct admissions or overt racial epithets by police during traffic or pedestrian stops. The chapter outlines cases that expand police discretionary authority in ways that enhance the likelihood of racially biased policing. It concludes with a discussion of successful settlements of racial profiling lawsuits and an account of legislation that covers data collection on racial and ethnic profiling.

In 2009, the World Health Organization estimated that 314 million people were suffering from visual impairment, 45 million of them being blind. Improving the autonomy of blind people is a particularly important societal issue as well as a fertile field of research, both from practical and theoretical points of view. For a few years, devices designed to help blind people to navigate independently in their environment have been found on the market. These devices aim at assisting or replacing functions impaired by the loss of vision using signal emission reception or satellite guidance technology. Rather than aiming to provide an exhaustive market survey, this chapter intends to suggest relevant ways to improve navigation aid devices adapted to the needs of blind people. To do so, we first describe several electronic aid devices and their general functioning. This allows us to subsequently explore new perspectives for the development of improved systems. Finally, we look at the extent to which blind people’s spatial representations are improved by the use of such devices.

Chapter 6 looks at the world of official urban planning and placemaking, providing different perspectives on its relationship to DIY urbanism. Through the voices of professional planners, the chapter explores their conflicted opinions on DIY approaches: criticizing their informality and emphasizing the importance of regulations and accountability for everything from basic functionality to social equity, yet sympathetic to do-it-yourselfers’ frustrations and often excited to adopt their tactics, harness their energy, and exploit their cultural value. The chapter then describes how some DIY projects have found pathways to formal adoption and inspired popular “tactical urbanism” and “creative placemaking” approaches to public space design. Many such interventions can result in innovative public spaces with social, environmental, and economic benefits. But the reproduction of an aesthetic experience selectively inspired by a hip grassroots trend and combined with “creative class” values can mark the resulting spaces themselves as elite and exclusionary.

My essay explores Keats’s ‘Cockneyism’ in the letters describing his six-week ‘northern tour’ in 1818 with Charles Brown in letters to his brother Tom and other family members, as well as to friends like Reynolds and Bailey. His tour letters and poetry are placed in the context of post-Waterloo travel accounts of Scotland, and of contemporary criticisms of the Highland tour as a commodified and Cockneyfied cliché, especially in the wake of the craze for Scott’s Highland romances. The essay considers the literary influence of Wordsworth, Burns, and Scott, although the latter is a conspicuous absence from Keats’s account. Keats’s pedestrian tour is interpreted as an exercise in masculine self-fashioning and social mobility, a distinctive cultural performance, rather than merely an episode in the poet’s creative development. Attention is paid to Keats’s accoutrements and itinerary, and new research identifies the guidebooks he consulted, as well as his relations with local people, especially in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. Keats’s account of key sites, like Loch Lomond, Inveraray, Mull, Iona, Staffa, and Ben Nevis are explored in relation to the light-hearted tour poetry that they inspired. My essay explores how Keats negotiated this ‘beaten track’, both as a cultural and as a literary practice, anticipating the ironic sense of poetic identity that he developed in the poems of his last years.

Start with the trips people make from home to work, and then back home again. Each commute reflects choices of where to live, where to work, when to work, when to go home, how to get from home to work, and what side trips to make along the way. Each decision depends on the opportunities available, with those in turn explained by the characteristics, resources, and values of workers, their families, their employers, other travelers, and of course the built environment of sidewalks, streets, bus routes, and rail lines connecting home to work. Nonwork trips, the great majority of trips in modern times, entail even more finely detailed mosaics of people, places, and the variety of things one obtains, or hopes to obtain, by going somewhere. Travel is the outcome of a grand confluence of human and other factors, many systematic and many others not. It will never be fully understood. But because travel poses numerous challenges, and opportunities, it would be good to understand more. Planning strategies to reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality continue to get prominent attention. Several increasingly influential efforts emphasize the potentially mitigating role of the built environment. For example, a good deal has been made in recent years of the fact that people drive less and walk more in downtown San Francisco than in suburbs anywhere. Part of this observed behavior is no doubt attributable to the kinds of people living there, people who prefer and indeed seek out the many benefits—travel and otherwise—of a diverse, high-density, mixed-use environment. But many observers have also asked, quite reasonably, if it would not make sense to design suburbs and other neighborhoods to be more like downtown San Francisco, or more like whatever it is about those places that leads people to drive less. Perhaps then people in suburbs and elsewhere would drive less and walk more. And perhaps that would lead to improvements in traffic congestion, air quality, and other transportation problems associated with the automobile.