Mapping How Cities Are Reclaiming Street Space

To help get essential workers around, cities are revising traffic patterns, suspending public transit fares, and making more room for bikes and pedestrians.

"The fight against coronavirus has brought cities to a standstill. With roughly one third of the global population under lockdown, vehicle traffic has all but vanished on the world’s busiest roads and highways. Public transit ridership in global metros has dropped by more than 80% since early January. For residents in one U.S. city, Seattle, the average daily travel distance has gone from the length of the Las Vegas Strip to that of a bowling alley..."

see article:  Mapping How Cities Are Reclaiming Street Space

A Common Sense of Place

What are streets for? What story should they tell? Featuring Ben Hamilton-Baillie. Produced by Martin Cassini in association with Maniac Films.

People & Traffic in Llan - Crowdfunding for change

Llangollen, North Wales, UK  07 March 2015

"Everyone grumbles about Castle Street. Drivers in a hurry to get through would like all parking banned, pedestrians would like safe crossings, shopkeepers need to load and unload and want more parking for their customers, tourists want a pleasant place to stroll.

At the moment we have the worst of all possible solutions, some legal parking, some illegal parking, double yellows down one side giving motorists the illusion of a clear road - until they meet a large vehicle coming the other way, and pedestrians running the gauntlet. The only good thing is that it's so chaotic the traffic is often slow and there haven't been any serious accidents. There have been a lot of near-misses, minor bumps and startled pedestrians. Relying on poor traffic management to keep people safe isn't really a sensible policy..."

more at http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/people-traffic-in-llan/

Breaking news: 

Crowdfunding target for Llangollen road survey reached !

http://www.newsnorthwales.co.uk/news/145131/crowdfunding-target-for-llangollen-road-survey-reached.aspx

Shared Space pedestrian and traffic interaction, Bern, Switzerland

"Free-flowing pedestrian and traffic flows along this busy suburban arterial route into Bern. illustrates the potential for improving pedestrian flows where a low-speed traffic environment has been created. Road carries over 20,000 vehicles per day. First three years of this and similar schemes have seen traffic flows improve, pedestrian delays reduced and significant improvements in accident rates. All former signal-controlled pedestrian crossings were removed."[Ben Hamilton-Baillie and Fritz Kobi] [Note the children's play structure with bouncing kids at the roundabout in the background. Also the emergency vehicle @ 4:23 min. shows how the pedestriam median refuge is mountable in emergencies. ]

Helmets Safer..or Not?

Elle Macpherson's child bicycle bungle

This is how the UK's Daily Mirror described the incident:
...Elle Macpherson is not exactly a model mum - as she cycles along with her son perched precariously on the handlebars.
Elle, 44, seemed oblivious to the dangers as she laughed and chatted with [son] Aurelius Cy while weaving through busy West London streets... [more]

The Guardian's Simon Jenkins however had a different opinion:

Elle Macpherson deserves a medal...
The press are idiots to condemn the model for cycling without a helmet. The real villains are over-active traffic managers

...Macpherson was probably the safest cyclist in London that day. Like the mayor [of London] , Boris Johnson, she is signed up (I guess by instinct) to the Wilde-Adams theory of compensatory risk assessment. By not wearing a helmet, she lowers her risk threshold and thus rides more carefully. She commendably cycles rather than drives a car and protects her child, who cannot manage his own risk. The society should give her a medal, not insult her. The press were idiots.
By chance, this week sees the publication of another tome in the mountain of evidence that Britain's safety culture is making us increasingly unsafe. Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic collates a mass of evidence about how we drive cars and use roads. It demonstrates the extent of mendacious brain-washing inflicted on the public by health-and-safety lawyers, bureaucrats and sellers of expensive equipment...Galileo had the same trouble with the Inquisition. I say give Elle Macpherson a Galileo medal. [more]

What do YOU think?

Signal Failure

By MICHAEL BRUNTON Time.com

For decades, traffic engineer Hans Monderman had a hair-raising way of showing off his handiwork to anyone who took the trouble to visit his native northern Dutch province of Friesland. He would walk backward, arms folded, into the flow of traffic, and without horn-honking or expletives, drivers would slow or stop to let him safely cross to the other side. Monderman's stunt was an act of faith in the concept of "shared space," a radical street-design principle he quietly pioneered in more than 120 projects... Monderman explained that removing signs forces you "to look each other in the eye, to judge body language and learn to take responsibility — to function as normal human beings."
...Monderman long argued that the overuse of signage was due to a misguided culture of risk avoidance among town planners. "Each time someone complains," he told TIME, "something gets added to the system. And no one asks if it's effective." [more]

(To see Hans' stunt, watch videos on right.)

Jan Gehl


"Only architecture that considers human scale and interaction is successful architecture.""First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works."