Urban planning

Before the pandemic, Urbanism Next developed a framework organizing the disruptions to cities caused by emerging transportation technologies on land use, urban design, building design, transportation, and real estate. COVID-19 has disrupted the trajectory of these emerging technologies and will, in turn, change some our original assumptions. This paper revisits the original Urbanism Next framework, taking into account the cascading impacts of the pandemic. This report is one of two reports completed by Urbanism Next on the impacts of Covid-19.

Townscaper is an experimental community simulation and town-building game where the user can draw a series of buildings to obtain a town and represent urban spaces.

"In this paper we put together a list of the basic instincts that drive and contain travelers' behavior, showing how they mesh with technological progress and economic constraints."

"This Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of all of the major factors that underpin our understanding of urban and transport planning in the developed world. Combining urban and transport planning in one volume, the chapters present the state of the art as well as new research and directions for the future."

This article studies the relationship between gasoline consumption and urban design patterns by comparing 32 principal cities from around the world. The purpose is to evaluate physical planning policies for conserving transportation energy in urban areas.

This article examines the relationship between urban form and vehicle miles travelled, especially as it relates to last mile goods delivery and greenhouse gas emissions.

The city of Chandler, Arizona is preparing for autonomous vehicles’ impact on parking by allowing developers to provide less parking if they provide accommodations for ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles.

Buffalo has become to first major city to completely remove its outdated minimum parking requirements citywide.

This article discusses regulations around land use and why careful implementation is important. The author studied how two areas of Los Angeles near rail stations developed housing under baseline land use regulations and found that developers were most sensitive to density restrictions and parking requirements.

In this book, Donald Shoup reports on the progress cities have made on the principles outlined in book The High Cost of Parking. Remove off-street parking requirements, charge the right prices for on-street parking and use that revenue towards improving public services.

The development of automated vehicles is moving into the deployment phase. Automation is being tested in vehicles as well as buses, trains, trucks, and tractors. Some initial deployment could occur in Oregon in the form of pilot programs for a low-speed passenger shuttle and a truck-mounted attenuator. This guide focuses on potential impacts for the next five to fifteen years and discusses policy implications for each use case of automated vehicles.

“Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems.”

This article is a literature review of the definition and effects of urban sprawl for the purpose of implementing planning policies that discourage sprawl.

“Parking is expensive. We can break these costs down into two categories. One is the explicit fiscal costs of parking, to the provider and to the public. The other is the implicit opportunity cost of parking, which occupies land that could have been put to another beneficial use, and/or is often built at the expense of another beneficial activity.”

Today, warehouses are transforming into massive “mega-distribution centers” located in increasingly suburban areas. However, the rapid delivery expectations of E-commerce will also perpetuate the need for a network of local, smaller-scale supply points.

Open source simulation platform for supporting planning and analysis of urban development, incorporating the interactions between land use, transportation, the economy, and the environment.

Urban Footprint provides a cloud-based urban planning software built by urban planners and designers who truly understand planning needs. Service includes actionable data, scenario building, and multi-metric analysis.

Open source and free, web-based street design platform.

Open source and free, web-based street design platform, specifically cross-sections of streets for multiple uses.

Urban population movement simulation tool for strategic planning.

Fluicity is a citizen engagement solution that allows collective decision making around topics of general interest.

Open-access scenario planning package that allows users to analyze how their community's current growth pattern and future decisions impacting growth will impact a range of measures from public health, fiscal resiliency and environmental sustainability.

Riggs, Boswell and Ross describe their pilot street design project deploying Streetplan, a version of the opensource tool Streetmix. As part of the City of San Luis Obispo downtown revisioning project, their efforts inform the process, currently underway, of revising the Downtown Vision Concept Plan.

Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs.

"This paper builds on the growing scholarship on neighbourhood-level GHG production by combining emissions calculations from embodied energy, building-operating energy, and transportation energy, examining four variations of residential density."

"This paper provides a review of scenarios on these issues to date. Although some scenario studies provide useful insights about urban growth and change, very few consider detailed impacts of AVs on urban form, such as the density and mix of functions, the layout of urban development and the accessibility of locations, including the distance to transit."

Concerns over rising fuel prices and greenhouse-gas emissions have prompted research into the influences of built environments on travel, notably vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Accessibility to basic employment has comparatively modest effects, as do size of urbanized area, and rail-transit supplies and usage. Nevertheless, urban planning and city design should be part of any strategic effort to shrink the environmental footprint of the urban transportation sector.

This report includes information on the first of many research tasks planned for the partnership between SDOT and the Urban Freight Lab. This is the first assessment in any American city of the privately-owned and operated elements of the Final 50 Feet of goods delivery supply chains. These include private truck freight bays and loading docks, delivery policies and operations within buildings located in Center City.

"This paper presents a comprehensive discussion of the value capture mechanisms that cities can and do use to help finance their public transport systems. It highlights the most important findings from the literature and adds to it with new insights gained through case studies of public transit finance in six European and American cities. The objective is to inform a lively and productive dialogue on non-fare sources of public transport finance, and ultimately to find the best ways to finance the maintenance and extension of transit service in cities around the world."

This study examines the potential changes in residential location choice in a scenario where shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) are a popular mode of travel in the Atlanta metropolitan area. This hypothetical study is based on an agent-based simulation approach, which integrates residential location choice models with a SAV simulation model. The coupled model simulates future home location choices given current home location preferences and real estate development patterns. The results indicate that commuters may relocate to neighborhoods with better public schools and more amenities due to reductions in commute costs.

This edition of the Blueprint is organized into three parts, taking the reader through the principles and political structures that underscore and shape our vision of the future, key policy choices around transit, pricing, freight, and data that can reshape our cities, and finally, exploring the sweeping vision for city streets of the future: Shaping the Autonomous Future Today, Policies to Shape the Autonomous Age, and Design for the Autonomous Age

With this paper, RMI hopes to (1) offer cities and other mobility and built environment stakeholders an experimentation toolkit that puts them in a position to more quickly unlock the full potential of new mobility in cities designed to shape and enable it, and (2) engage stakeholders in further codeveloping and exploring a concept for living, flexible, and collaborative experimentation sites we’re calling MOD Cities.

"Here we present a unique long-term (decadal) record of CO2 mole fractions from five sites across Utah’s metropolitan Salt Lake Valley. Four state-of-the-art global-scale emission inventories also have a nonlinear relationship with population density across the city; however, in contrast to our observations, they all have nearly constant emissions over time. Our results indicate that decadal scale changes in urban CO2 emissions are detectable through monitoring networks and constitute a valuable approach to evaluate emission inventories and studies of urban carbon cycles."

Urban Mobility in a Digital Age is a transportation technology strategy designed to build on the success and innovation of the City of Los Angeles and its Department of Transportation (LADOT) as regulator and transportation service provider in a complex and evolving ecosystem of public and private services.

This publication profiles some of Copenhagen's best sustainable solutions. In the spirit of sharing, Copenhagen reaches out to cities worldwide with our solutions, but is also on the lookout for new ideas to improve Copenhagen and hope to be inspired by the lessons learnt by others.

On May 10, 2017, Mayor William Peduto charged 120 National Summit on Design & Urban Mobility delegates with the following challenge: “we must develop and carry-out a new social compact for mobility in cities. Now is the time to address mobility to ensure that we serve and support core community values of equity, inclusiveness, sustainability, and collective advancement. A social compact with shared and autonomous mobility providers ensures that these services do good for communities while these businesses do well in cities.

This report asks what role AVs can play in our society and how to create policy to allow them onto our streets in a way that will maximize our return?

The author presents his view of limitations of prediction and how it apply to transportation prediction such as ridership prediction. He describes the concepts for planning the future (with time and space) that always emphasize the freedom as the goal.

"Beyond Mobility is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places. This is as important, if not more important, than expediting movement. A stronger focus on accessibility and place creates better communities, environments, and economies. Rethinking how projects are planned and designed in cities and suburbs needs to occur at multiple geographic scales, from micro-designs (such as parklets), corridors (such as road-diets), and city-regions (such as an urban growth boundary). It can involve both software (a shift in policy) and hardware (a physical transformation). Moving beyond mobility must also be socially inclusive, a significant challenge in light of the price increases that typically result from creating higher quality urban spaces."

Through a review of long-range transportation plans and interviews with planners, this article examines how large metropolitan planning organizations are preparing for autonomous vehicles. In just a few years, the prospect of commercially available self-driving cars and trucks has gone from a futurist fantasy to a likely near-term reality. However, uncertainties about the new technology and its relationship to daily investment decisions have kept mention of self-driving cars out of nearly all long-range transportation plans.

The 2017 Community and Transportation Preferences Survey echoes many of the major findings from the previous surveys. Residents in the fifty top metropolitan areas continue to be split on what they look for in a neighborhood. A small majority prefer the idea of a walkable community and more alternatives to driving, but suburban living remains highly attractive to a sizable portion of the community.

This report examines how urban living affects residents’ mental health and happiness, and ways to use this information to create saner and happier cities. Some often-cited studies suggest that urban living increases mental illness and unhappiness, but a critical review indicates that much of this research is incomplete and biased, and the issues are complex, often involving trade-offs between risk factors. City living may increase some forms of psychosis and mood disorders, drug addiction, and some people’s unhappiness, but tends reduce dementia, alcohol abuse and suicide rates, and many people are happier in cities than they would be in smaller communities. This report examines specific mechanisms by which urban living can affect mental health and happiness, and identities practical strategies that communities and individuals can use to increase urban mental health and happiness. This analysis suggests that it is possible to create sane and happy cities.

With Mayo Clinic defining its landscape, Rochester has always been a place where health is front-and-center. But a primary goal for the Destination Medical Center is to transform Rochester into America’s City for Health where residents and visitors will, literally, walk the walk when it comes to wellness. The Design Guidelines that the Design Center at the University of Minnesota has developed with the staff of the City of Rochester and the Destination Medical Center show, in very specific and concrete terms, how to achieve that goal.

The purpose of the Primer is to describe and document new integrative approaches, guiding principles, and living examples that will serve SMART partner communities. It is also meant to serve businesses, community leaders, transportation practitioners and policymakers who are interested in improving and transforming their transportation systems (and related economies) as whole systems. This Primer aims to contribute to a growing literature of integrative and practical approaches for implementing multi-modal, “next generation” transportation and transportation infrastructure. More broadly, it aims to contribute to advancing livability, sustainability, and economic vitality in communities and city regions of the world through systems-based transportation.

For 50 years, American geography and land use has been centered on the personal car. The three revolutions in vehicle sharing, automation and electrification present new challenges and also great opportunities for land use and transportation planners. Absent policy reform, the three revolutions may contribute to more sprawl, but a sustainable planning approach that supports both higher-density development and lower single-occupant (or zero-occupant) driving can once again put people first rather than their cars.

A first-of-its-kind law will give New York City data on small businesses fleeing the city as retail rents skyrocket. But skeptics fear that won’t be enough.

In the 1960s, countercultural icon Timothy Leary popularized the phrase, "turn on, tune in, drop out," to describe the idea of using LSD and other psychedelic drugs to detach from society and achieve a higher level of thinking. Later in his life, he argued that the personal computer was the "LSD of the 1990s"—at that time having no inkling how much automation and augmented reality would play in our society, or how autonomous vehicles might change the way we connect with others. Might automated vehicles (AVs) be one of the ways that humans "tune in, turn on" and disconnect for the next few decades?

In this report, we present a set of four alternative scenarios set in major American metropolitan areas in the year 2030. We intend that these scenarios can be used to spur and inform discussions about the key issues that the nation’s transportation planners and policymakers need to anticipate in the coming decade. And we craft the alternative futures by using the approach of four archetypes: growth, collapse, constraint and transformation.

This briefing document concisely conveys the key findings of NCHRP Research Report 845: Advancing Automated and Connected Vehicles: Policy and Planning Strategies for State and Local Transportation Agencies. NCHRP Research Report 845 assesses policy and planning strategies at the state, regional, and local levels that could influence private-sector automated vehicle (AV) and connected vehicle (CV) choices to positively affect societal goals. The researchers identified and described mismatches between potential societal impacts and factors that influence private-sector decisions on CV and AV technologies. Policy and planning actions that might better align these interests were then identified. Researchers and the project oversight panel identified the promising actions and then conducted in-depth evaluations of the feasibility, applicability, and impacts of 18 strategies.

"While recent policies directed toward multimodal or complete streets have encouraged increased funding for bicycle- and pedestrian oriented projects, many streets are still plagued by unsafe conditions. This is especially true for one-way streets, which studies show often create unsafe crossing conditions. This study evaluates changes to street dynamics after a two-way street conversion in Louisville, Kentucky. We find that traffic flow increased after implementation of two-way flow, but traffic accidents decreased. We also note other ancillary benefits, such as increase in property values and reduced crime. These results provide evidence that conversions can promote mobility, safety, and livability."

This study looks at the potential for a shift away from curb use focused on street parking to more flexible allocation that includes pick-up and drop-off zones for passengers and freight. It presents the results of quantitative modelling of alternative curb-use scenarios and discusses their relative efficiency, contribution to wider policy objectives and implications on city revenues. The work builds on a workshop held in September 2017, and outreach to numerous experts. It also provides insights from a modeling exercise to quantify the impact of re-allocating curb space from parking to pick up and drop off zones.

With AVs on the brink of roll-out, what is next? How do our streets evolve and where does our capital begin to go? This article discusses some possibilities on the ways we may be able to better our streets without widening the roads to fit more cars.