Urban Design

This report looks at the potential impacts autonomous vehicle deployment could have on parking demand and how that might impact urban development. The study focused on three distinct areas of San Francisco. The research found that, contrary to headlines about AV impacts on parking, achieving large reductions in parking demand based on AV deployment will not be easy. To achieve significant parking reductions, AVs would need to be shared (not privately owned), pooled (riders willing to pick up other passengers along the way), have widespread geographic deployment (across entire metropolitan areas), and would need to complement high-capacity transit. Without all or most of these factors, parking demand may only by marginally impacted by AV deployment. The study also found that if parking demand could be reduced, different areas of the city would see quite different results. While many areas in San Francisco would see minimal development impacts as parking is not currently a significant driver or limiter of development, more auto-dominated areas could see substantial impacts if parking demand could be reduced by more than 40%. This raises interesting questions of how these levels of parking demand reduction might impact more auto-dominated and suburban areas throughout the country. This research was funded by Waymo.

Microtransit—shared transportation that offers dynamic routing and scheduling to efficiently match demand—is emerging as an ally to fixed-route services. However, its positive impacts are too often constrained by the politics and economics imposed by existing transit infrastructure. This paper proposes a solution that ‘‘flips transit on its head.’’ By rapidly prototyping microtransit services across cities and analyzing supply-demand mismatches, it is possible to launch truly data-driven transit services. To illustrate the framework, a unique dataset generated from a year of Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s GoLink service, one of the largest ondemand microtransit services in North America, is used. Mapping and machine learning are combined to empower planners to ‘‘join the dots’’ when (re)designing fixed-route transit lines. It is shown that microtransit should not simply fill in the gaps left by inefficiently scheduled bus routes: by incorporating it fully into their planning processes, cities and transit agencies could dramatically reverse the fortunes of public transit.

Many cities are rolling out bike share programs. However, few studies have evaluated how bike share systems (BSS) are used to quantify their sustainability impacts. This study proposes a Bike Share Emission Reduction Estimation Model (BS-EREM) to quantify the environmental benefits from bike share trips and compare the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions from BSS in eight cities in the United States, including New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. The BS-EREM model stochastically estimates the transportation modes substituted by bike share trips, considering factors such as trip distance, trip purpose, trip start time, the accessibility of public transits, and historical distributions of transportation mode choices.

Urbanism Next Center Director and Professor Nico Larco testified during the congressional hearing, "The Road Ahead for Automated Vehicles." Professor Larco highlighted the work of Urbanism Next and the potential cascading impacts of autonomous vehicles.

This report is an examination of parking, curb zones, and government service changes in the context of AVs. Given that there are very few actual AVs on the road, the analysis in this report is an attempt to project what we might see, using the current phenomenon as starting points. The report uses a mix of econometric modeling, cost accounting, and case studies to illustrate these projections.

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.

How is the COVID-19 pandemic changing urban living? In this paper, we explore the landscape of COVID-19 disruptions to date on land use and real estate, urban design, building design, transportation, e-commerce and retail, and goods delivery. We also highlight the longer-term questions and potential ongoing impacts COVID-19 might have on the built environment.

Urbano has been developed by Cornell University and other organizations. This software has some special features like download geospatial data, import and aggregate data, lookup and modify metadata, routing in different modes, analyze amenities and streets, integrated cad workflow, etc. Also, is useful to quantify urban parameters like amenity demand, streetscore, amenityscore and walkscore. It has a friendly interface to visualize different urban planning parameters.

Make pedestrian ways, particularly sidewalks, first class members of an open data transportation network. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has made available extensive, user-contributed open data on transportation networks, providing the basis for many use cases and downstream activities, including rich analytics, travel route optimization, city planning, and disaster relief. Sidewalks in the built environment have generally been treated an addendum to streets, failing to serve people with limited mobility.

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.

The Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, in partnership with Alta Planning + Design, Spirit for Change, and Metro hosted the Future of Public Spaces and Placemaking workshop on January 24th, 2020. This one-day workshop, supported by the Knight Foundation, brought together a wide range of community activists, government officials, policymakers, urbanists, planners, designers, technology representatives, and other professionals to share ideas and concerns, and to discuss emerging technologies such as new mobility, Mobility as a Service (MaaS), autonomous vehicles (AVs), and e-commerce, and their impacts on urban space and placemaking. The workshop concluded with a site-specific charrette aimed at investigating how communities can best prepare for these changes and adapt their public spaces to create places that are resilient, dynamic, equitable, and sustainable.

"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."

With the rapid growth of ride-hailing services, e-commerce and on-demand deliveries, demand for curb space has increased in urban areas.

This report studies how the use of Transportation Network Companies are increasing the demand for curb space and the potential related issues such as access, circulation, and safety.

"This memorandum outlines the process, objectives, and findings of an analysis the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) engaged Economic & Planning Systems (EPS) to undertake regarding whether proposed density bonuses would create sufficient additional residual land value to compensate for newly-established regulatory requirements in Multi-Dwelling Unit zone districts."

Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft are reducing the need for parking, which negatively affects parking companies but is otherwise beneficial for cities.

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.

This report discusses 761 walkable urban places in the United States' 30 largest metropolitan areas and their impact on social equity and educational attainment, and their economic impact on office, retail, and housing land uses.

This article describes thirty three of New York City's neighborhoods, detailing the character and brief history of each one.

The article describes five of Portland, Oregon's neighborhoods and their respective histories, along with the native restaurants and shops that characterize each neighborhood.

Cities around the world are beginning to prioritize people over vehicles by closing major streets to traffic and opening them up to pedestrians, cyclists, public transit.

Various cities across England and Germany have completely abolished parking minimums.

U.S. Census estimates through 2017 indicate a revival of suburbanization and migration towards metro areas in the middle of the country.

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.

In Seattle, a suburban shopping center’s parking lot is being transformed into a new walkable neighborhood.

An increasing number of architects, developers, and engineers are designing new parking garages that can be converted into other uses in the future if needed.

San Francisco’s emerging trend of transforming parking spots into “parklets” has sparked residents, businesses and nonprofits from around the city to come up with creative ways to turn parking into public space.

San Francisco’s “parklet” trend of transforming parking spots into small public spaces has mixed reviews among residents. Some people think that they are provide spaces for neighborhoods to come together, while some believe they exacerbate gentrification.

With the rise of e-commerce, Americans are demanding more deliveries. However, with declining warehouse availability, congested streets and limited curb access, the U.S.’s infrastructure may not be able to handle the increasing demand.

“This research examines office parking at a series of case study sites in suburban Southern California, identifying its impact on travel behavior, development density, development cost, and urban design.”

“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.”

“This study investigates neighborhood scale net migration of young adults in the top 20 urbanized areas (UAs) in the United States between 1980 and 2010.”

This is a survey of 3,000 adults in the top 50 metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. about the quality of life in their communities.

“While most big cities are still gaining population, the rates of that gain are falling off for many of them as the nation’s population shows signs of broad dispersal.”

This is the sponsorship brochure for the 2020 Urbanism Next European Conference.

This is a fact sheet suitable for use as a printed handout on Urbanism Next's topline research findings regarding micromobility.

This is a fact sheet suitable for use as a printed handout on Urbanism Next's topline research findings regarding TNCs.

Sustainable, inclusive, prosperous, and resilient cities depend on transportation that facilitates the safe, efficient, and pollution-free flow of people and goods, while also providing affordable, healthy, and integrated mobility for all people. The pace of technology-driven innovation from the private sector in shared transportation services, vehicles, and networks is rapid, accelerating, and filled with opportunity. At the same time, city streets are a finite and scarce resource.These principles, produced by a working group of international NGOs, are designed to guide urban decision-makers and stakeholders toward the best outcomes for all.

This framework provides an overview of the work Urbanism Next does and how we approach our research.

The purpose of this report is to analyze potential impacts and offer recommendations for the cities of Gresham and Eugene, OR, to understand the potential impacts of new mobility technologies – with an emphasis on autonomous vehicles (AVs) – and prepare a policy and programmatic response. While Gresham and Eugene are case studies, it provides mid-sized communities information on how new mobility services could impact their communities and what they can do about it, from broad strategies to specific policy responses. While this work focuses on the various new mobility and goods delivery services that currently exist, the framework that is discussed here is also applicable to emerging technologies that haven’t yet been introduced, such as autonomous vehicles (AVs).

The goal of this white paper is to consider the impact of AVs on municipal budgets. AVs create a “potential rat’s nest of a budgeting challenge.” This paper seeks to begin the process of untangling that rat’s nest, and provide the foundation for future phases of the project that will consider potential additional revenue sources to fund the infrastructure changes that may come from the integration of AVs as well as land use planning implications.

Residential Preference: the social, environmental, and physical preferences that affect a person or family’s choice of residential location (for our purposes, in relation to the urban core and other amenities offered as a part of living in density) The introduction of autonomous vehicles and the comprehensive integration of E-commerce into the urban and suburban fabric will have a widespread effect on the factors the influence a resident’s location preference.

The invention of the internet introduced a new typology to the marketplace, the online retailer. Omnichannel retail strategies - where a retailer operates through both physical locations and online sales - have become a necessity in today’s market.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are a near future reality and the implications of AVs on city development and urban form, while potentially widespread and dramatic, are not well understood. This report describes the first order impacts, or the broad ways that the form and function of cities are already being impacted by forces of change including⁠—but not limited to⁠—AVs and related technologies.

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.

A blueprint for designing 21st century streets, the Guide unveils the toolbox and the tactics cities use to make streets safer, more livable, and more economically vibrant.

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.

The purpose of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide (part of the Cities for Cycling initiative) is to provide cities with state-of-the-practice solutions that can help create complete streets that are safe and enjoyable for bicyclists.

The Transit Street Design Guide provides design guidance for the development of transit facilities on city streets, and for the design and engineering of city streets to prioritize transit, improve transit service quality, and support other goals related to transit.

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.

Metro data enables deep analysis of cyclist and pedestrian activity including popular or avoided routes, peak commute times, intersection wait times, and origin/destination zones. Metro processes this data for compatibility with geographic information system (GIS) environments.

Urban population movement simulation tool for strategic planning.

Provides a platform to design and manage your city's transportation future, specifically bus and micromobility services.

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

Mapbox is the location data platform for mobile and web applications. they provide building blocks to add location features like maps, search, and navigation into any experience you create.

Policy Guidebook for urban transportation and land use decision makers.

The Option Generator allows users to create a list of ranked policy instruments based on individual search criteria.

This scorecard shows the criteria and point values that make up the BRT Standard, including a description of each category.

La Fabrique aims to maximize the chances of success of mobility innovations without providing direct financial support to projects. La Fabrique provides organized resources and partnership opportunities to entrepreneurs.

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.

Surveyor app from Coord to collect accurate curb asset data in half the time with the power of augmented reality.

Provides a platform to analyze, share, and collect curb data.

Card game to engage citizen in the participatory budgeting process.

Citilabs offers a number of analytical and visualization products to aid in modeling population movement, scenario planning, and transit operations.

Guidelines for cities to implement sustainable and environmental mobility strategies for people and goods.

BikeAble can use mapping technology to model the low-stress bike route options available from any origin to any destination. Doing this for a large number of origins and destinations allows us to aggregate the results to show not just how connected one household is to key destinations, but how well connected an entire community is.

The following key findings are based on the World Population Prospects 2019: Highlights, which presents the latest round of global population estimates and projections by the United Nations.

In order to ease congestion downtown and relieve pressure on parking during the holiday season, the city of Boulder, Colorado engaged in a partnership with Lyft, Uber, and a taxi company zTrip. The pilot project, which ran for 11 weeks, involved the city subsidizing rides for residents of Boulder who travelled downtown using one of the partnership companies. This report presents the motivation, design, operation, and results of the pilot.

This report categorizes and summarizes efforts that are already underway in cities across the world to rethink curb management, to outline the key takeaways from the one-day workshop that involved city staff from Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, and to identify major research gaps.

This is an exercise that deconstructs an urban and a suburban streetscape using the Restreet.com participatory design tool. Restreet was created by William Riggs, Mike Boswell and Ryder Ross in 2016 as a code fork from the Code for America project Streetmix. The idea was to democratize the way we plan streets and synthesize that data for policy and decision-making. The streets depicted show right-of-way needs eroding due to the prevalence of autonomous vehicles creating efficiency or the policy decision to do so in advance of their adoption. The final two slides show the submissions from the over 6,000 users since September and the related summary statistics. All suggest that policy that supports traffic calming and lane reductions to support multimodal transportation might be appropriate in the immediate future.

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.

This policy paper focuses on the primary concept of the street as space that can be repurposed – real estate that can be allocated in similar or different ways than done currently. Cities generally refer to this publicly owned and regulated space from one side of the street to the other as the right of way (ROW). Our focus is on the centrality of the ROW in dictating many other community functions and values – transportation and otherwise. And our particular bias is to focus on the opportunities that AV technology is likely to create to rethink how the ROW is allocated, so that our communities can meet their substantial and unique environmental, social, and economic challenges.

The Mobility Hub Reader’s Guide is meant to provide guidance and inspiration for city staff, property owners, developers, designers, transit agencies, and community members for enhancing project developments and public right-of-way improvements in proximity to existing or new transit stations with amenities, activities, and programs to support multi-modal connectivity and access.

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 article describes the changing driving landscape in New York City. The city is making efforts to return the streets to the people and also optimize public transportation options. The pushback is steep again the community where the traffic is being pushed as well as with the business owners.

Urban innovations company Sidewalk Labs and the Canadian government announced a partnership Tuesday to develop 750 acres along Toronto’s waterfront into what they envision as a high-tech living laboratory for solving urban problems. It would be the largest urban redevelopment project in North America.

"A pioneering urban economist presents a myth-shattering look at the majesty and greatness of cities."

This white paper discusses the forces affecting U.S. passenger travel, the permanence of which is often unclear. We explore travel demand’s relationship with explanatory factors such as economic activity, gas prices, urban form, socio-demographic traits and generational effects, the expanding availability of travel options (including electronic alternatives to travel) and technological innovations in the transportation sector (including the advent of emerging transportation and shared mobility services). We discuss how these factors modify the alternatives available to travelers, the characteristics of each alternative, and the way travelers perceive and evaluate these characteristics.

This chapter estimates how minimum parking requirements increase the cost of constructing housing, office buildings, and shopping centers. It also explains proposed legislation to limit how much parking cities can require in transit-rich districts.

This blog talks about how the autonomous vehicles will change the built environment such as street design, parking infrastructure, public space, etc. It also mentions how different modes can be integrated with the change of built environment.

Although recent studies of Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs) have explored the economic costs and environmental impacts of this technology, little is known about how SAVs can change urban forms, especially by reducing the demand for parking. This study estimates the potential impact of SAV system on urban parking demand under different system operation scenarios with the help of an agent-based simulation model. The simulation results indicate that we may be able to eliminate up to 90% of parking demand for clients who adopt the system, at a low market penetration rate of 2%. The results also suggest that different SAV operation strategies and client's preferences may lead to different spatial distribution of urban parking demand.

In working with Waterfront Toronto, the public entity that owns the land, to develop Quayside, Sidewalk Labs would reimagine urban life in five dimensions—housing, energy, mobility, social services, and shared public spaces—with an aim to “serve as a model for sustainable neighborhoods” around the world.

One of the public policy goals for livable and sustainable communities is to minimize the use of automobiles. This paper focuses on introducing and justifying an important new policy principle. Even when car travel is minimized with smart growth land development policies, transportation demand management, and increased public transit, a significant level of automobile use will remain. As a result, reducing the environmental, economic and safety impacts of those remaining automobiles should be an essential element of a livable, sustainable community. Fortunately, fundamental and disruptive technological advances in new vehicles—automation, connectivity, and electrification as described in this paper are fast emerging to make this new priority feasible.

The "what ifs" are endless at this point. This article leaves us with only the tip of the iceberg of answers that could lead to what will happen as we are faced with major changes in transportation.

"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."

The storm clouds of sprawl addiction had been gathering for years, but it took the Meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession to make it clear just how damaging that addiction had been to the health of cities across the US and abroad. Sprawl has two really big things going for it, but three even bigger things now going against it which are poised to turn the tide against the pattern of sprawl.

Currently, little planning is being done to prepare for driverless technology. Actors at multiple levels, however, have tools at their disposal to help ensure that new technology does not come at the expense of the nation’s remaining natural habitats. This Article advocates for a shift in paradigm from policies that are merely anti-car to those that are pro-density, and provides suggestions for both cities and suburban areas for how harness the positive aspects of driverless cars while trying to stem the negative. Planning for density regardless of technology will help to ensure that, for the world of the future, there is actually a world.

This Blueprint outlines a vision for cities in a future where automated transportation is both accepted and widespread as part of the built environment. It is a human oriented vision for the potential of city streets, intersections, and networks-one in which automation can serve the goals of safety, equity, public health, and sustainability.

"Mobility Plan 2035 (Plan) provides the policy foundation for achieving a transportation system that balances the needs of all road users. As an update to the City’s General Plan Transportation Element (last adopted in 1999), Mobility Plan 2035 incorporates “complete streets” principles and lays the policy foundation for how future generations of Angelenos interact with their streets."

As we build new developments, are we still short on parking? Parking minimums have created endless hot, asphalt deserts in our developments and now cities are working to reverse these laws.

Seattle City Council passes in a 7 to 1 vote a plan for large parking reforms including separating parking costs from rent and increasing bike parking requirements.

This report describes a shoppers trip and what the planner may be most interested in about it as well as street design and it's accommodation for all activities that may need to happen throughout the day.

The main objective of this research project is to provide FDOT with information and guidance on how best to begin to prepare for a future in which AV technology first takes root and then takes over the market. The FSU Research Team is investigating the potential impacts of widespread adoption of AV technology on the transportation network and urban form for four key land use and transportation nodes that are vital to the welfare of the State of Florida: Downtown, Office/Medical/University Center, Urban Arterial, and Transit Neighborhood. To accomplish this, the FSU Research Team engaged one-hundred planners, engineers, industry professionals, and public officials in a facilitated visioning session at the 2015 Florida Automated Vehicle Summit (FAV Summit). During this session the research team gathered input on how AVs will impact our communities and how the built environment will need to adapt to accommodate AVs in the coming decades.

We quantify the importance of early action to tackle urban sprawl. We focus on the long-term nature of infrastructure decisions, specifically local roadways, which can lock in greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The location and interconnectedness of local roadways form a near permanent backbone for the future layout of land parcels, buildings, and transportation options. We provide new estimates of the environmental impact of low-connectivity roads, characterized by cul-de-sacs and T-intersections, which we dub street-network sprawl. We find an elasticity of vehicle ownership with respect to street connectivity of –0.15—larger than suggested by previous research. We then apply this estimate to quantify the long-term emissions implications of alternative scenarios for street-network sprawl. On current trends alone, we project vehicle travel and emissions to fall by ∼3.2% over the 2015–2050 period, compared to a scenario where sprawl plateaus at its 1994 peak. Concerted policy efforts to increase street connectivity could more than triple these reductions to ∼8.8% by 2050. Longer-term reductions over the 2050–2100 period are more speculative, but could be more than 50% greater than those achieved by 2050. The longer the timescale over which mitigation efforts are considered, the more important it becomes to address the physical form of the built environment.

"In this paper we propose a new method to study how replacing privately owned conventional vehicles with automated ones affects traffic delays and parking demand in a city. The model solves what we designate as the User Optimum Privately Owned Automated Vehicles Assignment Problem (UO-POAVAP), which dynamically assigns family trips in their automated vehicles in an urban road network from a user equilibrium perspective where, in equilibrium, households with similar trips should have similar transport costs.