Liberté, Égalité, Parking

I have a new favorite example about designing places for people, and how much human nature can complicate that process. Mont Saint-Michel is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, just over ⅓ of a square mile in size, and visited by 2.5M tourists per year. With just a few exceptions, it’s not possible to drive right up […]

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Streets without trees are dangerous

With more cities developing Vision Zero initiatives to eliminate road traffic fatalities, more people are seeing the way streets that are designed as a life-and-death issue. That entails seeing things that used to look fairly benign – a 13′ lane width, for example – as hazardous. We should start seeing the absence of mature street […]

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Taking in the local atmosphere

With this post, I’m starting a series about air. It ties back to another small post from today about swimming pools, which you can find here if you’re curious. The gist of it is that when the systems around managing a shared public resource like a simple pool of water aren’t working, it’s gross on […]

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If Mpls & St Paul grow and add affordable housing and movie stars, will they be like Islington?

If you’re familiar with the Twin Cities, stretch your imagination with me and picture a city in which: Both exceptionally very wealthy and very poor people live. People reliably support liberal politicians. There’s an area to the west that’s also wealthy, has less poverty, and leans further right politically. Residents have a reputation for being […]

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