Lack of affordable, walkable neighborhoods linked to poor health

A lack of affordable housing in Metro Vancouver is forcing many residents who want to live in pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods to move to car-dependent areas, which could be negatively affecting their health, according to new research from the University of B.C

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Lead researcher Larry Frank, a professor in UBC’s School of Population and Public Health, said the study’s findings highlight a need for politicians, real estate developers and healthcare providers to work together to bring housing costs down and build more pedestrian-friendly, healthier neighbourhoods.

“Our healthcare costs are going to continue to spiral out of control,” Frank told Metro. “We have a perfect storm in front of us with an aging population, increased chronic disease and people living in sedentary, unwalkable environments.”

Read the rest of the story here.

The Hidden Reason Why Rent Is So Expensive In Cities: Parking Spaces

While many factors contribute to drive up the price of rents, parking is among the most significant, according to University of California Los Angeles professor and renowned parking guru Donald Shoup. BuzzFeed News sat down with Shoup during the CityLab 2014 conference in Los Angeles Monday to talk about how parking makes housing more expensive. His point: “It’s unfair to have cities where parking is free for cars and housing is expensive for people.”

Read the list at BuzzFeed.

7 Simple Ways to Make Every City Friendlier to Pedestrians

San Jose is expected to grow faster than any city in the Bay Area in the next few decades. The local government is working to meet that demand with mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. To help it out, the non-profit San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) wrote a 67-page report looking at building and design techniques the city should encourage developers to use to better promote walkability—a fancy term that basically translates to pedestrian friendliness—and better use of mixed-use spaces.

Read the rest of the story at Wired.

UVA Transportation Training Academy Workshop Update

The University of Virginia's Transportation Training Academy has released its class schedule for the rest of the year.  To view the class list and find links to register, please check out our latest update here.

Building the City of the Future Through Smart, Connected Urban Transport

The concept of smart, connected transport is a hot topic among city leaders looking to ride the wave of innovation to more sustainable, prosperous cities. Despite this, building a truly smart and interconnected urban transport system is more than most cities can hope to do all at once.

Three key elements of smart urban transport – communications, efficient operations, and integration – serve as important starting points and can yield significant social, environmental, and economic benefits.
Using a “Smart City” approach to integrate services

Transport involves a host of variables that lead to complex coordination problems. In today’s cities, these challenges have led to the creation of individual networks, each one trying to solve each challenge separately. Many cities are burdened by individualized, disconnected transport systems that exist in silos and fail to connect the parts to the whole. Take the example of Bangalore, which has the largest bus fleet in India, and recently integrated and reorganized its service to improve user experience and efficiency.

Read the rest of the story here: http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/embarq/544981/building-city-future-through-smart-connected-urban-transport

Drivers express angst over I–95 tolls

The express lanes being built on Interstate 95 are expected to save commuters plenty of time.

But recent reports that it could cost up to $24 for one trip has many people wondering if the time-savings is worth that kind of money.

Under current pricing plans, the maximum a solo driver could pay to use the entire 29-mile stretch from Garrisonville to just north of the Capital Beltway during peak traffic periods is $23.20, says an official of the private corporations building the express lanes for the state.

And under the varying, congestion-priced rate structure, the cost could be less than $6 per trip when traffic is light.

Read the rest of the story here:  http://news.fredericksburg.com/newsdesk/2014/09/27/drivers-express-angst-over-i-95-tolls

The 4 Transportation Systems You'll Meet in the Future

We tend to think of transportation networks as the result of large public works projects—hello, Interstate Highway System—but lately, private hands have been tinkering at the edges of urban mobility. App-based e-hail car services like Uber and Lyft are disrupting traditional city taxi programs. Smartphonesare changing the way we wait for and pay for public transportation. And, of course, Google is on the verge of reshaping movement as we know it with the driverless car.

It's time to get the public sector talking again, says Anthony Townsend of New York University's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management. To start the conversation, Townsend and the Rudin Center have released Re-Programming Mobility—a report intended to provoke city officials, urban planners, and the general public into participating in the future of transportation, rather than reacting to it. Otherwise, he says, decisions made in board rooms today will impact the civic arena for decades to come.

"Really, what we're trying to do is provoke a far-ranging discussion that's much less one-dimensional than the kinds of futures we're hearing coming out of a lot of these companies trying to disrupt the marketplace," says Townsend.

Re-Programming Mobility conceives four fictional-but-fact-based urban-mobility scenarios set in roughly 2030. The 15-year window is far enough away for mobility to be uprooted—the U.S. interstates were largely completed between 1955 and 1970, after all—but still close enough to be reshaped by public input. While each scenario feels a bit far-fetched in its own right, together they offer plenty of food for thought to anyone concerned with the future of urban movement.

The whole report worth a read, but brief summaries of each scenario will follow here:http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/09/the-four-transportation-systems-youll-meet-in-the-future/380904/