6 Examples of What Makes a Great Public Space

People often ask us, “What makes a public space great?”

When PPS was recently approached by USA Today to provide a list of the best city parks in the U.S. for their upcoming interactive webpage, we were excited for the opportunity share our thoughts on this question that has been at the core of our work for 40 years. After narrowing down our extensive library, our co-founder Kathy Madden submitted 20 parks for consideration. A handful of our selections were chosen for the shortlist (now available online for your vote)! Some of those chosen included some longtime favorites, such as Central Park in NYC, Jackson Square in New Orleans, Millennium Park in Chicago, and Boston Public Garden.

Although famous spaces like Central Park will always top lists like these, we wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some other examples of great public spaces around the world—including a few that may sometimes fly under the radar.

So, how do we decide if a public space is great? Good question, since it might seem pretty subjective—one person might feel deterred from the same place that another feels a deep attachment to. This is why we created our Place Diagram.

See the diagram and read the rest of the story here.

NYC Rethinking Left Turns

It's been two years since the city launched its Vision Zero approach to traffic safety, and while the mayor is touting the drop in fatalities as encouraging, he says the progress is "just beginning."

"Vision Zero is going to move ahead with even more intensity in the coming year," said de Blasio.

One area of intensity: left turns.

As WNYC has reported, the move is difficult for drivers — and can have disastrous consequences for pedestrians. In New York City, they account for 30 percent of vehicle-pedestrian crashes. Now, they're coming under increased scrutiny by the city, and the mayor says making them safer is one of his Vision Zero goals for the coming year.

Read the rest of the story here.

"Zipper Truck" Changes The Way We Build Tunnels

'Zipper' truck
This 'zipper' truck is radically changing the way we build tunnels.
Posted by Tech Insider on Sunday, February 28, 2016

The Real Source of America's Urban Revival

Something strange happened in U.S. cities circa 2000: people started to move downtown. Not all people. If you look at the top 100 metro areas between 2000 and 2010, only two downtowns grew faster than their outlying suburbs in terms of total population. Two. But among young college graduates—a key indicator of an area’s growth potential, in the eyes of urban economists—moving downtown became more the rule than the exception.

From 2000 to 2010, more college-educated professionals aged 25 to 34 moved downtown than to the suburbs in 39 of the 50 largest U.S. metros. For 35-to-44-year-olds, the same held true in 28 of the 50 largest metros. This revival was true in the places you might expect, like New York City or San Francisco, and in places you might not, like Cleveland. It was true despite historical trend lines showing that, for the better part of a century, the wealthy typically moved one way when it came to cities: out of them.

Read the rest of the story here.

How Fast are We Really? Bring on the Concept of Effective Speed

Judging by the numbers from the Berliner Senat (or from speedometers), cars are a lot faster than bikes. However, a re-evaluation of the way in which we think about speed would have cyclists (and in some cases pedestrians) whizzing by motorists almost all the time: enter the concept of effective speed.

How fast do we go when we move around our cities? For Berlin, estimates of the average speed are about 25 km/h for motorists. But that’s just the average speed from the time a journey begins to when it ends, depositing you at your destination. But when does a journey really begin? Did you have to brush snow off your windshield or pump up your tires? If you walk, did you include the time it took to tie your shoes? Is the last hour you spent at work dedicated to earning the cash to enable your drive home? Or the first fifteen minutes of your income allotted to paying your bike mechanic for the tune-up you got last week?

Traditionally, we measure speed in terms of distance traveled divided by the time it took to travel that distance. That’s how we arrive at ideas like ‘kilometers per hour.’ The most recent data released by the Berliner Senat claims that motorists in Berlin travel at an average of 24.9 km/h. Cyclists, it reports, have an average speed of 12.3 km/h. This difference might seem large, but what if we figure in the time that motorists and cyclists invest in paying for and maintaining their vehicles?

Read the rest of the story here.

The New Science of Street Design

In his excellent recent book Street Smart, veteran New York transportation engineer Sam Schwartz recalls a 1980s battle over the Williamsburg Bridge. Schwartz was the city’s transportation commissioner when he received the bad news: The 1903 bridge, which carried a quarter-million New Yorkers daily, was in danger of collapse.

Schwartz faced a choice that required federal funding: Replace the span or repair it. Replacement did not strike Schwartz as the right thing to do. "Had we decided to replace the bridge, New York would have had to spend [an extra] three-quarters of a billion dollars on a bridge whose primary effects would have been to destroy existing neighborhoods on both sides of the East River and put even more cars and trucks on Manhattan streets."

The feds wanted to do just that. The bridge did not fit the prevailing theories on safe streets. The Williamsburg Bridge’s lanes were narrow—less than 9 feet at the towers. To convince the federal government that replacement would be the wrong course, Schwartz mapped traffic collisions on the bridge for a three-year period. It turned out the safest part of the bridge was the narrowest part—even though its lanes there were far short of the standard, recommended 12-foot lane widths. Schwartz’s hypothesis, since confirmed by many studies, is that drivers are more careful when lanes are narrow.  

Although the bridge was saved along with (what is now) billions of dollars’ worth of homes and businesses, the findings raised no curiosity among transportation and traffic engineers. No one suggested further studies. The incident was quickly forgotten, except by Schwartz. At least since the 1960s, engineers had designed urban thoroughfares on the theory that wide streets, lacking in nearby obstacles like trees, parked cars, and lampposts, are the safest. To the detriment of people and communities, these designs suppressed other uses of urban streets—such as walking, biking, socializing, and transit—but that outcome was either ignored or deemed an acceptable trade-off.

Read the rest of the story here.

By Neglecting Bikes, Transit, Wisconsin is Losing Young People

For the last decade, Wisconsin has been experiencing a “brain drain,” with more college graduates leaving the state than staying. Based on what we’ve learned from numerous recent surveys of millennials, including a new WISPIRG Foundation survey of 530 college students at 14 Wisconsin campuses, one factor could be our crumbling transit infrastructure and lack of driving alternatives.

Growing evidence suggests that young people choose where they want to live largely on the lifestyle and amenities of those communities, and that they gravitate toward more walkable, bike-able and transit-friendly communities where lifestyles are less dependent on driving.

Could modernizing transit, bike and pedestrian infrastructure be one strategy to reverse the brain drain and make Wisconsin communities a destination where millennials seek to locate?

Read the rest of the story here.