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The COVID-19 pandemic helped reveal much-needed insights about how people view cities and interact with public space City leaders, planners and even the public realized how much space in streets is devoted to moving automobiles at the expense of walking and bicycling Responses to the pandemic, furthermore, helped people become aware of how the character of streets can change quickly Here, King and Krizek argue that there is an urgency to act now, being on the brink of a once-in-a-century occurrence where street use is changing potentially at the same time as new vehicle types They view the condition of the pandemic as one capable of spurring rapid change to fix long-standing problems with urban transport

Transport planning and policy is increasingly being called to action in ways that differ from practices of yesteryear. Varied segments of society are increasingly looking to city streets—the workhorse of a city's transport system—as places to enact change. Namely, to change their character away from the type of streets pervasive in auto-oriented urban environments. Acutely experienced during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency response measures from many cities across the world abruptly altered the nature and purpose of street space. These “street experiments” fueled an opportunity, in part, to explore a transition to practices prioritizing forms of sustainable mobility such as walking and bicycling. This research inventories street-focused emergency response measures from the 55 largest cities in the US. We devise a rubric to systematically assess and locate characteristics of these measures that enable a transition. Results show that five “innovator” and several “early adopter” cities are using COVID conditions to test new forms of streets and in some cases, street networks. These cities excelled in conveying a vision for alternative future, articulating implementation pathways, leveraging political capacity, and circulating information. After six months, half of the cities continue their efforts, including only six which have expanded. The few showing continued strength demonstrate endeavors to evaluate the experiments, validate their feasibility, and embed the experiments into existing sustainability policy. These components, when leveraged together, could seed innovative break-throughs in how city streets are used, designed, and standardized. The paper establishes baseline evidence on which future research efforts can build and provides empirical evidence on early stages of the experimentation and transition processes of urban mobility systems.

Embracing a biological and evolutionary perspective to explain the human experience of place, Urban Experience and Design explores how cognitive science and biometric tools provide an evidence-based foundation for architecture and planning. Aiming to promote the creation of a healthier and happier public realm, this book describes how unconscious responses to stimuli, outside our conscious awareness, direct our experience of the built environment and govern human behavior in our surroundings. This collection contains 15 chapters, including contributions from researchers in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, France and Iran. Addressing topics such as the impact of eye-tracking analysis and seeing beauty and empathy within buildings, Urban Experience and Design encourages us to reframe our understanding of design, including the narrative of how modern architecture and planning came to be in the first place. This volume invites students, academics and scholars to see how cognitive science and biometric findings give us remarkable 21st-century metrics for evaluating and improving designs, even before they are built.

The intrinsic qualities of bicycling in urban areas are oft-asserted and difficult to measure. These benefits may therefore be undervalued. Considering the majority of research of bicycling in cities has captured functional characteristics (e.g., travel time, cost, health), less is known of how bicycling provides intrinsic benefits (e.g., the feeling of wind in one's hair, social cohesion, stress relief) and how such benefits could be incorporated into travel analysis. I argue how and why access to a destination by bicycling can be more valuable than access to destinations by other modes—largely owing to intrinsic qualities—and point to opportunities and challenges for measurement. Drawing from the idea that travel often times has a positive utility, coupled with the emerging research base that points to how bicycling advances emotional well-being, I extend a framework based on measuring access to destinations and point to future challenges and opportunities in doing so.

To Copenhagenize or bust; is there no in-between? New mobility innovations are shuddering shockwaves through transport practices in cities worldwide, compelling planners and elected officials to re...

Strategies to manage transportation demand are colloquially labeled carrots or sticks: carrots (or enablers) to entice desired travel behaviors and sticks (or deterrents) that discourage undesirable ones. Assessing the merits of each approach requires answering two questions: which approach is most effective at influencing travel behavior; and what is the difference in terms of ease of implementation between carrots and sticks? The literature typically examines these questions in isolation, but success depends upon both intervention efficacy and the ability to implement. Using a multiple-methods approach, we find those interventions that incorporate both enablers and deterrents are most effective at encouraging active transportation while remaining feasible to implement.

The manner in which cyclists visually perceive elements of the urban environment plays an important role in bicycle crashes, which have been increasing in recent years. Yet, how visual information is processed by the user while riding a bike is still poorly analyzed by researchers. This study investigates cyclists&rsquo, eye gaze behavior at signalized intersections taking into account a set of gaze characteristics. Recording cyclist&rsquo, s visual fixations by mobile-eye glasses in a real outdoor environment, a total of 13 field tests have been analyzed along a three-kilometer route in the urban center of Bologna, Italy. Findings reveal key differences in gaze behavior by experience level of the cyclist and type of intersection.

This commentary argues for strategies to rapidly increase access by small, human-scaled modes in cities through changes to street designs. Such rapid transformations are necessary as part of responses to critical environmental, economic and public health challenges cities face. We explain that even though coordinated transport and land use planning is desirable, the built environment is mature and slow to change, while streets can and have changed in character and use frequently. This suggests that access to employment, amenities and services should be dramatically increased through reoriented street space toward human-scaled transport modes which will improve safety, reduce pollution, and save households and governments money. We then articulate the prospects of a new generation of accessibility research based on network evolution.

This case study examines transportation infrastructure investments along with data revealing mode share in order to highlight correlations between investments in sustainable transportation infrastructure (‘supply’) and patterns of non-automobile mode share (‘demand’). The analysis assesses data from Boulder, Colorado, a city that has made substantial efforts to improve its multi-modal transportation infrastructure and services by investing in pedestrian, bicycle, and transit infrastructure and services. We aim to describe connections between supply and demand by measuring two phenomena: the extent of transportation infrastructure investments supporting pedestrian, bicycle, and transit modes made between 1990 and 2009 and the share of these modes during the same 20 years period. Results illustrate an overall increase in transit and bicycle mode share and a decrease in single occupancy vehicle share, with consistent pedestrian share. We conclude that Boulder's investments in improving mode choices through new infrastructure and services supporting non-automobile modes are associated with increasing share of non-automobile modes. This is despite national trends that indicate an increasing automobile mode share. Regardless of the reasons for the positive trends experienced in Boulder, the presence of robust pedestrian, bicycling, and transit infrastructure has clearly coincided with evolving travel preferences. Boulder therefore serves as an example for other cities desiring to focus on developing policies and infrastructure that expand the availability of non-automobile modes.

The environmental benefits of bicycling and walking depend on the degree to which their use substitutes for car driving. Assuming that every walking and bicycling trip replaces a driving trip is likely to produce overestimates of the potential for such modes to reduce vehicle travel and city-scale greenhouse gas emissions. Measuring this “substitution effect” is not straightforward. There are many dimensions of the substitution effect, including trip type, substituting mode, extent, time horizon, and activity patterns. Previously used approaches to measure substitution include indirect inference and direct questioning. This study piloted an intercept survey using the direct questioning approach at five locations in two metropolitan areas. The rate at which utilitarian walking or cycling trips substituted for auto trips ranged between 25% and 86%. Logistic regression models demonstrate that disparate factors explain walking substitution and bicycling substitution behavior; age is significantly correlated with substitutive walking behavior while number of car trips per week and helmet use are each significant predictors of bicycle substitution. This research represents a valuable first step toward developing a method to estimate the substitution effect that is useful for practitioners. Better estimates of the substitution effect will in turn lead to better estimates of the environmental impacts of bicycling and walking.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe four phases for how universities have addressed a sustainability agenda and offer specific lessons for how and where experiences on one campus, the University of Colorado Boulder, have been met with success and other challenges. The authors offer general reflections for executing university‐wide sustainability initiatives with a central intent of illuminating central barriers against, and incentives for, a coordinated and integrated approach to campus sustainability.Design/methodology/approachThe approach for arriving at four phases and a description of the University of Colorado Boulder is based on experiences from learning, teaching, and administering within universities–collectively for almost a century among the authors–and lessons from “war room” discussions.FindingsSustainability initiatives on campus may evolve through a series of phases labeled: grassroots; executive acceptance of the business case for sustainability; the visionary campus leader; and fully self‐actualized and integrated campus community. The University of Colorado Boulder, while a leader in many respects of sustainability (research, student activities, facilities management) has experienced serious challenges for coordination.Originality/valueThe four phases are a relatively novel contribution for the specific literature on sustainability education. Second, the tangible examples from University of Colorado Boulder demonstrate how coordination is difficult in these situations; these examples allow readers to better relate to and understand such challenges. Finally, the authors reflect on central issues according to three categories: self‐reflection, recommendations, and advantages.

Many transportation planners undertake local surveys for a better understanding of the levels of walking and cycling of residents in their city or town. This paper explores the challenges of designing a robust sampling strategy for such surveys. A review of existing surveys on nonmotorized transportation demonstrated that many existing surveys used less than ideal sampling approaches for communities that were aiming to collect populationwide data on cycling and walking and thereby jeopardized the strength of their conclusions. Either surveys used approaches that were too expensive and complex for most communities to implement or surveys generated data that were not applicable to all residents in a community (i.e., data that were not generalizable to the full population). In response to that sampling problem, this paper presents a new method for collecting generalizable data: the sampling method developed in the Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS) project. PABS offers a rigorous, yet inexpensive, simple, and well-documented method to conduct surveys. The PABS mail-out–mail-back survey and probabilistic (generalizable) sampling approach can be performed in-house within municipal agencies. With the use of PABS, transportation professionals can obtain higher-quality data about their community as a whole than they would obtain with many of the other existing approaches. PABS is thus a useful complement to other sampling approaches such as intercept surveys (an important way to collect data on the use of specific facilities) or surveys distributed to e-mail lists (a cheap and useful way to collect qualitative data).

Would urban design considerations and practices be different if the experience of bicycling was given a more central place? Drawing on a review of international literature and practice, this paper compares the characteristics of cyclists with those of pedestrians and motorists, showing that cyclists have a substantial number of unique characteristics that warrant further investigation in terms of a special urban design response. Focusing on four issues—community layout, cycling facilities, analysis and design processes, and detailed design—the paper offers a framework and central considerations for cycling-oriented urban design. It concludes with a call to take the experience of cycling seriously in urban design. This involves moving beyond a concern with safe and convenient facilities and complete networks to a more substantial interest in the experience of the environment from a cyclist's point of view.

There is increasing interest in Health Impact Assessment in planning. This paper describes the results of different approaches to health impact assessment (HIA) conducted in 10 municipalities and one county in Minnesota. The paper outlines the HIA processes, outputs, and short-term outcomes concluding that it is important to engage a diverse group of stakeholders. Overall, HIA is potentially an important new tool in the planning toolkit. Strategic use of HIA to evaluate draft plans and inform plan updates and project redesigns can help raise awareness about health issues and focus planning on important human problems.

Cycling continues to increase in popularity and garner attention for the ability to achieve environmental, health, and congestion-mitigation benefits for communities. Although the growth in both cycling and transit may be in small part attributed to bicycle and transit integration, the growth is difficult to measure. Which of the variety of available strategies for bicycle and transit integration–such as increased bicycle parking at stops, increased bicycle capacity on transit vehicles, and shared bicycle infrastructure–is more cost-effective? Which strategies will yield the highest number of cycle transit users? To fill a void in the literature about integrating bicycling and transit, four common bicycle and transit integration strategies were described and assessed. A framework was developed for evaluating strategies, and a preliminary cost-effectiveness assessment was conducted. Cost-effectiveness comprises costs and cyclists’ preferences for each strategy. Preferences were gathered through stated-preference surveys from focus groups in five case study communities and calculated according to the analytic hierarchy process, a multi-criterion decision-making tool. Transit with a bicycle aboard was most preferred by cyclists, whereas results of the cost-effectiveness measure suggest that enhancing bicycle parking at a transit stop proved most cost-effective when compared with the most common bicycle onboard transit configuration: front-mounted bicycle racks on buses. The limited growth potential for bicycles aboard transit requires consideration of alternatives. The overall importance that cyclists assigned to security suggested considerable room for creative solutions to improve the favorability of the other strategies while addressing some inherent capacity limitations of the most popular strategy: transporting the bicycle with the rider on transit.

The widespread adoption of automated vehicle location (AVL) systems and automatic passenger counters (APCs) in the transit industry has opened new venues in operations and system monitoring. In 2005, Metro Transit, Minnesota, implemented AVL system and partially implemented APC technologies. To date there has been little effort to employ the collected data in evaluating transit performance. This research uses such data to assess performance issues along a cross-town route in the Metro Transit system. We generate a series of visual and analytical analyses to predict run time, schedule adherence and reliability of the transit route at two scales: the time point segment and the route level to demonstrate ways of identifying causes of decline in reliability levels. The analytical models show that while headways are maintained, schedule revisions are needed to improve run time and schedule adherence. Finally, the analysis suggests that many scheduled stops along this route are underutilized and recommends stop consolidation as a tool to decrease variability of service through concentrating passenger demand along a fewer number of stops. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Three hundred well-designed empirical studies were examined to provide guidance on how specific strategies can influence walking or cycling for travel: community design, infrastructure availability, infrastructure quality, programming, pricing, and combined strategies. Urban environments with high levels of walking and cycling for travel typically represent a combination of many factors that help promote these modes. The most compelling argument, particularly for cycling, is that only via an integrated range of built environmental features (including infrastructure and facility improvements), pricing policies, or education programmes will substantive changes result. This has been undertaken in Netherlands, Denmark, and parts of Germany for decades. By linking research to practical advice, the article fills a gap between (a) the many excellent literature reviews pointing to where further research is needed and (b) useful practice-oriented guidelines based on experience.

Health impact assessments (HIAs) provide an attractive approach for those interested in injecting health issues into planning processes. While HIAs have been mainly employed outside the United States and led by professionals from the public health field, they hold promise for addressing the important dimension of human health in planning. This article describes the history of HIAs and their relationship to other analogous tools, reviews current theory and practice of HIAs, and discusses the role of HIAs in current planning initiatives. The authors suggest it is important to modify existing HIA tools so that they are perceived by planners as a useful supplement to current planning processes rather than a burdensome additional requirement. The authors close by discussing how HIAs present distinct advantages, providing a more specific focus on the important topic of human health and a further opportunity to more closely partner with potential allies from public health and related fields.

Many school districts in the United States allow parents to choose which school their child attends ('school choice' or 'magnet schools') while other school districts require students to attend their nearest ('neighborhood') school. Such policies influence children's transportation. We survey elementary-school parents in St. Paul and Roseville, Minnesota, to discover how children travel to school and underlying factors influencing parent's choice of their child's travel mode. From this information we develop a statistical model of travel mode choice. We find that children's commute mode and parental attitudes towards school selection differ by school type (magnet versus neighborhood), income, and race. Relative to neighborhood schools, magnet schools draw from broader geographic regions, have lower rates of walking, bicycling, and commuting by automobile, and higher busing rates. Parent attitudes towards transportation also differ by race and school type. For example, parents of nonwhite and magnet school students placed greater-than-average importance on bus service and quality. This paper highlights the potentially unintended influence of school district policy on school commute mode. KW: SR2S Language: en

When effectively integrated with transit services, bicycling may achieve various environmental, health, and congestion-mitigation benefits for communities. A successful marriage between the two will most likely result in increasing (a) the catchment area and subsequent patronage of transit, (b) the efficiency of transit, and (c) the overall demand for cycling. A core problem, however, exists in that the predominant approach for integrating bicycling and transit vehicles frequently runs against capacity restraints. Effectively integrating bicycling and transit requires analysis of a broad range of alternatives that consider the travel patterns and needs of individuals and accompanying urban form characteristics. To fill a void in the literature concerning integrating bicycling and transit, this paper surveys existing knowledge about the two modes, describes three innovative initiatives that show promise in addressing capacity limitations, and sketches an analysis framework for communities and transit agencies to maximize the integration of bicycling and transit. A preliminary index is developed to predict cycling transit user (CTU) generation at transit stops. Factors identified in the literature as important in determining the share of CTUs (i.e., transit mode, location in the urban fabric, access and egress distance, and trip purpose) are nonuniform among communities, indicating that solutions must be tailored to fit local circumstances. Although the literature has traditionally focused on bicycles aboard transit, real gains will most likely be realized through initiatives such as bicycle stations and bicycles at egress locations for use with egress trips. Analysis relying on robust cost-effectiveness could help transit agencies with increased integration of bicycling and transit.

While the transportation planning literature contains many examples of the calculation of measures of accessibility for urban areas, these measures are largely restricted to motorized modes and to a handful of destination activities. This paper explores the issues related to the development of accessibility measures for non-motorized modes, namely bicycling and walking. We note that difficulties in calculating accessibility measures arise primarily from problems with data quality, the zonal structure of transportation planning models, and the adequacy of models and travel networks for describing and predicting travel by non-motorized modes. We present practical strategies for addressing these issues. The application of these methods is illustrated with the calculation of accessibility measures for a small study area in Minneapolis, MN (USA). The paper concludes with some direction for future development of non-motorized accessibility measures and ideas about their applicability to the practice of transportation planning.

How can planners more systematically incorporate health concerns into practical planning processes? This paper describes a suite of health impact assessment tools (HIAs) developed specifically for planning practice. Taking an evidence-based approach the tools are designed to fit into existing planning activities. The tools include: a short audit tool, the Preliminary Checklist; a structured participatory workshop, the Rapid HIA; an intermediate health impact assessment, the Threshold Analysis; and a set of Plan Review Checklists. This description provides a basis for future work including assessing tool validity, refining specific tools, and creating alternatives.

Many school districts in the United States allow parents to choose which school their child attends (‘school choice’ or ‘magnet schools’) while other school districts require students to attend their nearest (‘neighborhood’) school. Such policies influence children’s transportation. We survey elementary-school parents in St. Paul and Roseville, Minnesota, to discover how children travel to school and underlying factors influencing parent’s choice of their child’s travel mode. From this information we develop a statistical model of travel mode choice. We find that children’s commute mode and parental attitudes towards school selection differ by school type (magnet versus neighborhood), income, and race. Relative to neighborhood schools, magnet schools draw from broader geographic regions, have lower rates of walking, bicycling, and commuting by automobile, and higher busing rates. Parent attitudes towards transportation also differ by race and school type. For example, parents of nonwhite and magnet school students placed greater-than-average importance on bus service and quality. This paper highlights the potentially unintended influence of school district policy on school commute mode.

Can the craft of planning take advantage of a growing body of planning-relevant research? Evidence-based practice proposes a better connection between research and professional work, but raises several concerns about the character of valid evidence, the strength and clarity of planning research, and inequalities in the available resources for integrating research into planning practice. Much of planning practice is a reflective craft where skills of mediation, negotiation, listening, and framing are prominent. As part of the planner's work employing these skills, however, there is a valuable role for research-generated evidence to inform decision making. Evidence-based practice needs careful implementation but it can enrich the field of planning by linking research to practice.

This study employs United States census data to analyze changes in bicycle commuting between 1990 and 2000 in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn. area. A variety of perspectives are used to understand the impact of newly created facilities. The evidence suggests that bicycle facilities significantly impact levels of bicycle commuting, although the results are not totally free of uncertainty. For example, areas near new bicycle facilities showed considerably more of an increase in bicycle mode share than areas farther away. Observing increased cycling due to these physical interventions provides a starting point to which future research could add detail that would be needed to guide infrastructure investment.

This special issue explores emerging research agendas in planning. It brings together scholars from diverse schools working on new areas of research and application in urban design and planning. Emergent research agendas include both novel areas of research and important shifts in the direction of a research area. The challenge for planning schools is to reflect critically on these changes and develop long-term research agendas that can better position our field in society and academia, and provide a basis from which to assess our academic programmes. The chapters presented in this issue reinforce key aspects of planning: multi-scale, and multi-faceted, yet integrative in its intent, stressing the physical, yet inescapably social. At the same time, they identify research areas that respond to major social and environmental changes. Blanco and Alberti focus on the latest findings in climate change science and on planning for adaptation; they highlight the opportunities that planners have to provide leadership in this area. Forsyth, Krizek and Rodriguez take up the issue of non-motorised travel, a topic of increasing interest for urban designers, public health experts and transportation and energy planners. For Talen and Ellis, an emerging challenge is the need to plan for diverse and compact communities. What social factors, policies, programmes and planning processes facilitate compact and diverse communities?