You had one job
MEMBER NEWS DIGEST - THE LATEST AND GREATEST FROM OUR MEMBERS' BLOGS
Ever seen the "YOU HAD ONE JOB" meme? Andrew Price does the Strong Towns version, with head-slapping photos of the built environment that will make you shake your head and just say, "You had one job."
In "Jelly in the Jam", Granola Shotgun discusses those places in Silicon Valley which occupy a middle ground between walkable urbanism and car dependent suburbia. "Too thick to be jelly, too thin to be jam."
I keep wanting suburban retrofits to work, but they rarely do. The typical suburban chassis makes incremental urbanism a hit or miss affair. Mostly miss. The question is… what are the alternatives?
Walkable West Palm Beach gets wonky, delving into historical traffic counts data that indicate a declining trend in vehicle trips in and around the downtown area, despite the growing residential population and commercial occupancy in the downtown over the same time period. A Transportation Concurrency Exception Area (TCEA) was established in the downtown, allowing for increased development capacity without the typical Palm Beach County obsession with road widening. To borrow from a Governor Rick Scott Twitter campaign slogan, "#ItsWorking."
Granola Shotgun expounds on on what works and what doesn't work in creating viable municipalities that will be fiscally sustainable. Hint: It isn't necessarily density.
This system worked well enough all over North America for the first three or four centuries of European settlement and it’s very much in keeping with the conservative small government, low tax, self reliant ethos of much of the voting population.
More great content from member blogs this past week:
- The Middle Middle housing typologies are explored locally in a post by Dave Alden
- Walkable West Palm Beach calls out a so-called transportation summit for giving free parking to all attendees without any mention of alternative modes
- Patrick Kennedy's post "Houston Creepin on a Come Up" gets a mention by virtue of the epic title
- A downtown movie theater could generate more activity and pedestrian traffic if the right steps were taken. Post from Small Town Urbanism
If you're headed to Dallas for CNU23, safe travels. We'll have plenty of content to share from this year's Congress as the week progresses.
You can check out the entire member blogroll on the Strong Towns member site. If you're a member with a blog and would like your work to show up there, please let us know about it.