Alec Davis is the founder of Momentum Des Moines, an urban advocacy organization dedicated to building a better city by working with local government to end car dependency and make the city more accessible for everyone
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This week, our Neighborhood Storyteller reminisces about how her community came together during a time of impending disaster.
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What started as a simple email group turned into a storytelling forum.
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A recent wedding in Clutier, Iowa, shows the power of a community that's committed to supporting each other and maintaining their historic assets.
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Rural communities across the Midwest are careening toward collapse, and all at the same time. What this means for the region as a whole. Small towns need Strong Towns too.
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The Iowa Department of Transportation helps educate the public with this video explaining why reducing an urban street from 4 to 3 lanes can be a win-win for drivers and pedestrians.
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In a thinly veiled attempt to keep "those people" out of a local mall, this spring, the Valley West Mall in West Des Moines demanded that a bus stop that services the mall be removed from its property.
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The skywalks are an exclusive zone that cost millions of dollars to create and have siphoned business and activity away from the streets. Now some cities are trying to bring pedestrians back onto the street and make better use of the existing public sidewalks.
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Are your taxes paying for the cost of your street? Nitin Gadia has created an interactive mapping tool to explore the answer to this question in his hometown of Ames, Iowa.
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As Strong Towns advocates, we are catalysts for change, and the metaphorical walls that our institutions have erected against change are being chipped away.
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A revelation from the Iowa DOT Director and a speech on transportation to the Iowa ULI by Chuck Marohn.
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The Iowa DOT Director acknowledges that we've built more highways and bridges than we will maintain. The system is going to shrink.
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Forgiving design principles that traffic engineers employ have replaced the “that’s what kids do” burden on the driver with a “that’s what drivers do” burden on all of society. If we want to make our cities prosperous again, we have to return that burden to the driver. Not just at intersections. Not just where there are properly specified signs. It is their burden, their responsibility, everywhere, all the time. Period.
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