It is the experiences of real people that should guide our planning efforts. Their actions are the data we should be collecting, not their stated preferences.
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I don’t know why I’m an certified planner anymore. More importantly, it’s not clear to me why the world will be a better place if I am.
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It is backward to think of a parking ramp as a catalyst for success; it is the outcome of success. There is no shortcut to building a Strong Town, but lots of rewards for the effort.
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School officials in my town claim our neighborhoods are too unsafe for their children to walk to school. Yet the actual key to safety lies in numbers. We need designs that make it so more, not fewer, people will choose to walk.
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There is no justification for a city to maintain minimum parking requirements, to force others to build parking, or to build parking for others to use at no charge.
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If America is going to be a strong country, it must first have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods.
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It’s always a small handful of people that change the world. Today, let it be you.
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In an earlier Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck Marohn chatted with urban analyst Aaron Renn, who made the case for Carmel, Indiana’s massive debt as an investment in a high-quality place for posterity. In today’s episode, Chuck pushes back more forcefully on the assumptions underlying Carmel’s big gamble.
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Retrofitting an urban, neighborhood school to resemble a suburban campus is bad public policy. Doing it in the name of safety is incoherent.
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We know how to make our streets so safe that no cyclist really needs a helmet. Should we all wear them anyway?
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A few reflections during the middle of a marathon of travel.
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When it comes to parking, it’s time to reconcile our free-market rhetoric with our market-busting reality.
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Hilton Hotels sacrifices their customers in the name of efficiency. There is a lesson there for your city about the tradeoffs of efficiency.
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Decades ago, we decided where roads will go. Whether it makes sense or not today, that is where they must go.
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The more we invest in something, the harder it becomes to walk away. Yet, we need to walk away from a lot of what we’ve built.
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The core neighborhoods of our big cities and our small towns have more in common than we might think.
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Americans need to become more tolerant of government failure. That will happen, if and when, government starts to deliver improvements iteratively, and demonstrates the capacity to learn and improve with each iteration.
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Austin needs a new Grand Bargain, one that includes everyone and exempts no one.
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Does the average resident want dramatic change or do they want the urban development status quo?
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This week we are examining what went wrong with Austin’s CodeNEXT process and what should be done now.
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