Cities & Planning

The citizen-driven plan that the city is considering now would create the largest car-free area in a city anywhere in the world.

This week’s Traspo Notes highlights: hearing on an additive Sound Transit funding bill, cats and dogs can ride the King County Water Taxi, the state transportation department has a new mobility pla…

Reaching the station platform could take six minutes at the deepest stations. Sound Transit’s preferred alignment for the next phase of light rail in Seattle includes a Westlake Station that …

Locked public restrooms are an easy-to-spot sign that a municipality is suffering from an underinvestment in public infrastructure. If a city doesn’t maintain public restrooms it’s likely tha…

Prepare for light rail, slow down Interbay, and save 15th Avenue Imagine for a moment taking a pleasant walk from Ballard to Queen Anne. Coming from one of the neighborhood’s fine breweries, you step out onto a tree lined Northwest 14th Avenue, busy with folks walking and rolling. You head south, stopping occasionally at crosswalks

Faced with worsening floods and a shortage of housing, the Netherlands is seeing growing interest in floating homes.

The approach—which has been replicated throughout Rwanda and beyond—simply serves patients better.

When trying to cool off a space, most people reach for an air conditioning unit that uses a pump, compressor, refrigerant, and a radiator to move heat from inside a room to the outside air. But in a break from this typical model, YouTuber Curtis in Seattle came up with a system that pumps water between […]

Making an electric car is more carbon intensive, but lower emissions when driving soon makes up the difference

The goal is a new network that could level the economic development playing field by offering super-fast speeds to poorer cities and rural towns that currently suffer from a distinct

[Image: Max Ernst, “Landscape with a view of the lake and chimeras” (1940), via Archive.] While we’re on the subject of astronomical events leaving traces in our everyday world, here’s another stor…

In 2020, cities adapted to COVID-19 with open streets, outdoor dining, and added bike lanes. In 2021, some of those changes became permanent—and advocates for walkable, bikeable cities can take lessons from what worked to redesign even more streets.

TOKYO -- In a quiet residential area in the capital's Nakano Ward is an atelier doubling as a house that is a registered national tangible cultural pr

Marco Polo noticed an interesting feature in the architecture of Hormuz: “The heat is tremendous, and on that account their houses are built with ventilators to catch the wind. These ventilators are placed on the side from which the wind comes, and they bring the wind down into the house to cool it. But for this the heat would be utterly unbearable.” This technique has been used for thousands of years, originally in ancient Iran and now throughout West Asia: By catching the prevailing wind and directing it through the interior of a house, the residents can greatly increase air...

Well, I'm not sure this book could be any further up my alley; I mean: The life and legend of New York City, from the size of i

While indigenous communities, farmers, and those living close to the land have known for generations the role that beavers play

Scientists have developed an all-season smart-roof coating that keeps homes warm during the winter and cool during the summer—without consuming natural gas or electricity. Research findings reported in the Dec. 17 edition of the journal Science point to a groundbreaking technology that outperforms commercial cool-roof systems in energy savings.

Faced with worsening floods and a shortage of housing, the Netherlands is seeing growing interest in floating homes. These floating communities are inspiring more ambitious Dutch-led projects in flood-prone nations as far-flung as French Polynesia and the Maldives.

Much of America isn’t built for walking. Alex Wolfe is doing it anyway.

Although the Central Washington city's car culture reigns, intentional planning in similar small cities might be the ticket to getting environmental best practices to stick.

The belief in hydrogen as the future of green power should be based on where it is most needed, not on a near-religious faith in its universal abilities.

This is my book of the year. It delivers on so many things that we want a book to do–it could never be replicated by a website or even a film. The audiobook is even better… It’s e…

The decline of “baseload” has been predicted for many years, now South Australia is showing a grid can operate without it.

Like many suburban American cities that saw major growth in the second half of the 20th century, Lynnwood lacks a defined central commercial area. Businesses are grouped instead as strip malls alon…

I once visited White Sands National Park in New Mexico, and even with sunglasses on, it was positively blinding. At least the sun goes down in New Mexico. Imagine being in the similarly all-white landscape of the Arctic during that time of the year where the sun sticks around 24-7.

Apps are telling us how to get around our cities faster. But if each person acts only in their own interest, society at large gets stuck in traffic.

Posted on Friday 26 Nov 2021. 1,173 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.