When a patient dies, doctors review if and how their own actions led to that patient’s death. Shouldn’t engineers be doing the same, when people die in car crashes?
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If we want safe and productive streets, we have to focus on the deadly design of our public spaces and not be distracted by the scapegoating narrative of the “reckless driver.”
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If the federal government wants to fund transportation, skip the megaprojects. Start with a billion bollards.
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The 85th percentile rule makes it hard to ensure safe streets, so residents of northeast Kansas City took matters into their own hands.
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Policing is a divisive subject. One expert’s balanced and thoughtful perspective points us to a better way.
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Fire departments have a lot of influence over a city’s planning decisions. Too often, that influence is focused on one metric—emergency vehicle response times—rather than a more holistic approach to public safety.
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A new study provides the first experimental evidence that better street lighting has a cause-and-effect relationship with reduced crime. Lighting is an example of the kind of low-cost, high-returning public investment that’s all around us… but that our cities too often ignore.
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The idea of a community garden isn’t a new one. Now, when modern life seems to be more stressful and uncertain than ever, community gardens could prove to be the salve that heals our hurting communities.
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When a small Massachusetts town made national news as its entire police force quit, it was easy to have preconceived notions about what the moral of the story must be. Then a reader from the town reached out to give us this far more nuanced and interesting explanation.
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Drunk driving is a behavior on which we spend a lot of effort discouraging and yet somehow largely ignore the importance of design. This article asks whether America has a drinking problem or a driving problem? What's worse yet, is that through things like minimum parking requirements and zoning we are virtually coding a problem into existence.
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For a city to get there, current priorities need to be realigned and everyone -- from the mayor, the city engineer, the maintenance worker and everyone in between -- needs to be working to get more value out of our existing investments.
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