Walkability 101-B, or why it's good to be connected | Kaid Benfield. Travel and the Built Environment - Journal of the American Planning Association - Volume 76, Issue 3. Ped Shed » Frequently asked questions. What is a ped shed? Ped shed is short for pedestrian shed, the basic building block of walkable neighborhoods. A ped shed is the area encompassed by the walking distance from a town or neighborhood center. Ped sheds are often defined as the area covered by a 5-minute walk (about 0.25 miles, 1,320 feet, or 400 meters). They may be drawn as perfect circles, but in practice ped sheds have irregular shapes because they cover the actual distance walked, not the linear (aerial) distance. A synonym for ped shed is walkable catchment. What is the definition of “walkable”? Destinations close byIf people are going to walk, there have to be places to walk to.
What are streetscapes, thoroughfares and frontages? Urban designers use a precise lexicon to describe, design, and write codes for the streetscape, which is the major element of the public realm. The three layers of streetscapes are: the private frontage, the public frontage, and the vehicular lanes. What is urban design? Ped Shed » Connectivity Part 4: Neighborhood Walking. A walkable neighborhood isn’t walkable unless it has a well-connected thoroughfare network. A well-connected network, composed of direct, convenient routes, is one of the key ingredients of walkability. Well-connected neighborhoods have a host of advantages for residents and for the greater community. A large and growing collection of research is finding that street connectivity is associated with more walking, less driving, greater safety, less crime, better physical fitness, and fewer per capita emissions.
This post reviews the research on neighborhood-scale relationships between connectivity and walking. Connectivity on the neighborhood scale is about connectivity neighborhoods. It’s about the routes and connections from building to building, from lot to lot, and from block to block. For more about the key ingredients of walkability, see the frequently asked questions page. Connectivity research begins with basic definitions. . (1993) by Allan B. Greenwald, Michael J. and Marlon G. Traffic explained, then fixed in 4 entertaining minutes | Kaid Benfield. Ped Shed » The Power of Intersection Density. Intersection density is the number of intersections in an area. It corresponds closely to block size — the greater the intersection density, the smaller the blocks.
Small blocks make a neighborhood walkable. This diagram shows three street layouts — extremely walkable, moderately walkable, and unwalkable — with their counts of intersections per square mile: Intersection density makes surprising news in a study by the formidable academic duo of Reid Ewing and Robert Cervero. They have published Travel and the Built Environment: A Meta-Analysis in the Summer 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association. As the title notes, the study is a meta-analysis: a study of 50 other studies about travel and the built environment.
Their findings? This is surprising, given the emphasis in the qualitative literature on density and diversity, and the relatively limited attention paid to design. The authors report their built environment measures in terms of elasticity. The definitive study of how land use affects travel behavior | Kaid Benfield. EN-Vs Impress Media at Consumer Electronics Show. LAS VEGAS – General Motors’ EN-V concepts made their North American public debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, following a six-month run as main attractions at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.
EN-V, short for Electric Networked Vehicle, is a vision of the future of urban personal mobility. Three different EN-V designs represent distinct characteristics that emphasize the enjoyable nature of future transportation: Jiao (Pride), Miao (Magic) and Xiao (Laugh). Using a driving course set up outside of the Las Vegas Convention Center, GM demonstrated the autonomous driving capabilities of EN-V, including a feature that would allow the vehicles to park themselves and automatically return to the user when summoned from a smartphone application.
At less than half the length of a Smart ForTwo six EN-Vs can fit into a standard American parking space while oneself-balancing two-wheeled EN-V provides interior space for two passengers. CDC.gov: Halt Obesity Epidemic by Building Complete Streets Now.