Newsroom

Jun 7, 2011

The iconic Metro map is being redesigned more than thirty years after it was first unveiled. The original designer Lance Wyman has been chosen to update his creation. There are a lot of issues to consider such as geographic accuracy vs. clarity what services to include (commuter rail connections the Purple Line streetcars etc.) the addition of new lines and upcoming changes to existing lines (Silver Line Blue Line changes) and how to manage long station names just to name a few.

Jun 6, 2011

Unless the world starts taking serious action on climate change very soon we may all be tuning into The Weather Channel rather than Cinemax for our horror fix. That’s the point of a recent piece in Newsweek in which Sharon Begley puts the future of the planet should we continue to dawdle on climate change into terrifying perspective .

Jun 2, 2011

Admittedly it doesn’t flow off the tongue quite like s mart growth but the Triple Bottom Line is a similarly comprehensive concept. The Triple Bottom Line (TBL/3BL) expands the traditional economic-centric “bottom line” to account for two other factors: social and environmental. And as it relates to planning that’s what Region Forward is all about: promoting growth while ensuring that it has not only a positive economic impact but positive social and environmental impacts as well.

Jun 1, 2011

The “new economy” is a term that’s been bandied around for awhile. In general it’s meant to reflect the transition from a manufacturing-driven economy to a largely service-based economy that has occurred in many Western nations since the late 20 th century. However in one major sense it’s a misnomer. The new economy is in fact still running largely on old power .

May 31, 2011

City rankings are wildly abundant and as we’ve written before many of them have questionable criteria at best. Although there’s no shortage of “most livable cities” indexes there is little variation among most of them (the top listings often going to mid-sized cities in Canada Australia and Scandinavia) the common element frequently missing is the megacity. Though they can be some of the most sustainable places to live (thanks to dense land use and high transit usage) megacities are hard to​

May 26, 2011

Media portrayal is powerful. In the same way that Friends and Sex and the City made the vibrancy and diversity of big city life appealing to a generation of young people raised in far-out and often monochromatic suburbs NYPB Blue Law & Order and countless other shows and movies have made cities appear as the hubs of crime in America. That portrayal is out-dated argues Richard Florida in a piece for the Atlantic .

May 25, 2011

This Streetsfilms project (video below) demonstrates how recent Complete Streets projects in New York City have been able to increase the safety modal diversity and overall use of transportation corridors. ​

May 24, 2011

Obesity. Air pollution. Traffic congestion. Health disparities. All of these problems can be reduced by one thing: better land-use planning. We’re not simply talking about a matter of aesthetics. A recent article in The Globe and Mail discusses a study showing quite starkly evidence of a “new crisis of cities” – the negative health effects of bad planning and the disparities they create:

May 23, 2011

We harp on this subject because it’s important. And thankfully we’re not alone in doing so. As funding sources like the gas tax become increasingly insufficient for funding transportation folks are realizing that something needs to has to change. The devil’s in the details of course.

May 19, 2011

Taxes are designed to two things: 1) to raise revenues to fund the government and/or to 2) incentivize a desired change in behavior. Part one is obvious. The government provides services such as public education or national defense that costs money and it collects taxes to cover those costs. That’s fairly straight forward. Of course it’s the politics – the what and how much government does – that gets tricky but that’s another topic.