Archive — Cities

Six secrets from the planner of Seville’s lightning bike network

Cycling in Seville

Six secrets from the planner of Seville’s lightning bike network

Lessons on how Seville transformed its cycling infrastructure, and why doing so is a no brainer.

The whole network is €32 million. That’s how many kilometers of highway — maybe five or six? It’s not expensive infrastructure. … We have a metro line that the cost was €800 million. It serves 44,000 trips every day. With bikes, we’re serving 70,000 trips every day.

It’s going to become more and more important that cities encourage active travel. With car ownership set to decrease with the advent of autonomous vehicles, this is the opportunity to do cycling infrastructure properly.

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‘For me, this is paradise’: life in the Spanish city that banned cars

‘For me, this is paradise’: life in the Spanish city that banned cars

Pontevedra banned cars from its centre, pedestrianising 300,000 square metres.

Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores has been mayor of the Galician city since 1999. His philosophy is simple: owning a car doesn’t give you the right to occupy the public space.

“How can it be that the elderly or children aren’t able to use the street because of cars?” asks César Mosquera, the city’s head of infrastructures. “How can it be that private property – the car – occupies the public space?”

There are some interesting details in here about exactly what causes most congestion, and why car-filled cities are so undesirable.

Reading between the lines of the end of the article, the scheme isn’t without its critics, or its problems. But I think the time has come for us to more seriously consider how many car journeys in city centres we really need — and how much better the city might be if more people could walk and cycle around without having to watch for motorised vehicles.

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Glasgow’s urban decay risks squandering 30 years of progress

Glasgow’s urban decay risks squandering 30 years of progress

More on the decline of Glasgow — and the lack of any action plan to reverse it.

Go west along the river and you’ll see a hotchpotch of development, wasteland and missed opportunity that literally only takes you so far – Glasgow must be one of the few cities in Europe where it’s not possible to walk or cycle right along the banks.

The urban realm of Glasgow is deteriorating through fire, desertion and neglect in a quite ghastly way, and what is most alarming is the seeming lack of a strategic plan to reverse it.

See also: What next for Sauchiehall Street?

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Do British cities have grid systems? We used science to find out

Do British cities have grid systems? We used science to find out

A neat way of visualising how closely a city layout relates to a grid.

Includes the revelation that Milton Keynes isn’t actually as grid-like as you might think.

The designers decided that the grid concept should apply but should be a lazy grid following the flow of land, its valleys, its ebbs and flows. That would be nicer to look at, more economical and efficient to build, and would sit more beautifully as a landscape intervention.

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