#designed infrastructure

[thebreakfastgod]

America's Roads: Dangerous by Design

[quartzdecay]

I have a request for people with experience with wheelchairs, if you personally use/used them or have people in your life that do: PLEASE COMPLAIN ABOUT THEM TO ME! TELL ME ABOUT THE WAYS IN WHICH THEY CAN SUCK! IN GENERAL OR SPECIFICS!

I need this information for a project I'm doing in my design class, wherein my group is going to attempt to prototype a wheelchair with both offroad and indoor capabilities, per say, that is still reasonably light and inexpensive. I'm asking this of you all on tumblr because to begin our project, we need to familiarize ourselves with the nature of this problem. We want our solution to actually be made with the opinions of wheelchair users in mind. I would be incredibly grateful if anyone could reblog or comment with any gripes they have about wheelchairs, especially in relation to their maneuverability, but anything works! Thank you so much for your time!

[archiveofaffinities]

Mulholland Dam and Reservoir Beneath Hollywoodland Sign, 1926

[ceilidhtransing]

I've been thinking about urbanism and about how some people (I'm particularly thinking folks like “the vocal minority of business owners that go absolutely apeshit any time there's a proposal to remove some space from cars in favour of a bike lane, a tram line, a pedestrianised area, etc”) don't seem to really consider anyone outside a car to be a person.

*a city plans to remove some parking spaces to make room for a protected bike lane*

“But how is anyone supposed to get here?!”

*looks at bustling street filled with pedestrians, cyclists, and people riding a tram*

Like, it genuinely doesn't seem to occur to some people that all of those people moving around outside of cars are people. That's how “anyone is supposed to get here”: by way of all of the non-car options, especially those that are actively made safer and easier by the removal or limiting of space for cars. And I don't know what's going on here - whether it's something like classism (only those wealthy enough to drive everywhere matter as people) or simply that car dependency is perhaps so entrenched and unquestioned for some folk that it genuinely doesn't occur to them that getting to a place without a car is (or at least should be) an entirely valid and possible thing to do. It's probably a bit of both. But my god does it drive me nuts when people respond to a new proposal that will dramatically increase the capacity and footfall of an urban space by shifting from emphasising cars to emphasising walking, cycling and public transport with “but how will anyone get here?!”

[bykremi]

Istanbul

[greenhorizonblog]

Rough sketches for an idea of dual purpose covered bike and walkway, inspired by victorian and art nouveau architecture and decoration style. What do you think? :)

[stellacaerulea]

Kimi's bloodline finally broke the curse of smol

[anghraine]

My best friend and I moved in together with his closest friend from his MA program, and while I had met her before (the friend; my bff is a man), we hadn't spent much time together because I've never lived away from the West Coast (and only two years out of the PNW) and she's never lived outside of North Carolina and only briefly visited the PNW once, when she went to Portland last year.

It's been a delight to show her around the PNW and realize we need to explain things that are just sort of omnipresent in our lives. The bff and I were casually griping with each other about having to run an errand to Trader Joe's at an inconvenient hour, and were telling her, "it's okay, you can stay in the car and avoid the people if you want" and she was like "NO I MUST SEE IT, I'VE ONLY HEARD OF THEM" and nearly ascended to another plane when we showed her around the store.

The bff and I grew up in the same town in NW Washington (him for his first 18 years, me from 9 to 19) and he lived in Bellingham and Seattle for years before he went to NC for grad school (I went to the SF Bay Area for mine, a very different experience). Both of them are hardcore coffee aficionados, but he struggled with the different Coffee Ways of the South, so for the true PNW experience they want to tour various indie coffeeshops next.

Also, she adores Kaidan in Mass Effect and we were like, oh, is your passport up to date? We could take a trip sometime and show you your boyfriend's beloved English Bay. It's very beautiful :)

her: O_O

me: Actually, it's worth going to Vancouver BC for its own sake as well, it's truly spectacular. We used to go all the time as kids.

bff: And Victoria!

her: O_O

[arc-hus]

Public Toilet Design, Chuancang Village, China - Fuyingbin Studio

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[thoughtportal]

Official measurements have found that Paris is rapidly becoming a city of transportation cyclists. The survey of how people now move in Paris was conducted with GPS trackers by academics from L’Institut Paris Région, the largest urban planning and environmental agency in Europe.

The institute’s transportation report was published on April 4. It found that the way Parisians are now traveling from the suburbs to the city center, especially during peak periods, has undergone a revolution thanks in part to the building of many miles of cycleways.

Those cyclists now on the streets and roads of central Paris are not Spandex-clad professionals as seen on the Tour de France but everyday transportation cyclists.

L’Institut Paris Région carried out the survey for a consortium of fourteen public and private partners, including local government and rail companies.

Reporting on the institute’s survey, French TV channel 20 Minutes told viewers that the “capital’s cycle paths are always full.”

Between October 2022 and April 2023, 3,337 Parisians aged 16 to 80 years old were equipped with GPS trackers to record their journeys for seven consecutive days. In the suburbs, where public transit is less dense, transport by car was found to be the main form of mobility. But for journeys from the outskirts of Paris to the center, the number of cyclists now far exceeds the number of motorists, a huge change from just five years ago. Most of the journeys recorded were commuter trips.

The city’s socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo has pushed through a great many anti-motoring measures during her two administrations—such as reducing the number of parking places, restricting access by SUVs, and closing some major roads to motorists—and the latest survey will be validation for her policies, none of which have caused the kind of protests that the French capital has long been famous for.

In short, culling cars has been far more popular than her petrolhead critics predicted, with Paris becoming cleaner and healthier to boot.

Notably, and without the spread of conspiracy theories common outside of France, Paris is also putting into practice the home-grown concept of the “15-minute city,” creating urban areas where access to amenities is close and hence there’s less need to drive. {read}

Carlton Reid

I was Press Gazette’s Transport Journalist of the Year, 2018. I’m also an historian – my most recent books include “Roads Were Not Built for Cars” and “Bike Boom”, both published by Island Press, Washington, D.C.

[atlantathecity]

As I was reminded while walking here earlier today, the sidewalk on Edgewood Avenue is way too narrow. Folks regularly have to step into the roadway to pass others.

It shouldn't be like this anywhere, but especially not on the streetcar route. We're missing an opportunity to match transit investment with great pedestrian conditions.

Please look into redesigning this as a shared street, Atlanta! This is an incredible success story waiting to happen.

Some people complain that the streetcar "doesn't go anywhere people want to go," but I see the problem as being that we have 2.7 miles in the middle of the city that can be described by too many as a place they don't want to go.

What we should be asking is: how many people are we delivering to the streetcar by way of a combination of rail-supportive land use that puts an appropriate density near the stations -- and excellent pedestrian conditions that help alternatives to driving be competitive.

We're failing on all those fronts, but we can turn this ship around. We're capable of succeeding in Atlanta and becoming a city that truly supports alternatives to driving (like the streetcar) through our urban design and policies.

Every little piece of that puzzle matters, including the design of every block of street on the streetcar route.

[rosalinastan]

walkable cities is the colloquial term for what we in landscape architecture and civil engineering call "accessible infrastructure" which sort of has the inverse effect of making it seem exclusively focused on accessibility for the disabled. the goal for (respectable) professionals is to create a seamless city with as few catching points as possible for as few people as possible. This means it will be a "walkable" city (read: gives the most individuals the greatest degree of freedom to move between the most points). This Obviously includes people with mobility aids, it also includes parents with small children in strollers, and blind people, and those with cognitive disorders, and the elderly, and young children who should, in a functioning urban area, be able to take themselves to school, or a friend's house, or after school activities. there will never be only one solution to creating accessible infrastructure, which is why you should never trust someone claiming a single approach will solve everything. There will always be someone who needs a car, but if we create spaces which are less violently inhospitable to anyone outside a car, it opens up a lot of new interesting solutions to sustainable transportation.

anyways this has been my rant in response to someone else's very incorrect rant about how "walkable cities is an ableist framework and if you claim that people saying this is a psyop you're evil and cruel". I understand the person who made the post probably just doesn't understand the term or how it is used among the people actually designing things so I didn't want to dump this on their post. I also think the original post calling this (incorrect) position a psyop probably is just one misguided person reacting to other misguided people so like. not really on anyone's side here just trying to explain the actual intent behind the terms so maybe everyone can just calm down a little

[tilbageidanmark]

The old Kugekhaus (Sphere building) in Dresden. It was built in 1928, and demolished by the Nazis in 1938, for being "Un-German".