Holiday reading

1. Street Trees and Intersection Safety from the University of California Transportation Center. They say things that traffic engineers don't like, such as this from the opening paragraph:

The study derives from a rather simple, straightforward observation: that on the best tree-lined streets the trees come close to the corners. They do not stop at some distance back from the intersecting street right-of-way. Indeed, in Paris, a city noted for its street trees, if the regular spacing of trees along the street runs short at an intersection, there is likely to be an extra tree placed at the corner. For at least 250 years, the finest of streets the world over have been associated with trees.

In DC, trees are supposed to be at least 10 feet away from intersections and not immediately abutting the street. However, (although it seems I haven't uploaded photos), trees on the west side of Brentwood Road NE and on the north side of the 200 block of D Street NE (across from the Capitol Police Department headquarters) do immediately abut the road, although this is likely the result of past road widenings.

2. Design Guidelines for Pedestrian-Friendly Neighborhood Schools.

3. And while it really reinforces the reality that New Urbanism is really New Suburbanism, this paper by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, "The Second Coming of the American Small Town," from the Wilson Quarterly, published in 1992, is a great explication of what's wrong with places that are designed for cars, not people. (It's a scanned copy, so the images aren't the greatest, but the writing is superb.)

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking