Articulo: Giuliani ayudará a combatir el delito en Río

Rudy Giuliani, ex alcalde de Nueva York | AP El alcalde de Nueva York, Rudi Giuliani, dijo el viernes que Río de Janeiro puede convertirse en una ciudad segura antes de ser anfitriona de las Olimpíadas de 2016. Su firma consultora será contratada para asesorar sobre el proceso, dijo el gobernador Sergio Cabral. No se divulgaron los detalles del trato. Giuliani elogió los esfuerzos de Río para pacificar las favelas (barriadas pobres) dominadas por narcotraficantes. Cuando Giuliani era alcalde, de 1994 a 2002, Nueva York experimentó una fuerte caída de la criminalidad, que sus partidarios atribuyen a su política de tolerancia cero. En 2005, la consultora de Giuliani cobró 4,3 millones de dólares por su ayuda para combatir el delito en Ciudad de México. http://www.el-nacional.com

Articulo: The Return of The Two-Way Street

Why the double-yellow stripe is making a comeback in downtowns.

Over the past couple of decades, Vancouver, Washington, has spent millions of dollars trying to revitalize its downtown, and especially the area around Main Street that used to be the primary commercial center. Just how much the city has spent isn’t easy to determine. But it’s been an ambitious program. Vancouver has totally refurbished a downtown park, subsidized condos and apartment buildings overlooking it and built a new downtown Hilton hotel.

Some of these investments have been successful, but they did next to nothing for Main Street itself. Through most of this decade, the street remained about as dreary as ever. Then, a year ago, the city council tried a new strategy. Rather than wait for the $14 million more in state and federal money it was planning to spend on projects on and around Main Street, it opted for something much simpler. It painted yellow lines in the middle of the road, took down some signs and put up others, and installed some new traffic lights. In other words, it took a one-way street and opened it up to two-way traffic.

The merchants on Main Street had high hopes for this change. But none of them were prepared for what actually happened following the changeover on November 16, 2008. In the midst of a severe recession, Main Street in Vancouver seemed to come back to life almost overnight.

Within a few weeks, the entire business community was celebrating. “We have twice as many people going by as they did before,” one of the employees at an antique store told a local reporter. The chairman of the Vancouver Downtown Association, Lee Coulthard, sounded more excited than almost anyone else. “It’s like, wow,” he exclaimed, “why did it take us so long to figure this out?”

A year later, the success of the project is even more apparent. Twice as many cars drive down Main Street every day, without traffic jams or serious congestion. The merchants are still happy. “One-way streets should not be allowed in prime downtown retail areas,” says Rebecca Ocken, executive director of Vancouver’s Downtown Association. “We’ve proven that.”

he debate over one-way versus two-way streets has been going on for more than half a century now in American cities, and it is far from resolved even yet. But the evidence seems to suggest that the two-way side is winning. A growing number of cities, including big ones such as Minneapolis, Louisville and Oklahoma City, have converted the traffic flow of major streets to two-way or laid out plans to do so. There has been virtually no movement in the other direction.

Minneapolis opened its First Street and Hennepin Street commercial areas to two-way traffic on October 11, hoping to pump some life into a stagnant corridor. It’s too early to draw any firm conclusions, but the early responses were mixed. First Street is home to several nightclubs, and some of them complained that bringing in two-way traffic made it difficult for bands with large trucks to park. “The city has royally screwed us,” one club manager declared. The city basically shrugged those complaints off. Its planners claimed the clubowners were making self-interested arguments that ignored the common benefits of a healthier street life.

Before World War II, one-way commercial streets were pretty rare in the United States. People frequented downtowns in which buses and streetcars negotiated two-way traffic, and they got off to shop at the stores that lined both sides of the street. Those who drove could park right along the sidewalk.

After the war, a couple of things happened. Civil defense planners, taking seriously the threat of nuclear attack, worried that residents trying to escape would create gridlock on the crowded two-way streets, imprisoning themselves in smoldering cities and causing many more casualties. The arterial streets were the only escape routes they had. Making them one-way, on an alternating basis, would speed things up and save lives. Or so it was thought.

But atomic bombs were only one factor that made civic leaders and transportation planners partial to one-way streets in the postwar years. They were worried about congestion, period. Some thought that the frustrations of moving through downtown the old-fashioned way were driving people to do their shopping in the suburbs. More mobility might mean more customers. Others, in those pre-Interstate days, cared mainly about the satisfaction of the suburbanites themselves. These people were using the arterial roads to commute in and out of the city, and there was little dispute that one-way streets could get them back and forth more quickly.

By the 1970s, though, there were new urban realities. Large portions of the Interstate Highway System were built, so nobody would have to flee the Soviets on gridlocked city streets. More important, downtown retail customers were shopping at suburban malls no matter what the local chamber of commerce did to try and stop them. Downtown had begun its long, familiar decline. The one-way streets fashioned in the 1950s and 1960s were still pretty good at whisking people out of central cities, but far fewer area residents wanted to enter the cities in the first place. Many downtown one-way streets became miniature speedways that served largely to frighten anyone who had the eccentric idea of strolling down the sidewalk.

Anyone who travels a lot to the center of big cities has had an experience like this: You arrive at night, and start looking for your hotel. You find it, but you can’t drive to the entrance because the street is one-way the other way. Finally you come to a street that goes the way you want, but once you get close again, the signs won’t allow you to make the turn you need to make. You can waste 20 minutes this way. And as you keep driving, you notice that the streets are empty anyway. Any reason that might have existed for turning them into single-purpose speedways simply did not apply anymore.

Meanwhile, local governments were slowly learning that the old two-way streets, whatever the occasional frustration, had real advantages in fostering urban life. Traffic moved at a more modest pace, and there was usually a row of cars parked by the curb to serve as a buffer between pedestrians and moving vehicles. If you have trouble perceiving the difference, try asking yourself this question: How many successful sidewalk cafés have you ever encountered on a four-lane, one-way street with cars rushing by at 50 miles per hour? My guess is, very few indeed.

So over the past 10 years, dozens of cities have reconfigured one-way streets into two-way streets as a means of bringing their downtowns to life. The political leadership and the local business community usually join forces in favor of doing this. There are always arguments against it. Some of them are worth stopping to consider.

mong the critics are traffic engineers and academics who were taught some fixed principles of transportation in school decades ago and have never bothered to reconsider them. Joseph Dumas, a professor at the University of Tennessee, argued a few years ago that “the primary purpose of roads is to move traffic efficiently and safely, not to encourage or discourage business or rebuild parts of town . . . . Streets are tools for traffic engineering.”

If you agree that streets serve no other purpose than to move automobiles, you are unlikely to see much problem with making them one-way. On the other hand, if you think that streets possess the capacity to enhance the quality of urban life, you will probably consider the Dumas Doctrine to be nonsense. That is the way more and more cities are coming to feel.

There are other arguments. It’s sometimes said that more accidents occur on two-way streets than one-way streets. The research that supports this claim is decades old, and to my knowledge, has not been replicated. Even if you accept this argument, though, you might want to consider that, at slower speeds, the accidents on two-way streets are much more likely to be fender-benders at left-turn intersections, not harrowing high-speed crashes involving cars and pedestrians.

Finally, there are complaints from fire departments that it takes them longer to reach the scene of trouble when they have to thread their way around oncoming traffic, rather than taking a straight shot down a one-way speedway. I can’t refute this, and in any case, I don’t like arguing with fire departments. But I have to wonder how many people have died in burning buildings in recent years because a fire truck wasn’t allowed to use a one-way street.

I wouldn’t argue that two-way streets are any sort of panacea for urban revival, Vancouver’s experience notwithstanding. And I understand that they are not always practical. Some streets simply are too narrow to have traffic moving in both directions; others have to be designated one-way because their purpose is to feed traffic onto expressways.

What I would say is this: When it comes to designing or retrofitting streets, the burden of proof shouldn’t fall on those who want to use them the old-fashioned way. It should be on those who think the speedway ideology of the 1950s serves much of a purpose half a century later.

http://www.governing.com

CNU Online

from single-use to multi-use district

In Boca Raton, Florida, a failed shopping mall was converted into a mixed-use district including residences, offices, and shops designed around a central esplanade. Mizner Park is now one of the most successful regional shopping districts in the country.

Quote

“Asphalt is the last crop you’ll grow on the land.”

Bill Gay, Colorado rancher

CNU Online

Mobility

Every trip made by foot, on a bicycle, or via public transit means independence for one more child or elder .

Each of these trips is also one fewer car on the road which diminishes both pollution to the atmosphere as well as traffic congestion.

Dispersed, low-density development produce far-flung road systems, which in turn create places designed to support the maximum speed for the automobile's daily travel.

Each development typically collects all its traffic into a single entrance and exit which deposits the cars into a "collector road." The collector road then aggregates traffic from all of the residential developments along its corridor and deposits that traffic into an "arterial," named as if the roadway could work like the arteries of the human body.

The problem with the metaphor is that cars are not as orderly as blood cells and tend to want to travel in a large bundle at the same times of day.

When roadways are considered purely as a means of moving cars from one location to the other in the shortest possible time, then the kinds of places that the roads create is a side-effect.

...there are few destinations of interest related to arterials or collector roads.

he long intervals between low-density developments also produce a small yield of consumers per acre, and so not only is walking or bicycling unlikely, but transit is not feasible, either.

This conundrum demands a regional transportation perspective, as well as reconsideration of fundamental neighborhood planning principles in order to provide for easier access and greater individual choice.

In combination with the definition of boundaries and centers, regional densities can support arterials as transit corridors and boulevards that provide higher density dwellings and commercial destinations.

At the neighborhood scale, streets can be reconfigured to provide greater connectivity.

Increased numbers of intersections not only provides more route choices, but also the potential to calm traffic and to create streets and sidewalks amenable to pedestrians.

This freedom of choice reduces isolation and singular dependence on the automobile.

Applying these principles to a greenfield site and working with the basic units of neighborhood design to produce a defined center generates a more compact community with a greater variety of destinations within a five-minute walk as well as the opportunity to provide a density needed to support even light transit

Applying the principles of edges and boundaries in concert with regional planning establishes an important framework for metropolitan transit systems that connect villages, towns and cities across the landscape.

CNU Online

Economics

Increased mobility makes it very easy to cross local jurisdiction lines, and so people may live in one city, work in another and shop in a third

As a result, labor markets are regional, housing markets are regional, and consequently industries are regional.

The metropolitan region is the unit of world economics, even though very few metropolitan regions work through a single government.

Los Angeles, for example, is a vast region in Southern California and yet, the cities of Beverly Hills and Hollywood are distinct governmental entities. Although the outside world may think of the smaller cities as part of Los Angeles, and even though the workers in Beverly Hills are likely to live in Los Angeles, it is not unusual for cities like Beverly Hills to themselves at odds with the interests of the city of Los Angeles.

This kind of interfamilial conflict occurs throughout the world as the constituent cities, towns and suburbs of a metropolitan region compete for resources.

In order to create a competitive regional economy, regions should work together to protect the environment, build transportation, and create industry.

Silicon Valley, for example, was created because Fred Terman, an Engineering Professor at Stanford University in the 1930s, realized that academic and business communities should work together for the benefits of both. He was able to bring research support to the university, and encouraged students and faculty to start their own companies (i.e. Hewlett-Packard). Silicon Valley now includes cities such as Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City and San Carlos, and is growing everyday.

Growing industries create demand for regional transportation.

Natural resources are limited and therefore sharing is inevitable, but working together to preserve these resources is crucial

CNU Online

Boundaries and Centers

The higher density settlement of the center, along with mixed land use makes possible the preservation of land outside the center.

Life within a five-minute radius of the center provides walkable access to goods and services

With enough density, as well as the potential for transit linkage, the density can provide socioeconomic diversity, and through a series of related centers that work together to form an identifiable region, the potential for larger economies of scale emerges.

Boundaries and centers are the fundamental building blocks of a comprehensive regional plan, which must convey a compelling and widely shared vision of how and where to grow

Articulo: Living Above the Store

Paul Buck has spectacular views of downtown Vancouver from the two glass walls of his condo, which wow everyone who walks in.

But what really impressed one of Mr. Buck's friends, in from a town near the Yukon border, is that he lives over a giant Home Depot.

"He was visiting from Dease Lake and he was beside himself that I was living right next to a hardware store," says Mr. Buck, the CFO at a biotechnology company that is a convenient two blocks from his condo.

Mr. Buck also lives over a major grocery store, a Winners, a sushi restaurant, a cellphone shop, and a Starbucks, in a complex that has broken new barriers when it comes to an increasingly popular development trend: the mixed-used project.

The Rise is attracting attention and even awards from across North America for its combination of big-box stores on the bottom, with condos and townhouses clustered around an enclosed garden on the top.

But while the combination of uses is unusual, the underlying concept is not.

Cities are aiming to maximize their land use and build greener and denser. At the same time, certain developers have discovered the joy of multiple revenue streams as a niche market of tenants and buyers are drawn to hybrid life. Mixed-use projects have become not only more prevalent but are incorporating wider ranges of uses with each passing year.

In Vancouver, the Shaw Tower has divided a tower on the waterfront edge of the central business district with Triple A office space on the bottom and high-end condos on top. The city's Woodward's project near the Downtown Eastside combines condos, social housing, space for non-profits and city offices, a grocery store, a drugstore and Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts, with its multitude of performance spaces.

On Georgia Street, the Shangri-La incorporates a hotel, restaurant, spa, sculpture gallery and condos. Near GM Place, Concord Pacific has four residential towers over a Costco outlet.

In Toronto, the Distillery District east of downtown has mixed 1,500 units of condos with art galleries, offices, restaurants, a theatre and space for non-profit operations. For the World on Yonge, currently being planned in Markham to the north, the drawing board at Liberty Development includes four residential towers, a large shopping complex with an interior plaza, and an office building. In Yorkville, Quadrangle Architects created a complex at 155 Cumberland that combines high-end retail, offices and expensive apartments.

Fans of mixed-use developments say this is a case of cities returning to the way they used to be.

"Zoning was very much a post-war phenomenon when there was a move to separate different uses," says architect Les Klein, whose firm, Quadrangle, is also working on mixed-use projects in Ontario's Kitchener and Niagara-on-the-Lake. "What we're really trying to do is return to a mixed-use society, which also makes cities more green. It's planning catching up with reality."

But even enthusiasts such as Mr. Klein say that challenges come with building mixed-use projects. Often developers dive into them when they know how to do only one part well - the offices, the condos or the retail - but they add on the others, thinking they'll be easy gravy. It turns out they aren't.

Some uses just don't work together, with restaurants being especially problematic because of their smells, waste and noise issues.

Or developers don't think about timing problems and they end up with different groups of users clashing as one tries to leave while the other is arriving.

What does work best is when developers create multiple uses that appeal to a similar demographic.

Both Matthew Rosenblatt at Cityscape Developments, which is part owner of the Distillery District, and Marco Filice at Liberty say they aim to create complexes where each part - shopping, office or residential - draws people from the same general niche.

"We market to the same demographic generally," Mr. Rosenblatt said. So the offices, condos and shops at the Distillery District work together to attract people who like an urban, arty environment.

"We wouldn't entertain the idea of having a nightclub there with 18-year-olds lining up," says his partner, David Jackson.

Mr. Filice said his company aims to create a critical mass of residents who are interested in the kind of retail or office services integrated in the complex. For that reason, he structures his projects so that two-thirds of the space goes to residential, one-third to retail and office.

"It's basically a life-cycle approach - we have a captive audience for them." It's not that different, he thinks, from the area he grew up in near St. Clair and Bathurst, where people lived over shops on the ground floor and doctors' offices on the second floor.

In spite of that, many Torontonians, such as Mr. Klein and Mr. Jackson, are skeptical about Vancouver's radical experiments in putting people on top of giant stores.

"The jury is very much out on the idea of residential on top of big box, like we're seeing in Vancouver," Mr. Klein says.

But Vancouver's planning director, Brent Toderian, said he believes the Rise is a wonderful new example of mixed use. It's one that the city went out of its way to encourage.

The developers of the Rise say it's proven to be a good experiment for their company. "We had to take a bit of a leap of faith," says James Patillo, senior vice-president of Grosvenor Americas.

It wasn't the easiest project. The banks don't always understand mixed-use projects, he acknowledged. And the designers had to come up with an internal loading system for the building underground, so that residents wouldn't be annoyed by constant deliveries or garbage pickup.

Now, he says, they're achieving good rents - about $2.25 a square foot, comparable with anything in the area - and they have very low turnover.

"Some might say they don't like the retail below, but I think the acceptance grows and grows," Mr. Patillo said. "We've made a strategic shift to retail and residential. We think it's here to stay."

Mr. Buck agrees. He doesn't care about the retail below except that it's handy for him. He shops at all of the stores in his building. What matters most is that he lives across the street from his work, he's a block from the subway line to the airport, and it's a cool space.

Living over the store isn't so bad.

THE CHALLENGES OF MIXED USE

Some projects work better with separation

"There is a sense among condo owners that there are strangers in their territory if they aren't separated from the offices users," says Les Klein, Quadrangle Architects.

Some projects work better without much separation

"When you separate your users too much, you lose the opportunity for the synergies. Residents want to be in the mix they bought into," says David Jackson, Cityscape Developments.

Some combinations just don't work no matter what

"Most pure office-type tenants would not want to be in a building with cooking smells, a lot of traffic or after-hours groups," says Rob Armstrong, managing director, Avison Young Toronto.

They're not for every developer

"You don't see a lot of mixed-use projects because most companies are capitalized to do their single-purpose specialty," says Matthew Rosenblatt, Cityscape Developments.

You might need a partner

"Most developers specialize in one area and then they add the other component. But you can end up with something - retail or office or condos - that feels like it's left over if you don't work with a partner who knows that area," says Mr. Klein.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com

Cuaderno de Ideas

Rapidly growing cities and towns house half of the world's population. They represent 75 percent of all energy consumption and generate 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. This means that the battle to create more sustainable cities and urban environments - environmentally and socially - is one of the most decisive factors facing the UN Climate Change Conference Copenhagen in December. For this reason the Göteborg Award, one million Swedish crowns, is shared equally by three people who have found new solutions to these enormous challenges: Dr. Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Tanzania Enrique Peñalosa, Bogotá, Colombia and Sören Hermansen, Samsö, Denmark http://www.goteborgaward.com

Articulo: Walking, biking good for you and the planet: Study

Pedestrians and cyclists should be made king of the urban jungle, according to an international study showing the big benefits of “mass active travel.”

Photograph by: File, CNS

Pedestrians and cyclists should be made king of the urban jungle, according to an international study showing the big benefits of “mass active travel.”

It suggests money should be diverted way from roads to make walking and cycling “the most direct, convenient, and pleasant options for most urban trips.” Pedestrians and bikers should also get “priority” over cars and trucks at intersections.

The study is one of six reports on the “health dividend” of combating climate change published in the medical journal Lancet Wednesday.

The reports say that enormous changes are needed to slow global warming, but show that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will be good for people's health. Millions of deaths could be averted by getting people out of cars, breathing cleaner air and eating healthier food.

Public health researchers and leaders issued the reports in a bid to get the message across to world leaders and negotiators heading to next month’s climate talks in Copenhagen.

“Sadly, policy-makers have been slow to recognize that the real bottom line of climate change is its risk to human health and quality of life,” Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, says in a commentary with the studies.

She says the threats to public health are real: Climate change is expected to increase malnutrition, and its “devastating effects” on child health, worsen floods, droughts, storms and heat waves, and alter the geographical distribution of insects that spread malaria and dengue.

“The issue now is not whether climate change is occurring, but how we can respond most effectively, ” says Chan.

The up-side, say Chan and the researchers, is that some carbon-reduction strategies could result in major health improvements.

Simple measures to improve household energy efficiency could have huge benefits, according to one study that looked at polluting indoor cook stoves widely used in low-income countries.

Replacing the stoves with low-emissions stove technology that costs $50 US per household has the potential to “avert millions of premature deaths and hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse pollutants,” says the study led by Dr. Paul Wilkinson at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

It found a 10-year program to introduce 150 million efficient, low-emission cooking stoves in India could by 2020 prevent 240,000 children under age five from dying of acute lower respiratory infections and more than 1.8 million premature adult deaths from heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Reducing the use of coal to produce electricity would also have “co-benefits,” a second study reports. Carbon emissions wafting into the atmosphere would be reduced along with particulate air pollutants linked to lung cancer, and acute respiratory and cardio-respiratory illnesses. The researchers say that by 2030 “decarbonizing” electricity production could prevent an estimated 93,000 premature deaths in India, another 57,000 in China and 5,000 in the European Union.

The urban transportation study says encouraging more walking and cycling would have big benefits for both health and the climate. It compared different transportation scenarios for London and Delhi. Walking and cycling came out on top even when compared to increased use of low-emission vehicles that are widely touted as “green” solutions.

"Important health gains and reductions in CO2 emissions can be achieved through replacement of urban trips in private motor vehicles with active travel in high-income and middle-income countries,” the researchers conclude.

They suggest policy-makers divert investment away from roads and toward provision of infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists. They suggest motor vehicles be slowed down and more strictly controlled, while pedestrians and bikers should have direct routes with priority at intersections, to "increase in the safety, convenience, and comfort of walking and cycling."

http://www.vancouversun.com

Cuaderno de Ideas

Majora’s Vision

“I believe that you shouldn’t have to leave your neighborhood to live in a better one.”