“A Design that Celebrates the People”: Normal, IL Traffic Circle Wins Smart Growth Award as New Civic Space

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Coleen Gentles

Earlier this month, EPA announced the winners of the 2011 National Award for Smart Growth Achievement.  We are excited to report that Normal, Illinois is the recipient of the award in the Civic Places category for their traffic roundabout. We’ve written before about how the town’s new traffic circle has successfully managed traffic flow at [...]

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Visions of Closing Roads and Creating Parks

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Coleen Gentles

A previous post highlighted a few cities that closed roads through parks to increase pedestrian and non-motorized use. We’ve recently learned about a proposal to temporarily close streets to traffic during weekends and holidays in Buenos Aires and bring in portable playground equipment and benches to turn these roads into parks. A video of this [...]

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Road Closures: A Driving Force for Park Visitation

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Ryan Donahue

We’ve written before about city parks that close roadways for use by pedestrians, cyclists, rollerbladers, and more. Closing parks to cars actually has been shown to increase visitation, which may come as a surprise to some. Some of the more famous examples include JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, and [...]

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The Times Square Transformation

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Coleen Gentles

We found a very nice video discussing New York’s goal of being the “greatest, greenest big city in the world,” according to NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.  While the video focuses more on transportation improvements in the city, specifically bicycle infrastructure and bus rapid transit, there is a brief discussion on the success of closing Broadway [...]

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When Parks, Transportation and Water Collide

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Coleen Gentles

Sometimes small towns are the communities pushing the envelope on innovation. What happens when you take a regular traffic circle, cover it with a lawn, add some trees for shade and then a fountain for kicks?  Well, in Normal, Illinois they did just that as a means for reducing downtown congestion in this college town. But the [...]

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Dumpster Diving on New York’s Park Avenue

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Coleen Gentles

Credit: Alan Miles NYC (Flickr Feed) Of the many unique activities New York is known for, the most entertaining this summer involved closing roads and opening pools, specifically dumpster swimming pools.   For the third summer in a row, New York’s Department of Transportation presented the Summer Streets program, closing almost seven miles of posh Park [...]

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The Range of Street Closure Efforts in Cities

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Ben Welle

Cities around the world are shutting down streets for pedestrian, cyclist and mass transit thoroughfares and plazas, wrote John Mattson in an article in Scientific American last month. Case in point is New York City’s move to shut down portions of Broadway around Times and Herald Squares. These car-free areas in the heart of Manhattan [...]

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Some news from around…

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Elissa Hoagland Izmailyan

The New York Times reports that budget problems are forcing many of the nation’s state parks to close their gates or cut services. The National Trust for Historic Preservation agrees, listing State Parks at the top of its “Endangered Places” list. New York City Economic Development gets creative to address unfunded park project, temporarily transforming [...]

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Some news from around…

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Elissa Hoagland Izmailyan

Students in the Bronx celebrate their new playground, one of 42 vacant lots that the Trust for Public Land has transformed into playgrounds and community spaces in New York City. (NY1) Proof parks are brought to life by their communities — Youngstown, Ohio residents set up a temporary “pop-up park” in a downtown parking space. [...]

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Turning Times Square into a Pedestrian Square

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Ben Welle

The New York City Department of Transportation is undertaking an experiment to close parts of Broadway that traverse Times Square, and started this on Memorial Day. So far, lots of people out on the new public spaces and no significant traffic problems. (See article and video) For cities looking to create more space for the [...]

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