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Monday Mailing Quote of the Week: “Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!”

-Dr. Seuss Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon was founded on Feb. 14, 1859. It was the 33rd state admitted into the union, and in 1860 was home to over 54,000 residents. Today, around 4 million people call Oregon home. Only 10 Oregonians call the town of Greenhorn home.

Year 23 • Issue 32 15 May 2017 1. Study: The Quality of Bike Infrastructure Matters 2. Free Webinar: Planning for Profitable Agriculture and Sustainable Food Systems - Thursday, May 25, 2017 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM 3. Planning Tools to Enhance Community and Regional Quality of Life 4. The New Suburban Crisis 5. Free Report: Livable Transit Corridors: Methods, Metrics, and Strategies 6. 10 Ways Bicycle-Friendly Streets Are Good for People Who Don't Ride Bicycles 7. Do You Live On The Front Lines Of Automation?

8. Healthy Comprehensive Plan Assessment Tool 9. Free Report: Urban Blight and Public Health: Addressing the Impact of Substandard Housing, Abandoned Buildings, and Vacant Lots 10. Making The Case For Wooden Buildings 11. Rental Income Just Hit An All-Time High. Here’s How That Drives a Wedge Between ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’ 1. Study: The Quality of Bike Infrastructure Matters "A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health has concluded that physical separation from motor traffic is “crucial” to reducing the higher than average cyclist injury rates seen across the U.S.," reports Mark Sutton.

The study collected evidence from Europe, ten cities and the United States, and an earlier study of Boston.

An editorial that accompanies the study [pdf] also states the following about the effect of infrastructure quality on safety outcomes: It is crucial to provide physical separation from fast-moving, highvolume motor vehicle traffic and better intersection design to avoid conflicts between cyclists and motor vehicles. More and better bicycle infrastructure and safer cycling would encourage Americans to make more of their daily trips by bicycle and, thus, help raise the currently low physical activity levels of the US population.

The study's exhibit A is provided by Minneapolis, where the city "grew its cycle network by 113% between 2000 and 2015, delivering a 79% reduction in severe injuries per 100,000 cycle journeys," explains Sutton. "This also tallied with a 203% growth in cycling in the areas where safe infrastructure was present."

To access the full report, click here.

2. Free Webinar: Planning for Profitable Agriculture and Sustainable Food Systems - Thursday, May 25, 2017 10:00 AM 11:30 AM How can local and state governments take stock of their rural resourcebased industries, assess where these industries are headed, and Page 1 of 4

determine how to support local farm-to-table commerce? Two recent studies in Maryland examine these questions and explain why planners throughout the country should care about these issues.

In this webinar, Joe Tassone (of the Maryland Department of Planning) and Greg Bowen (of Land Stewardship Solutions) will discuss “The Future of Sustainable Farming and Forestry in Maryland” (also the name of one of their recent published reports), and summarize their findings and recommendations toward a healthier, more equitable and resilient food system, with lessons from the Chesapeake Bay region that apply elsewhere To register for this webinar, click here.

3. Planning Tools to Enhance Community and Regional Quality of Life FHWA Community Vision Metrics and the PlaceFit tools to emphasize the connection between transportation, livability, and communities. The Community Vision Metrics tool enables planning practitioners to search for performance indicators or measures relevant to a county or community’s specific circumstances and quality of life goals. This tool may be used during the visioning and goal setting steps in the planning process. The PlaceFit tool is an investigative tool that allows the user to select primary and secondary characteristics that describe what they are looking for in a community, as a desirable place to live.

Click here to listen to a recording of a recent FHWA webinar that demonstrated these two tools.

4. The New Suburban Crisis During the mid-1980s, before anyone thought of the suburbs as being on a downward trajectory, the urban designer David Lewis, a Carnegie Mellon colleague of mine at the time, told me that the future project of suburban renewal would likely make our vast 20th-century urban renewal efforts look like a walk in the park.

Indeed, with their enormous physical footprints, shoddy construction, and hastily installed infrastructure, many suburbs are visibly crumbling. Across the nation, hundreds of suburban shopping malls are dead or dying; countless suburban factories, like their urban counterparts a couple of generations ago, have fallen silent.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Free Report: Livable Transit Corridors: Methods, Metrics, and Strategies This report from the Transportation Research Board presents practical planning and implementation strategies to enhance livability in transit corridors. This handbook provides a resource for planning practitioners, policy makers, and other stakeholders to measure, understand, and improve transit corridor livability.

To access a copy of this report, click here.

6. 10 Ways Bicycle-Friendly Streets Are Good for People Who Don't Ride Bicycles Even in the most crime-free of America's neighborhoods, people don't feel entirely safe when they're out and about.

Drivers, some of whom view the nation's roadways as their exclusive domain, are having to contend with growing numbers of bicyclists and pedestrians.

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Bicyclists, who are largely focused on maneuvering through vehicle traffic and not getting sideswiped on shoulderless streets, sometimes don't realize how they imperil pedestrians.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Do You Live On The Front Lines Of Automation?

If you live in Las Vegas, El Paso, or Louisville, there’s a particularly good chance that your job could be taken by a robot in the next two decades.

Using data from a 2013 Oxford study that found that nearly half of American jobs are at risk from automation–from truck driving and telemarketing to legal assistants–a new study maps out which cities are likely to lose the most jobs. (The next phase of the research will look at how the risk affects people differently based on age, race, educational level, and other demographic factors, and will break down data further by ZIP code).

Researchers at the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis at the University of Redlands wanted to make the risk tangible and understandable through the new study.

For access the full story, click here.

8. Healthy Comprehensive Plan Assessment Tool Healthy and equitable communities are created through vision, design, and planning. Review, assess, and implement your comprehensive plan using ChangeLab Solutions’ Healthy Comprehensive Plan Assessment Tool (HCPAT).

This project is in beta version, which means we're still testing functionality and collecting feedback from users. If you use the tool and want to share your experience, please contact us!

Read on to learn more about how this tool will provide you with an assessment plus targeted recommendations to improve your plan.

To access the toolkit, click here.

9. Free Report: Urban Blight and Public Health: Addressing the Impact of Substandard Housing, Abandoned Buildings, and Vacant Lots We spend more than two-thirds of our time where we live; thus, housing and neighborhood conditions affect our well-being. The health impacts from blighted properties are often not immediately visible or felt. This report synthesizes recent studies on the complexities of how blight affects the health of individuals and neighborhoods while offering a blend of policy and program recommendations to help guide communities in taking a more holistic and coordinated approach, such as expanding the use of health impact assessments, tracking health outcomes, and infusing public health into housing policies, codes and practices.

To access the full report, click here.

10. Making The Case For Wooden Buildings Walk into the cavernous atrium of the National Building Museum a few blocks north of DC’s National Mall, and you’ll find a piece of wood whose scale rivals the 75-foot-tall, 8-foot-diameter masonry columns it sits next to. This 64-foot-tall plank, which the curators of the current exhibit Timber City have dubbed “The Pylon,” floats next to another 40-foot-long, 10-foot-tall section called “The Beam.”

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Together, they’re a potent demonstration of the power of mass timber, a back-to-the-future structural material that uses one of the oldest building materials on the planet in stronger, exceptionally sustainable ways.

Timber City pays homage to cross-laminated timber (CLT), which gains its strength — comparable to steel — from joining perpendicularly stacked sheets of wood with adhesive.

To access the full story, click here.

11. Rental Income Just Hit An All-Time High. Here’s How That Drives a Wedge Between ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’ You already know the rent is too damn high. But here’s fresh evidence that something’s amiss in the housing market: one metric of measuring housing costs has never been so high.

Rental income as a share of gross domestic product hit an all-time high of 3.86% in the first quarter, according to government data out Friday.

That makes sense: with lean supply and pent-up demand, it’s never been such a good time to be a landlord.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that. The government’s “rental income” data don’t just include income that people make renting out homes or rooms. It also includes what’s known as “imputed” income for homeowners.

To access the full story, click here.

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