Monday Mailing
Year 23 • Issue 39 17 July 2017 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
Quote of the Week: "People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be." ~Abraham Lincoln Oregon Fast Fact: The northern Oregon Coast Range can receive up to 200 inches of precipitation per year, versus as little as 8 inches in the eastern deserts. Also, the Willamette Valley typically receives between 30 and 50 inches of precipitation yearly, while the Cascade Range can get well over 100 inches of total precipitation, which includes snowmelt.
More Transportation Choices, Better Health Surveyed: What 5,000 Americans Think About Urban Design Are We Ready For The End of Individual Car Ownership? An Open Data Hub That Builds Better Citizens Eastern Oregon Neighbors Worry About Human Waste From Eclipse Campers, File Lawsuit How The Bicycle Paved The Way For Women's Rights Surviving A Tsunami In The United States Beyond The Bike Tax: Here’s What Else Oregon’s New Transportation Bill Does For Biking And walking A Town Well Planned: Street Design Responsible Tourism: How to Preserve the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg The U.S. Fertility Rate Just Hit a Historic Low. Why Some Demographers Are Freaking Out.
1. More Transportation Choices, Better Health An academic study shows that sustainable community design and transportation choice have a highly beneficial effect on public health. The study of 148 US metro areas on Commute Mode Diversity and Public Health is robust and broad, measuring 12 public health and quality of life indicators against commuting mode share (the portion of commuters who do not drive an automobile alone to work, which ranges from 11 percent to 36 percent in the metro areas studied). After adjusting for various demographic factors, the results indicate a positive relationship between higher mode share and public health outcomes including healthier behaviors, more leisure quality, more access to exercise, less sedentary living and obesity, more years of potential life lost (an indicator of longevity), and higher birth rates, reports Todd Litman, a research analyst with the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. To access the full story, click here. 2. Surveyed: What 5,000 Americans Think About Urban Design Park benches, well-maintained lots, planters full of bright flowers, lamp posts — these are public space design features that we often think of as perks, and maybe even beneficial to our physical and psychological wellbeing, but not as essential city services in the vein of safe drinking water or reliable public transportation. But a new survey from the Center for Active Design (CfAD) indicates that such features can have far-reaching benefits for civic life beyond the oftentouted (but deeply generalized) morale boost. Billed as “the first study to examine specific community design features that influence civic life, using large-sample survey methods and visual experiments,” the survey examined things like trust in local government and police, community engagement, and stewardship associated with those seemingly humble design elements.
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As Fast Company reports, it’s “a step forward in establishing urban design as essential — and not merely ‘nice to have.’” The Assembly Civic Engagement Survey (ACES), as it’s called, was fielded as an online survey to a “sample of 5,188 respondents from 26 communities across the United States,” in 2016, according to CfAD. Communities surveyed varied in economic conditions, racial composition and density. To access the full story, click here. 3. Are We Ready For The End of Individual Car Ownership? A historic photo taken on Easter Sunday, 1900, shows a street filled with horse-drawn carriages. If you look very carefully, you can pick out a solitary automobile. A photo of Easter 1913 shows the same New York Fifth Avenue scene packed with cars. If you look very carefully, you can pick out a solitary horse. That’s disruption: New technologies create a new market and transform existing industries in the blink of an eye. We face a rapid disruption of transportation today that could end more than a century of individual ownership of the gas-powered vehicle that disrupted the horse. This disruption will reshape the urban landscape and the world’s energy economy and bring huge benefits — economically, socially and environmentally — if policy decisions are well-informed. To access the full story, click here. 4. An Open Data Hub That Builds Better Citizens More than 100 American cities host online open data portals brimming with information on crime, housing, transit, traffic, and neighborhood boundaries. Such initiatives have promised to make government more transparent, accountable, and accessible, at a time when the public’s trust is scraping bottom. But so far, open data has largely fallen short of those lofty ambitions. Part of the problem seems to lie in design: Many online portals are hard for non-expert citizens to use. They keep datasets passively afloat, leaving it up users to know exactly what data they want and how to skim it out, skills which many lack. The numbers are there—but for whom, and for what purpose? Years in the making, a new tool aims to shift that paradigm. Launched Monday by the global GIS mapping software giant Esri, ArcGIS Hub is an online platform that clusters datasets around specific citywide initiatives, in the hope that people can more readily tap into information applicable to their lives. “Rather than ask what data should be available, this asks cities to think about what people care about,” says Andrew Turner, the chief technology officer of Esri’s R&D Center in Washington, D.C. He estimates he’s spent 15 years theorizing about this tool (and about two years building it with his team). To access the full story, click here. 5. Eastern Oregon Neighbors Worry About Human Waste From Eclipse Campers, File Lawsuit Neighbors of an eastern Oregon organic farm are asking a judge to stop it from renting out land to up to 6,000 campers during the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse.
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A lawsuit filed Friday claims the Stelzer family of Azure Farms hasn't received an “outdoor mass gathering” county permit for its four-night money-making venture titled “Azure’s Organic Orchard Great American Eclipse Camping Experience.” Neighbors worry that the 130 acres of apple orchards and other agricultural land will be overrun with campers -- and with a lack of portable toilets, human waste will contaminate neighboring properties and the John Day River in Grant County. What’s more, neighbors worry about damage by car and RV traffic to the shared dirt road that leads to all of their properties. And they have concerns about the possible fire hazard created by so many campers. Court papers state that five homes are within 1,000 feet of the Stelzer family’s farm in Kimberly, Oregon -- about a four-hour, 215-mile drive from Portland. To access the full story, click here. 6. How The Bicycle Paved The Way For Women's Rights The bicycle, when it was still new technology, went through a series of rapid iterations in the 19th century before it really went mainstream. Designers toyed with different-sized front and back wheels, the addition of chains and cranks and pedals, and tested a slew of braking mechanisms. By the 1890s, America was totally obsessed with the bicycle—which by then looked pretty much like the ones we ride today. There were millions of bikes on the roads and a new culture built around the technology. People started "wheelmen" clubs and competed in races. They toured the country and compared tricks and stunts. The craze was meaningful, especially, for women. Both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are credited with declaring that "woman is riding to suffrage on the bicycle," a line that was printed and reprinted in newspapers at the turn of the century. The bicycle took "old-fashioned, slow-going notions of the gentler sex," as The Courier (Nebraska) reported in 1895, and replaced them with "some new woman, mounted on her steed of steel." To access the full story, click here. 7. Surviving A Tsunami In The United States An ocean wave pulls away from the shore and then, as expected, it moves toward land again. But it keeps moving farther and farther inland. The water pushes over unsuspecting beachgoers, backyards and entire cities with startling speed. It leaves a wake of destruction in Indonesia that includes an estimated 230,000 deaths. Several years later, a similar scene unfolds in Japan when ocean water flows onto land to submerge cars, homes and even a nuclear power plant that never again will return to functionality. That time, the flood waters claim approximately 16,000 lives. The mind-boggling force of a tsunami is a horrifying spectacle, as the world witnessed in 2004 and 2011. Those disasters ingrained heart-wrenching images of water-borne tragedy into people’s minds around the world. For many Americans, though, such images depict a rare occurrence in far-off countries and not a phenomenon in the continental United States. But the reality is that a tsunami could happen here, and it would be equally devastating. To access the full story, click here.
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8. Beyond The Bike Tax: Here’s What Else Oregon’s New Transportation Bill Does For Biking And walking It’s no small task that Oregon legislators passed a $5.3 billion transportation package last week. We haven’t had a new way to fund transportation projects and programs since the Jobs and Transportation Act passed in 2009 and this year’s bill was nearly dead just days before being resurrected thanks to a few major compromises. But a small part of House Bill 2017 — a $15 tax on new bicycles — has gotten a lot of attention from transportation reformers (did you see the tweet from former New York City DOT Director Janette Sadik Khan?!). And for good reason. The tax an unprecedented step in the wrong direction from a state previously famous for passing the forward-thinking “Bicycle Bill” way back in 1971. And while our debates and discussions about the bike tax will continue, let’s not forget the other major components of this bill. After all, there had to be something good in the bill for The Street Trust and other progressive nonprofit groups to support it. So… What exactly did they come away with? Here’s how transit, biking, and walking fared. To access the full story, click here. 9. A Town Well Planned: Street Design The first article in my “A Town Well Planned” series proposed a three-part regulatory system for managing the design of urban environments. The series refers to this system as the “Civic Development System,” or “CDS” for short. The three pillars of this regulatory system are: (1) The Master Street Plan, (2) Basic Land Use Zoning Plans, and (3) Form Plans. My most recent article described how The City of Auburn, Alabama could use a Master Street Plan to design the subdivision of the Auburn Mall site. (You may want to read that article first if you haven’t to gain some context about the mall site, Auburn’s geography, and design work done so far.) The mall site was subdivided by using a common set of parcel types that are small, slim, and evenly divisible by one another. Within these parcels, city “blocks” were constructed. So far, the Master Street Plan for the Auburn Mall site (see the image on the right) only displays blocks and the parcels those blocks consist of. The negative spaces between blocks are the rights of way where streets and alleys will be placed. To access the full story, click here. 10. Responsible Tourism: How to Preserve the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg Where did you go on your last vacation? Was it rewarding and satisfying? Would you recommend it to a friend? Did the destination meet your expectations? Or were you disappointed? Did traffic congestion, dirty air, crowded beaches, slipshod service or excessive commercialism leave you feeling frustrated and cheated? Tourism is big business. Americans spend more than $800 billion a year on travel and recreational pursuits away from home. Tourism is one of the three largest industries in every American state and a critical factor in the world economy.
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However, tourism is also a doubled edged sword. On the one hand, it provides communities with many benefits: new jobs, an expanded tax base, enhanced infrastructure, improved facilities and an expanded market for local products, art and handicrafts. In short, it can be an important tool for community revitalization. On the other hand, it can create problems and burdens for local communities, such as crowding, traffic congestion, noise, increased crime, haphazard development, cost-of-living increases and degraded resources. Michael Kelly, former Chairman of the American Planning Association’s, Tourism Planning Division says ”The impacts of tourism on a community can be beneficial if planned and managed or extremely damaging if left without controls.” To access the full story, click here. 11. The U.S. Fertility Rate Just Hit a Historic Low. Why Some Demographers Are Freaking Out. The United States is in the midst of what some worry is a baby crisis. The number of women giving birth has been declining for years and just hit a historic low. If the trend continues — and experts disagree on whether it will — the country could face economic and cultural turmoil. According to provisional 2016 population data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday, the number of births fell 1 percent from a year earlier, bringing the general fertility rate to 62.0 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. The trend is being driven by a decline in birthrates for teens and 20-somethings. The birthrate for women in their 30s and 40s increased — but not enough to make up for the lower numbers in their younger peers. A country's birthrate is among the most important measures of demographic health. The number needs to be within a certain range, called the “replacement level,” to keep a population stable so that it neither grows nor shrinks. If too low, there's a danger that we wouldn't be able to replace the aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable. Countries such as France and Japan that have low birthrates have put pro-family policies into place to try to encourage couples to have babies. The flip side can also be a problem. Birthrates that are too high can strain resources such as clean water, food, shelter and social services, problems faced by India, where the fertility rate has fallen over the past few decades but still remains high. To access the full story, click here.
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