Janette Sadik-Kahn Lecture now online

Janette Sadik-Khan is a transportation superstar in North America. As New York City’s Transportation Commissioner, she helped introduce protected bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, sustainable street designs and, most dramatically, closed five blocks of Broadway in Times Square to vehicles — while improving traffic flow!

 In this video of her lecture last October 19, find out how she transformed New York and how that could affect us, our health, and our urban environments.

Woodward’s

SFU City Program Director Gord Price is posting first impressions of the Woodward’s complex, soon to be home of SFU’s School of Contemporary Arts – here.

Stay tuned to this space for more news on the upcoming Vancouverism events in January – two salons focusing on architect Arthur Erickon, and the Art and Architecture of Woodward’s.

Photo Finish

APSA (the Administrative and Professional Staff Association at SFU) sponsors courses occasionally – such as the lunch and learn photo workshops held on the campus at Burnaby Mountain.  The results are in of those who participated in the photo contest.

And the winners are …

First, Felix Chan for “Waterfall.”

Second, Lisa Jung for “Mountain Scene.”

Third, Carol Yong for “Night Scene.”

Integrating Bicycling and Public Transport

When Rutgers University prof John Pucher was last in Vancouver, he gave a stirring speech on cycling, the podcast of which went viral.  (You can find it here.)  John also took the opportunity to check out how cycling integrated with our public transport. 

He and colleague Ralph Buehler have just puplished a definitive paper on bike-transit infrastructure, comparing cities all over North America, in a paper for The Journal of Public Transportation.

This paper provides an overview of bike-transit integration in large American and Canadian cities. It begins with an analysis of national trends in bike-and-ride programs such as the provision of bike racks on buses, accommodation of bikes on rail vehicles, and bike parking at rail stations and bus stops.

Most of the paper, however, is devoted to case studies of bike-transit integration in six large American cities (San Francisco, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Washington, and New York) and two Canadian cities (Vancouver and Toronto).

Much progress has been made over the past decade in coordinating cycling with public transport, but the demand for bike-and-ride far exceeds the supply of facilities in some cities. More funding, in particular, is needed to provide more secure, sheltered bike parking at rail stations and to increase bike-carrying capacity on rail vehicles.

 You can read the whole paper here.  

 

Health, Meet Planning

Common sense suggests a stong relationship between healthy people living in healthy communities as a consequence of good planning.  But only recently have those responsible for health programs sat down with planners, and vice-versa.  Now the results of some of those conversations are becoming apparent.

The Healthy Living Issue Group of the Pan-Canadian Public Health Network has just released a report that summarizes intiatives across the country.   Bringing Health to the Planning Table: A Profile of Promising Practices in Canada and Abroad can be found here.

 

The report profiles case studies within 13 Canadian communities from across Canada where collaborative approaches to improve health outcomes have been a key consideration in planning decisions related to the built environment.

This approach was chosen so that the successes (and lessons learned) of a variety of different projects could be shared with other communities. With one case study from each province and territory it provides a pan-Canadian perspective. Two international examples highlight similar work happening abroad.

More here from the Public health Agency of Canada on their Healthy Living Strategy.

ULI’s Emerging Trends in Real Estate

The B.C. District of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) will be hosting its most popular forum of the year – Emerging Trends in Real Estate – on November 23 at the Terminal City Club.

This year, the keynote speaker is Jonathan Miller.  Miller has more than 25 years of communications and marketing experience in the real-estate industry as a partner in Miller Ryan LLC.  For the past 17 years he has authored the ULI’s premier annual industry forecast and speaks extensively on suburban and urban issues.

 

The local panelists are Avtar Bains (Colliers International), Jason Cottle (RBC Capital Markets Real Estate Group) and Cameron Muir (BC Real Estate Association).  The moderator is James Patillo (Grosvenor Americas).

Event Details 

$50 / $60 ULI members / non-members private sector

$40 / $50 ULI members / non-members public, academic, non-profi t,

Young Leaders (real estate professionals under 35 yrs)

$30 / $40 ULI members / non-members students

Registration deadline: Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Register online at britishcolumbia.uli.org or by phone at 1-800-321-5011

For more information, please contact jeannie.bates@uli.org

Shifting Gears: Janette Sadik-Kahn

At a more-than-full house on October 19, Janette Sadik-Kahn, the Transportation Commissioner of New York City, gave one of the most exciting talks in our Shifting Gears series.

Here’s a brief summary from the Planning Pool, a blog from the students at UBC’s SCARP:

It was such a pleasure to see such a brilliant woman with a clear sense of humor in the position of transit commissioner, in a stereotypically serious, male dominated field.   As the “largest real estate developer in New York” she is practicing “urban acupuncture” in the form of new bike lanes, linear plazas (Herald Square and Times Square), Hudson River greenway, regulations regarding indoor parking, increased number of street bike racks, select bus service in the Bronx, Summer Streets and more.

And, as usual, a summary from the Scribe of Richmond, Stephen Rees.

The Story of Six-Storey

A hundred planner- and construction-type afficionados turned out to a PlanTalk session to get the back-story on six-storey wood-frame construction.  Three speakers covered the ground, from big-picture overview to the nuts and bolts (and nails and screws). 

Speakers were Guido Wimmers, Equilibrium Consulting Inc.; Dave Ramslie, Cascadia Region Green Building Council; and Murray Frank, Constructive Home Solutions Inc.

You can here them here in this audio podcast. 

This was a jointly hosted PlanTalk by the Planning Institute of B.C., the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the City Program.

Views on “Views on Views”

Sean Ruthen over at re:place magazine has done a great job in reporting on the the “Views on Views” session held at the Segal Business School.  Here’s a taste:

Imagine then a world where the Eiffel Tower had never been constructed because it blocked a particular view of the Sacre Coeur, and compound this with the same view becoming blocked by a grove of protected tree foliage over time, and one begins to approximate the complexity that is the highly contentious subject of Vancouver’s view cones.

While cities in Europe have protected areas which limit building construction due to existing heritage structures, the City of Vancouver is unique in regards to its 27 protected view cones (though Seattle has their very similar ‘view corridors’). From the south shores of False Creek to Cypress, Grouse, and Seymour Mountains, the city has safeguarded these narrow pathways through its urban bulk from being overbuilt, all for the public benefit, with the consequence of having severely limited the development of those particular swaths of the city for the past twenty years.

Read it all here.

Reserve now for Janette Sadik-Kahn

Don’t forget to make your reservation for what promises to be a pretty special lecture:

Shifting Gears II Lecture Series

Transportation, Health and the Built Environment

Learning from New York 

Monday, October 19, 7 pm

 Venue: Room 11 and 12, East Building (under the sails), Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre, 999 Canada Place

Free admission; reservations required. Call 778-782-5100 or email cstudies@sfu.ca

Janette Sadik-Khan is a transportation superstar in North America. As New York City’s Transportation Commissioner, she helped introduce protected bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, sustainable street designs and, most dramatically, closed five blocks of Broadway in Times Square to vehicles — while improving traffic flow!

Find out how she transformed New York and how that could affect us, our health, and our urban environments. 

These lectures are sponsored by the Bombardier Foundation and the Active Transport Lab at the University of British Columbia and BC Recreation and Parks Association. Program partner: Simon Fraser University City Program. www.physicalactivitystrategy.ca www.act-trans.ubc.ca

Additional sponsorship for Jeanette Sadik-Khan’s lecture provided by Translink. This is a shoulder event to the Gaining Ground/Resilient Cities conference on October 20–22, 2009.

Admission is free but seating is extremely limited and reservations are required. Call 778-782-5100 or email cstudies@sfu.ca .

Image above from Price Tags 108 on Cycling in New York.