Archinect - News

A '15-minute' planned community is set to rise in Utah

2022-01-20T09:00:00-05:00

A new planned community in Utah will strive to make it possible for residents to meet all their daily needs within 15 minutes without getting in a car — and to serve as a model for other U.S. developers who want to build basic mobility into the foundations of their designs.

Called The Point, the envisoned community will be located in Draper, Utah, and take up about one square mile of state-owned land. The development, master-planned by SOM, will specifically aim to reduce the need for cars by featuring extensive biking, walking, and transit systems.

A range of transportation strategies will be employed in order to achieve this plan. Vehicle traffic will be restricted from a .125-square-mile section of the downtown core called the “pedestrian priority zone.” In addition, mixed-use zoning will make homes easily accessible to jobs, schools, and essential services. There will also be a city circulator that will shuttle residents around the community and connect to other transit routes.

The Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, the government agency overseeing the project, is currently in the process of selecting a developer for the project. Construction of the community will likely start in late 2024.

UPenn study uses biometric data to identify unsafe urban infrastructure

2021-07-21T17:08:00-04:00

A new study published in Accident Analysis & Prevention shows how biometric data can be used to find potentially challenging and dangerous areas of urban infrastructure before a crash occurs. Lead author Megan Ryerson led a team of researchers in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the School of Engineering and Applied Science in collecting and analyzing eye-tracking data from cyclists navigating Philadelphia’s streets.

As explained in a piece by Penn Today, current federal rules for making safe transportation interventions require the notation of crashes. This reactive approach relies on previous human cost before new considerations are made. Seeking to minimize harmful events altogether, Ryerson and her team sought to capture data on human behavior to better understand what factors make an area unsafe rather than previous data.

The team developed a quantitative methodology to evaluate cognitive workload, a measure of mental effort put forth by someone in response to certain tasks, in cyclists when faced with various infrastructure designs.

One of the main findings was a correlation between locations with disproportionately high numbers of crashes and consistent biometric responses that indicated increased cognitive workload. While high cognitive workload doesn’t mean a person will definitely crash, it can be inferred that one is less effective in processing new information, which could lead to d...

Is biking good for you even if the air is heavily polluted?

2016-05-23T20:01:00-04:00

...Given all the harm we know air pollution can cause, does cycling actually help, or could it hurt? After all, I’m not breathing in the foul fumes of a truck when I’m sitting inside an air-conditioned train. I’m certainly not breathing them in deeply, as I would while huffing and puffing on my cycle. Air pollution kills more than 5 million people every year, yet there has been no analysis of the costs versus benefits of city cycling. Until now.

Long story short: keep biking. Researchers found that, in almost every city around the world, the health benefits of biking "far exceed" the damage than can be caused by breathing in dirty air. Even in the worst polluted cities in the world, you have to ride at least 60 minutes a day to be more harmed than helped.

For more on the dirty air polluting cities around the world, check out these links:

These fascinating GPS doodles were 'drawn' by cycling the grid of the city

2016-02-09T15:11:00-05:00

Stephen Lund considers the Canadian city of Victoria his canvas and a bicycle his brush. And the paint? Strava, a GPS tracking system which marks his routes with crimson lines. So far, he has pedaled around in the shapes of critters such as an angler fish, giraffe, giant anteater, and nine-banded armadillo; mythical and interplanetary creatures such as the Siren of the Salish Sea, the Sea Serpent of Haro Strait, and the Dark Lord of the Sith.

Take a look at some of Lund's intricate "GPS Doodles," also known as "Strava art:"

Head over to Stephen Lund's blog gpsdoodles.com to find way more of this goodness and watch him explain his approach in the video from the recent TEDxVictoria below.

Jakarta's "car-free days" are only the start of the city's long journey to becoming bike-friendly

2015-09-11T18:13:00-04:00

Ask a cyclist what it’s like to ride in Indonesia’s capital – a sprawling megalopolis of 10.2 million people...More than likely, they’ll tell you it’s outright dangerous...Car-free days may be popular, but there is almost no [cyclist] infrastructure... [However, there] is hope among cyclists that bike lanes will become a priority after the city’s [mass rapid transport] system is finished in 2019. In the meantime, several young innovators are taking matters into their own hands.

Senator proposes mandatory helmets for California cyclists

2015-02-13T12:56:00-05:00

Sen. Carol Liu on Wednesday announced a bill, SB 192, that will require bicycle riders to wear helmets or face a $25 fine. “Any responsible bicycle rider should wear a helmet,” Liu said ... “This law will help protect more people and make sure all riders benefit from the head protection that a helmet provides.”

California law currently requires anyone under 18 to wear a helmet when riding a bike, nonmotorized scooter, skateboard, or wearing in-line or roller skates. Liu's SB 192 bill would extend this provision to everyone, not just minors, and also require cyclists to wear reflective clothing at night – requirements that no other state has adopted.

It might seem like wearing a helmet is the first-move for safe cycling, but Dan Snyder, head of the California Bicycle Coalition, disagrees: as quoted in the Sacramento Bee, “We know that the most important thing to protect people who ride bikes is to get more people out there riding bikes. Forcing people to wear crash helmets when they ride is counter productive to that goal.” This is the same reasoning behind ”Critical Mass": organized cycling tours that flood city streets with so many cyclists as to force car traffic into submission. Safety, for cyclists, is in numbers.

In countries with a hefty number of cyclists, where infrastructural adapta...