2015 is going to be a great year for city planning
Experts say smart planning will keep gaining ground in 2015. Hear more in two new videos from Mobility Lab.
In “Energizing People to Reimagine Our Cities,” the interviewees talk about broad changes in city operations. Harriet Tregoning, who used to be DC’s planning director, says residents need to support projects even when their cities “fail fast and fail often.”
“People don’t always talk about the fact that [Capital Bikeshare] is our second system,” she says. “SmartBike was an abysmal failure, [but] we were able to replace that dinky little bikeshare system with something that was much much better and immediately successful.”
Erin Barnes from the crowdsourcing site Ioby urges cities to rethink public spaces: “People get really upset if you talk about taking away parking spaces. But if you close a street to car traffic and open it up for anything else, you give people an opportunity to reimagine how you would use all that public space.”
In “Energizing People About the Future of Public Transportation,” Gabe Klein, previously DC’s transportation director, predicts a shift in how we talk about planning. He says we’ll move from a narrow focus on transit versus cars versus biking and walking toward a broader look at how transportation as a whole helps a city work.
Tim Papandreou from San Francisco’s transportation department cites a specific example: “We have smart phones, but really dumb wallets.” Mobile apps could make it easy to combine different ways of getting across town both from home and while traveling.
Emily Badger, a transportation reporter at the Post, says new types of data that tell us more about how people connect to jobs are transforming our approach to transit.
“2015,” Papandreou predicts, “is going to mean more, not less.”
The interviews for both videos were filmed in January at Transportation Camp, an annual “unconference” that Mobility Lab sponsors to bring together and advance new ideas in transportation.