Stephen Fesler

Last year, Uytae Lee of About Here discussed why point access block (single-stair) residential buildings are so good . But a common reaction to the idea was concern about fire safety by only having one means of emergency ingress and egress. In this video, Lee examines those concerns, fields the data, and looks to how this is addressed around the world.

Shibuya, Tokyo is world famous for it's massive at-grade pedestrian scramble crossing. In a way, it's a self-popularlized space. But there's a lot more to it with the history of the neighborhood and its train stations, and it represents something much more in terms of planning, land use, housing, and transportation. Dave Amos of City Beautiful recently visited the area and digs into why it's worth understanding on a deeper level.

Dave Amos of City Beautiful discusses drive-thru businesses and how they are evolving to create more vehicle throughput. As part of this, Amos discusses the merits of banning them in cities, offering San Luis Obispo as an example.

Urbanist circles differ in how they see autonomous vehicles, particularly as they move toward wider adoption. Some see them being a tool that builds up urban communities and improves safety while others worry that they could have exactly the opposite effect. Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes falls into the latter category with this video titled: “How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it).”

Streetfilms highlights how Ghent (Gent), a city in the Flemish north of Belgium, is making streets safe so that kids can walk and bike to school. The city has rolled out bicycle streets and school streets. Ghent was the host city for this year's Velo-city Conference

North American planning systems rely heavily on public hearings when making decisions. These usually happen at the end of a review and decision-making process as a capstone prior to final approval, under the guise that a public hearing provides a useful touchpoint in public engagement and vehicle to make decisions. But all too often, public hearings increase costs and time to reach a decision without meaningfully impacting decisions. Uytae Lee of About Here digs into the history of the public hearing and its utility, and whether another paradigm is worth pursuing.

Ray Delahanty of CityNerd runs through a shame list for the worst downtown interchanges. Seattle doesn't make the list, but the unfortunate prevalence of highway interchanges in North American cities does offer ample competition for worst.

# The right-wing populist provincial government in Ontario, Canada has voted to remove bike lanes and make it difficult to install them in the future in Toronto, the largest city in the Maple Leaf country. The effort is a mix of political distraction for a floundering government administration and cynical self-interest by Premier Doug Ford and

Inevitably, you're probably going to travel and, from time to time, go by plane to get to your destination. But if you're a transit enthusiast, environmentally minded, or an urbanist, you may want to make transit a more sustainable part of your travels, particularly to and from the airport. Ray Delahanty of CityNerd highlights the best medium and large airports served by transit in North America from the standpoint of travel time, frequency, span of service, and cost.