Transit
Frequency is the only transit statistic that matters to a passenger
Networks are marketed on speed and length. Riders experience waiting, and waiting is set by frequency.
Joris Vandeveld
Editor, Street to Sky
Joris edits Street to Sky and trained as an urban planner before concluding the reporting was more useful.
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50 articles
Streets
Kerbside is the most contested space in a city
Parking, deliveries, buses, bikes, dining and drainage all want the same metre and a half. Most cities allocate it by inertia.
Planning
Housing viability is the calculation that decides what gets built
Whether a scheme includes affordable homes is usually settled by a spreadsheet rather than by policy.
Public Space
A bench is a policy decision
Where seating exists, who it serves and whether it can be lain on are all deliberate choices that read as furniture.
Climate & Cities
Urban heat is a design problem with known solutions
Cities run several degrees hotter than their surroundings for identifiable reasons, and most of them are addressable.
Streets
A wider road fills up and the mechanism is not mysterious
Added capacity lowers the cost of driving a route, and lower costs attract use. Induced demand is ordinary economics wearing a hard…
Streets
Tactile paving is a language and cities keep mispronouncing it
Those bumps and bars carry specific meanings for people who cannot see the junction. Laid in the wrong place, they say the wrong…
Buildings
A deep floorplate is why your flat has one window
Building depth is settled early, on a spreadsheet about site efficiency, and it determines light, air and layout for the next…
Buildings
Ceiling height decides whether a building gets a second life
Buildings that outlive their original use share a few dull properties. Generous floor-to-floor height is the one that matters most.
Buildings
Sealed buildings were a mechanical decision, not an architectural one
Windows stopped opening because the air conditioning could not tolerate it. Everything else followed from that.
Transit
Dwell time is where a bus route loses its speed
Buses are slow less because of traffic than because of the accumulated seconds spent stationary at stops with the doors open.
Transit
Step-free access is a network property, not a station feature
A lift at one end of a journey is useless without one at the other. Accessibility is measured in complete trips or not at all.
Transit
Trams and buses differ mainly in who owns the road space
Most of the performance gap attributed to steel wheels comes from priority, platform design and permanence rather than from the…
Planning
Growth boundaries move development rather than stopping it
A line drawn around a city constrains where building happens. Whether it constrains how much depends entirely on what is inside the…
Planning
Permitting time is a cost that ends up in the rent
Every month a scheme spends in the consent process is a month of financing charges on land that is producing nothing.
Planning
Who turns up to a planning meeting decides what gets built
Consultation responses are not a sample of anybody. They are a self-selected group with the time, information and confidence to…
Planning
Phase one is always the good phase
Masterplans front-load the park, the square and the good architecture. The later phases arrive under different owners and a worse…
Public Space
A square works at its edges, not in its middle
People occupy the perimeter of an open space first and the centre last, which means the edge is where the design has to succeed.
Public Space
A park is a maintenance budget with plants on it
Parks are opened with ceremonies and funded with revenue budgets. The second of those decides what the park is like in ten years.
Public Space
Privately owned public space looks public until you test it
Plazas delivered by developers feel like squares and operate under private rules enforced by private staff. The difference only…
Public Space
Teenagers are the group cities design out first
Every public space policy has a category for children and one for older adults. The years between are handled by removing the…
Public Space
Playgrounds are designed for the adults watching
Sightlines, fencing and standardised equipment make supervision easy. They also make play predictable, which is the opposite of…
Public Space
Tactical urbanism survives only where somebody measured it
Paint and planters can test a street change in a week. What decides whether it becomes permanent is whether anyone counted anything.
Public Space
Cities removed drinking fountains and are slowly putting them back
Free public water disappeared for reasons of maintenance, liability and bottled competition. Heat and plastic have brought the case…
Public Space
An outdoor space with bad acoustics will never be used
Hard surfaces, parallel walls and traffic noise can make a beautifully designed square impossible to hold a conversation in.
Climate & Cities
Daylighting a buried river is a flood project first
Uncovering a culverted watercourse looks like landscape architecture. Its real function is giving water somewhere legitimate to go.
Climate & Cities
Flood maps describe the rain we used to get
Risk maps are built from historical records and assumed drainage performance. Both of those assumptions are moving.
Buildings
Single-stair buildings are a fire argument with a floorplan attached
How many staircases a block needs is a safety rule that quietly decides flat layouts, daylight and what small sites can hold.
Buildings
A car park podium is the hardest floor to convert later
Structured parking looks like spare capacity for a future without cars. Its slopes, headroom and drainage disagree.
Buildings
Facade maintenance decides how a building ages in public
Buildings do not weather evenly. Where the water runs and who can reach the surface decide what a street sees in ten years.
Transit
A late bus costs more than a slow one
Passengers plan around the worst trip they expect rather than the average one, so unreliability is paid for twice.
Transit
Park and ride moves traffic to the edge and sometimes adds more
A car park at a station converts car trips into rail trips. It can also convert bus and bike trips into car trips.
Streets
Road surfaces are specified for tyres and endured by feet
Surfacing decisions are made on vehicle performance and whole-life cost. What they do to walking, cycling and noise arrives as a…
Buildings
Purpose-built shared housing is a bet on one kind of tenant
Student blocks and co-living schemes solve a real housing problem with a floorplan that suits almost nobody else.
Transit
A depot decides where a bus route can go
Vehicles have to sleep somewhere, be cleaned somewhere and be repaired somewhere. Those sites quietly constrain the whole network.
Planning
Setbacks and site coverage design the building before the architect does
Two dimensional rules about how far a building stands from its boundaries do more to shape a city than any style debate.
Planning
Use classes decide what a high street is allowed to become
A shop and a gym look similar from the pavement. Whether one may replace the other is settled by a category written decades ago.
Planning
A design review panel has influence and no power
A group of experienced designers comments on a scheme and cannot decide anything. What happens next depends on who is listening.
Public Space
Lighting a park is a decision about who uses it after dark
Illuminating a green space extends its hours and changes its ecology. Leaving it dark closes it for half the year in some latitudes.
Public Space
Dogs are the reason many parks are occupied at all
Dog walking generates daily, year-round, early and late use of open space. Most park design treats it as a nuisance to be zoned.
Public Space
Public art is commissioned last and blamed first
Art arrives in a scheme after the budget, the layout and the deadline are set. It then carries the public argument about the whole…
Public Space
Cemeteries are the green space nobody counts
Burial grounds are often the oldest continuous open space in a district, and they sit outside every park budget and most park…
Public Space
A sports pitch allocates public land to whoever booked it
Marked pitches convert open ground into a reservation system. That is a fair way to share a scarce facility and it is not open…
Climate & Cities
A green roof is a drainage argument that grew plants
Vegetated roofs are usually sold on biodiversity and installed because of what they do to rainwater in the first hour of a storm.
Climate & Cities
Permeable paving works until nobody sweeps it
Surfaces that let rain soak through are a standard drainage measure. Their performance depends entirely on a maintenance task…
Climate & Cities
Cooling a city is an electricity problem before it is a comfort one
Air conditioning solves heat indoors by moving it outdoors and drawing power at exactly the hour the grid is most stretched.
Climate & Cities
Wildfire reaches a city through its gardens, not its forests
Fire at the edge of a built area usually spreads through fences, hedges, decking and stored fuel rather than by a wall of flame.
Climate & Cities
Cities count the emissions they make and not the ones they buy
A municipal carbon figure usually covers what happens inside the boundary. What residents consume from elsewhere sits outside it.
Climate & Cities
Electrifying the fleet changes the fuel and keeps the traffic
Replacing engines with batteries addresses tailpipe emissions. Congestion, road danger, space consumption and tyre particles are…
Climate & Cities
Ground floors flood first and that is where the shops are
Adapting buildings to flooding is less about keeping water out than about deciding what happens when it gets in.