Transit
Bike lanes fail at junctions, which is where the collisions are
A protected lane between junctions is straightforward. Protecting the point where paths cross is the actual engineering problem.
Ravi Shanbhag
Contributing writer, Street to Sky
Ravi covers planning, zoning and the politics of who gets to build what.
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14 articles
Buildings
The core is why a tower costs more per square metre
Lifts, stairs, risers and structure all grow faster than the floor area they serve. That ratio, not the facade, sets the economics…
Buildings
Cladding is a fire strategy before it is a finish
The outer skin of a building is judged in photographs and tested by flame spread. Those two assessments have almost nothing in…
Buildings
Basements cost more than the floors above them
Every metre dug below ground fights water, soil pressure and the neighbours. The floor area gained is the most expensive on the…
Buildings
Service charges are a design outcome nobody prices at the start
The lifts, plant, landscaping and cladding access chosen in year one become a bill residents pay every year afterwards.
Transit
A bus lane is only as good as its last hundred metres
Lanes that end before the junction hand the bus back to the queue at exactly the point where the queue exists.
Transit
Fares are a network design decision disguised as a price
How a system charges determines which journeys people make, which routes fill up and whether the network functions as one thing.
Transit
Bike parking is the cheapest capacity a station can add
A secure rack extends a station catchment from a ten-minute walk to a fifteen-minute ride, for the cost of a few metres of pavement.
Transit
Night service is a maintenance window before it is a timetable
The hours a network does not run are decided by engineering access, staffing and depots rather than by whether anyone wants to…
Buildings
Prefabrication moves risk from the site to the factory
Building components off site promises speed and consistency. It also concentrates the risk in a place the developer does not…
Buildings
Roofs are the largest unused surface a city already owns
Every building has one and almost none of them do anything. The obstacles are structural, legal and about access rather than about…
Transit
Real-time information changes the wait more than the waiting time
Knowing when a service will arrive does not make it arrive sooner. It changes what the wait feels like and what the passenger does…
Transit
Ticket gates shape a station more than its platforms do
Fare control decides where crowds form, how many entrances a station can have and how quickly it empties in an emergency.
Transit
A ferry is transit only where the water is the shortest line
Boats move few people slowly and can still be the right answer when a bridge would cost more than a city can raise.