Podcast: A Discussion with Karoliina Korppoo, Lead Designer for Cities: Skylines

There's a new city building game out!  From all the rave reviews its much better than the most recent SimCity release and you can do some cool things with modifications to terrain and your own buildings that weren't possible before. 

In this week's podcast, we talk to Karoliina about what has made the game successful, some of the cool new features that are coming out, and background on some of the nifty assets in the game including smiling sims and subway infrastructure.

Take a Listen

San Francisco's New Luxury Bus Service

There’s a new private service in San Francisco offering luxury bus rides to downtown from a few select neighborhoods. For $6 each way, Leap buses have free wifi, usb ports, and sell coffee and fresh juice on board during commutes. Leap is just one of a slew of new startups that are providing luxury or private transit services in the context of San Francisco’s often overcrowded and less than stellar public transit.

Muni has been struggling to keep up with its ridership for awhile, and recently announced a plan to improve its service. Under the plan, Muni’s service hours will increase by 2.5%. The bus shelters will receive slight improvements, like better maps, solar-powered lights that will glow even when it’s foggy, and bike racks. Muni will also try to meet service standards with more regularity. These upgrades are much needed and long awaited, but whether or not they will result in meaningful improvement to Muni has yet to be seen.

In the meantime, services like Leap are trying to corner a sector of the market that public transit just isn’t satisfying. Although Leap may reek of elitism, it is also shaking up transit industry and may drive the public sector to improve. Companies like Leap are much more flexible and experimental than public transit, and as a result, are the ones driving innovation in transit. One great feature of Leap, for instance, is that riders can pay using their smartphones or even check in via bluetooth so that they don’t even have to touch their phones. Riders can also check their phones to know how far away the bus is and how many seats are left.

Yet Leap Transit doesn’t seem to have taken off so far. The bus, which currently only serves the Marina District and North Pacific Heights, runs in the morning and takes passengers downtown, and then back to the neighborhoods in the evening. While the interior is fashionable and the service feels exclusive, the bar seating doesn’t seem very practical, and ridership seems low so far. It’s questionable whether the company will make it, but there’s no doubt that the public sector can learn some valuable lessons from it.

Podcast: Lighting in Cities with Clifton Lemon and Steve Lawton

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast Steve Lawton and Clifton Lemon of LightPlace Advisors talk about LEDs and the future of city lights.  We chat about lighting for pedestrians and how lighting has changed as cities grew up.  Join us for an enlightening adventure :)

City Building Games Can Help Illuminate Planning Issues

For those who are fans of the SimCity games, there’s a new game that’s taken the city building genre by storm. Cities: Skylines, by the Finnish game development company Colossal Order, was released last month, and it’s quickly become one of the top city building games. While there’s nothing in particular that’s is completely new or innovative about the game, it is rigorous in modelling all the traditional parts of city building simulations, a welcome change as the SimCity franchise has moved its focus towards the social engineering aspect of the game instead of the actual city building simulation.

Similar to SimCity, the player acts as mayor and builds a city by zoning land, building infrastructure, and developing public spaces like parks and schools. However, one of the biggest differences between Cities: Skylines and SimCity is that Cities: Skylines is far more robust in its modelling of transit. The game’s developers also built the transit simulation game Cities In Motion, and as a result, this game’s spectrum of transit options is much fuller: you’re able to draw bus and rail lines on top of just designating bus stops, as well as set overall service levels.

On top of being an entertaining game to play, Cities: Skylines can also be a fun way to understand urban and transportation issues. One of the greatest criticisms of the SimCity games was that it was a good game for building sprawled cities, but the lack of transit options made it impossible to model denser cities that rely on public transit. This game allows for the simulation of many more city archetypes. As you develop these cities, different issues may arise: traffic congestion, pollution, and most importantly, you’re able to see how your city’s budget holds up and its cost efficiency per citizen.

Podcast: Houston Part II - Transportation Time

This week we continue our conversation with Christof Spieler on Houston, this time focusing on transportation including discussions about BRT, High Speed Rail, the bayou bike network and implementation of the bus re-imagining program.

Egypt’s Plan for a New, Purpose-Built Capital

Egypt’s housing minister Mostafa Madbouly has announced a plan to build a completely new capital city, possibly as soon as within seven years. Cairo, which has a population of 20 million residents and is expected to continue growing, is overpopulated and polluted. The new city is expected to help alleviate some of that congestion and modernize Egypt’s capital. Unsurprisingly, this plan has been met with plenty of doubt. Egypt has built several “satellite” cities for Cairo in the past in an attempt to reduce congestion, but many of these cities now lay desolate. If that’s the case, how can a new capital city hope to attract the urban population of Cairo, which has over 1000 years of history?

The plan itself is ambitious, grand, and big. The new capital city is expected to house five million residents over 270 square miles of land, with 663 health centers, 1,250 mosques and churches, and 1.1 million homes. Taking notes from more successful purpose-built cities, the new capital will consist of mixed-use development, be connected to transit, and have plenty of green space. Madbouly believes that 1.5 million jobs will be created, and generate enough economic incentive for locals to move into the city. While planned cities have a bad reputation today, there are a few success stories, such as Brasilia.

But some have a much darker view of the plan. Egypt’s government, which rules by an authoritarian military regime, does not necessarily serve its people, and this new capital city is just as likely to be a tool for control as it is a solution to Cairo’s urban issues. Cities can be designed to make it easier for the military to quell riots and keep the poor out of sight. Not only that, this new city will be a monument to president Abdel Fatah al-Sis and his new vision for the country as well as help distance himself from Tahrir Square, where his past two predecessors were overthrown.

Podcast: Talking About Houston with Christof Spieler

This week on the podcast Houston Metro board member Christof Spieler joins me to chat about the wonder that is Houston Texas.  We chat about the densification of the urban core as well as the sprawl as it pertains to Houston's non-existent zoning.  Have a listen to this first part of a two part series.  You can subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher and you can always find it at it's original home at Streetsblog USA.

The Cost of Street Parking Spaces

Cities are adding bicycle lanes to streets with heavy bike traffic as a means of improving safety, but the process is constantly being hindered by strong opposition from the businesses along the streets where the lanes are proposed. Most small businesses with street parking spots are reluctant to give them up for parking lanes out of fear that decreased parking space will affect their business.

This was recently highlighted in San Francisco, when bike lanes were proposed for Polk Street. Though Polk was considered one of the most dangerous streets in the city for cyclists and pedestrians, the plan to add a bike lane faced heavy backlash from local merchants, and as a result, took over 2 years to implement. The backlash from local merchants provoked enough contention in bike advocates that some started a Yelp campaign against an optometrist who lobbied the Mayor to remove his block from the Polk Street bike lane plan.

However, the fears of bike lanes damaging local business are unfounded. In fact, many studies show that rather than decreasing business, increased bike traffic actually seems to promote more spending. While people in cars tend to spend more money per shopping trip, people on bikes tend to take more trips and will ultimately spend more. This has been seen in cities throughout the US and internationally, so any opposition to bike lanes based on negative economic impacts have yet to be justified.

Bike lanes aren’t the only use for parking spots that can be good for business. Parklets are popping up in front of stores and restaurants in many cities, and they too, can increase sales for nearby businesses. Parklets take up only one or two parking spots, but their occupancy rate and turnover are far higher than a parking spot. As a result, places that install parklets often find that the extra activity promotes extra business.

Talking Headways Podcast: Joe Cortright Discusses Central City Employment

On this week's podcast, Joe Cortright joins the show to discuss his new report Surging City Center Job Growth at City Observatory.  We talk about employment, employment data, and even self driving buses!  Join us either at Streetsblog or listen below.

You can always subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher as well.

How Accurate, Accessible Arrival Info Can Affect Ridership

The US continued its trend of increasing transit ridership last year, despite the dramatic drop in gas prices. While numbers varied widely across cities, the total number of transit trips in the country increased by 1% relative to 2013. Some of the increases in ridership were attributed to growths in transit service, while others were a result of economic growth. Interestingly enough, most of the national growth in heavy rail transit ridership can actually be ascribed to one city: New York. New York City makes up about one-fourth of all transit ridership in the US, so any changes there will have a significant effect on the overall numbers.

As mass transit continues to grow, one of the most useful tools to riders will undoubtedly be accurate, real-time information about their buses or trains. In fact, a study of New York’s Bus Time program, which provides real time bus tracking, found that ridership grew by about 2% on busy routes in the boroughs where the program was launched in 2011. A study done in Chicago found similar results, with ridership increasing about 2% for buses where a real-time information system was implemented. These are promising results for real-time tracking programs, but unfortunately, many of such systems in the US are often inaccurate, or broken.

On Monday, Google and Trimet rolled out a wireless train arrival beacon in Portland for the MAX light rail. The beacon connects to bluetooth-enabled Android phones and sends automatic notifications to riders at the MAX station. Whether the beacon will be a success will have to be seen: the service is not available for ios, and currently only works with Android 5.0 or newer. Riders can also access their train info online, so it’s uncertain if having an extra notification when they are already at the station will be worthwhile. Nonetheless, as public transit grows in the US, it’ll be important to expand and improve our current systems of tracking arrivals.