The hardworking folks at Tri-State somehow manage to be everywhere in our huge metro region: pushing for safe streets in New Jersey, smart growth in Nassau, and BRT in Connecticut -- I could go on. They also manage to write a top-notch advocacy blog and, in their downtime, take Cory Booker out to bike around Newark.

To support their excellent work, here's what you need to know:

Tri-State Transportation Campaign Annual Benefit
Thursday, October 29, 6:00 - 8:30 p.m.
The Gates, 290 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY
Tickets available from $150

A map of a neighborhood in Tigard, Oregon. Some of the proposed new trails are marked in blue.

The demand for walkable neighborhoods is up, but in order to fill that demand, we're going to have to transform our suburbs. How that might be accomplished was one of the most vexing issues discussed at last week's Walk21 Conference.

Suburban layouts aren't about connectivity; they're about space, with lots of separated roads and cul-de-sacs, and few direct routes from one place to another. But the folks at Kittelson & Associates, a transportation planning firm, have one suggestion: bypass roads entirely. That's what they're doing in Tigard, Oregon.

Tigard is a pretty typical Oregon suburb: It's about 10 miles from downtown Portland, it's 11.5 square miles, and about 47,000 people live there. That low density gave Kittelson and officials from the Oregon DOT the chance to connect areas of town by building trails that bypass roundabout suburban street design, allowing residents to easily walk or bike around their city, and get direct access to their neighbors, local businesses, and city parks. The idea came organically: For years, residents had carved out their own informal "desire paths" to get around. The Tigard Neighborhood Trails Project is meant to make existing trails safer, and to build new ones to form a better overall network.

On top of gathering community input at formal town meetings, Kittelson and ODOT also put together a website where residents could draw and comment on new trails on a Google Map, as well as point out existing informal ones. Jamie Parks, a planner on the project, said that the web interactivity made it so that far more members of the community had input into the project and, hopefully, will use the trails when they are completed.

The plan is done, and Tigard has begun implementing each trail, so it'll take some time to see how well this idea works out. Still, this could be a great way make disconnected suburban street networks much more walkable. It's a relatively cheap way too -- a network of 42 trails is set to cost approximately $1 million.

Categories of pedestrians, based on their walking patterns. Courtesy: Norbert Brändle, Austrian Institute of Technology.

Part of designing more walkable cities -- a goal of this week's Walk21 Conference -- is figuring out how pedestrians actually interact with the space around them, something that seems inherently difficult because of the erratic and unique behavior of your average walker. But two Austrian researchers came to the conference with with some intriguing ideas for measuring walking. Alexandra Millonig, of the Vienna University of Technology, and Norbert Brändle, of the Austrian Institute of Technology, decided to study and categorize pedestrian behavior based on a survey of Austrian shoppers. They lumped them into four basic types, as you can see above.

The researchers studied pedestrian shoppers in a variety of ways. On top of interviews, they followed shoppers on the street (Brändle called it "stalking"), noting their trajectories, speed, and number of stops. In another phase of the project, they equipped people with Bluetooth and GPS location trackers to map out each walking trip. If you know what different pedestrians look for based on these categories, you can build urban environments that have features that are appealing to each kind of walker.

Designing walkable environments, as you'd guess, is more complex than the grid-and-pavement planning of car-centric areas. The study found that, unlike drivers, who want the shortest path possible to their destination, walkers prefer more convoluted routes, and, more importantly, Brändle said, would prefer to take a different route home than the one they arrived on. That lends further credibility to the argument that in order to make areas more walkable, we also need to give them greater connectivity -- with more routes to and from the places pedestrians need to go.

If you want to see the full results of their study, Millonig and Brändle have made them available on an easy-to-read poster, which you can download here.

Chris Leinberger discusses strategies to develop walkable urban spaces in the United States. Photo: Mathew Katz

If the American Dream of the Baby Boomers was all about being able to have a car and a house in suburbia, the new American Dream is having the choice between living in drivable suburban places and walkable urban ones.

That's according to Chris Leinberger, a land use strategist at the Brookings Institution, who spoke today at the Walk21 Conference. There's a simple supply-and-demand argument, Leinberger says, for creating more walkable urban space: About the the same number of people want to live in a pedestrian-friendly environment as those who want to live in a drivable suburban one, but the supply of housing in walkable urban areas makes up only 5 to 10 percent of housing nationwide. As millions of New Yorkers know, that leads to exceedingly high prices. 

But that's not always a bad thing. Sarah Gaventa, Director of CABE Space in the U.K., said that her organization managed to prove that walkability adds value to nearby property and attracts investment. CABE developed a scale to rate pedestrian-friendliness called the Pedestrian Environment Rating System (PERS). For every point on the PERS scale, neighborhoods saw a 5.2 percent increase in residential prices and a 4.9 percent increase in retail rent. Attracting more retail and consumers also means more jobs, though there should be incentives to maintain local businesses and affordable housing, Gaventa said. Having proof that making a space more pedestrian friendly will add value to it is a great way to convince those in power that change -- and a more comprehensive strategy -- is needed.

That strategy, Leinberger said, should be the development of more places where residents' everyday needs are within a maximum of 3,000 feet. We've largely run out of room to build more in the busiest urban areas -- it would be difficult for Manhattan to get much denser than it already is -- so the solution to fill that demand for pedestrian-centric space is to transform outlying areas, such as suburbs, into walkable places.

It's not impossible. It's already happened in the D.C. metro area, where 70 percent of walkable areas are outside the city core. D.C. has the greatest amount of walkable urban places per capita in the country, Leinberger said. New York's metropolitan area, with our car-crazy suburbs and exurbs, comes in at tenth. By building up these new walkable places, we could kickstart transformative projects to give a major boost to our recession-weary economy over the next few decades, not to mention re-invigorate our collapsed housing market.

Having more walkable places also makes sense on a personal financial level. According to Leinberger's data, car-friendly suburban households spend anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of their income on transportation, whereas urban households spend only about 9 percent. That extra money can go into paying for housing, or even -- as Leinberger puts it -- that most un-American of things: savings.

Mexico City's dedicated-lane rapid transit bus system, Metrobus, carries as many as 250,000 riders a day. Photo: vonKinder/Flickr.

On Thursday, representatives from governments on the forefront of creating sustainable cities will discuss their strategies to help stop climate change (Thurs. Oct. 8, 9:15 a.m. - 10:45 a.m., Eisner & Lubin Auditorium). Kristina Alvendal, Stockholm's vice mayor of city planning, will explain her "Walkable City" plan, which focuses on a denser, safer urban environment. Steve Heminger, director of the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, will talk about the importance of walking to California's climate change mandate, which involves regional targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, Jon Orcutt, Director of Policy at the NYC DOT, will discuss the greenhouse gas implications of the city's pedestrian planning efforts.

Don't forget, there's also a cocktail reception tonight, as well as on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, where you'll be able to schmooze with many conference luminaries. Tonight's reception will feature a keynote speech by NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

The Walk21 Conference takes place at NYU's Kimmel Center from October 7-9. More information about each event can be found in the program (click to download). You can register for the conference here.

The conference is in New York this year, in part, to recognize the innovative work that NYC DOT is undertaking. Walk21 is a great opportunity for livable streets advocates, government officials, urban planners and sustainable transportation wonks from around the world to gather and share ideas for making cities greener and healthier.

There are a ton of great-looking events and panels (download the program) at the conference, and here are a few that members of the Livable Streets Initiative and The Open Planning Project will be running:

• Let Your Fingers Do the Walking: How Local Livable Streets Advocates Are Using the Internet to Build a Movement: Streetsblog's editor-in-chief, Aaron Naparstek, will be moderating a panel of top bloggers on how web-based media can be used to organize activists and keep a media spotlight on important livable streets issues.
  Friday, Oct. 9, 9:00 - 10:30 a.m., Room 802, NYU Kimmel Center
• We're Walking Here NYC: Livable Streets Education will be having a city-wide celebration of Walk to School Day for K-12 students, with lots of fun activities focusing on green and healthy lifestyles.
  Wednesday, Oct. 7, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m., Washington Square Park
• Pedestrian Films Screening - A screening of pedestrian-related films, put on by Streetfilms.
  Thursday, Oct. 8, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m., Room 914, NYU Kimmel Center
• Using Powerful Apps to Build a Livable Streets Movement: Nick Grossman, Director of TOPP Labs at The Open Planning Project, will be moderating a panel on how to use the power of the web to share urban data and build support for more walkable communities.
  Thursday, Oct. 8, 2:00 - 3:30 p.m., Room 802, NYU Kimmel Center
• Creating and Sustaining Successful SRTS Programs: Lauren Marchetti, Director of the National Center for Safe Routes to School, moderates a panel that includes Kim Wiley-Schwartz of Livable Streets Education.
  Thursday, Oct. 8, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m., Room 914, NYU Kimmel Center

Hosted by IBM Chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano, our SmarterCities NYC forum will continue the conversation started in Berlin in June to explore new approaches to regional partnership, identify roadblocks, evaluate frameworks for investment and review the tools that are helping our cities meet 21st century realities.

The event will begin at midday on October 1 and will include keynote addresses from major political and business leaders. That evening, IBM will host a very special reception and dinner. The session will continue on October 2, concluding late in the afternoon. The event will be structured in four parts—the third which will allow for peer-to-peer exchange, best-practice sharing and brainstorming to shape the blueprints for smarter cities. More on the program below.

As leaders, we all have a vital stake in ensuring that our cities become more resilient, more sustainable and more secure. Indeed, the health of our planet and of society depends on it. Let's start shaping that future.

To make smarter cities a truly collaborative effort, IBM has sought the guidance of senior leaders from key organizations from business, education, and civic enterprise including:

• Aron Cramer, CEO & President, Business for Social Responsibility 
• Dr. Matthew Goldstein, Chancellor, City University of New York 
• Steve Gunderson, President and CEO, Council on Foundations 
• Amy Liu, Deputy Director, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program 
• Richard M. Rosan, Chief Executive Officer, The Urban Land Institute 
• Raymond C. Scheppach, Ph.D., Executive Director, National Governors Association 
• Petra Todorovich, Director, America 2050 
• Kathryn Wylde, CEO & President, The Partnership for New York City 
• Robert D. Yaro, President, Regional Plan Association

Session I – A Planet of Smarter Cities
In Berlin we discussed how our cities are the perfect platform on which to innovate new solutions for our urbanizing planet. In New York, our first session will delve deeper into the tendencies that are making our cities the focal point of our planet's future. And, it will lay out IBM's view for why and how cities are becoming smarter.

Session II – A Vision for Smarter Cities
It is clear we need a new vision for our cities. For this vision to come to life, we'll also need new leadership requirements, new tools and new models. We'll also need an understanding of the key systems that make up our cities—and how all of these interact, within our cities and between them. This session will describe a vision for smarter cities, laying out a schema of the systems that comprise smarter cities and how these are interconnecting to create a complex web of opportunities for innovation.

Session III – What it Takes to Build a Smarter City – Breakout Discussions
Civic leaders are shaping their own leadership agendas, but they need practical plans to make their vision real. Here, we'll engage participants in several structured discussions about what it takes to build a smarter city. We'll hear from seasoned leaders who have implemented smarter programs in their cities in everything from transportation, healthcare, education, public safety and government services.

• Smarter Healthcare

  Access to quality, affordable healthcare is paramount to individuals living in urban centers. And cities have a complex mix of issues to address including aging population, growing numbers of uninsured people, virus outbreaks, and rapidly escalating costs. They also have an advantage in the close proximity of doctors, nurses, hospitals, universities, research centers and critical support agencies to share and integrate information and to connect collaboratively with social services agencies, emergency services, and other health-related urban services. Smarter Healthcare systems begin to address the societal issues of healthcare through a shared vision; followed by establishing plans to improve delivery and performance; then sharing information; and finally introducing collaborative care. All of these contribute to a healthcare system that creates value and improved quality of life.

• Smarter Transportation

  The economic growth of urban centers is dependent on the efficient movement of people, vehicles, freight and goods. These transportation systems have a huge impact on quality of life. At stake are a range of essential issues, from personal and economic productivity, to environmental sustainability, to social cohesion, to the 'personality' of a city. The discussion of transportation in a smarter city must encompass both the many modes of possible movement within a city, but also movement between the city and world around it. Planning holistically across a city's entire transportation system will require a move beyond traditional solutions of steel, asphalt and concrete. Rather, integrating available and developing technologies—cameras, sensors, dynamic signage, signals, fiber optics, network connectivity and analytics—as vital elements of a smarter transportation system will be needed. This session will examine relationships across the entire system, including elements of other systems touched by it (supply chains, businesses, where and how people live and work, etc.) and how to create transportation systems that are adaptable, responsive, sustainable and economically sound.

• Smarter Public Safety

  Public Safety is essential to the long-term health and vibrancy of a city. It is among the most important reasons that individuals and businesses choose to locate in a particular city. Today, a host of innovative, community-based approaches and new technologies are proving effective in helping to reduce urban crime and improve emergency response. However, equating public safety with 'crime prevention' would oversimplify the challenge and the opportunity—especially if the ambition is to create a smarter city. To feel safe, citizens must have confidence in the entire city environment and its ability to resist threats of many types (natural disaster, terrorism, etc.) This session will highlight how smarter cities are using advanced technologies and innovative approaches to anticipate and prevent crimes, better respond to emergencies and provide enhanced citizen services.

• Smarter Energy & Utilities

  New technologies, system level analysis, and optimization dramatically improve the delivery of a city's basic utilities: energy, gas, and water. These basic utility services are the foundational elements—and, in fact, a prerequisite—for any Smarter City implementation. Once these foundational elements are in place, suppliers and consumers alike can understand the demands in real-time through the use of broadband data streams, digital sensors and advanced analytics leading to better decisions. By providing real-time information about prices and the flow of energy, an intelligent utility system helps balance the load and supports citizens and utilities in making smarter, more responsible choices about the way they buy, sell and manage electricity, water, gas, and other resources. This session will highlight several best practices that are already in place to ensure a more dynamic and efficient use of these services.

• Smarter Education

  Fundamental to smarter cities is an education system that can deliver the skills needed to sustain a city's success. It requires bringing together industry, government and academia to create an education system that is highly adaptive to individuals' needs, that fosters creativity and innovation, and that views the city itself as a valuable learning environment. Today work flows across the globe like water, driving a new need for life-long education, skills acquisition and talent refreshing throughout a person’s life. Our current education systems served the industrial era well, but a services and knowledge-based economy has altered the landscape and requires different skills and ways of learning. This session will present examples of how new technologies and interconnectedness are reshaping learning, transforming partnerships, driving innovations and enabling the acquisition of new skills to successfully run our 21st century economy.

• Smarter Government Services

  Government services are essential to the economic health and quality of life of all citizens and businesses in the community, as well as being fundamental to the daily functioning of a city. These services are becoming more integrated into the fabric of everyday life. To thrive in the future, cities must make thoughtful decisions about the service priorities that will support the vision and growth goals for the city. These decisions must be grounded in assessments of current needs and insights about future trends and challenges. City leaders must drive the vision, assessments, and implementation plans to make these new and improved services a reality. Effective services must be citizen-centric and business-centric, offer greater transparency and improved resource sharing across agencies. This session will explore the leadership and implementation approaches that have established innovative services that are making a difference in leading communities today.

Session IV – Culture and the Smarter City
A smarter city is a cultured one. Whether through art, music, theater, dance, film, food or sports, culture makes a city come alive. Culture adds vibrancy, attracts new constituents, generates revenue opportunities and draws acclaim. More and more it is the difference between a stagnant city and a sustainable one. Listen as the leaders of some of our greatest cultural institutions talk about the factors that inspire them to do business in our cities.

Session V – Seizing the Opportunity
Forward-thinking city leaders are seizing the opportunity to make their cities, their regions and their countries smarter. We will hear about their bold steps and imaginative approaches to designing smarter solutions for their cities. This session hopes to offer our participants prescriptive ideas and blueprints for how mayors and other city administrators can map a path to a smarter city.

Session VI – The Leadership Challenge
Now more than ever, smarter cities need smarter leadership. Global competition for energy, talent and business is testing city leaders everywhere. Resources are low and demands are high. Whether you are trying to reinvigorate a stagnating city or manage an expanding one, let's not become victims of our own inaction. Let's take on this leadership challenge and explore those new requirements for managing and leading change in our cities, in our societies and in our world at large.

The mayor's initiative is not the only open-gov game in town. The City Council is currently considering a bill sponsored by Gale Brewer, Intro 991, that would require all city agencies to make their data publicly available.

My colleague Phil Ashlock over at The Open Planning Project, Streetsblog's parent organization, posted a great explanation of why opening up city data matters. TOPP is putting together a dataset wishlist to submit to the city by tomorrow's deadline, and they're looking for ideas and suggestions.

What type of data are we talking about, and how would it be used?

Consider CrashStat, the website produced by Transportation Alternatives that displays locations where pedestrians and cyclists have been injured in traffic collisions over time. To produce its maps, CrashStat crunches data obtained from the state DMV, data that must currently be procured through onerous freedom of information requests. Once TA gets the data, which arrives in a difficult-to-parse format, turning it into legible, mapped information is a long slog.

New York City has access to the same DMV data and could make it publicly available in easy-to-process formats. "Timely, accurate and complete access to crash records would allow individual citizens and organizations to identify dangerous intersections and blocks in their neighborhood," said TA's IT Director Mike Infranco. "Widespread and easier public access to this data would also potentially benefit the City, in that increased citizen engagement in issues surrounding crashes has the potential to reduce crash rates, and all their attendant personal, property, legal and societal costs."

Crash information is one of several datasets that TOPP developers will be requesting from the city. If you have ideas and suggestions for websites or applications that could be made with open data from the city, submit them through this feedback forum.

Update 10:45 a.m.: The segment is on now. 

Car Free Bronx Coalition: Bike New York, Bronx River Alliance, Clean Air NY, Montefiore Medical Center, Sustainable South Bronx, Transportation Alternatives and The Point CDC.

You can follow all of the action live on the committee's web site, right now, 11:15 am EST.

We are excited to announce the official launch of Streetsblog Capitol Hill. With major transportation, climate and energy legislation coming before Congress in the next year or two we felt that it was critical to have a talented journalist down in Washington D.C. covering the issues on a daily basis. With the financial support of the Surdna Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund the Livable Streets Initiative has hired reporter Elana Schor to cover the federal beat for us. DC.Streetsblog.org (as it's known to your web browser) will be her new home. Sarah Goodyear, editor of our national blog nework, and talented writers like Ryan Avent will be contributing to Streetsblog Capitol Hill as well.

Broadly speaking, we hope to do two things with this new edition of Streetsblog. First, we aim to make it a high-quality daily source for news and analysis of federal transportation policy and related issues. We want to create a blog that is a daily must-read for the advocates, lawmakers, Congressional staffers, urban planning practitioners, policy wonks and lobbyists who are working to shape the future of America's transportation systems.

Our second goal for Streetsblog Capitol Hill is to help bring outsiders into the federal transportation policy-making process. For decades, transportation policy on Capitol Hill has mostly been an arcane, complex insiders game -- a game that's been played best by highway lobbyists. Streetsblog Capitol Hill will put locally-oriented livable streets advocates on the playing field and help them better understand the rules of the game. As the 293 bloggers who are now members of the Streetsblog Network make clear every day, a vibrant, grassroots movement for sustainable transport, smart growth and livable streets is active and growing increasingly powerful in cities and states nationwide. Streetsblog Capitol Hill will help connect these local activists to the important action taking place inside the Beltway. 

The RSS feed for Streetsblog Capitol Hill can be found here.

Friends, readers, commenters: Please join us tomorrow evening for a celebration of three years of Streetsblog and Streetfilms, the launch of our new Livable Streets Education program and the ongoing search for the mysterious Zozo. There will be cocktails and entertainment.

Please RSVP if you plan to come.

There are 17 entries in the "Cars and Transportation" category, ranging from "Best City for Public Transit" (Bogota) to "Best Freight Shipping Innovation" (giant kites attached to cargo ships). We've been selected "Best Green Transportation Advocacy," and as of now we're neck and neck with Copenhagen ("Best City to be a Cyclist") in the overall competition.

Nominees are ranked by readers on a scale of 1 to 10. You can read about them here, or skip directly to the voting here. Voting ends at midnight tonight.

Let's show those Danes who's boss.

Doug's got a great mind and conversations with him are always fun and interesting, so tune in to 91.1 FM in New York or 90.1 FM in the Hudson Valley. Media Squat is a live, call-in radio show and it would be great to hear from some Streetsblog readers and commenters while I'm there. Call in to 201-209-9368 if you want to join in.

Doug's new book is called Life Incorporated: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back, and here's how he describes his radio show...

The Media Squat looks at both sides of Life Incorporated: How life has been literally "incorporated" by business and economics, and how can we incorporate LIFE back into our world via local commerce, community, social currency, and other emerging forms of participatory culture. This is free-form, bottom-up, open source radio looking towards similarly open source, bottom-up solutions to some of the problems engendered by our relentlessly top-down society.

You can find previous episodes of Doug's show and interviews with folks like Stephen Johnson, R.U. Sirius and Richard Metzger right here.

Here's a nice visual of what cities will look like when the livable streets movement has completely emerged from the wilderness (sorry for the extended metaphor, couldn't help it today). GOOD Magazine ran this photosim done by our very own Carly Clark in their transportation issue, with text by Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naparstek. They've got a whole interactive graphic that walks you through the elements of a livable street, and -- hats off to my coworkers -- it looks great.

GOOD is also putting on a photosim contest where readers can submit their own designs for a livable street. If you send something in, don't worry too hard about impressing the jury. Aaron will be the only judge.

We'll be taking a break from posting on Streetsblog tomorrow. Enjoy the matzoh ball soup and Cadbury eggs everyone. See you back here on Monday.

If you want to get involved in what we do, we'd love your help! You'll notice that we've got an open invitation to volunteers on the sidebar. To help us out, email volunteer@livablestreets.com, and we'll keep you posted about opportunities as they become available.