CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK
« (mis)Leading Pedestrian Interval
Pay-As-You-Drive Driving »

Twice the Volume, One Third the Space

From Jan Gehl’s new report on New York City (via Streetsblog), this graph nicely depicts the typical (mis)allocation of New York City’s public space. We need hardly point out the glaring gap in negative externalities as well.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Pedestrians, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Twice the Volume, One Third the Space”

  1. Christopher Monnier Says:
    November 17th, 2008 at 10:06 pm

    There was a good discussion about vehicle throughput vs. people throughput on Matt Yglesias’ blog here.

  2. jon seward Says:
    November 20th, 2008 at 12:44 pm

    This graphic is instructive, but somewhat misleading. What it truly shows is that pedestrians are very spatially efficient.

    It would be an error to say that space should be allocated simply on the basis of the ratio of users of various types. And at some point there is such a thing as too much room for pedestrians, but we aren’t there yet.

    IIRC, Holly Whyte, in CITY, mentioned a section of Lexington Ave on the Upper East Side with an eight foot effective width processing either 3,000 or 8,000 peds/hr. And doing a fine job of being a sidewalk/streetscape.

    I wouldn’t consider that an idealized outcome. But it does show how flexible pedestrians are, and it also suggests that there is value to certain levels of pedestrian congestion or propinquity.

    Christian, I agree. Atrios also touches on the subject relatively frequently, though it’s hard to say what level of discourse he manifests from it.

Leave a Reply

Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact Victoria Gerken at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

Amazon | B&N | Borders
Random House | Powell’s

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
U.S. Paperback UK Paperback
Traffic UK
Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

Upcoming Talks

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
November 2008
M T W T F S S
« Oct   Dec »
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930