CNU and USDOT Announce Every Place Counts Design Challenge Winners

In cities across America, aging urban highways impose serious consequences on health, mobility, and opportunity in communities. For decades, residents of neighborhoods bisected by highways have suffered from higher levels of air and water pollution, decreased economic opportunity, limited mobility options, less-active lifestyles, and greater likelihood of being struck by a car and killed.

Now, after fifteen years of Highways to Boulevards advocacy, CNU is assisting the US Department of Transportation for the Every Place Counts Design Challenge, a federally-funded initiative to reconnect neighborhoods and improve community health, mobility, and opportunity.

'Walkable Urban' dominates US commercial development.

Mixed-use, walkable commercial development is outpacing large-scale conventional suburban construction in every major metro area, according to the new report Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros, 2016.

For perhaps the first time in 60 years, walkable urban places in all 30 of the largest metros are gaining market share over their drivable sub-urban competition—and showing substantially higher rental premiums, the report says.

CNU's Summit on Equity + Transportation - Register by 9/25

Join CNU for the 2014 CNU Project for Transportation Reform Summit in New York City, October 1-3. This year's summit will bring together engineers, planners, designers, and public officials committed to creating and advancing transportation standards and policies that support urbanism and promote equity and equitable development.

These three days of talks, discussions, tours, and working meetings that will challenge participants to identify research opportunities, policy strategies, and design approaches that make transportation policy more holistic and equitable. These discussions around equity and transportation will form the basis of CNU’s work on this topic for the upcoming year.

Registration includes access to the Summit, a choice of afternoon tours and working sessions, light breakfast and lunch, as well as an invitation to join a special Wednesday evening reception.

Click here for details.

Matthew Lewis now City of Austin’s Assistant Director of Planning and Development Review–Urban Design and Long Range Planning.

Matthew Lewis, currently serving as Planning and Development Services Director for the City of San Marcos, will be taking on a new role as the City of Austin’s Assistant Director of Planning and Development Review–Urban Design and Long Range Planning. He'll begin in Austin on September 29.

His new duties with the City of Austin will include leading a staff of approximately 35 in the Neighborhood Assistance Center and the Urban Design Division, comprehensive and neighborhood planning and demographic analysis. He will oversee a $3.1 million budget.

You can check out the San Marcos