Activity Centers

Activity Centers
Rails Walk featured

Walking is the Pill That Could Start a Healthcare Revolution

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 1:12 PM

The next big health care breakthrough – which could cut rates of heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, and Alzheimer’s by at least 40 percent and save Americans $100 billion a year – comes from a place you’d least expect. On your block. At the park. Everywhere. So what’s this amazing treatment, which also happens to [...]

by Jake Lynch
Activity Centers
Jeff Speck featured

Mobility Lab Presents Author Jeff Speck, as Part of the Association for Commuter Transportation Chesapeake Chapter’s TDM Symposium

Thursday, April 18, 2013 1:53 AM

Mobility Lab is proud to present Jeff Speck as the keynote speaker at the Association of Commuter Transportation’s symposium on Achieving Sustainability Through Transportation Demand Management. Speck is coauthor of the landmark bestseller Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream,and his new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step [...]

by Paul Mackie
Activity Centers
Walkable Dupont featured

“War Against D.C. Drivers” is Much Ado About Nothing

Tuesday, March 12, 2013 3:02 PM

A recent headline in Washington D.C.’s Examiner newspaper raged, “D.C. Waging War Against Drivers.” It cited the District’s Sustainable DC plan, released February 20 by Mayor Vincent Gray, as an example of how this “war” starts at the top. While the Examiner’s headline was full of sound and fury, the article’s content was, in the end, [...]

by Paul Goddin
Activity Centers
London Olympics featured

London Shows That Every City Could Use an Olympics

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 11:26 AM

The Summer Olympics serve as a chance for host cities to showcase their architectural prowess. Who can forget the fabulous flyover views in 2008 of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium? But now nearly five years later, the Bird’s Nest remains largely vacant, and its future unclear. Even one of its creators, Chinese dissident artist Ai Waiwei, has [...]

by Paul Goddin
Activity Centers
Speck review featured

Jeff Speck Illuminates Many Dividends of a Walkable City

Friday, February 22, 2013 1:29 PM

Urban planners have long proselytized about the preferability of urban forms of development over suburban sprawl. But it wasn’t until fairly recently that the market caught up with their sermonizing. Urban planner Jeff Speck, who will be speaking at a Mobility Lab event on April 18, has written a new book called Walkable City: How Downtown Can [...]

by Paul Goddin
Activity Centers
Affordable housing featured

Strategies Detailed to Remedy DC’s Affordable-Housing Crisis

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 11:09 AM

Lack of affordable housing is an unintended consequence of a region’s success, and can certainly be seen in the Washington D.C. metro area. As the public demand for walkable neighborhoods has increased, low- to moderate-income residents are being priced out of those neighborhoods. And unfortunately, the public policy regarding housing affordability in the United States [...]

by Paul Goddin
Activity Centers
Winter walkers featured

Build It and They Might Come: Why the Path to a Vibrant City is Not Merely Walkable

Monday, January 28, 2013 4:00 PM

It’s no secret that I’m an avid proponent of “good” urban design, walkability, and dynamic cities. I’ve bemoaned the lack of those elements in my hometown (Miami) loudly and repeatedly (see my rant about the bright blue Public Storage building at the corner of my mom’s block). So the fact that ever more planners, government officials, [...]

by Mariela Alfonzo
Activity Centers
Tysons featured

The Silver Line Playbook: Clarendon and Tysons

Wednesday, January 16, 2013 5:01 PM

The differences between Clarendon and Tysons Corner – two communities in Northern Virginia – are readily apparent to even a casual observer. Clarendon has walkability, cohesion, and sense of place and Tysons has sprawl, confusion, and traffic gridlock. Although these two places will soon be linked when Metro’s Silver Line opens west of Washington D.C., [...]

by Paul Goddin
Activity Centers
Affordable Housing featured

Affordable Housing Needed in Areas With Transit Access to Jobs – Brookings Institution

Friday, December 7, 2012 1:58 PM

People in the Washington D.C. region who can afford to live in pricier neighborhoods with the best transit access save a lot of money because of the many economic benefits of options like trains, buses, bikeshare, and walkability. Problem is … the people who most need the inexpensiveness of transit don’t live close enough to [...]

by Paul Mackie
Activity Centers
The Economics of Bicycling featured

Home Values Higher in Bikable Neighborhoods – League of American Bicyclists

Thursday, November 15, 2012 2:08 PM

There have been many good recent studies lately on how bikable, walkable areas create “activity centers” that improve real-estate values. And it is worth remembering that those values are increased not just for commercial properties but also for homes. At the back of a new report called Bicycling Means Business by the League of American [...]

by Paul Mackie

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