I thought people might enjoy this draft of street design priciples and think about how they are / could be applied to Fort Worth.
https://sidewalklabs.com/streetdesign/
Posted 26 April 2019 - 04:09 PM
I thought people might enjoy this draft of street design priciples and think about how they are / could be applied to Fort Worth.
https://sidewalklabs.com/streetdesign/
Posted 26 April 2019 - 04:55 PM
In case anyone is'nt familiar with Sidewalk Lab it's a division of Alphabet, Google's parent company, with some high ranking officials heading it up.
https://en.wikipedia...i/Sidewalk_Labs
Posted 29 April 2019 - 10:11 AM
!Hot Take!
Smart Technology is not going to save our cities, let alone Fort Worth. Smart Streets are a solution in search of a problem. They are expensive. They are high maintenance. And their benefit is marginal once an area is properly built-up for pedestrian traffic.
Sidewalk Labs is simply Google's continuing efforts to insinuate itself into our daily lives, by selling us a silver bullet solution to a highly complex problem.
Let's get down to brass tacks:
Sidewalk Labs correctly identifies a few issues today that prevent streets from being places where people want to be, ie. stroads, automobile-oriented planning etc etc.
They even correctly highlight in their principles section, the general solutions for the problem: Tailor streets for different modes (ie bike lanes, bus lanes, and traffic lanes); grade separation, etc
But then they layer on these bizarre connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), and suddenly we have 3 types of streets just for cars. And these CAVs are still designed for 1-4 riders, which leaves us with the same problems of cars and congestion as before. Streets would be filled with expensive sensors, which I don't know if trucks can drive on for loading or unloading, but I assume that trucks are using a completely separate road system as well as CAVs, cars, bikes and buses.
There doesn't seem to be any consideration for freight in their model at all, with all the stress that freight puts on infrastructure. Camp Bowie is brick, and now imagine that each brick was a precision made sensor. Now think about how often city crews are out there fixing the street! But now instead of pavement crews, you have to hire google techs to insert and calibrate the sensor arrays. In a down town.
The fact is that Fort Worth would benefit more from a smaller scale approach of implementing the topographic changes that Jane Jacobs recommended decades ago of walkable, dense and diverse urban environments at a fraction of the economic and social cost that the Alphabet company would recommend.
EDIT: Sorry roverone for the rant. I work in digital marketing and have been watching the increasing insanity in our world caused in part by smart technology from the front row. Apparently it's my trigger! Thanks for posting it!
Edited by ACE, 29 April 2019 - 10:17 AM.
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