Bricks: A classic material used across the country to construct everything from buildings and walls to sidewalks.
Americans love the familiar look, but increasingly, towns and cities are having a hard time justifying the clay-based material — especially as it ages.
But now, innovations in asphalt treatment and decoration are allowing surfaces to offer the same great look but without the bricks, according to the Washington Post.
So, how do these new crosswalks and sidewalks go from looking just like the surface of a road to resembling authentic brickwork?
First, the asphalt is heated, then a metal grid with the desired brick pattern is laid on top (think of it as a giant cookie cutter). This creates a pretty convincing brick-like indentation, which then comes to life through a paint or plastic coloring to complete the look.
Primarily offered by Quest Construction Products and Ennis-Flint, these ingenious surfaces offer countless advantages over traditional brick. Changes in the underlying soil often causes bricks to dislodge, but that won’t happen with these new paths since they are made of contiguous material. Not only does this make surfaces safer for pedestrians, but also easier to maintain – especially considering the toll a tough winter takes on our sidewalks and crosswalks.
Additionally, since the cracks in between traditional bricks are no longer a factor, unsightly weeds will not take over sidewalks. People also won’t be tempted to steal bricks – yes, that actually happens – as there won’t be any to remove.
A civil engineer for Boston’s public works department, Bob Astrella knows a thing or two about this subject. He boasted to the Washington Post, “this is a hell of a lot easier to repair than brick crosswalks,” adding that brick “looks nice, but there’s a maintenance issue.”
Thanks to this new advancement, public surfaces in cities and towns across the country are going to get a whole lot safer, and much easier to maintain, too.
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Tag: cities
Which City Has the Best Tap Water?
Not all water faucets produce equally. In fact, tap water can vary a lot these days — from grimy to cloudy to just simply flammable.
In Boston, however, you can find some great water. That’s because the city just won a national tap water taste test competition (yes, that exists) organized by the American Water Works Association.
The annual competition (which, by chance was held in Boston this year) revealed the secret to Boston’s delicious H2O: Watershed protection, according to Yes!
The city purchases its water from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which for the better part of the last 30 years has been buying conservation land near the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs — both of which are the sources of Boston’s water.
This uninhabited, undeveloped space naturally filters the water before it reaches the reservoirs, as well as during its journey to the city, purifying it. This natural cleansing doesn’t just make it healthy and tasty; it also just about eliminates the need to use expensive chemical filtration on it, too.
The tasty tap water doesn’t come cheaply, though. It has cost the Authority billions of dollars to purchase the four hundred square miles of protected forest surrounding Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs, as well as their cleanup and conservation efforts along the Charles River and in Boston harbor.
Though with the huge improvement in quality made since 1985 (when the Authority was established), it seems like money well spent.
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Cities or Suburbs: Which Area is Seeing a Population Boom?
Close your eyes and picture idyllic tree-lined streets in a cheery suburban neighborhood. If you open your eyes, however, you might still see that image — only there might be a lot of “for sale” signs posted in front yards or dark houses due to vacancy.
That’s because cities are now seeing a population influx. According to census analysis by William Frey of the Brookings Institution, this could be the decade of big-city growth.
Analyzing data from 2010-2013, Frey was able to figure out that cities themselves — not just their metropolitan areas — grew at a measurably faster rate than suburbs, with “primary cities” (those with a population over 1 million) growing 1.13 percent from 2011 to 2012. At the same time, suburban areas grew at only .95 percent.
While the difference (and growth rate itself) may seem minimal, it reflects more significant changes that are happening in a select number of cities such as New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; San Jose, California; Austin, Texas; Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina; Denver; and Seattle. All those cities have even faster growth rates even faster than the national average!
Although there are a variety of reasons that people may be migrating back to cities, one that we’ve mentioned before is the rise of the innovation district – urban areas that are easily accessible and combine a variety of organizations and people advancing ideas and promoting ingenuity. These areas attract not only jobs, but because of their cosmopolitan and integrated feel, residents too.
Another specific driver of growth could be the new transportation initiative in Minneapolis-St. Paul, another booming city, according to City Lab.
So, does this mean the demise of white picket fences and two-car garages? Hardly. As the study points out, the suburbs are continuing to grow, albeit at a slower pace. But with growth, comes innovation — giving cities the upper hand.
Public Transportation Is Getting a Major Makeover
Noise, exhaustion and incredibly long wait times – all of these words are inconveniences most of us have associated with riding public buses. Seats aren’t guaranteed, and then there’s the ever present fear of the bus just not showing up. But one company is now working to make those fears a thing of the past. Say hello to Bridj, dubbed “the world’s first smart mass transportation system.”
Using the power of technology, Bridj is hoping to reinvent and rejuvenate the transportation industry. How do they plan to do this? By collecting and analyzing 14 million data points, Bridj maps out how the city moves. It finds out where most people live and work, and designs bus routes that align to create more effective and efficient travel.
While this seems a little techy for most of us, the process for users is much simpler. Patrons need only check the Bridj app to find the closest stop to their location and go there to catch the bus.
So far, Bridj has only been introduced in Boston and the Washington, D.C. metro area, but the results are positive. For one trial route in Boston, the commute is usually a 45 minutes subway ride, but, on Bridj, the commute has been cut in half and that is including traffic. The plan is to have 40 main routes in the city, with a few shorter or pop-up routes for big occasions such as concerts.
Although the cost of the ticket — $3 to $5 — is a little higher than traditional public transit, Bridj feels that the overall experience more than compensates. Amenities include free Wi-Fi, power outlets and a guaranteed seat with the purchase of a ticket.
Bridj is not taking over or disregarding the public transportation system, though. Instead it wants to work with them, setting up partnerships with public transportation authorities in cities across the country with the end-goal of decreasing the amount of cars on the road.
A little comfort and relaxation goes a long way on the morning commute, and Bridj is looking to provide that. With less traffic, less waiting and more luxury, Bridj hopes to change the image of public transportation—something that could benefit all of us and reduce a little of that commuter stress.
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Tech Companies Are Stepping into the Urban Fray. Here’s Why
It’s officially a mass exodus: Techies are decamping from “Nerdistan” and heading for the big city.
Thank Richard Florida, urban studies theorist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, for this particular “–stan,” which he uses to describe the suburban office parks ringed with vast parking lots where tech companies have traditionally set up shop.
These isolated Nerdistans are declining in popularity, Florida and others have noticed, in favor of companies headquartered in urban centers — extra points if they’re within walking distance of public transit.
“Cities were always the cradles of innovation,” said Florida, as quoted in a recent Boston Globe article on the suburb-to-city trend. “Suburbanization was a deviation on the course of history.”
Take the Boston metro area, for example. Recent research from recruitment firm WinterWyman found that in 2013, 63 percent of available software jobs were in the urban core of Cambridge and Boston, and only 13 percent were located in suburbs Burlington, Lexington, and Waltham, where, back in the 1990s, the majority of such jobs were based when high downtown rents and space needs made the suburbs a no-brainer.
Why the flight from suburbia?
Now, software companies don’t need the square-footage that once held servers and other oversized equipment. And tech CEOs say they’re willing to pay cities’ higher rents when it means having a wider selection of top talent — including young urbanites eager to hold tight to their car-free commutes.
Other cities with high techie concentrations — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York — are exhibiting similar patterns of urban migration.
Who knows, if Richard Florida is right, maybe the hours-long, smoggy suburban commute will soon be headed the way of the Commodore 64.
The 21st-Century Take on Citywide Transformation
As we grow increasingly Facebook-connected, Twitter-obsessed, and otherwise socially networked, a funny thing is happening in our cities: They, too, are seeing the benefits of becoming more connected, networked, and social themselves.
Case in point: Cities are ditching old approaches to economic development — which tended to involve building a sports stadium and sprinkling some housing and retail space around it — in favor of making room for new “innovation districts” that layer some combination of startups, major firms, research universities, housing, and plenty of coffee shops.
One of the most important aspects of these districts? They’re walkable — allowing for happy collisions among creative types that spark new ideas.
As the National League of Cities (NLC) blog explains, innovation districts are emerging around the world — with recent sightings in Baltimore, Barcelona, Pittsburgh, Portland San Francisco, Seattle, Stockholm, St. Louis, and Toronto.
But Boston may provide the most archetypal example. Over the past four years, 1,000 acres along the rundown South Boston Waterfront have been transformed into what the NLC blog calls “a unique live-work-play innovation community.” The new hub has drawn 200 companies and over 4,000 jobs. Many of those jobs (30 percent) are in the tech space, but not all: Another 21 percent are in advertising and design, and 16 percent represent green technology and life sciences.
Other cities are taking note. The Michigan Municipal League, for one, is taking a close look at innovation districts around the world to isolate best practices. As cities around the world continue to share their innovation-district successes and missteps, this is an area where we can definitively say that over-sharing would only be a good thing.
Can Living in a City Give You a Leg Up in Life?
We’ve been hearing for years that people who live in cities tend to be thinner and more active than those who live in suburbs—all that walking and climbing stairs seems to contribute—but a new study finds that people who live in densely-packed cities also are more likely to be agile in a different way: climbing the economic and social ladder.
The study by Smart Growth America and the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Urban Center is significant because it quantifies urban sprawl. Sprawl is not just about how much land is occupied by a city. As the authors write, “sprawl is not just growth, but is a specific, and dysfunctional, style of growth.” The study shows that the health benefits that correlate with city living are specific to dense cities, where residents have lower rates of obesity and diabetes. Residents of sprawled-out cities such as Atlanta do not show the same benefits as do those living in packed-in places such as New York.
Reid Ewing of the University of Utah, lead researcher on the study, told Lane Anderson of Deseret News, “Urban places provide higher likelihood of moving up the social ladder. Compact places provide better access to jobs, better transit and more integration.” The study judged Los Angeles to be relatively dense compared to Atlanta and other sprawling places, and found that a child in L.A. has a 10 percent chance of moving from the bottom of the income scale to the top, while an Atlanta-based low-income child has only a 4 percent of chance of such a rise.
Ewing said that one factor in this difference might be transportation—denser cities tend to have better public transportation, which gives citizens of all income levels more access to better jobs and schools, but is especially important for low-income people who may not have a car. Better mixing between people of different ethnicities and economic levels might contribute to the social mobility, too. “In dense areas, there are more chances for networking, for meeting people, more chances of getting better salaries and jobs,” he said. And riding the train also seems to keep people thinner—train riders are 6.5 pounds lighter than car drivers, according to The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and they’re 81 percent less likely to ever become obese. One twist: the study found that kids get more exercise in the suburbs where they can run around in backyards and playgrounds, and adults get more exercise in cities, where they are forced to hoof it.
The authors of the study hope their findings will encourage more cities to implement healthy changes, such as bike-share programs, more mixed-use developments, and improved transportation. Or, as Ewing asks, “It’s time to ask the question again, how can we make cities better?”
MORE: More College Graduates Moving Into Cities
What Has Two Wheels, Two Pedals and Can Boost the Economy?
Cycling is a great way to stay in shape, but building a more bike-friendly society can make budgets and the economy healthier too. In her new book Bikenomics, Elly Blue makes the case for bicycles as the next big solution to help cities and the nation as a whole get healthier and wealthier. Blue breaks down plenty of numbers, to show how big of a difference low-cost commuting and traveling by bike can make. At almost $10,000 a year, most families spend more on transportation than on groceries, and cycling quickly slashes that budget. She also examines national and global spending, like the 22% of the world’s oil supply that the U.S. uses, ⅔ of which we use on our auto-based transportation system. She argues for the opportunity to “save the economy” by using bikes more extensively and more effectively than ever, steering the nation and especially its biggest cities away from depending on oil and relying on automobiles. Blue admits that bikes won’t single-handedly turn the economy around, but argues that they’re an effective and efficient (not to mention healthy) solution to the problems we can see coming from our current spending and car-dependent habits. She writes, “The bicycle may not be able to save either the economy or the world we have now. But it is one means by which we may be able to get through whatever comes next with grace and meaning.” (And as a bonus, think about how much stress you’ll save yourself by skipping your daily driving commute!)
More College Graduates Moving Into Cities
For decades, college graduates in America tended to buy houses in the suburbs even if they worked in the city. But that’s changing. According to a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, American inner cities are now better educated than their surrounding suburbs—a finding that holds true across the country, from D.C. to Chicago to Houston to Portland. In 1980, most college graduates lived 10 to 25 miles away from cities, and now the majority of them live within 15 miles of city centers. This trend is fueling the resurgence of cities across America, cutting down on long commutes, which can help the environment at the same time as it revitalizes urban areas.