Better streets.
It's funny how you move to a new place and suddenly you get some insight into whatever urban planning situation is most important at that time. I distinctly remember the year and a half in the early nineties I spent in Uniontown PA (the bottom corner pocket of the state, as I always say) ... when every other article in the local paper was about new highways being built from here to there and back. (By the way, I've driven on those roads two decades later when I've been in town to visit ... and I have to tell you that they seem a little empty like they're not being used after all the work and attention [and money] that were put into them.)
Here in southern Florida, the comparable situation seems to be a toss up between upcoming promised public transportation (high speed rail between Orlando and Miami and other "all aboard Florida" initiatives) and ongoing immediate experiments with how to handle existing streets. There's the "complete street" concept, which is shown in the image, that takes pedestrians, bicyclists, automobiles AND public transportation all into consideration during an redesign of the streetscape ... and the "open street" concept, which is somewhat ironically named, as it is when the city occasionally *closes* the street to the primary automobile traffic to allow pedestrians and bicyclists to take over (which is something they used to do back in Chicago on Lake Shore Drive for intentional holiday biking events, accidental snow-pocalypses and spontaneous protest marches).
With the new year approaching, I now have a vested interest in these plans, because (spoiler alert to my upcoming new year's resolutions post), I'm planning on getting back on a bike for the first time in over two decades in 2015. So anything that makes it safer for me is something I'm obviously going to support ...
THE *OCCASIONAL* OPEN STREET CONCEPT:
http://www.fortlauderdale.gov/departments-/transportation-mobility/transportation-division/building-community-today/open-streets-fort-lauderdale
THE UPCOMING COMPLETE STREET PROJECT:
http://touchbroward.org/complete-streets-fort-lauderdale-walking-audit-huge-success/
THE CUTTING EDGE OF URBAN PLANNING TECHNOLOGY:
http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets/complete-streets-fundamentals/complete-streets-faq
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