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Think you can design a better street? Good Magazine wants to hear from you

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Good Magazine is doing a contest this month called Project: Design a Livable Street and wants your submissions. Here are the details:

 

America’s streets leave a lot to be desired. As Carly Clark and Aaron Naparstek write in the latest issue ofGOOD, “For the most part, [traffic engineers] viewed the city from behind a windshield and saw the street as a problem to be solved for automobiles. The result is the America city that most of us know today: sprawling, traffic-choked, hostile to pedestrians and cyclists, dependent on a vast, never-ending flow of cheap oil, and deeply unsustainable.”

We can make our streets better, though, and the first step is imagining the solutions. That’s the point of the Project at hand. We’d like you to design improvements to a street in your area.

the OBJECTIVE
To imagine improvements to our struggling streets.

the ASSIGNMENT
Take a photo of a street or intersection you know and hate, and then use Photoshop or any other image editing techniques at your disposal to make the changes you’d like to see implemented.

the REQUIREMENTS
Send your BEFORE and AFTER images to projects[at]goodmagazine[dot]com. Aaron Naparstek, the editor of Streetsblog, will judge the submissions. We’ll send a GOOD T-shirt and a free subscription (or gift subscription) to the winner. We’ll take submissions now through May 1.

RESEARCH and INSPIRATION
Check out the example from Carly and Aaron: an overhaul of the the intersection of Amsterdam Avenue and West 76th Street in Manhattan.

Also check out livablestreets.com and streetsblog.org.

 

While Good may have designated us at one of their best burgeoning bike scenes in North America, I can think of some pretty ugly streets here in Austin that need a redo. In addition to their suggestions, I’d look at pictures on any large U.S. city circa 1910-1920, basically when bikes and transit replaced horses but before cars dominated the scene.

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1 Comment on “Think you can design a better street? Good Magazine wants to hear from you”

  1. #1 Peter
    on Apr 15th, 2009 at 4:52 pm

    praise the bicycle gods! count me in!

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