Here is an article I wanted to share with you from the Torontoist over there efforts to become a transit city.

Transit City: the TTC’s plan to build a network of light rail, extending dedicated transit infrastructure to many of Toronto’s neighbourhoods that lack it, thereby increasing residents’ quality of life, reducing our collective environmental footprint, and redressing a major backlog of transit development. Transit Cities: the term applied at a symposium held last week to cities that don’t just have transit but integrate it properly into the urban landscape, making good on the promise that transit expansion seems to hold but on which it doesn’t always deliver. Designing Transit Cities was its name, and bringing planners, academics, advocates, and the public at large up to speed on the opportunities and pitfalls of transit expansion was its goal.

The day-and-a-half-long symposium, co-sponsored by the City of Toronto, the Canadian Urban Institute, the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto, the Toronto Society of Architects, and various transit agencies, brought in experts from around the world to outline the successes and failures they’d seen in other cities’ transit expansions, and extrapolate some lessons for Toronto. Panel discussions dealt with everything from intelligent planning to community advocacy, and the symposium managed to cover a lot more ground than such events often do. (Though, as local transit guru Steve Munro suggested on his blog, this ground was perhaps well-trod, a rediscovery of ideas that have been discussed for decades.)

Though the speakers came from a variety of backgrounds, some themes did emerge quite clearly, providing a consensus view on the relationship between transit planning and urban development.

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When President Barack Obama proposed a network of high-speed passenger trains criss-crossing the U.S. last week, there were high-fives in Kansas City. The Obama Administration’s proposal includes Kansas City in its high-speed rail proposal.

“I’m very excited about it,” said Dr. Charles Wheeler, former Kansas City mayor. “The president deserves a lot of credit for putting it in the loop as they say.

“I’ll do anything to work with the people in St. Louis to get the Department of Transportation to work with the president to see the project moves forward.”

It’s high time for high-speed, Wheeler said.

For too long, rail travel has been allowed to languish, he said.

But there’s more that should be done with passenger rail travel and Kansas City should be in the middle of it, Wheeler said.

Because of its central location in the U.S., Kansas City should be a key national rail hub as it was in the past, when hundreds of passenger trains used Kansas City’s Union Station, he said.

“It’s a logical connection,” Wheeler said.

The Obama proposal mirrors a regional high-speed rail proposal that’s been around several years, said Kevin Klinkenberg, Kansas City architect and passenger rail advocate.

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Kevin Klinkenberg guest writes for OneKC Voice about maintaining and developing a healthy downtown.

Who doesn’t want a healthy downtown? After all, isn’t that like mom and apple pie?

The truth is, universally people declare that they wish their immediate downtown was vibrant and healthy, as well as other downtowns in the region. And yet we seem to struggle to achieve this in so many of our communities. Why is this? Do we not mean what we say?

Of course, the answers are complex. In some cases, we have willfully presided over the demise of the hearts of our communities, but most of the time it’s unintended consequences that have caused so much damage. We’ve created big roadways that bypass or cut off our downtowns, land use policies that make redevelopment difficult, encouraged or subsidized their competition in shopping centers with free parking, and in general not realized the appeal that these places have to so many people. But the good news is threefold:

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In an interview from Streetsblog, Congress for the New Urbanism President, John Norquist, discusses what’s broken with national transportation policy and how to fix it. Here is some of the interview:
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One of the best Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in the U.S. is located in one of the country’s most crowded, congested, and sprawled cities.

Streetfilms produces videos that show how cities around the world are reclaiming their streets for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders.
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