Tag Archives: planner

CLIC: Idenfitying the Long Term Costs of Sprawl

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Can you identify the long term costs of sprawled development? Three BC-based planners certainly think so and they’ve contributed to the creation of a free online tool to help communities of all sizes do the same. “I feel like it’s the tool planners have been waiting for,” said project lead Narissa Chadwick, playfully referring to the tool she helped create…. Read more »

Creating Beautiful Communities that Move Us: Thoughts on Ensuring Connection between Land Use Plans and Mobility

This article was published in Planning West magazine, Volume 58, Number 2 (Spring 2016), and is reprinted here with permission from the Planning Institute of British Columbia (PIBC), all rights reserved. Since Planning West is a professional planning publication, the article was written with that audience primarily in mind, one planner to another as it were.  However, I still want… Read more »

Rockin’ it New and Old School: Transit Data and Planner Scratch Maps

It goes without saying that changing technology has had huge impacts over the last 20 years, and its impact on how we plan cities and transit systems is no different. This post is about some of the best parts of those changes…and a love letter to the “old school” practice of marking up maps that I still believe is an… Read more »

Curse of the Lollipops (A Route Structure That is Usually Not so Sweet)

I am no fan of lollipops. I’m not talking about the sweet kind, they’re great.  Instead, I mean the route structure that looks like a lollipop: the cases where a bus route leaves an otherwise lovely linear path to take riders on a journey twice.  Up a stick, around a loop, and right back down the stick (or road) they… Read more »

So You Want to be a Transit Planner? (Pt. 1): What the job is like

I’ve recently had the pleasure of connecting with the students of UVic’s Urban Development Club (UDC).  A key mission of the UDC is to connect students with practising professionals in fields related to shaping cities. Some of the most frequent questions I’m asked when I meet with students is about my job as a transit planner: what exactly I do… Read more »