Walkability from Eye Level

This spring five UW-Madison students working through the Morgridge Center’s Badger Volunteers program are 1000 Friends’ “eyes on the street,” literally! They are walking up and down every street in Downtown Madison performing a walkability survey, taking notes on where there are blind corners, unsafe sidewalks, poorly designed intersections, conflicts with other road and street users, and other impediments to top-notch pedestrian-friendliness.

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Understanding Changes in Walking and Biking in America’s Cities

With so much information at our fingertips day in and day out, sifting through it for clarity and analysis can be challenging. One of the things we try to do at 1000 Friends of Wisconsin is to shed light on underlying trends and patterns that can help communities make better decisions about design, services, and […]

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Public Space Priorities

In our series on how to measure and interpret the sustainability and livability of our communities, we continue today on the theme of public space priorities. We know that walkability is important and that creating a better pedestrian environment improves the economy and vitality of our communities. Making choices for better walkability also goes hand […]

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Parking Space Or People Space?

As we continue our research into what makes a community healthy, sustainable, and livable, we can use maps and geographic data to reveal new underlying trends and identify areas where our communities need improvement. We are using our home base of Madison, Wisconsin, as our test case, but the types of analysis we are doing […]

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Paved Roadways or People Space?

An important element of livable communities is how much space we devote to different modes of transportation. It is no secret that most American cities strongly favor cars. This picture shows how much space in downtown Detroit is devoted to space for storing cars. Parking garages and lots aside, many streets have been engineered to […]

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