Walkable Neighborhoods

I am excited to announced that it appears I have successfully moved Walkable Neighborhoods from Textpattern to Wordpress! I am still tweaking the design, but you are welcome to check it out. There are, of course, a few glitches which will be painfully obvious. The biggest problem is that NONE of my images moved over. [...]

Many of you already know this, but I haven’t officially announced the news yet on this website: I got engaged last summer! The girl who does not yet know what she’s in for is Sarah Bontrager. She’s also an urban planner, though she works in the private sector and focuses mainly on assisting communities with [...]

I want to welcome you to our new website, neighborhoods.org!
Some of you probably already guessed that this was the new website, since I had to effectively put the website up live a few weeks ago. There are still some technical issues that I’m dealing with behind the scenes. Plus, the site design and layout is [...]

Greetings everyone! We had some website issues that took us down for a while. Unfortunately, it also took our site traffic way down. It’s amazing how that can happen so fast. We’re making a steady recovery though and we’ve upgraded our software to the latest version which will hopefully solve the problems.
I had an absolutely [...]

August has been insane month so far, and that’s before I started traveling. Today, I’m going to make it even more insane. I’m headed to Seattle to visit some friends and explore its walkable neighborhoods. After a few days, it’s off to Ohio to visit friends in Dayton and a wedding in Wooster. So, I [...]

April and May were rather busy months, and I’m afraid my writing frequency suffered because of this. June might not be any different for me, but I wanted to share some ideas and changes I have in mind for the direction of Walkable Neighborhoods. These changes might help free up some time for additional postings.

First, I wanted to give an update on me since many of you have been asking. I have mostly recovered from the stomach ailment and am feeling much better, thanks for your well-wishes! The same goes for my broken ankle, the healing has been slow going, but I am walking with very little pain now and hope to be playing active sports again soon. I plan on giving a full article into what it’s like to go through this process through the eyes of a pedestrian advocate and a social observer. It’s been quite interesting and challenging. I’ve been waiting until I was “healed,” but the process has been slower than expected.

I also said that I had some big news to share a few months back. I was asked to start writing on a blog for a large real estate organization (hmm…), but unfortunately, the company is focusing attention on another project right now and, in fairness to the writers, have put us on hold until they can focus more attention to the blog. That’s no problem for me, my time is stretched really thin as it is and I don’t want to take too much time away from this site. >>Continue Reading This Article>>

You may have noticed a few new authors posting articles for us lately. The great thing about each of them is that they all work in different career fields, yet all are strong advocates for walkability. We have a politician, a technical writer, a Realtor, and a transportation planner. We’re very lucky to get such a broad range of knowledge and I think it’s part of the reason our site traffic has increased by 2,900% in the last few months and truly is one of the fastest increasing trafficked websites in the world according to Alexa. Let me introduce our newest contributors:

Chris Bradshaw is the first politician to contribute to the website. He is the former leader of the Green Party of Canada and now runs a car sharing service in Ottawa, Ontario called vrtuCAR. America Walks named him the “father of pedestrian advocacy in North America” in 2001. You can read more about Chris in his Wikipedia bio. Look for an article from him in the upcoming days.

Mark Dempsey is an award-winning technical writer and a former Realtor, loan officer (mortgages and SBA), and appraiser. He spent many wasted (what he says) years as Vice-Chairman of the Rio Linda / Elverta Community Planning Advisory Council for the County of Sacramento. He is also very active on the Congress for New Urbanism listserv, where we “met.” You can see Mark’s résumé here.

Toby Boyce is s a REALTOR with Disbennett Real Estate in Delaware, Ohio. He spent 15 years as a professional writer for various newspapers and colleges around Ohio before making the move to real estate in July 2006. He also runs a fantastic website — Sadie’s Take on Delaware Ohio — that you should visit.

And last but not least, my friend Lauren Hilliard. She is a transportation planner for Fehr & Peers in Sacramento. She also is a board member for Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) for Sacramento and will be involved in the Sacramento Urban Design Alliance’s State Fair Transportation Exhibit this summer. She recently completed a study abroad program in Europe and wrote several articles for this site while she was there. You can view her articles here. >>Continue Reading This Article>>

You may have noticed that we have a new link on the sidebar that says “Jobs.” With the help of Job-a-Matic, we now have a new Jobs section on our website. If you visit our jobs page, you can see the job we posted. We are looking for creative minds to write for our website. [...]

I have joined the world of the temporarily disabled: I broke my ankle playing basketball the other day and will be in a cast and on crutches for the next six to eight weeks. My ankle actually doesn’t hurt that bad, it’s really the swelling that’s the worst part, but that should subside in the [...]

I apologize for my drifting into the unknown lately to our frequent readers, those that have e-mailed me, and those that left comments. I have a semi-valid excuse. The smashed-up car that is pictured in the photo above is the Toyota Corolla that I had just purchased. I don’t want to say too much about the collision because the insurance companies are battling it out on the claim, but I do want to share with you that I was driving the vehicle and I suffered a mild concussion. I am okay, but for a few days following the collision, I had some headaches and was very tired. And right after the collision I was pretty woozy. I have no ill-effects from the crash, except that I have been very tired in the weeks following, and have had a definite lack of motivation for writing articles. The being tired part is typical following a concussion from what I understand. One other thing that I will say about the crash is that I think that if the pedestrian facilities were better at the intersection near where the collision took place, I would guess that the crash would have been less severe. I have been thinking about that at the intersection ever since I moved to Sacramento. The ironic thing is that I was on my way to a walkability workshop!!

Another excuse of mine is that I have been traveling a lot lately with family visits and whatnot. See my large and pretty photos after the jump. >>Continue Reading This Article>>