Aaah, Madison. I’ll be there tomorrow through Sunday at CNU 19. I will be part of a CNU team blogging about the conference, and I encourage you to follow us at http://liveblog.cnu19.org/. I’ll be covering a tour of Milwaukee led by former mayor and current CNU President John Norquist, as well as in-depth sessions on Retrofitting Suburbia, how to implement walkable thoroughfares (not as easy as you think!), a tour of Middleton Hills, presentations by William Cronon (professor at UW Madison) and Will Allen (founder of Growing Power), a Q and A with Ed Glaeser (author of Triumph of the…

My heart goes out to Wisconsin this week, but there is a part of me that says “you got what you asked for.” According to the Capital Times in Madison, Ray LaHood has announced the U.S. Government will not be including imrpovements to the Hiawatha Line, connecting Milwaukee and Chicago, in its latest round of funding. The state of Wisconsin requested $150 million in upgrades to the line, which is growing in popularity, having increased ridership by 6% last year to 783,000 riders. This news is a shame for users of the line, but it comes on the heels of…

My colleague Charles Marohn from Strongtowns forwarded me this excellent video entitled “Roads Unfit for People.” It features a very well done look at an intersection in London where a traffic signal was removed. It may seem counterintuitive, as pointed out in the video, but the intersection became safer after the removal of the light. Watch the cars, bikes and pedestrians navigate the intersection and you’ll see this delicate dance of everyone using caution and allowing each other to proceed through in a somewhat orderly manner – again counterintuitive at first but logical when you think about it. Now watch…

What impact does increased housing have on cities? This is particularly important to cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, which have flatlined in terms of population growth as of late, according to the 2010 Census. (For a very good article about this, read Steve Berg at MinnPost.) This is very disturbing for a city with so much potential. So what do we do about this? Lot’s of things, from plans to zoning for infill development, financial incentives for developers to develop and residents to choose the city, to imrovements to transit and the public realm. But what about getting existing…

A new video by Streetfilms looks at the many blessings of urbanism in Melbourne, Australia. Watch it here at Kaid Benfield’s blog, brought to you via Mike Lydon. The lessons of good urbanism abound. It should be noted Jan Gehl has a role in the success of Melbourne, as documented in an article I wrote for ULI here. Enjoy!

I have some good news and I have some bad news. The good news is the Central Corridor light rail line, connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul, received full funding last week. Trains will start running in 2014. The bad news is within one day of the funding announcement, the St. Paul City Council voted to reduce density along its route! Two steps forward and one step back. The Twin Cities will see its second light rail line, serving downtown Minneapolis and the planned multimodal hub there, the University of Minnesota, an array of neighorhoods along University Avenue, the Minnesota state…