Seen here in Addis Ababa. Across the developing world urban streets are clogged as people’s ability to buy more cars outstrips governments’ abilities to build roads or mass transit infrastructure.
Ways To Acquire Additional Website Traffic To Your Website
Whatever you do online is basically pointless without having traffic. You can have the best developed website or the very best items for sale but if you never get any website traffic, you will not have an online service.
You can pay for traffic to drive visitors to your website or you can utilize free website traffic techniques. Here are 10 ways you can increase the quantity of totally free website traffic you receive.
1. Know Your Keywords
Keywords are the words that a possible client will type into a search engine when looking for services or products that pertain to your online company. Make certain that your website material consists of these keywords. The online search engine supply a possible consumer with a list of websites that match their keyword search.
2. Construct An Email Database
When you have an email database list of potential clients, you send e-mails to your list to direct them to your website whenever you publish or publish something brand-new on it.
3. Email Signature
Include your website address into your email signature. Ask your readers to share and visit it.
4. Visitor Blog
Try to find authority figures in your market and ask if they will accept as guest article from you. If they accept publish something for you, produce an original piece of content for them and provide it with a good image or image to accompany the post. Consist of a brief biography with a link to your website.
5. Get Onto YouTube
YouTube is a wonderful free traffic generator. Videos are much easier to make than you probably believe! Include your website URL in your videos, and in the description. Do not forget to inform people to visit your website in your videos too.
6. Join a Specialized Blogging Neighborhood
Numerous specialized neighborhoods are complimentary to join. However even if there is a small charge think of joining one in order to get traffic to your website.
7. Enhance Your Seo
Discover as much as you can about seo. It’s vital if you wish to get more free website traffic.
8. Produce a Website Map
A site map is a list of pages on your website that you desire indexed by the online search engine. If you utilize the WordPress platform to handle your website you can get a plugin to help you develop a sitemap.
9. Create a Facebook Page
Develop a Facebook page so that you can display your article and posts on Facebook. Use a “discover more” tab to connect to your website.
10. Release Articles In Popular Ezines
Ezines are online newsletters and are released in just about every niche you can image. Have a look at the top ones in your market and offer to compose appropriate material for their newsletter for exchange for a link back to your website.
Renzo Picasso (1880-1975) was an Italian engineer, architect and designer. Originally from Genoa, he visited the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and was deeply impressed by American urbanism and technical innovation. Inspired by these “discoveries,” he produced a large number of visionary drawings and plans depicting the most striking aspects of what he saw, such as skyscrapers, elevators, public transports, and urban plans. Read the article Gli straordinari progetti di Renzo Picasso per Genova published in the magazine “Viaggio in Liguria”, issue 02/2010, for more information.
Along streets suddenly devoid of traffic, pedestrians get a fresh look at all the space that motor vehicles have commandeered.
The New York City streetscape has become a strange, inverted mirror image of the normal world. Suddenly, if you have a car, and actually have someplace to go, driving seems weirdly pleasant, almost rational: Congestion is rare, gas is even cheaper than usual, and parking is abundant. This is the Hollywood version of getting around Brooklyn: No matter your destination, you can find a spot right out front. During the coronavirus-induced lockdown, not many people are driving to work, shuttling kids on the school run, or sharing Ubers home from a Lower East Side bar. Vehicle traffic moves smoothly, now that it largely seems to consist of what traffic on urban streets arguably should consist of: the movement of goods to people, the movement of public transit, the movement of emergency responders and other essential services.
For people on the sidewalks, the situation is much different. Those islands of street-side serendipity where friends once spotted one another and stopped to chat—clusters that, as the urbanist William H. Whyte observed, so often happened at corners—suddenly seem like miasmatic hot zones.
Things that might have only slightly rankled before—the couple insisting on running side by side down a narrow sidewalk, the dog walker thoughtlessly unspooling a long leash, the large family strolling four abreast—are now sources of real anxiety. The usual strategies by which one pedestrian might avoid walking into another, such as ducking into the small patches of sidewalk space nestled between street trees and trash cans, are no longer sufficient. Also disconcerting is the sight of people walking in the street, or in bike lanes. At my local Trader Joe’s, a portion of the block-and-a-half-long line of would-be shoppers (stretched as it was by the six-foot intervals between them) extended into the street, close to traffic, presumably to keep the sidewalk free for walkers.
Moments of crisis, which disrupt habit and invite reflection, can provide heightened insight into the problems of everyday life precrisis. Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system, the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars. When relatively few drivers ply an enormous street network, while pedestrians nervously avoid one another on the sidewalks, they are showing in vivid relief the spatial mismatch that exists in urban centers from coast to coast—but especially in New York. […]
The status quo became untenable when a pandemic required six feet of social distancing between people—a distance wider than many cities’ sidewalks. In Canada recently, two performance artists with a group called the Toronto Public Space Committee drew attention to this problem by building what they called the “social-distancing machine.” It was a brilliant provocation. They used a large circle of plastic—like a hula hoop with a two-meter radius—to create a skeletaloutline of government-mandated air rights around the person wearing it. One of the artists suspended it from straps on his shoulders and then tried to walk through the city, keeping everything and everyone else at a safe distance. In a video released by the group, the hoop-wearer is barely able to navigate Toronto’s obstacle-laden sidewalks, much less share those sidewalks with others.
The social-distancing machine was actually inspired by an earlier device, the so-called Gehzeug, or “walkmobile,” created by Hermann Knoflacher, an Austrian civil engineer, in the 1970s. Knoflacher’s idea was to construct a wood-frame outline of a car that a pedestrian could wear to show how much extra space someone driving alone would consume. A cheeky, visually effective cri de coeur on behalf of cyclists and pedestrians, the Gehzeug was created at a time when even cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen—now renowned for their bicycle traffic—were turning their streetscapes over to the car. [Full article]
Map-based information is one of our biggest and richest assets at Uber. The billions of GPS points handled by our platform every day in real-time pose atypical challenges for real-time mapping visualizations and in-browser, data-dense visualizations. […]
Our tech stack for these applications consists on a few libraries that we developed and open sourced.react-map-gl provides a React-friendly layer on top of MapboxGL, a library from Mapbox that we use extensively at Uber. deck.gl provides an interface for creating WebGL-powered layers that can be put on top of a map or used standalone for creating abstract data visualizations. […]
We recently created a data visualization that explores how uberPOOL can have an impact in making cities’ transportation much more efficient. Behind Travis Kalanick in his TED Talk, you’ll see the data visualization we crafted to show traffic per street segment with and without uberPOOL, demonstrating POOL’s ability to make cities smarter by reducing traffic.
The interesting conclusion is that after about five minutes, the longer you wait, the longer you will have to wait. If you waited for 15 min, the medianadditional waiting time is another 8 minutes. But 8 minutes later if the train still hasn’t come, the median additional waiting time is now another 12 minutes.
So when should you give up waiting? One way to think about it is how much time you think it’s worth waiting. The time you already waited is “sunk cost” so it doesn’t really matter. What matters is how much additional time you are willing to wait. Let’s assume you want to optimize for a wait time that’s less than 30 min in 90% of the cases. Then the max time you should wait is about 11 minutes until giving up (this is at the point where the yellow line cuts the 30 min mark).
Detroit has been through decades of social and financial problems ever since the city slowly slumped into oblivion and collapsing on itself until bankruptcy. The auto industry fueled the city’s growth for many years starting at the beginning of the 20th century with the advent of the automobile.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and everything is gone from the city once thrived with the biggest industry of the West. But it wasn’t enough for Detroit as it gamble its entire economy on cars rather than diversifying the industry investing in different fields. By the time politicians realized that it was too late.
We can trace back how the city developed into something fit only for those having the ability to afford cars, while the rest of those who relied on walking were left out of the equation for good. Today Detroit still lags behind in having an effecting public transportation system to make a significant impact, but it’s very hard when the entire city was developed inside the car-culture.
Three freeways isolate downtown from the rest transforming it in a citadel.
One of the main issues that affected the urban development and prevented the city from adopting a better road system, was the the layout of the freeway system that chokes downtown Detroit. The John C. Lodge, Fisher, and Chrysler freeways surround the urban center isolating it from the rest of the city.
Artificial barriers in the form of roads, ramps, collectors, are responsible for creating specific condition among neighbors, mostly negatively impacting hundreds of blocks at the time. Developers find this method very useful to separate high and low values housing so it won’t affect the pricing market, thus ensuring specific parts of town remain within a specific yield of profits.
Another important issue is the large presence of parking lots surface downtown. Highlighted in red the volumes dedicated to car parking are spread out comprising a large portion of the city core. Whenever cars have a place to be stored they will create incentive to use them everywhere as an extension of people’s lives that cannot be excluded.
The two portions in blue represent large areas of vacant lots that once hosted buildings. Today they leave tremendous gaps between blocks that reminds of Berlin in 1946 after the rubble removal. Focusing on the site located on the top-left corner we can comprehend how much Detroit has been neglected.
The highlighted area has an approximate dimension of 176,900 square meters of vacancy (plus/minus the presence of some buildings).
A close up of the area shows how depressing the area appears. Temporarily parking lots are placed where once buildings stood as there is no certainty of the urban plan for this area.
Uptown faces the same issues of large presence of parking areas that make up for a large potion of the space. The gargantuan suburb conveys tens of thousands of drivers every day requiring areas to leave their vehicles somewhere. Although commercial and public volumes required park spots for obvious reasons, they still represent a small percentage compare do the rest.
The red area represents the high-density portion of Detroit while the yellow one is low-density with suburban-type zones. This has been impacting the city for decades: everything revolves around vehicle ownership and those who don’t cannot rely on the weak public transport system or downtown residency.
Crime and high rents have pushed people away from the high-density areas towards the suburbs. Downtown is a corporate fortress that is ‘protected’ by a ring of freeways which doesn’t allow for a smooth transition towards the fringes.
The sprawl of Detroit -like many American metropolis- has impacted the life style of many citizens who are subjugated to the condition their neighbors dwell. In the last 20 years the city has suffered from crime sprees, major city corruption, financial collapse.
To build and to maintain such enormous suburbs required billions of dollars that cannot be made back in tax revenues: low-density neighbors don’t yield enough property taxes. The city was lost with a 20 billion dollar budget gap in 2013 after declaring bankruptcy.
The only way for Detroit to swamp itself out is to drastically rethink its urban design by reshaping vacant lots and abandoned neighbors. Building hi-density zone with enough green and public surface will create a major investment for the future.
At the same time public transportation must be made bigger than it is today, so streetcars and buses will have to increase in fleet size and stop network to provide access to everybody from the city fringes to downtown.
Retrofitting neighbors has the best ability to render any city a place worth caring for. Once dead malls and flat surfaces are reborn building gracious communities and promoting pedestrian activity, then everything can become precious again . Areas that are well lit and offer rich patterns in their design will always engage the eye placing more importance in its care and existence.
Detroit can surely use what New Urbanism has done to other cities by reclaiming unused volumes and structures to increase their values by tailoring places around people first and cars second. Redeveloping city blocks opens for new opportunities of business and residential units for mixed using, departing from the old concept of leaving the housing pod with the car just to make small purchases.
Sunday afternoon I decided to walk uptown Toronto on Yonge St. to reach the Kinkos shop so I could mass print a few documents. The weather was stable enough and it felt just right a stroll after lunch.
The whole corridor between Finch Ave. and Sheppard Ave. on Yonge has been a constant crescendo of high rise activities since 2000, between the realization of the purple subway line and the many Asian restaurants that replaced the old pubs and burger joints.
The apartment complexes running along the street are coasted by two large low-density residential areas to the west and to the east side, virtually shielding them from sight. Plenty of food from sushi to Korean bbq, from pharmacies to bubble tea shops, it’s a vibrant and young portion of town that will keep you busy if you are a foodie.
Mel Lastman’s Square is great for public events, but its positioning doesn’t attract people.
However, if you slow down and pay attention you will notice the lack of public spaces with the exception of Mel Lastman’s Square; the rest is sidewalks and a series of missed opportunities that would have given a better look and functionality to this part of town.
The square especially has a problem in terms of accessibility since it doesn’t generate pedestrian flow. People have their major entrance and exit point only from the Yonge St. side, leaving the back unattended for lack of opening. The place feels rushed in terms of design development, and the facts it has limited entry and sight doesn’t help.
Squeezed between two towers, an attempt at public space suddenly appears.
I took a picture of a portion of space between two buildings that allegedly should work as public dominion, unfortunately it’s always empty and leads to nowhere but private property access. Indented areas don’t really work if there’s no accessibility from either side when built this way, pedestrian activity doesn’t happen because there’s no source of foot traffic transiting through.
This spot would have worked better if it featured a more welcoming sitting configuration and some flowers too, unfortunately it wasn’t well kept and weeds grew out of the large green container. The overwhelming use of metal elements to create this space make it feel cold and unwelcoming.
The Bauhaus nostalgia is strong with this one.
Close to the sitting area the North York Centre functions as shopping area for thousands of residents and visitors. Inside it hosts a cinema, a large grocery store, restaurants, health clinics, electronic shops, subway stop, and formerly a two-story Staples point which is now no more leaving a huge retail vacancy that removed the only bit of colour from its facade.
From outside the industrial look minimizes its appeal removing any human element form it. The lack of distinctive patterns and vegetation alienates the pedestrian from having a pleasant interaction with the place, also the absence of alternative space arrangement emphasizes the frenetic flow of people along the sidewalk: nowhere to stop, nowhere to sit, it’s not meant to have anyone gazing around or stopping to contemplate.
What punishes this urban setting is the verticality of Yong St. which left no options for an alternative design to happen; intersections are at right angles and leave no room for the public realm to properly exists. This pushes these areas to become sad enclaves of private spaces that oust the public from enjoying their towns.
Diagonal, a missing term in the urban design manual of North America.
Alternatively, the design would have improved if roads took a different angle than crossing at 90 degrees with each other. The Spanish city of Barcelona is characterized by the Avinguda Diagonal, a large and important street which goes through the whole city without running parallel with other roads. Paris is another example of alternatives to the repetitive pattern of road grids that characterizes Canada and the US.
Diagonal street design has the ability to make cities feel more organic and less artificial, they allow for more sidewalk space to exist and therefore to grant access to more pedestrian traffic and business activity which can expand outdoor.
Above the aerial view of the portion of Yong St. and Mel Lastman’s square with an alternative design: purple lines represent additional roads that help relieving traffic directions, red is the focal point that connects all the streets, the dashed yellow line represents a much bigger possible public space pedestrians can enjoy and business to thrive.
The current setting of designing roads doesn’t allow for a natural flow of pedestrians, but rather a parallel dynamic dictated by the car traffic directions. This is one of the reasons these areas don’t collect as much people as they should. At random times through the day you can see the lack of people, the only instant they have activity is during lunch hour when office workers eat their meals in the square.
A cafe in Paris where outdoor seating is a must, even in the winter.
Intersections that meet at different angles have the ability to generate more sidewalk space for people to experience. Cafes in Paris flourished because of this road design which allows commercial activities to extend their seating capacities just outside their doors, becoming a staple reference point for citizens and for cities to become alive.
Bars and outdoor seating areas are greatly cherished and respected in Europe as they represent the quintessential experience of claiming the public space which rightfully belongs to the people. On the contrary, in North America, the systematic absence of the public realm has favored the car-culture to bloom uninterrupted, creating more harm than anything else to cities, pedestrians, and the environment.
The pleasant sight of people filling the streets and enjoying the public realm, a rarity in North America.
Why does this happen less frequently in Canada and the US?- It’s understandable how the weather of certain portions these two country experience has its own impact; however, the good season allows for metropolitan areas to have their share of pedestrians activity to fill the streets.
The current design of cities in these two countries developed around the Industrial Revolution period, where the need for mechanized transportation was already in place, so roads had to be able to host a large flow of private transportation which later transformed society with the advent of the car and the birth of the suburbs, thus more road lanes and less space for pedestrians.
All in all, cities never stop to change especially when we talk about Toronto, now the 4th largest metropolis in North America; so there are big shoes to fill from this perspective. Tourism can greatly benefit from extended pedestrian areas that concentrate people granting more time to be spent around business activity.
In the end we should rethink the way we perceive the public realm. Public as for pedestrian to use, not for cars to generate more traffic that already exists, so it’s essential for citizens to demand from their local and national political representatives to broaden their views in terms of environmental issues. It’s not just a matter of how many trees you plant, but how much space families and tourists can benefit from a better developed city.
This is Saratoga Springs in the state of New York in early 1900. The coloured picture shows a specific period in time where pedestrian outnumbered in presence the carriages and cars. The space division between building to building it heavily emphasized by a generous sidewalk outlined by a series of tall and lush trees that carry along the road.
In recent times we have forgotten how important is a well designed road network. Systematically we removed many pedestrian features to favor cars and its culture. The realm of public life has been ruined by the pervasive ideology that cars are the solution to public life, and also to the transportation issue.
The phenomena of removing space from sidewalks and its features has transformed North American cities into speedways. If once we had more square surface for feet, now we have more than that for rubber. All this has developed by leaving the public transportation out of the equation and pushing the notion that commuting is the way to be.
The essence of the public space extending from the edge of buildings towards the road, is the pedestrian domain of social activities which makes the urban landscape vibrant and acceptable. Without it we would give up our very own ability to claim public spaces a human experience.
The sidewalk becomes an opportunity for business to thrive and for the public to experience a better urban life by walking their neighbors.
Today we have seen the drastic changes of our cities in favor of a chaotic systems that pushes for cars to be the main feature of urbanism. As the invention of the car made its way worldwide, we slowly reduced the public spaces to a mere sequence of tarmac junctions for traffic to collect in it.
The functionality of a wide sidewalk to host plenty of people, along with a solid sequence of trees, has been proven to work pretty well in terms of urban design. As the road traffic flows along streets, the parallel parking creates a virtual barer to define the obstacles along the road in order to protect the pedestrians.
Wide sidewalks aren’t just for people to stroll by, but they provide opportunities for local business to become part of the community establishing their brand and practices. Bars, restaurants, cafes, are all in need of public pedestrian space to engage people into enjoying the city.
At the same time a solid line of tall trees enforces the safety boundary between the street and the sidewalk, while simultaneously the branches with their leaves provide the necessary shade to cool the ground and preventing excessive heat from creating heat bubbles across the city.
The trees coasting the streets will absorb the CO2 produced by vehicles and release at night the fresh oxygen, which replenish the air quality of the city. This will help the overall urban temperature from producing excessive heats during summer periods.
Trees along roads will work beyond their natural purpose. We forgot how the presence of green throughout cities has the ability to remove the grey effect of buildings, and to create a welcoming atmosphere through communities, enhancing the psychological aspect of citizens.
Municipalities ought to reconsider the way green spaces are used. Trees, bushes, and others natural elements can increase the life quality of many urban dwelling. Reshaping public spaces for pedestrians can only have positive impacts, engaging people into becoming more active among city streets while reconsidering their approach with the car.
Parks and vegetation spread out across cities works towards creating a wide and positive sense of urban beautification, which aims at defeating the grey and obsolete polluted stereotypes city dwells into. Municipalities can only benefit from implementing such natural spaces that focus on pedestrians to reclaim space from cars; also by reshaping the old concept of suburban solumes that are virtually isolated from any walking experience or commercial engagement.
