Infrastructure – Transportation and Transit
The construction phase is where the vision of a future-proof parking facility truly takes shape, where theoretical plans transform into a tangible, tech-ready structure. This step isn’t merely about pouring concrete and raising steel; it’s a critical juncture for embedding the smart capabilities that will define the modern parking experience and ensure its long-term relevance in an evolving mobility landscape.
Most people walking Denver’s 16th Street today won’t stop to admire its drainage system or its suspended paving soil cells. They may not notice the careful choreography of trees, transit, and human movement as they stroll the pedestrian-oriented thoroughfare. What they will notice, ideally, is that something about the street just feels better. This kind of sublime shift reveals itself through human experience.
Las Vegas is betting on significant investment in public transportation to help generate thousands of new real estate developments along major city streets such as Maryland Parkway, one of the city’s most important corridors outside of the Las Vegas Strip.
As concerns about the sustainability of the world’s love affair with the car and airplane grow, the European Union aims to put more people back on trains, a strategy that will require not only laying new tracks but refurbishing old stations. From Barcelona to Vilnius, some of these developments aim not only to make public transportation more convenient but to renew the quarter in which they are located.
The Austin Transit Partnership announced a partnership with an international design team led by HKS, UNStudio, and Gehl to create systemwide architecture and urban design for the light-rail program of Project Connect, a major expansion of Austin’s public transit system. Project Connect is a transformative, voter-approved investment that includes light rail, expanded bus routes, and more services across the city.
The New York Convention Center Operating Corporation announced the completion of the Javits Center’s new rooftop event space as part of its $1.5 billion expansion project on Manhattan’s West Side. The farm and event space, along with several other sustainable upgrades, builds on the success of the convention center’s robust sustainability program.
ULI has announced the launch of the Curtis Infrastructure Initiative, a multiyear initiative to identify and promote infrastructure solutions to create equitable, resilient cities and enhance long-term community value. The initiative aims to provide research and practical tools to help ULI members advance infrastructure investment and identify new solutions to local infrastructure issues, as well as directly support member engagement at the local level through the Institute’s 52 district councils.
This summer, Urban Land is profiling online and in print each finalist for 2020’s ULI Urban Open Space Award. The winner(s) will be announced in the fall. Learn more about award-winning and innovative open-space projects as part of the 2020 ULI Virtual Fall Meeting.
Insurers and investors adopt new models to calculate how the changing climate will affect long-term asset values.
Panelists talked about how the San Antonio region is faring versus other cities in Texas in attracting talented workers and corporate office tenants and where it can improve compared with cities of a similar size.
Autonomous vehicles will remake cities in ways we are only beginning to imagine. Architects and planners have to envision structures now that will fit into that future.
The next-generation wireless telecommunications technology known as 5G, which will operate at vastly higher speeds and be able to handle many times more devices than existing 4G networks, is likely to have significant impacts on the real estate industry, a speaker said at the 2018 ULI Spring Meeting in Detroit.
Detroit’s metropolitan area is slowly growing again, which means it’s time to focus on planning to accommodate more people in an area already light on transit infrastructure. For a place long known as Motor City, it has been an uphill battle to become a transit-oriented community, but what can the region do with its existing infrastructure in the short term?
While the $1.5 trillion tax-cut bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives is widely seen as beneficial for commercial real estate, one provision would eliminate a municipal financing tool that has been essential for housing, infrastructure, and industrial development investment for decades.
The Chicago Riverwalk, which reused derelict infrastructure, is a 1.25-mile-long (2 km) civic space between Lake Michigan and the confluence of the Main Stem, North Branch, and South Branch of the Chicago River. This reinvention of urban life is at the heart of a new chapter for Chicago in which public space becomes a gathering ground for residents. Providing sweeping views and new connectivity, this civic amenity reunites the river and the city.
NBA champion and dedicated urban developer Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. is targeting a new prize—infrastructure. “If you look at infrastructure in America, it’s old,” he told the audience at the 2017 ULI Fall Meeting.
With consumers increasingly expecting to tap their smartphones and find a product on their doorstep within hours, e-commerce is creating an ever more intense demand for industrial real estate near population centers that can used for last-mile logistics, according to panelists at ULI’s 2017 Fall Meeting in Los Angeles.
As soon as 2030, the trend toward fewer and smaller cars will mean a reduced need for wide roads and parking, reshaping cities and how people interact. Experts explored the implications at a recent interdisciplinary parking symposium in Arlington, Texas, co-sponsored by ULI North Texas.
Parking is a big issue in the Dallas/Fort Worth region, an area that 3.4 million more people are expected to call home between now and 2040, raising the total population to 10.6 million while adding 2.3 million more cars to clogged roadways. At an event in Dallas, land-use experts considered several solutions for a flexible future.
The word infrastructure, which originated during the 1920s, was unusual enough to still appear in quotation marks in the Wall Street Journalas late as the 1980s. Henry Petroski’s The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructureis an exhaustive tour of the tremendous variety of built works encompassed by the term.
Speaking at the recent ULI Housing Opportunity Conference, Rick Haughey, vice president of industry technology initiatives at the Washington, D.C.–based National Multifamily Housing Council, likened the wiring of the United States to the internet to the early development of the nation’s highways, but as a cautionary tale, creating unintended winners and losers in the process.
The primary goal of SFpark—a major initiative for the city of San Francisco—is to make it easy to find a parking space. The rationale behind the initiative is a belief that drivers unable to find a space on the street will cruise around or double-park, adding to congestion.
Two of the four major outdoor advertising companies converted to real estate investment trusts in 2014, prompting a look at outdoor advertising trends and REIT performance. The movement toward highly flexible digital billboards is driving outdoor advertising revenue growth. Plus, interest rate survey results from Trepp.
Speakers at a concurrent session on the creative reuse of aging infrastructure added three case studies to the growing list of success stories, including Chicago’s MetraMarket, Buffalo’s Erie Canal, and Hollywood Park in Los Angeles.
It is envisioned as one of the grandest parties in the Western Hemisphere—the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil.
The Colorado Convention Center is one of the country’s busiest meeting venues. The work of a ULI Advisory Services panel played a significant role in Denver’s decision to build the convention center. But it had a humble and fractious start.
A report commissioned by Transportation for America shows that in a majority of metros with 1 million or more people, over half of seniors aged 65 to 79 will have poor access to mass transit in 2015.
Infrastructure Is Key Priority in President’s Budget. Last week, President Obama unveiled his FY2012 budget, which includes a strong emphasis on infrastructure. While the budget contains a five-year freeze in discretionary spending to reduce the federal deficit, the president pegged infrastructure as a catalyst for job creation, economic recovery, and global competitiveness.
