I just wrote a post about Temple Grandin as urban designer? and I probably should modify my suggestion. Grandin might well be an urban designer but — with obvious reference to her work — perhaps her significance is as a transportation planner with particular emphasis on traffic-calming.
What did Grandin (most famously) do?
She calmed the cattle on its way into the slaughter house.
Without drawing too fine an analogy, what she was doing was "traffic calming." Yes it was animal behavior in general but very specifically she was observing and designing for calming cattle moving forward.
Now, as an aside, if there is one big thing wrong with the typical approach to "traffic calming" as an urban design practice, it is that there is too much emphasis on the "traffic" and too little on "the driver."
"Traffic" calming may be the goal but the means is really "driver" calming. That's a subtle but huge shift of perspective.
I think that's great, we really do need to shift the focus to driver calming versus simply traffic calming. The whole idea is to change driver behavior and that should be taken into account when designing a "traffic calming" plan. www.trafficcalmingblog.blogspot.com
Posted by: Trafficlogix | Aug 07, 2012 at 08:46 AM