UConn ouster a setback for New Urbanism

Norman Garrick, a leading researcher on how to make America’s transportation systems better serve pedestrians and communities, was removed in March from the directorship of the Center for Transportation and Urban Planning at the University of Connecticut.

Garrick, a Jamaica-born UConn associate professor of engineering who had led the Center since 2006, has produced transportation studies that have been of enormous interest to new urbanists.
A notable example: In 2008 Garrick and a graduate student, Wesley Marshall, conducted a computerized analysis of 130,000 vehicular crashes in California and determined that the safest communities were those with extensively connected street networks, such as grids (see Jan.-Feb. 2009 New Urban News). The communities with the most traffic fatalities were those with many cul-de-sacs, fewer intersections, and more traffic concentrated on big roads.

Garrick has been a key participant in the Congress for New Urbanism’s transportation summits, pressing for street and road networks that give people many ways of getting around on foot, on bicycles, and in motor vehicles. One of his latest research projects, on page 12 of this issue, suggests that city parking policies and the routes chosen for Interstate highways bear some of the responsibility for the decline of downtown Hartford, Connecticut.

Mun Young Choi, dean of UConn’s engineering school, appointed another faculty member, Nicholas Lownes, to the position Garrick had held. Choi told New Urban News the change would help the Center focus more attention on “transportation security” matters, such as development of materials and methods that can make tunnels and bridges less likely to fail. This more engineering-oriented direction may include work on construction systems equipped with sensors that would indicate when a tunnel or bridge is in danger of giving way.

Choi said the Center, which is being renamed the Center for Transportation and Livability, will continue working on sustainability and livability. Under Garrick, the Center, which was established in 2005 with funding from the US Department of Transportation, recently paid for a program to inform smart growth advocates in Connecticut about the potential of streetcars to generate compact, mixed use urban development.

Garrick will remain on the UConn faculty and expects to continue his research that serves New Urbanism. He noted, “We are supposed to be developing a Sustainability Transportation Index,” which would require transportation agencies to “consider social, economic, and environmental effects, not just how well they’re moving traffic.”