The WPB plan calls for reclaiming street space along Wood and Hermitage, little stub-end streets on the 1300 block of N. Milwaukee that were cut off by the subway trench. They’re “the big empty streets to nowhere,” as the plan calls them, and their purpose could be served by just a single lane of traffic. (A similar opportunity exists at Milwaukee & Diversey.)
Here’s an example of how a similar street, off Washington Ave. in downtown St. Louis, was reclaimed through the simple addition of some planters. In theory, a car could still drive through here for emergency access, about where the people are standing. An even cheaper option — the ECObox temporary garden in Paris, built by ringing the site with discarded wooden pallets and backfilling with dirt — is profiled in the cool “Actions: What You Can Do With the City” exhibit up at the Graham Foundation right now.
Two other cool things I noted at the exhibit:
- The emotion map, which is kinda what happens when mood rings meet GPS and GIS. It locates “areas of communal arousal.”
- From Atelier Bow-Wow and firmly in the vein of chindogu, an idea for the “left bike battery charger”: that passerby could ride parked bicycles to feed electricity into their devices’ batteries. Maybe the “green gym” could offer such a service as an incentive for people to stop in and recharge daily.
The University of Chicago closed the streets within the Quadrangles to motor traffic (during the day, at least). Even though there never was much traffic on the circle before, I can’t remember many people choosing to lounge on the benches that faced it. Now that the cars are gone, they’re choice spots.
Something else, posted as comment on Chris Swope’s Urban Notebook, in the vein of several other posts:
Traffic rules as we know them weren’t codified until car traffic overran cities in the 1920s, and even then were created to prevent cars from running over everything else. If the intent of a stop sign is to keep traffic from speeding through an urban neighborhood, then any 10MPH cyclist is observing the intent of that law even if she doesn’t follow the letter of the law. (Not that drivers do, either: stings here in Chicago found 80% speeding through school zones and almost none yielding at crosswalks.)
Cyclists in Amsterdam or Copenhagen get not just bikeways, but also a completely different set of road rules tailored around cyclists — even green lights are timed to move bike, not car, traffic. Actual full stops are relatively rare; instead, signs oblige vehicles to yield. Yet both driving and cycling there are much safer than in the US.
This “yield if it’s safe” approach exists in North America: in Idaho, cyclists may treat stop signs as yield signs; in British Columbia, pedestrians and cyclists may treat flashing-green stoplights as stop signs; and in Portland, stops have been replaced with yields along 100 miles of “bike boulevards.” These acknowledge that a full stop for a cyclist isn’t like tapping the brake pedal in a car, since the car wields 500X as much horsepower (and thus deadly force). It’s more like demanding that drivers stop, shift to park, engage the parking brake, turn off the ignition, remove the key, and start up again. It’s akin to asking pedestrians to sit down before getting back up and crossing the street.
Instead of more enforcement, better laws would go a long way towards improving safe and orderly traffic flow for everyone.
Edit: Here’s an interesting intervention. Installing a “bike scramble” at one intersection in PDX increased cyclist compliance with the signal from 21.9% to 95.8%. [PSU study, h/t Twin City Sidewalks]
Everybody loves Milwaukee Avenue — perhaps a little too much so. It’s the city’s busiest on-street bicycle route, with a bicyclist passing through Milwaukee, North, and Damen every six seconds during rush hour. Besides all these bikes, it moves 15,000 cars and buses a day, and 70,000 passengers ride alongside on the O’Hare Blue Line.
It’s certainly the most direct route between the northwest side and downtown, but sometimes we cyclists want a route that involves less door zone and more trees. So, after years of living in Ukrainian Village, Wicker Park-Bucktown, and Logan Square, here’s one set of lightly trafficked routes which get me to and from downtown with minimum fuss (and often with stoplights as it crosses arterials). It’s 36% longer than a straight shot down Milwaukee from Logan Square to Wells/Monroe (22.7km vs 16.7km) and takes about 10 minutes longer.
[A zoomable, turn-by-turn route can be found at Bikely.]
The route takes advantage of a few streets around Logan Square that were platted around Milwaukee’s diagonal axis, evidently before the gridiron was enforced. It also runs along the grid through scenic Ukrainian Village and the Kinzie-Carroll-Fulton industrial corridor on the near west side. For those times when a stop on the north side is necessary, I’ve found Kingsbury and Larrabee-Geneva to be good routes.
How can these streets become even better for bikes and for their residents? One approach, popular on the West Coast (and in the WPB plan!), is called the bicycle boulevard — radically traffic-calmed side streets that are optimized for bicyclists moving at a steady 10-15 MPH. They’re the mainstay of the bikeway networks in cities like Berkeley, Portland, and Vancouver, and take full advantage of the fact that Western cities have extensive street grids with good connectivity. Although they’re a key element of Chicago’s Bike 2015 Plan, none have been implemented yet here. When they are, there’s plenty of guidance out there, like this new Bicycle Boulevard Guidebook. Local residents get calmer traffic with fewer inconveniences, cyclists get faster and better routes, and everyone wins with more safety — similar interventions in Europe have resulted in 50% reductions in injuries.
A few of the elements found along bicycle boulevards:
Traffic calming features like chicanes (twisting the path of vehicle traffic, often using planting or curbside parking) and low speed humps.
Cut-out sleeves and other curb features allowing bikes to go two ways on a street, but restricting car traffic to one-way or altogether. (This simple feature, already implemented by Dearborn Park in the South Loop after years of effort, could make a lot of the new culs-de-sac around town much easier on bikes.)
Bicycle-friendly traffic signals give cyclists and pedestrians a protected way to continue where the bike boulevard crosses arterial streets.
This still leaves the question of how to further improve Milwaukee Avenue for the thousands of cyclists who use it every day. A few ideas:
1. Perhaps there are enough cyclists — roughly half of peak-hour traffic, by some accounts — to justify creating a “green wave” for bikes. I know that I can never seem to hit the green lights in sequence, regardless of my speed. (The usual argument against, particularly for CMAQ funds, is that the air quality benefits of encouraging bicycling rarely cancels out the AQ impacts of stopping cars/trucks, but perhaps we’ve reached a level of cycling where the balance has tipped into the bikes’ favor.) The “wave” improves safety by speeding cyclists through intersections, which is where where conflicts and crashes occur.
2. At particularly complex intersections, a Leading Pedestrian Interval could dramatically improve pedestrian and cyclist safety. An LPI gives pedestrians a three-second head start over cars at an intersection (often used by bikes, but this could also be explicit), giving peds clear priority over turning vehicles. It’s like a mini-scramble signal, and it’s incredibly effective: a test in St. Petersburg, Fla. found conflicts diminished by 95%. The six-corner intersections have lots of turning movements and thus many conflicts; they’re also perhaps not best for scrambles, since few pedestrians would wait through the entire cycle to cross the street.
3. Speaking of turns, I would suggest that the protected left-turn signal phases (which I generally dislike: there’s no right to a left turn!) follow, not lead, the green phases. (Here’s another argument for it.) In other words, the left-arrow-green should come after the green light — which is, after all, usually when people sneak a left anyways (after getting stranded in the middle of the intersection by the “left turn trap“). Also, too often it seems that the drivers waiting in the left turn lane get distracted and don’t make their turns until their protected signal phase is almost over, which wastes precious signal time for everyone; this should be less of a problem with a trailing signal phase. Apparently, this is called “lag-lag (permissive-protected) left-turn phasing” in the traffic engineering literature, and I should probably ask a few engineers about it.
4. I was going to write something about how more radical bike lane designs (like these in NYC, with even less space and higher traffic volumes to work with) could revolutionize the way the street looks — but they’re impossible until the parking-meter contract ends, since there’s no way to add much new bike space (or bus space, or pedestrian space) without subtracting at least some parking spaces. Oh well. File this one for the 2083 file.
5. A while ago, I thought I saw a schematic plan for Logan Square which showed narrower roads, fewer crossings, and tighter curb radii, but I can’t seem to find it. Regardless, there’s no reason whatsoever for the two-lane roads approaching the square to become four or six lanes; the excess pavement could be returned as green space. In the future, the urban-fabric wounds left by the subway tunnel (the space over the portal, the principal subway entrance and the huge blank wall behind it, the underutilized former terminal [now Banco Popular and its parking lot], and the bus terminal) can be healed with new buildings or public amenities.
The rise of Silicon Valley employee shuttles has been much covered by the press — with some finding solace in the fact that they grant an urban, car-light lifestyle option to formerly office-campus-bound techies. Since these are operated by private employers as an employee courtesy, they’re usually comfortable and sometimes have sophisticated IT backends that make them more demand-responsive than public transit options. A few disappointments, though:
1. They’re not quite the IT revolution we were promised, although that could certainly change. Given that all the users are well-wired (erm, well-wirelessed?) and that origins and destinations are relatively closely clustered together, this is one population that could conceivably pilot a fully demand responsive “smart jitney” system. Yet instead, fixed route buses (and all the wasted capacity they entail, especially with each company offering its own service) appear to be what even the savviest of techies are comfortable with.
2. The shuttles add even more layers of complexity to what’s already a mind-bendingly complicated transit network. I’m the sort of guy who loves figuring out puzzles, and again IT can do a lot to help sort out complex equations like “getting from A to B” — but Bay Area 511 already has to keep track of 41 different transit agencies. I remember one afternoon excursion, with two destinations, which sent me on six different agencies’ vehicles — each with different fares, transfer policies, hours of operation, whatever.
3. Their emergence really points up the failure of the last-mile solutions, in SF and particularly in the Valley. Muni is a poor crosstown solution to get to CalTrain, whose corridor is not particularly close to many trip origins. And in the Valley, auto-oriented development patterns make that last mile utterly impossible. It’s telling that (just to choose one example from biotech) Genentech’s South San Francisco facility is hidden in an office park 4000′ from a CalTrain commuter rail station, while its Cambridge University Park facility is a pleasant 1000′ walk from an MBTA rapid transit line.
In short: Silicon Valley needs to grow up at some point. Perhaps nowhere else in America is there a more clearly demonstrated need for transit-oriented development.
1. Good press stunt: the Maldives held an underwater cabinet meeting. They’ll need to learn how to do that more often, since I’ll probably outlive the Maldives: at the rate we’re going, their islands will be inundated by rising seas in a few decades. The cabinet ratified a statement urging rapid global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — an SOS to be presented at COP15 in December.
2. Good coverage: there is a kind of awesome article in Crain’s this week by David Sterrett about the market for electric hand dryers, formerly controlled by Berkeley, Ill.-based World Dryer. Some choice phrases: “the local company that’s dominated the industry since its inception is seeing new business slip through its slightly damp fingers… dryer-industry arriviste Sir James Dyson… Timothy Griffin, acting village administrator, [says] ‘People have nothing to do when drying their hands, so they read the label and see Berkeley.’ “
(I’ve tried to avoid paper towels since a visit to Japan, where they’re nonexistent. Some restrooms have hand dryers — often the Mitsubishi Jet Towel — but the general assumption is that you bring your own cloth towel.)
3. Not covered at all: among global scientific bodies, it’s not just IPCC (politically tainted by that Nobel Peace Prize!) that’s come to a consensus that we humans have royally changed the climate. In fact, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London states that we’ve actually managed to shape the vastness of geologic time by ushering in the Anthropocene, per a report from Mike Davis.
Of course, this being Davis, there’s a mention of slums: “While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai’s celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread.” There’s also the transmutation of said slums into a cynical, Blade Runner apocalypse:
Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened ’solidarity’ without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential ‘exit’ option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living — none of which seems highly likely. And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity?… We’re talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet…
Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?
Okay, so I’m a sucker for structuralist diagrams and virtuous/vicious cycles. “Where We Want To Be,” a new paper by Todd Litman/VTPI features this handy, oh so self reinforcing Cycle of Automobile Dependency and Sprawl:
And that, in a nutshell, is the machinery that continues to drive sprawl. (My favorite is “degraded cities.” Maybe a PPT illustrating each step could be useful.)
(h/t Kaid)
Two thoughts on larger themes:
1. The FT tells us that “Republican politicians have highlighted the dollar’s slide as evidence of waning US power,” going on to quote that superpower of economic analysis, Sarah Palin. Oh, that’s rich, especially seeing as how some of us had noticed years ago the “longstanding bearish case against the currency” (Economist), caused by the Bush era’s reckless-at-best inflation of a colossal debt-and-overconsumption bubble.
There is a lovely comeback from AEI’s Norm Ornstein, though: “there may be a legitimate debate to be had… but Sarah Palin is not qualified to participate in it.”
Of course, we also have reasonable voices on the left (here’s Chris Hayes) calling for “a forceful, unequivocal, ‘yes to inflation,’ ” so let’s just say that I’d like to get my international travel over with sooner rather than later.
2. The idea of a per-capita carbon cap — versus a per-country limit, the idea being that each of us humans has an equal right to the sky above all our heads — has apparently come back. “The authors suggest setting a cap on total emissions, and then converting that cap into a global per-person limit… The paper suggests that the personal emissions target would be set at around 10.8 tonnes of CO2 per year.” (Economist)
Getting everyone’s emissions down to urban levels would be a great start, of course: Chicago nearly clears the bar with 12 tons per capita, while NYC and London easily clear it with 7 and 6 tons apiece, respectively.
How stupid! Why didn’t I just phone my internist or the person taking calls for him? When I didn’t do that and went to the ER instead, why didn’t I just answer the first physician, ‘No, that’s not necessary,’ when she suggested referring me to a couple of specialists?
In most settings, the doctor has far greater incentive than disincentive to order excessive services — that is, those that aren’t indicated by practice guidelines or evidence-based medicine. – Jack Coulehan in Health Affairs, reprinted in the WaPo
This reminds me of my own ER story.
I travel a lot for work. A few years ago, during a convention in Denver, I began feeling a little ill. I called off the evening plans and went to bed early. The next morning, I had incredible nausea which ended with projectile vomiting — think “Ren & Stimpy.” It was actually kind of funny, in the few clear-headed moments I had. All throughout the day, I attempted the usual things (principally ginger ale) but couldn’t keep anything down at all. By the end of the day, I was beyond lightheaded — I’d now gone 20 hours without fluids, my abdomen was sore from all the retching, and in the most recent episode (at a bagel shop) I’d noticed flecks of blood amidst the soup. I needed fluids, and fast. I somehow managed to pack up what I was doing and told a cab driver to take me to the nearest hospital.
That hospital turned out to be Denver Health, the recently privatized county general hospital — but still the city’s primary safety-net provider. (Where I was on 17th was actually a bit closer to St. Joseph’s or St. Luke’s, it turns out, but the drive down Speer is faster.) I walked into the ER and waited as the triage nurse saw patients. He was doing an admirable job: although his Spanish was no better than mine, he maintained his composure far better than I would’ve in the face of a parade of misery that included gunshots and gangrene among other ailments. Quite a lot of them looked to be in much worse shape than I, but when I was called up I pretty quickly gained admittance to the ER. I suspect that I might have been turned away had I been just another one of the uninsured out there.
Once in, I did get an I.V. drip for fluids and a couple pills of a strong antiemetic; after a brief nap, I felt okay. Yet the attending physician, not seeing any obvious cause for this, said that perhaps the abdominal pain was from appendicitis (when no, it was just sore after spending a day violently vomiting) and that a CT scan might be in order. Even at that moment, I highly doubted it, but ended up playing along. Soon after the CT scan, I was discharged and told to follow up back at home in a week. Several weeks later, I get some confusing statements from my insurance which clearly say “do not pay” — and soon thereafter, a notice from a collection agency, even before I was instructed to pay anything. Since I was out of state, the reimbursement rate was lower than it would have been at home, and that pointless little trip through the CT cost me $1,000.
Contrast this with my most in-depth experience with a single-payer system of sorts: Kaiser Permanente. A month before I left for college, my brother and I went mountain biking on some trails near home and I endo’d on a downhill — braked too suddenly up front, flipping myself over the handlebars, and breaking my right collarbone upon landing. (This is a common injury among cyclists, since the clavicle is a pretty wimpy bone.) I didn’t know it at the time; all I knew was that I couldn’t really move my right arm, and therefore couldn’t bike out of the park. We walked our bikes along a few miles of equestrian trails — the most direct, if muddy, way back out. It just happened that the Kaiser medical center was not far from the park entrance, so we stumbled in — bloody and smelling of horse shit — scanned the little ID cards that brought up our records, and waited a little while. I got called from the waiting room, got a bit of cleaning up and an X-ray, and got a bit of joking from the staff as they pointed to the fracture. There’s not much one can do about a clavicle, anyhow, but what was equally notable was how there weren’t huge bills afterwards. Our premiums (and co-pays) covered basic services like, well, X-rays for broken bones.
One of the more funny-if-it-weren’t-sad local tales of planning gone awry* is the “47th Street Blues District,” so christened in a strange economic development effort by former Ald. Dorothy Tillman and her odd version of an edifice complex. (Sometimes, it seemed more like a de-edifice complex, given the countless vacant lots in her ward.) 47th was the celebrated commercial artery of Bronzeville once upon a time, the retail cornerstone of “The Stroll” boulevardier circuit. This Trib article by Antonio Olivo gives some background about the grand plans for a street that’s not even a ghost of its old self, and how those plans are adjusting under a new, reality-based alderman. Here was a street which could have been a great case study for an incremental, historic preservation-based and transit-oriented approach to revitalization — these buildings tell great stories — but which fell victim to venal local politics which sucked away key resources (buildings, businesses, money, time), and now has that much further to go.
A few key foibles along the way:
1. Neighborhood historian Timuel Black insists that 47th was a street for jazz, not blues, so the entire premise rested on pretty thin ice.
2. The only remaining viable business from the street’s heyday as an entertainment destination, the Palm Tavern, was unceremoniously shuttered by eminent domain in 2001 and subsequently demolished using promised TIF funds — and replaced with nothing.
3. Now, we find out from Tom Corfman in Crain’s that the much-heralded, expensive, and strangely quiet cultural center which was to be the centerpiece around which the district would grow (pretty much from scratch, seeing as half the urban fabric thereabouts has disappeared) is not just in violation of its city grant terms, but in foreclosure as well.
4. And lest anyone forget, the Rosenwald Garden Apartments will soon face another long winter of abandonment and decay.
* even in a city where the feds launch investigations with names like “Crooked Code.”
Every once in a while, I try to remember that currency is the currency of the internet — and therefore that quick blog posts are just as worthy as detailed thoughts — but I still get hung up on doing justice to good ideas. Anyhow.
1. Good riddance, Olympic mania. A prime example of the worst possible “project planning” (to use Roberta Brandes Gratz’s term) — for a temporary event, no less. What annoyed me most was that the organizers not only suckered local corporations and foundations out of millions of dollars (which did not, btw, fall from heaven but was ultimately taken from the pockets of other local charities), but that they sold some magical expectation that the Olympics would somehow magically solve the CTA’s woes. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only did the Bid Book explicitly state* that no transit improvements were planned (and you can’t get what you don’t ask for!), but even the most optimistic figures about what sort of money could indeed fall from the sky (i.e., the feds) fell far, far short of the region’s eye-popping $50 billion in unfunded transit capital needs. (If the broad outlines of what’s being discussed in Congress for TEA4 happen, we might have a good start on getting that funded — without the hassles of the Olympics.) Besides, if there really is money falling from the skies, let it fall upon Brazil — they need it more than we do.
* the comments on that story are actually pretty on-topic. Too bad that disillusionment didn’t spread as far as the implied lies did.
2. Proposition 13 really is a tax on newcomers and the young, according to research by Dowell Myers. Senior homeowners get an average of $1,000 a year, paid for by homeowners under 45.
3. Daimler’s car2go offers one-way car sharing, which sounds like an intriguing concept. That’s possible for bike sharing systems only due to their ubiquity; is that also the intent here?
4. Phoenix wants to be carbon neutral? “Dementia.”
5. Most of the examples of “circle lines” (circumferential rapid transit lines) that I’ve seen distribute passengers through sprawling downtowns from commuter rail terminals that, due to imperial dictate, have been located outside the CBD. (Beyond London, Paris, and Tokyo, this seems to be the case for Buenos Aires.) As I’ve argued before, the proposed CTA Circle line does not fit this model: even the Illinois Medical District isn’t that focused an employment center (the Longwood Medical Area packs twice the employees into half the space, and the Boston Urban Ring is projected to be a BRT project. It also won’t work as a Metra connector, since most Metra trains will never stop at the Circle Line — most Metra customers will continue to the downtown terminals. (The line also has limited TOD potential since it runs through many built-out neighborhoods; arguably, the Clinton subway has greater TOD bang for the buck.) The line also wouldn’t serve many circumferential trips well; changing from a single bus-rail transfer (or a single rail-rail transfer one mile down the line) to a double rail-rail-rail transfer wipes out any potential time savings.
One exception I found: in Santiago, L4/L4A (which require a transfer) link the Providencia-Las Condes business district, via a peripheral freeway median line, to the high-density southern suburbs — laden with Pinochet-era public housing. Not a great example.
6. Two impressions that I gathered from a quick look at Dallas:
- Ample illustrations of the problem with putting the right thing in the wrong place. Victory and West Village might have looked fine on the drawing boards, but in practice they’re difficult to reach from anywhere else (except by driving, of course). West Village, in particular, would be exactly the sort of development to place next to DART — not a few blocks away.
- The boom/bust cycle of Texas development results in some interesting half-built stuff. Local developers hitch on to the latest planning fads with great enthusiasm (and the local “BEAN: Build Everything, Anywhere, Now” planning culture encourages it), but the market collapses before anything actually gets completed. With proper phasing, you could have a few good blocks here and there, but no.
7. A scale comparison: HOPE VI spent $6 billion in total. The Livable Communities Act bill introduced by Sen. Dodd authorizes over $4 billion over the next 3-4 years. This could have a significant impact.
8. Filed under “fun endeavors that I wish I’d thought of”: Will Cycle For Charity, creators of events that exercise people and brains, while building goodwill for cycling and raising charitable donations.
I’m moving, so time to unearth a lot of stuff that’s been cluttering my shelves. (Back before the interwebs, I felt compelled to keep a lot of magazine back issues around for reference.) In 1997, the Utne Reader ran a list of Hip Hot Spots which listed first-tier and up-and-coming hip hoods nationally. Let’s grade them less on their ability to find hot spots but for their prescience in seeing where the trends were going. 12 years on, the “hip” spot should now be safely square, and the upstart should be where it all is, if still a bit quiet.
- New Orleans: Lower Garden; Marigny/Bywater. Good pick, and the shift did happen — but nobody could’ve foreseen how Katrina would tilt the city uptown.
- SF: Inner Mission; Hunters Point/Bayview. Didn’t happen. Even the hypercharged decade in between couldn’t dethrone the Mission.
- NYC: Williamsburg; Red Hook. Didn’t happen. Red Hook might be the only neighborhood described in the Times as having its gentrification fail.
- Montréal: Plateau; Little Italy. Close; Mile End isn’t quite Little Italy, but it certainly took over from the Plateau.
- Toronto: College/Clinton; Kensington. Yes and no; College is hopeless, and Kensington resurgent, but who could’ve miss Queen?
- Chicago: Wicker Park; Pilsen. Not so much. Wicker Park has lost edge, but still has dibs on hipster social life; Pilsen has been slow to mature, and the “Chicago Arts District” didn’t help matters along.
- Seattle: Belltown; Pike/Pine. Spot on.
- Philadelphia: Olde City; Northern Liberties. Spot on.
- Vancouver: Commercial Drive; Mt. Pleasant. Correct.
- Minneapolis: Whittier; Northeast. Correct, although the shift has been slow.
- LA: Los Feliz; Echo Park. Can’t argue, but Echo Park still plays underdog to Silverlake.
- Detroit: Hamtramck; Woodward. Can’t honestly comment, but I can’t imagine that many people get priced out of anything in the D.
- DC: U Street; Mt. Pleasant. Yeah, can’t argue.
- Boston: Davis Square; Jamaica Plain. No quibbles.
- Miami: Lincoln Road; Buena Vista (Design District). Correct.
Verdict: investors, drop your Forbes subscriptions and grab the Utne instead.
Another one of those “oh gosh, is it a good thing that a good idea has crossed over to the commercialized, suburban mainstream?”: Darden Restaurants, more famous for Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and Capital Grille, is seeking to take its Seasons 52 “local, seasonal” concept national. New locations in suburban Chicago and Philadelphia will join 11 existing locations, mostly in Florida.
{Posted to The City Fix}
[C]ritics conflate New Urbanism with the broader but contemporaneous neoliberal trend towards privatizing space. This is perhaps understandable, but neoliberalism well predates New Urbanism by many years. The plazas or lawns surrounding Modernist office buildings, the golf courses and greenways that wrap around Houston tract houses or Arizona retirement homes, the atria of 1980s shopping malls — none of these are New Urbanist in any way, and all arguably predated New Urbanism, but all involve private governance of what would otherwise be public space.
Diggs Town is a curious example. I don’t know the specifics there, but here in Chicago, the public sector had more or less abdicated control over the common spaces within and around the buildings. Without any clear understanding of who was in charge of these spaces, they fell into deep neglect, with dire consequences. Redevelopment of these sites places a clearer boundary around such spaces, either enclosing them into the private realm of yards or creating actual parks. I’m not sure how that “privatizes governance that was not previously private” so much as assigns governance over that which was previously ungoverned.
The false notion that New Urbanist subdivisions have stricter or more nefarious homeowner covenants than conventional suburban subdivisions is an unfortunate result of Celebration — which, I might point out, has CC&Rs that are in many ways less strict than many comparable Florida golf-course PUDs.
(posted as Transport Politic comment)
Chicago was always a surface-lines town, which served it well when the region was essentially a series of factory towns orbiting around a commercial core. But travel patterns have changed; distances have increased and jobs have aggregated into centers and corridors (although not necessarily in transit-ready patterns).
Extending the principal cross-town rapid transit service (the Red Line) for “the last five miles” — it reaches the city’s north border, but stops well short of its south — should be a high priority. The largely low-income and transit-dependent far south side has lost countless heavy-industry jobs. Having gone there last weekend, it takes a double bus connection or infrequent commuter rail to get anywhere, compounding its distance from the N/NW “favored quarter.” These lines have been on transit plans for 100 years; the Orange Line “extension” proposed was even part of the original proposal but got value engineered out. (In the intervening 20 years, though, the original terminal area has declined economically, and I’m not sure whether it can really come back. The Yellow Line extension is interesting and restores access to a major job center, but pretty small in the grand scheme.)
Given the distances involved (12-16 mi. as the crow flies from downtown), there’s no way for surface transit to serve the same need. That said, there’s no local match money available for anything, anyways.
The Circle Line looks interesting on a map, but it’s an expensive solution in search of a problem. It serves a corridor of middling job/population density and limited growth potential, and offers minimal rider time savings. Other proposals to enhance downtown distribution, or improve crosstown buses, would offer better time savings and TOD potential.
Oh, and BRT? Impossible, since IDOT jealously guards its sacred freeway lanes, and Morgan Stanley is holding our parking meters hostage until our great-grandchildren come around.
(And an addendum on the Circle Line: a finding from a thorough calculation of its merits by Ritesh Warade finds that “the majority of the transit accessibility to households impacts of the Circle Line project have already been achieved after implementation of the Pink Line project… travel time reductions are not sufficient for the Circle Line project to have substantial accessibility impacts above and beyond those of the Pink Line project.” The marginal increase in transit riders’ accessibility to jobs that the Circle Line would achieve is 0.2%.)
A little while ago, Chris Leinberger and Arthur Nelson were making headlines by predicting that America would face an oversupply of millions of single-family homes. Households have changed; the “nuclear family in its castle” now accounts for less than one in four households. Yet housing production has been geared towards these households for decades, and almost all zoning ordinances strongly encourage that new housing fit families.
The result is a housing landscape that’s already vastly out of whack with housing demand. This is especially evident in thriving cities which draw young people. In many Sunbelt cities, a lack of apartments forces even white-collar thirtysomethings into fraternity-style group homes. Accountability for household chores (and dishes and taking out the trash pale in comparison to yardwork) is inversely related to the number of people sharing the space.
My own dense urban neighborhood has a similar dynamic at work: apartments built for working-class families with children are now unfit for the legions of young singles and couples who now inhabit them. There are nowhere near enough studio or one-bedroom apartments to satisfy demand, and Chicago’s low-rise zoning categories have conspired against the construction of many more around here. (A peculiar provision inserted to stop the “four plus one” explicitly discriminates against studio/efficiency apartments.) As a result, renters pay a significant premium for one-bedroom apartments; indeed, one can rent a two-bedroom for just a few hundred dollars more. At least Chicago has plenty of 2-BR apartments to go around, though.
There’s much, much more where I came from.
My ancestors, like those of many Chinese-Americans, hail from a pair of valleys about 100 miles west of Hong Kong. The conurbation rapidly rising between the two — standing astride the Pearl River Delta — is “the fastest growing region of the fastest growing country” in the world, with a population estimated at over 50 million. That’s akin to packing the population of the three West Coast states into an area smaller than the Phoenix metropolitan area. (That, in turn, is only a bit smaller than the three states of southern New England.)
(This reflection comes from the graphic comparison of metropolitan footprints in Peter Bosselmann’s book Urban Transformations.)
Of course, China’s vast population defies any attempt to put it into scale; after all, per Guinness, I share my last name with over 100 million Chungs. Just about as many people answer to just my last name as pledge allegiance to Mexico or Japan. Luckily, I’m the only living “Payton Chung” known to Google.
Several weeks ago, I attended a hybrid meeting in Oak Park: a discussion on local historic preservation challenges (of which there are many) followed by a visioning session for GO TO 2040, CMAP’s current long-range regional visioning process.
The visioning session uses CMAP’s instant-polling process to develop a regional growth scenario based on the choices of those in the room. There’s pretty quick feedback, too — the system spits back a report card of outcomes right after the scenario’s basics have been set.
A few improvements I’d make, or general drawbacks to this approach:
1. The feedback metrics are still pretty darn wonky. It’s tough to avoid this, of course, since part of the entire problem with regional planning is that all of it is way too abstract. (Jane Citizen typically isn’t motivated by the idea of “there will be a few PPM less of air pollution in the sky if I do this.”) Metropolis 2020’s work on regional metrics came up with some good metrics that people can relate to, like “hours spent in a car”; maybe these could be brought into the scenario modeling.
2. The presentation format tried a bit too hard with the hokeyness, especially for what seemed to be a very buttoned-up Oak Park crowd. This was Unity Temple, after all.
3. The choices presented to the audience always were in groups of three. The three choices always ended up sounding like a Goldilocks scenario: “too hot — too cold — just right,” and it’s no surprise that answers flowed towards “just right.”
4. The presenters found themselves constantly apologizing for the illustrations for the choices; many were photographs of buildings or a neighborhood, when they were really aiming to illustrate region-wide approaches. Perhaps illustrations showing a broader approach would have been more appropriate.
A rebuttal to two common conceits about NYC vs. Chicago, in an attempt to clarify.
1. “Chicago is more segregated than New York.”
From CensusScope analysis of 2000 Census data, this is false. The usual measure of segregation is called the dissimilarity index; an index of 100 implies total segregation between two groups. The New York PMSA in 2000 had a black-white dissimilarity index of 84.3 and a Latino-white dissimilarity index of 69.3. Chicago’s comparable indices are 83.6 for black-white and 64.8 for Latino-white.
2. “You only find Midwesterners in Chicago. New York draws from all over the country.”
An admittedly dated (from 1999, using 1990 Census data) analysis by USC professor Dowell Myers [PDF, pp. 934] found that a similar proportion of New York and Chicago region residents* were born within their respective tri-state areas. 57.6% of New Yorkers were born in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut; 60.5% of Chicagoans were born in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin. For all its claims to be a national draw, only 18% of New Yorkers moved from other states/territories, while 24.8% of Chicagoans moved from outside its region (but within the country). By comparison, in the Washington, D.C. region, “long believed to be a region of transient residents who came to town for short tours as students, military officers or federal workers” (as the WaPo wrote in 1991), only 34.5% of residents were born within D.C., Maryland, or Virginia.
This particular complaint is often levied against the Lincoln Park area, with its “Big 10 frat party” feel, although fewer than 1 in 120 Chicago region residents live there. Yet the New York region’s white population is even more provincial than the Chicago region’s: fully 73.4% of New York’s white residents were born within the tri-state area, vs. 71% of the Chicago region’s.
Far more of New York’s population was born abroad (24.5% vs. 14.7%), although Los Angeles easily beats both with 30.1% of its residents being foreign-born.
* Over 25.
It may come as a surprise to readers outside Chicago that the Sears Tower, still the tallest building in the Americas and longtime tallest building in the world, was built as-of-right. It required no planning approvals, no design review, no zoning change, no Planned Unit Development review. Yes, indeed, Chicago’s old zoning ordinance was so very generous with the bonuses for plazas and upper-floor setbacks that the tower achieves 110 stories and an FAR of about 40, with more floor space than the original Mall of America — all as of right. (Its construction did require that the city vacate an alley.)
Now, Todd J. Behme reports in Crain’s that the owners wish to replace the Wacker Drive plaza with what looks to be a 50-story hotel. Anywhere else, this would be a huge building, but next to the since-renamed Willis Tower’s heft it’s rather puny. Of course, there are already huge hotels down the street and vacant lots across the street, but no! This has to be on *our* property.
And the zoning bonus? The so-windy-it’s-useless public space that was our public payout for allowing an extra two million square feet of offices? Ah, screw it.
