Author Archives: payton

The basin isn’t always so placid

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Blossomania! Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Sure, living by the water has its highlights — like being able to walk out your front door to views like these — but I can’t help but worry about the impact of sea level rise on my neighborhood. Luckily, I suppose, I live a few meters above sea level; Washington’s park-lined waterfront allows a substantial buffer against the encroaching high tides.

The EPA’s Rising Sea site offers state-by-state reports on adaptation plans for sea level rise. For the District, the reports indicate that there is a high likelihood of further shore protection for already armored shorelines, like the ones nearest me. A hybrid approach may be taken for currently natural shorelines, like those along the Anacostia River.

Ultimately, the answer may be akin to the tidal gates that have kept the Tidal Basin relatively clean for over a century: a tidal barrier akin to the Thames Barrier, the IHNC under construction outside New Orleans, or one contemplated for New York Harbor. I found a 1963 Army Corps publication on hurricane preparedness (pp. 16-17 of this PDF) that modeled the 15-foot storm surge protection that could be afforded by a mechanical tidal barrier. Their proposed location for the barrier was between Marshall Hall, Maryland and Mason Neck, Virginia. Incidentally, the Marshall and Washington families used to run a little ferry across the river there — but protecting the city named after Mr. Washington might ultimately trump his lifelong dream of improving the Potomac’s navigability.

[2017 update: a Bisnow article mentions proposals for storm surge barriers in Boston, Houston, and New York harbors.]

Auto age deathwatch (update)

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As reported here before the Great Recession, the formerly inexorable decline in driving came to a sudden halt, and slipped into reverse, a few years ago. A few recent NY Times articles also pinpoint the date of this inflection point to the mid-2000s, when more teenagers began to forego drivers’ licenses:

“[O]ne of the most vexing problems facing the car industry: many young consumers today just do not care that much about cars… In 2008, 46.3 percent of potential drivers 19 years old and younger had drivers’ licenses, compared with 64.4 percent in 1998, according to the Federal Highway Administration, and drivers ages 21 to 30 drove 12 percent fewer miles in 2009 than they did in 1995. Forty-six percent of drivers aged 18 to 24 said they would choose Internet access over owning a car, according to the research firm Gartner.” [Amy Chozick]

Todd & Victoria Buchholz mention a longer-term decline in driving, all the way back to the start of the Millennial generation: an op-ed on declining mobility “in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent.”

If anything, the Great Recession and related mass youth unemployment has accelerated this long-term trend: “55 percent of Millennials surveyed have actively made an effort to drive less, up 10 percentage points from 45 percent in 2010, highlighting the growing trend of consciously reducing road time.” (Zipcar via TreeHugger)

Crystal City Diamond Derby

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On a whim last weekend, I registered for the Crystal City Diamond Derby, the first race I’ve done in a while. (Placed 7th!) The race’s combination of scavenger hunt elements and its underground setting reminded me of a few other race ideas I’ve thought of in the past. A lot of the riders seemed unclear on the concept; I watched them fly past the bonus-point checkpoints, which were where I got probably 3/4 of my points.

I did find one photo (Andy Zalan) and one video (by Mark Blacknell, see about 1:00 – 1:40) of me riding.

quick quotes

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“The federal budget for nonsecurity discretionary outlays — categories like highways and rail, education, job training, research and development, the judiciary, NASA, environmental protection, energy, the I.R.S. and more — was cut from more than 5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the 1970s to around half of that today. With the budget caps enacted in the August agreement, domestic discretionary spending would decline to less than 2 percent of G.D.P. by the end of the decade, according to the White House. Government would die by fiscal asphyxiation.” — Jeffrey Sachs

“For a BJ’s customer, you may think that is absolutely ridiculous. We never expected people to use mass transit to shop at a wholesale club.” — Patrick Smith, VP real estate of BJ’s Wholesale Club. [Not actually that unusual; Vancouver has a Costco with direct access to Skytrain.]

“It used to be that Republicans understood that transportation investment was necessary to spur economic growth and create jobs. Now, I guess they think if we give the rich enough tax breaks they will get off the golf course, get in a bulldozer, and start building roads.” — Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chair of the Senate Banking subcommittee with jurisdiction over public transportation

“Sometime during the past ten years or so food preparation officially surpassed filmmaking as the loftiest form of creative expression for the liberal arts demographic.  Furthermore, it’s essential that this food be prepared and served from some sort of vehicle (preferably a truck or a bicycle) instead of from an actual restaurant.  Part of the reason for this is of course that it’s cheaper that way, but it’s also because gentrification moves so quickly now that you need to be able to descend upon a new neighborhood within hours of reading a Tweet about it so you can provide all those young “pioneers” with the food products to which their refined palates have grown accustomed.   In any case, I have no doubt that if Darren Aronofsky were getting started today he’d never have made the movie “Pi;” instead, he’d be selling actual pies from a bakfiets.” — BSNYC weighing in on food trucks

A while ago, there was a pile-up on a Japanese highway of incredibly expensive sports cars. In the world’s second-largest car-making nation, this was a response typical of the social disapproval such showy vehicles receive: “It was a gathering of narcissists” — Mitsuyoshi Isejima of the Yamaguchi prefecture expressway traffic unit told Bloomberg.

Searching for one more hit of oil

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New approach: one topic per post! Let’s see if this helps me get things published in a more timely manner.

“Like a drunk ransacking the house in hours of unearthing one more bottle, we can pollute the beaches and invade the last wilderness areas, searching for just one more big deposit of oil.” — Donnella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, pg. 134

Indeed, opening all of America’s coasts to drilling would lower gas prices by 2¢. (Original EIA source is Table 9 here.) I’m sure that opening up America’s playgrounds and backyards to drilling won’t make a difference, either; this finite resource is largely gone from these shores, and no amount of wishing will bring cheap, easy, domestic oil back. Idiots like a certain presidential candidate who promise to halve gas prices remind me of a definition of insanity, from folks who might know about addiction: doing the same thing over again, but expecting different results.

Man behind the (sprawl) curtain

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“Your city has been making decisions for you for a long time. Those decisions have led to this point: You’re standing in your driveway, keys in hand, wondering why you don’t seem to have a choice. You need socks or cereal. You want to see a movie with a friend. Each of those mundane tasks seems to require a journey of some distance. Why are these things so separated?” — Susan Piedmont-Palladino, “Intelligent Cities”

Here’s the main problem I have with anti-government status-quo boosters: they’re somehow completely blind to how government created the existing situation, but then loudly whine about how government shouldn’t change anything! Not even removing its distortionary supports for the status quo!

That perspective completely ignores that the oil/sprawl status quo has suffered a sea change regardless of government’s (in)action. Consider:
– Miles driven plateaued in 2007 and is now declining, shrinking relative to all the factors that supposedly caused its growth (GDP, population, employment)
– Not only that, car ownership is actually declining in the USA
– Completions of the three iconic suburban building types (detached houses, malls, office parks) have fallen to post-1950 lows, or in some cases basically stopped*
– Along with that, migration to the suburbs has also passed an inflection point
– Rail freight transport is about two-thirds cheaper than trucking, per ton-mile
– If you’re going to cheerlead a fossil fuel, oil’s the wrong one: CNG is now 36% cheaper than gasoline per gallon equivalent

* Might be interesting to research this on the housing-starts front. Post adapted from a comment to GGW.

Homes vs. Parking, ca. 1954

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Homes vs Parking Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The Smithsonian’s American History museum had this fascinating photo (from the Chicago Historical Society’s collection) of a Chicago two-flat whose owners were very unhappy about being pushed aside by redevelopment. It appears that their house was eventually taken to be a parking lot for Post Office trucks, but the date indicates that this was actually years after the Blue Line subway portal opened.

This was taken on the very same Mautene Court that WPB has spent so much effort trying to reactivate, and I’ve written about my ideas for resurrecting this block before. I hope this year’s Open Streets event on Milwaukee will feature events on Mautene, introducing the space to a broader audience.

The signs: “Homes vs Parking,” “Houses not Parking Lots,” and “We Will Not Give Up Our Home for a Parking Lot.”

Shorts: Climate Ride, shouting, Reston, Toronto, brew boom

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Ah, 20° = shorts weather! (Celsius, of course.)

1. Speaking of great biking, I’ll be riding 300+ miles, from New York to Washington, as part of the Climate Ride in May.

Sponsor my ride and you’ll give to a host of organizations working to heal the earth — from global and national environmental organizations down to local bike advocates — by sponsoring me for the 2012 NYC-DC Climate Ride.
Your sponsorship will make a difference globally and locally: funds will underwrite bike/walk advocacy in DC, Chicago, and NYC, as well as the Alliance for Biking & Walking nationally, plus the great environmental news service Grist and the international agitators at 350.org. Upon arriving at the Capitol, I’ll be taking the message to NC’s Senators. (That covers most of where my friends live.) Thanks, all!

2. “PowerPoint presentations were no match tonight for good old-fashioned chanting” when anti-transit hacks were paid to speak in Honolulu recently. Oahu’s dense corridors (of sprawl) are uniquely suited to transit:
Fingers of sprawl

3. For a class project, I recently spent a day wandering around old and new Reston, Virginia: Lake Anne and Reston Town Center. The photos are here.

4. See 25km of streetcar urbanism — along Toronto’s famed 501 Queen Street line — in 1 minute of video Note the overwhelmingly low-rise densities (and it pretty much goes through the middle of “downtown”) but the very high mixed uses throughout.

5. No, it’s not just you; the number of craft breweries is growing exponentially. Per the Brewers Association:
craft breweries in USA

Promising developments

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Five new developments around town that will hopefully set new standards for welcoming pedestrians and cyclists:

1. Giant apartment REIT Archstone will outfit its new NoMa tower with a DIY bike maintenance facility and an outdoor movie screen. Evidently, these are the amenities that today’s luxury apartment renters want, and the REIT shareholders are going to give it to ’em.

2. A few blocks north, a “Metropolitan Branch Trail Atrium” will feature “an automatic bike pump for maintenance; a water fountain; a refreshment area with vending machines, tables and chairs; indoor bike parking and a natural ventilation system… stairs will have a bike trough” to encourage cycling to work from the elevated Met Branch Trail (which shares said Branch with the Metro and the Amtrak/MARC Northeast Corridor trains) to the Washington Gateway office complex.

Speaking of “NoMa,” everyone should quit complaining about the name. It’s not derivative of “SoHo,” and anyone who claims that obviously suffers from a goodly dose of NYC provincialism; SoHo itself was copied from Soho in London. Besides, no one seem to have no trouble with NoVa, at least written. Granted, I would have preferred a name like Union Quarter or Union Yards to reference its location behind Union Station, but maybe that would’ve kiboshed its appeal to Republican firms. Anyhow, elsewhere in northeast DC:

3. Over in Brookland, the new Bozzuto-Abdo “college town” connecting Catholic University down to the Metro will face the station with an “Arts Walk” pedestrian plaza lined with ground floor studios and convenience retail. The ground floor uses are flexible enough to work regardless of the level of foot traffic, and can evolve as the site develops.

The combination sounds like Liberties Walk in Philadelphia, whose scale and merchandising I’ve admired before:
west block
The emphasis on artisans also sounds like some of the “alleys” in LA’s Old Chinatown.

4. Speaking of pedestrian passages, a proposed Georgetown development would bring secondary retail entrances around to a 10′ wide alley, a la Cady’s Alley between M St and the C&O Canal. Developer Anthony Lanier from EastBanc: “We believe that today’s alleys can be tomorrow’s courtyards, shopping streets, or accesses.” (More on alleys, including a short history of DC coach houses’ removal and potential renaissance.)

5. Annals of ambitious private-sector redevelopment attempts: a developer has offered to buy out a full block of 1970s townhouses — purchased by the tenants as condos in 1998 — along 14th St near Logan Circle. The three-story townhouses now stick out as a relic along increasingly mid-rise, commercial 14th Street. (Heck, just the parking lots could be worth a lot if developed in situ.)

The buildings’ condo ownership structure makes redevelopment (in the absence of eminent domain) incredibly difficult. As Lydia DePillis writes, “each of the two separate condo associations would have to vote unanimously to dissolve themselves. Obviously, this would have been much easier with a single owner (whether a rental building or even a co-op, where only a majority of shares can dissolve the association), but condos’ recent proliferation as a way of making homeownership more attainable has the unintended consequence of hyper-fragmenting land ownership.

That challenge almost makes redeveloping a single-family subdivision, as at MetroWest at the Vienna Metro station, look like a picnic by comparison; in a single-family subdivision, a single hold-out can just be built around rather than holding up the entire process. Add into that contentiousness the added elements of class struggle and, inevitably, race — most of the current owners are moderate-income families of color, with some having lived there for a generation — and, well, I can’t imagine that the condo board meetings go very smoothly.

P.S. Post #1000!

Cool ideas from TRB (1)

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[Obviously, I heard a lot of interesting ideas at TRB, so I’ll try to let them speak for themselves with some brief paper excerpts.]

What would happen if the suburbs walked & biked as much as the cities did? How much healthier would retrofitting suburbia make suburbanites?

For the scenario with the highest levels of physical activity (ATC), I-THIM predicted a 15% reduction in disease burden due to cardiovascular diseases and diabetes and approximately 5% reductions each for breast cancer, colon cancer, dementia, and depression. Risk reduction of this magnitude would rank among the most notable public health achievements in the modern era, and reduce the estimated $34 billion in California annual costs from cardiovascular disease and other chronic conditions such as obesity.

In the most ambitious active transport scenario, this potential harm [from road traffic injuries] is approximately 14% of the benefit from physical activity. [i.e., benefits outweigh harm by 7X]

The other principal finding is that wide scale adoption of active transport could have as large an impact on carbon reduction as strategies based on… reengineering automobiles and fuels.

From the California Department of Public Health, “Health Co-Benefits and Transportation-Related Reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Bay Area” by Neil Maizlish with James Woodcock, Sean Co, Bart Ostro, Amir Fanai, and David Fairley.

Here on the south side

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Three shorts from the wrong side of the “city of magnificent intentions”:

1. Richard Layman correctly calls a proposed National Harbor casino an “enclave development,” but perhaps that’s the point.

Singapore recently legalized casino gambling, in a bid to keep business travelers amused — and so sought to minimize its impact on local residents by placing the casinos only within integrated resorts, far from local transit, and even requiring a passport check at the casino door (locals can enter for a $75 fee). That way, the city gets the tax revenue without having to deal with the external costs of residents’ gambling addictions.

The closest analogue to that situation in this area, or indeed in most any American city, would be… National Harbor. (The Maryland-waters casino boat at the pier in Chesapeake Beach, Virginia was a similarly inspired way of internalizing the benefits and externalizing the costs, but I doubt Virginia would be quite so happy with it.) I also don’t think that gambling will be all that sustainable a revenue stream, but I’d be hard pressed to find a more appropriately hidden-in-plain-sight site.

2. None other than Leon Krier, the eminence grise of classicism, weighed in on my (extended) neighborhood thusly [in Metropolis, curiously]:

“The post-war redevelopment of the Southwest D.C. neighborhood, beyond the human tragedy of wholesale clearing an entire urban community, replaced L’Enfant’s urban armature and network of streets and squares with a soulless nowhere. The gruesome operation was a crucible for imposing on Washington, D.C. the modernist vision so detested by Eisenhower, abhorred by the users and occasional visitors and avoided and ignored by those who have no obligatory business there… In my opinion [Gehry’s] expressionist design formulae would yet effect a welcome respite from the debilitating boredom of the area.”

He fondly mentions Francisco Ruiz’s counter-proposal, whose best feature by far is a statue astride the Maryland Avenue axis, entitled “The Republic Exhorts the Congress to Conscience.” I’ve thought about doing the same myself some days, but what’s the best costume?

3. I actually sorta relate to Mittens’ recent befuddling utterance that “trees are the right height” in Michigan. I grew up amidst trees, albeit too often trees marked for destruction, and after too many years at the edge of the prairie began to miss to trees. That’s one big reason why I moved back east.