Category Archives: public space

Where we’re missed

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Years ago, when this kind of stuff was only in the back pages of the Reader (and when I was younger, less bitter, and more easily charmed by such romantic notions), I had the notion of totaling up and plotting out the location of Missed Connections. Perhaps it could provide an empirical alternative to the Tribune’s occasional christening of random bus lines (first the 151, more recently the 66) as “the Love Bus” — but more interestingly, one could see whether missed connections correlated with overall density of singles in a neighborhood (perhaps not, since shy singles might live apart from the gregarious types who don’t miss their connections), whether springtime really is for lovers, or whether we non-drivers really do interact more with our fellow (wo)mankind.

The internet makes such analysis much easier, of course. Sure enough, EveryBlock, the hyper-local aggregation service just launched in three cities, also includes the locations of Craigslist Missed Connections posts, plotting them based on business names. In the past 11 days, 60657 (Lake View) accounted for fully 50% more MCs than 60622 (Wicker Park) — which might follow, since 61% of 60657 households are non-family, vs. 29% in 60622.

The other way of looking at that, though, is that 60657 has fully twice the proportion of non-family households but only half again as many MCs. Thus, it appears that the highest density of “MCs per single” might actually be right here. Fancy that.

Also, probably for the same reason that call center volumes peak early in week (weekends are busy!), people tend to post MC ads on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.

You have been warned

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A couple of car-culture blurbs for Monday. First, a report by Eric Pfanner in the Times:

Quick, what’s more dangerous: automobiles or cigarettes?

The European Parliament proposed last Wednesday that car advertisements in the European Union carry tobacco-style labels, warning of the environmental impact they cause.

Under the plan, 20 percent of the space or time of any auto ad would have to be set aside for information on a car’s fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, cited as a contributor to global climate change.

So, should we prepare for warnings along the lines of, “Driving this car may damage the health of the planet”?

The real goal is, as usual for Brussels, to scare the industry into “voluntary” submission — but also to counteract automakers’ more-is-better message. Perhaps they need some scare, though: Wendelin Wiedeking, the chairman of Porsche, was quoted by Mark Landler in an article covering the Frankfurt Auto Show as saying “We need to be a little realistic. People need transportation; we’re not all going to start riding bicycles.”

* The same Frankfurt Auto Show package of articles includes a ho-hum piece by Keith Schneider on Seattle’s livability initiatives (from the same mayor proposing a 50% widening of the waterfront freeway). “The result is that cleaner, greener, safer cities are attracting legions of new employees and residents. But municipal leaders in Seattle and elsewhere say they are determined not to turn their cities into warehouses for the vehicles that come with all the newcomers. However, there’s also this:

This November, residents of Seattle and other Puget Sound communities will vote on whether to raise the sales and vehicle excise taxes to generate $7.8 billion for road construction and $10 billion to build 50 more miles of light-rail lines and other transit projects.

Contrast that 56.2%-for-transit figure with the “casino capital” bill advanced by the Illinois Senate, as analyzed by Julie Hamos:

Within SB 1110 is funding for “transit capital”, pegged at $425 million in new state funds – only 1/10th the amount included for roads. This is quite a contrast to the last capital bond program in 1999, when roads received twice as much as transit – not 10 times as much!

* Word leaked last week that the administration is investigating privatizing the city’s parking meter operation, which brings in about $22 million in revenue each year. Unlike downtown garages or even the Skyway (which is paralleled closely by the Bishop Ford freeway), parking meters serve other social purposes besides revenue. Apparently, aldermen agree; from Fran Spielman’s story in last Monday’s Sun-Times:

Aldermen were intrigued by the idea. But, they were also concerned about the loss of control — over jobs, benefits and, most of all, parking meter rates.

“We saw that in the Skyway. Fees went up. If we lose control of that, the citizens have nobody to complain to. That’s like complaining to General Motors. They’re not going to listen to John Q. Citizen,” said Transportation Committee Chairman Tom Allen (38th).

Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd) called privatization of city assets a “slippery slope.Where do you stop? At what point does a for-profit hospital want to run our clinics?”

Parking meters, unlike the downtown park garages, reach deep into the neighborhoods (where they are often the only pay parking option) and serve (or could serve) policy purposes broader than simply raising revenues for the city. This move would come just as the city, prodded by some neighborhood groups, is embarking on significant and revenue enhancing price-optimization strategies (in fact, San Francisco estimates that it can quintuple revenues through better management) which would be stifled by this action. Worse yet, privatizing before the upside has been milked takes what could easily amount to $50 million in additional annual revenue and puts it in the bankers’ hands.

A private operator won’t have the same incentives to work with neighborhoods — to, for instance, put down free bike parking spaces in lieu of paid car parking (as in Brooklyn or Montreal, which also adds some scooter spaces).

And then, of course, there’s the fact that taking out second mortgages left and right is not exactly a sure sign of an organization’s fiscal health. Contracting out operations or management (writing in new incentives for higher yield — like how energy auditors get paid out of the net energy savings) could achieve the same end, but the net rewards would still accrue to the public instead.

* Fran Spielman also reported last week on Alderman Tom Tunney’s talking-while-driving ticket:

[Ald. Tunney] question[s] why officers in an “understaffed police district” with serious unsolved crimes are “assigned to pull people over solely for cell phone violations.”

Um, well, maybe that’s because cars kill more people in your ward than guns do, Alderman.

* Speaking of cars killing, Alan Durning continues his excellent Bicycle Neglect series of articles with an investigation of bicycle safety, finding naturally that not bicycling kills more people than the alternative. The good news: urban cycling is getting safer, at least one study shows that cycling is 40% safer than driving (using a strange per-hour measurement), and the cardiovascular health benefits of cycling vastly outweighs (by a factor of four) any health risk from crashes. Indeed, every minute spent walking or cycling adds three minutes to an individual’s life. In other words, don’t think of time spent walking; think of time invested walking, since that time will pay back interest later in life. (Quite literally, in fact!)

The bad news: cycling is three (per trip) to ten (per passenger km) times more dangerous than driving — although, to be fair, driving, in turn, is 10 times more dangerous than mass transportation (buses, trains, planes), and walking is three times still more dangerous than cycling per trip.

Still, bicycling could be much safer — and by making it safer, societies stand to gain immensely in terms of health, safety, environment, and energy security, not to mention livability. Indeed, Dutch cyclists are ten times safer per passenger-km; in other words, as safe from harm as American drivers. He also underlines that the key to this isn’t blaming cyclists for not wearing helmets — in other words, personalizing the problem of safety — but in taking collective action: facilities, law enforcement, education, and getting more people [and fewer cars] on the streets (a.k.a. “safety in numbers“).

(A quote from aspiring-Brit Noah Raford that “in numbers” article: “From a public policy standpoint, from a safety standpoint, the message is, if you want safer streets, have more people on them.”)

Reminds me of Tom Friedman last week: “But actually, the greenest thing you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.” Al Gore’s wecansolveit.org echoes the sentiment:

When we solve the climate crisis, it will be because of regular people like you and me. It will be because we, along with our neighbors, co-workers, and friends around the world, took a stand and demanded that our leaders make stopping global warming a top priority.

* Speaking of collective green action, the national Step it Up rally — intended by author Bill McKibben to create a mass movement around climate change — returns on 3 November.

World upside down

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Oh, the surprises that await when the world actually does turn upside down.

Now we know who’s in charge of Minneapolis streets. It’s a loosely organized group of serial lawbreakers called Critical Mass. — Katherine Kersten, resident reactionary op-ed-er at the Strib

I think it might be fun to turn this “we, the hegemonic majority, are being oppressed!!! how dare someone challenge my heretofore unquestioned privilege!!!” meme (a common right wing trope, for those unable to see the power underlying their own positions) on its head. After all, my first internet claim to fame was contributing to “Life in Our Anti-Christian America,” a compilation of fictitious ways in which we atheists exert oppressive control over the poor Christian hegemony — e.g., “It’s difficult to find people with good Christian names like John or Paul or Christopher.”

Ah, if only I had as much time now as I did then.

Sweep

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I’ll be away for a week or so (some of it in Toronto, where I’ll get to attend some workshops preceding Walk21), so…

* John McCarron writes in the Trib about a new book by UIC’s John McDonald about the fortunes of American cities:

The good news for Chicagoans is that, while we fell as hard as any of the big cities on McDonald’s list during the ’60s and ’70s, we turned it around during the late 1980s and mounted the most dramatic comeback of all.

But we had a long way to come back. Chicago lost 17 percent of its population between 1970 and 1990. During that time, the poverty rate jumped to 21.6 percent from 14.4 percent. The average annual family income, measured in 2005 dollars, dove to $48,500 from $54,300. The murder rate jumped by 30 percent and the percentage of single-parent households nearly doubled to 41 percent from 22 percent.

Then came the turnaround. “The reversal for Chicago and the region during the ’90s was truly remarkable,” McDonald said in an interview. “Far more so than was the case for New York and the other Northeastern cities.”

Of course, that turnaround cannot be taken for granted; underinvestment in infrastructure, in particular, is a problem. Hence…

* “Illinois Works,” according to the Southtown, will consist mostly of accelerating current IDOT highway plans. The Trib reports:

The legislation approved by the Senate would provide $425 million in capital funding to the Regional Transportation Authority. The CTA would receive 55 percent under the current formula. Brown said the $234 million the CTA would receive — roughly what the agency gets now — is far short of what’s needed. CTA officials said almost $6 billion in maintenance is required to put the bus and train systems in good repair.

Yes, that means just 8% of this massive capital package will fund transit in the Chicago region. The many Chicago senators who voted for this bill should be ashamed.

* The 26 September NYT included a feature on Portland’s food scene, citing its affordability and easy access to farms. Farmland at the urban fringe has value far beyond its aesthetic interest as green space, and the economic value has a multiplier inside the city as well. I’m sure that the Cato Institue doesn’t care, anyways.

* Leadership is about “follow me” not “after you.” — Tom Friedman on U.S. climate policy, responding to the insistent whine of “after you, China.” As I’ve said before, “Until you’ve taken constructive, positive action, you forfeit any right to waste my time with whines and complaints.”

A park in ten minutes

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18:16 Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Here’s a photo of Pilsen’s newest park, created (for the most part) in just ten minutes on Friday by a small group of local volunteers. More photos I took documenting its rise (and fall) are in this Flickr set.

Meg Gustafson took some great photos of the temporary (but very professional) Bloomingdale Trailhead park, just two blocks from my home, and other Flickr users have uploaded hundreds of photos from around the country of other public spaces temporarily liberated from cars. Props to TPL (like other land trusts, typically a pretty staid group) for embracing this bit of urban direct action. CBF was not so lucky, though.

Mountain meadows

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Where am I? Sitting at DEN, giggling over the latest installment of what Wonkette has described as Endless Cummer, the cavalcade of silly scandals befalling various “family values” Republicans.

Driving past Vail reminded me of a long joke I once read online, apparently about a subdivision in Beaverton, Oregon. It seems to have been lost to the sands of antiquity, but still makes me giggle: The Ballad of Sexton Mountain. (A web search reveals that “IN… ADOWS” later disappeared from even the runt name.)

Walking, biking

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A few posts made to Sightline, first on Alan Durning’s post about “bicycle shame” (and counterpart “bicycle respect“) debunking notions that bicycling isn’t to be taken “seriously” by government — notably about biking’s split social-class personality.

Thanks for the statistics on commuters’ earnings [bicycle commuters have middling incomes]. While biking to work today, a driver who “didn’t see” me yelled some “cheap-[obscenity]” insult — and it honestly puzzled me, since his used car and ragged T-shirt fairly screamed “proletarian.”

That said, I know that I spend well over 10c a mile on bicycling — tooling around town on a shiny steed doesn’t rack up that many miles, but costs a good many shiny pennies. All told, my “extravagant” non-car lifestyle amounts to getting around town on <$150/mo., including transit, sturdy walking shoes, and flashy bike gear.

@Arie: Sadly, the really big money’s still on driving. Just GM’s advertising budget is bigger than the entire American bicycling industry! That said, I read a business-mag article about how Shimano (one of bicycling’s biggest companies) did thorough market research into promoting bicycling in general in creating the Coasting marketing campaign. And smart but slick (and maybe cheap) ad campaigns actually attract city-dwellers’ attention better than carmakers’ airwave saturation strategy.

Durning writes that “a Bicycle-Respecting community is more equitable than a Bicycle Neglecting one… Like such democratizing social guarantees as public schools and unemployment insurance, Social Security and national parks, safe, separate, continuous facilities for cycling and walking put a common foundation under us. Such guarantees bind us together as one people, among whom—while many things are distributed by the competitive logic of the marketplace—certain necessities are available to all. We provide these things because we are not simply a collection of consumers who share a currency and a string of freeway exits. We are a community.” (emphasis added) Another response:

We, as a community, also provide public space within our cities for enjoyment and for circulation. “Sweet modes” (as the French say) like walking, cycling, and transit are incredibly space efficient: we could shrink our roads 80%+ overnight if everyone used them. It’s cars and trucks, those space hogs, who demand not only giant public expenditures but also the lion’s share of the public-space commons.

Since urban space is by definition an expensive and scarce resource, it makes perfect sense to charge those who waste (and lay waste to) it, while granting free access to those who use it wisely and graciously.

We already ration, price, and regulate urban transportation’s use of public space via like parking meters, residential parking permits, drivers’ licenses, and now congestion pricing — but we usually don’t think of it that way. Instead, we’ve been trained by decades of car-think to see “roads” as conveyances [or storage facilities] for private vehicles, rather than as shared community assets.

and on WalkScore.com:

89 at home in Wicker Park, Chicago; 98 at work in the Loop. (I’ve plugged a few Manhattan addresses in, and they max out at 98 as well.) My first upgrade would be to consider the street network. If my circa-2000 PalmPilot’s Vindigo software could calculate walking distances over the grid, then it shouldn’t be that hard to program.

A good bikeability map is a bit more complicated, since it involves adding data layers that aren’t already in GMaps. The routes I bike, even more so than the routes I walk, are often indirect and subject to more “quality of movement” factors. GoBikeBoulder includes off-street paths, signed on-street routes, and elevation in its calculations.

One of CNU’s members, Eliot Allen from Criterion Planners in Portland, has developed some really fantastically complex software that models and analyzes walkability, bikeability, transit, and driving in the context of land use and urban design conditions, like street network, use balance, and intersection safety. I still don’t quite understand everything about it, but J,M,& M might want to give it a look.

Green city bites

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  • The current (July) issue of Builder has a fantastic cover package of articles on affordability — about two-thirds of which is New Urbanism. It addresses both design and policy (finance, finance, transportation, inclusionary, and more) solutions, without any right-wing NAHB complaining.
  • PARK(ing) Day — a day to reclaim curbside parking back for the public realm — will be a national observation this September 21 (following on last September’s observation). My quick idea: perhaps some donated floorcoverings (carpet?* turf?) and a communal table, around which we will discuss The High Cost of Free Parking, perhaps not coincidentally APA’s Planners Book Club selection for August. I can think of a few sponsoring groups who could get behind that. Or perhaps two dozen kick stand-ed bicycles parked (and locked), plus work stands for two mechanics.
  • Mike Davis has a heartwarming article in Sierra about the last time Americans banded together to collectively fight a mighty foe — and downshifted the whole economy in the process.

    Would Americans ever voluntarily give up their SUVs, McMansions, McDonald’s, and lawns?

    The surprisingly hopeful answer lies in living memory. In the 1940s, Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption and waste. The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation, called on Americans “to change from an economy of waste–and this country has been notorious for waste–to an economy of conservation.” A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others enthusiastically, answered the call…

    Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national “Food Fights for Freedom” campaign. By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables–freeing the nation’s farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia… Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if that concept didn’t yet exist) and self-reliance…

    With recreational driving curtailed by rationing, families toured and vacationed by bike. In June 1942, park officials reported that “never has bicycling been so popular in Yosemite Valley as it is this season.” Public health officials praised the dual contributions of victory gardening and bike riding to enhanced civilian vigor and well-being, even predicting that it might reduce the already ominously increasing cancer rate…

    The total mobilization of the time was dubbed the “People’s War,” and while it had no lack of conservative critics, there was remarkable consistency in the observation of journalists and visitors (as well as in later memoirs) that the combination of a world crisis, full employment, and mild austerity seemed to be a tonic for the American character. New York Times columnist Samuel Williamson… pointed out that American life had been revolutionized in a single generation and many good things seemingly lost forever; the war and the emphasis on conservation were now resurrecting some of the old values. “One of these,” he wrote, “may be the rediscovery of the home–not as a dormitory, but as a place where people live. Friendships will count for more.”

* Did you know that Interface FLOR is based in Chicago?

Virtually attend MPC lunches

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Video is now available for two recent MPC panels, courtesy of CAN-TV. No pre-registration and no insipid Corner Bakery box lunches. (They were much better when they had fresh chips.)

Fred Kent from the Project on Public Spaces, on Streets as Places, with a response by CDOT’s interim commissioner and Tom Samuels from the 48th Ward office. This was pretty good, but the local response paled in response to Kent’s inspiring (if generic — I’d heard it all before) call to action.

Parking 101, a panel discussion on district managing parking and update on the Parking Benefit District concept as it moves towards reality in Chicago. Haven’t yet had a chance to view this, but it got good reviews.

Mid-May miscellany

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Quick links! The new site isn’t ready, and CNU XV is next week. Wow!

1. “Everyone should bike to work for a week, if for no other reason than the people who complain about bikers breaking the law would shut the hell up…. Bicyclists disobey traffic regulations is very predictable and self preserving ways.” — BrodyV at DCist

2. A new bike’s on its way! Looks like this — a Surly Long Haul Trucker, 52cm, which I test rode at Hub Bike Co-op in Minneapolis recently but have ordered from Boulevard.* The thought process behind that particular frame was similar to this guy’s: a solid road bike, eminently practical and comfy on short or long rides. Although everyone says I should go for a faster, lighter cross bike — like, say, the Cross Check. On my test rides the Cross-Check wasn’t any more responsive or sprightly (a tad squirrelier, maybe), although it did corner ever so slightly better. Oh, and touring bikes are trendy in a retro-’70s way, unlike, say:

“In the last few years, however, track bikes have won over a decidedly nontough, unathletic batch of acolytes: hipsters. Grab a latte on any random corner in the Haight, Castro, Mission, etc., and you’ll be treated to a veritable parade of carefully coiffed thin mints trucking along on bikes like me. Zut alors!” — Ephraim the Track Bike (SF Weekly)

However, I’m still leery of touring, if only because I find American countryside to be supremely boring. French countryside, though — Paris-Brest wouldn’t be my first choice, but it *is* awfully famous.

Update, 4 July: Photos of the bike. After the little Wisconsin journey, I’m looking into Amtrak supported tours along the Allegheny Passage from Pittsburgh, Lake Champlain from Burlington, and the Niagara region from Buffalo. Hmm — funny how a different perspective changes everything.

* Update, 9 May 2008: Boulevard now has a few Surly models built-up and in stock, so future purchasers can stay on this side of the Mississippi. North Central Cyclery in DeKalb always keeps some in stock, but (as with much else in exurban Illinois) it’s honestly easier for me to go to Minnesota.

3. Design your own street.

4. Unlike here in Illinois, state legislators in Pennsylvania are paying attention to transit funding solutions. An editorial in the Morning Call by Rep. Douglas Reichley (R-Emmaus) calls for integrated regional transit funding:

[W]e should look seriously at the model for mass transit in New York City, where bridge and tunnel tolls subsidize fares for buses and subways. We should determine if the same kind of system could be implemented in individual cities, such as Philadelphia, or even on a regional basis.

A Lehigh Valley transit authority consisting of the parking bureaus from the three major Valley cities, the Lehigh Valley International Airport, and the Lehigh and Northampton Transit Authority (LANTA) could set up a system of fees and excise taxes to help LANTA stand on its own feet financially.

Such a transition would help to end the annual plea from mass transit systems for taxpayer bailouts, and relieve the financial drain of mass transit systems on the state budget.