A group in SF called Rebar planted a small park — complete with bollards, 15′ tree, and iron bench — in a parking space for two hours. Sounds like a good “installation” for the CCM art show, although maybe with a Bike Winter edge: I’m thinking of a BBQ.

* A few years after knocking down Soldier Field to build the new Bears stadium (one of the smallest in the NFL), Daley has suggested “getting a new NFL team”:http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=18914 — not because they’d win more than the division-leading Bears, but because he wants an Olympic dome. Uhm, okay, so why didn’t he support LPCI’s plan to leave well enough alone at Soldier Field and build a new dome in Bridgeport, next to the Sox stadium? As Roger Ebert pointed out in the Sun-Times lately, _Detroit_ got the Super Bowl this year because they have a dome. Meanwhile, a dome in Bridgeport would solidify opportunities to build more sports-related entertainment venues there, give more weeks of life to the often-empty Sox parking garages, and provide the city with a new indoor venue with better transportation than the lakefront.

* An interesting, if dated, table found in a 1999 paper by Dowell Myers entitled “Demographic Dynamism and Metropolitan Change” shows that, among other things, NYC is really no more of a national draw than Chicago, and that Blacks in large metros actually have higher mobility rates than Whites. Wouldn’t be hard to get Census 2000 numbers; some numbers I’ve seen for LA have shown that Asian and Latino immigration has slowed, and a new generation of second(+) generation immigrants has matured. (Left out a line about migrants from US territories, i.e., Puerto Rico, and numbers for DC.)

*Place of Birth of 1990 Adult (>24) Residents, by Race-Ethnicity*
|*Los Angeles* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|California|27.5%|31.7%|27.8%|9.3%|23.2%|
|Other states|42.2%|57.5%|66.7%|6.2%|9.8%|
|Other nations|30.1%|10.8%|5.3%|83.5%|66.1%|
|*New York* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|NY, NJ, CT|57.6%|73.4%|37.2%|3.9%|17.6%|
|Other states|14.0%|12.0%|37.3%|1.9%|1.4%|
|Other nations|24.5%|14.6%|25.0%|93.9%|50.9%|
|*Chicago* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|IL, IN, WI|60.5%|71.0%|47.4%|4.2%|19.2%|
|Other states|23.7%|19.7%|50.5%|5.1%|9.5%|
|Other nations|14.7%|9.4%|2.0%|90.6%|58.4%|

* Claire Wilson in the “Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/realestate/18cover.html reports on how developers have swooped down upon the High Line, proposing 13 towers with 5,500 apartments, media offices, star-chef restaurants, new gallery spaces, and a Standard Hotel. Assuming an average of $1M per apartment (modest even after accounting for a 20% inclusionary set-aside), just the residential development spurred by the $130M High Line project would be worth $5.5 billion!

“Developers balked — and some who wanted it torn down threatened to sue — when Friends of the High Line was formed in 1999 and proposed the idea of turning the railroad bed into an elevated park. Six years later, the corridor is like catnip to the same developers, with more than a dozen projects planned and countless others being considered.”

* “Metropolis 2020”:http://metrojoe.org/joe.htm has posted a quiz game featuring “Metro Joe.” It has annoyingly slow animated transitions, questions that are pretty tough given the 8th grade target audience (although I haven’t seen the accompanying curricular materials), and the scoring’s a bitch: you actually lose points for incorrect answers, instead of just not winning them.
* Found a site that appears to “take credit for”:http://counterproductiveindustries.com/ much of the street theater that’s gone on in Chicago in recent years — except Critical Mass.
* Beerfly Lew Bryson has “a heartwarming read”:http://www.lewbryson.com/buzz703.htm for the “Draught Beer Preservation Society”:http://www.westnet.com/~kbehrens/lsdbps/manifesto.html:

bq. Who’s the villain here? Zoning and NIMBY. Zoning is NIMBY, which is policy-speak for Not In My Backyard… What [overly restrictive zoning in the suburbs produces] is a noisy bar that’s creating drunks. The owner may not have had that in mind, but that’s where business and zoning has driven him. Bars are caught between rising costs, public disapproval, and stiff chain competition. Is it any wonder that corner bars owners are cashing out left and right, taking big bucks for their licenses and folding up?

bq. Here’s what I’d like to see instead. If we’re going to live in the suburbs, I’d like to see subdivisions with an in-built commercial area: a grocery store (not a supermarket, a grocery store, with food), a coffee shop/deli, and a bar. And they’d have no parking. None. Just bike racks. You’d have to walk or ride there. The bar would have to close at 11, no loud music allowed. It would be a special license, a neighborhood tavern license: non-transferable, stuck to that address, and cheap, say $300 a year. They’d have to serve food: simple sandwiches, soup, stews, salads. It wouldn’t be a nuisance, it couldn’t be a nuisance.

bq. Sound like much ado about nothing? After all, do you really have to have a neighborhood bar? Consider this. Do you ever get together with neighbors and talk politics? Have you met your state legislators, your township supervisors, your school board? Your parents did, your great-grandparents did, the country’s founders did: at the local tavern.

Going away for a week to celebrate Solstice in sunnier climes. Happy Holidays, damnit.

bq. Roger in his book cites a number of accusations that make me respond, Dreiser-like, with a rueful feeling that, whatever may be the European biases, certain of those anti-American denunciations touch on something real, and we ought to pay attention and sometimes hang our heads. French writers, Roger explains, have waxed indignant for centuries now over the quality of American city life, sometimes for reasons that will not appeal to us — an outrage at racial mingling, for instance. Céline did not like Jews, and did not like blacks. The Judeo-negroid sidewalks of metropolitan America were not for him.

bq. On the other hand, some of the classic French indignation will strike us as well-directed. Sartre recoiled at the lack of public places in American cities — the lack of French-style cafés, for instance. What halfway intelligent American, having returned from a week of double espressos in the cafés of France, will think that Sartre was wrong? Sartre observed that European cities benefit from a sharp definition of the city limits, as defined by the ancient bulwarks, and American cities suffer from the lack of anything similar. This remark, too, has its truth. Bulwarklessness has done us in. The plazas and promenades of a thousand European towns offer a public warmth and aesthetic joy that hardly anyplace in America can rival — a chilly reality of American life.

— Paul Berman, reviewing “The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism” by Philippe Roger (among others) at The New Republic

The office received, courtesy of “Jan Gehl”:http://www.rudi.net/bookshelf/classics/lifebetweenbuildings/index.shtml, a copy of the “Places for People 2004”:http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=202&pg=2602 report [“full PDF”:http://www.gehlarchitects.dk/images/melbourne_2004.pdf%5D chronicling the public space improvements made in center-city Melbourne. (Gehl not only believes in improving public spaces as places to travel through *and* linger in, but also in quantifying pedestrian traffic the same way that car traffic is quantified, so as to better represent pedestrians in the transportation decisionmaking process.) A plethora of changes to the street environment and land use over the preceding decade resulted in:
* 830% more residents
* 71% more public space on streets and in squares
* 62% more students
* 275% more cafes and restaurants
* 39% more pedestrians on summer weekday daytimes/afternoons
* 98% more pedestrians on summer weekday evenings after 6pm — 30% of all pedestrian traffic!

The closing essay by Gehl is well worth excerpting:

For a number of years it has been common urban planning theory that improvements to the pedestrian environment might result in a more lively and attractive city, where more people would like to walk and spend time in the city. Evidence from various cosy, old European cities with crooked streets and romantic buildings has been plentiful… Melbourne now adds a new dimension to these tales. A young colonial grid city, with wide, straight streets and no built in squares whatsoever, and furthermore a city studded with uncoordinated high rise development… a monofunctional, empty, and useless city center by 1980… Many cities across the New World will fit this description. And in most of these, the car continues to be the king and the “doughnut syndrome” is still prevailing.

This definitely is not any more the case in Melbourne. A carefully planned and executed process for turning the city into a people oriented city has been gradually implemented since the first plans were made in 1985, but especially during the past decade following the “Places for People 1993” evaluation, many achievements have been accomplished.

Of all the things a city can do to improve the city environment Melbourne has done most everything: more students and residents, more people streets, squares, lanes and parks, wider sidewalks, quality materials, active shop frontages, fine furnishings, new street trees and several art programmes. The invitation to walk and to linger has indeed been extended. Also, sustainability issues such as the greening of the city and the upgrading of the public transport systems and bicycle infrastructure have been systematically addressed.

Most of this has been accomplished over a short span of years, and the outcomes of this effort comes out strongly in this report. Life in Melbourne has changed dramatically. Many more people are walking the streets: on weekdays, some 40% more, and in the evenings twice as many as in 1993. And many more people come to town to promenade and to spend time enjoying the city, the surroundings, and especially the number one city attraction: the other people. An estimated two to three times more people are using squares, parks, street benches, and cafés as compared to 1993.

Summing up, an empty, useless city center has in 20 years been turned around to a vibrant, charming 24-hour city center — more lively, more attractive and safer than most other city centers found anywhere in the world…

The “Melbourne Miracle” which is documented in this report gives hope for cities in all parts of the world struggling with the “doughnut syndrome.” A further incentive can be the positive tidings about the substantial improvements to the city center economy derived from the growing popularity and attractiveness of the city center.

Contrast this, of course, to the current campaign to scare pedestrians off Chicago’s sidewalks by mowing them down with high-speed traffic.

Somewhat lost in the brou-ha-ha over an Andersonville café’s recent posting of a polite little sign asking patrons to “use inside voices” (a phrase which struck me as a weak-willed euphemism even at age seven) has been the café owner’s wider commitment to principles of civility:

bq. Mr. McCauley said he would rather go out of business than back down. He likens this one small step toward good manners to his personal effort to decrease pollution by hiring only people who live close enough to walk to work.”I can’t change the situation in Iraq, I can’t change the situation in New Orleans,” he said. “But I can change this little corner of the world.”

Half of bars “surveyed by the Sun-Times”:http://www.suntimes.com/popups/NWS/air1025.html had air quality that violated EPA standards for healthy adults (red, purple, or maroon on the AQI).

Three — Jimmy’s, Long Room, and Club Foot — had air bad enough to issue a first-stage air pollution alert under the Pollutant Standards Index; only smoke-free restaurants garnered air quality ratings in the “good” range.

The “catty reference”:https://westnorth.com/2004/08/01/whatd-i-say/ to the Las Vegas Monorail earlier had to do with an idle libertarian comment I saw about it: that it was proof that the free market could build transit. In fact, though, it’s proof that the free market is incapable of building adequate transit _networks_. Private actors, in their zeal to efficiently cut out free loaders, will overlook major traffic generators while (especially in the absence of eminent domain) choosing paths which make little sense from a systems standpoint.

One example might be the PATH walkway system under central Toronto. As Emily Bowers writes in Spacing,

For all its commercialized shelter from the frigid winters and smoggy summers, the PATH has taken a somewhat bumpy road into existence, through years of conflicted city councils and profit-driven downtown corporations. There have been plenty of collisions of interest in a space that is privately controlled, but exists to serve the convenience of thousands of members of the general public.

One of the biggest problems has been signage. For years, buildings posted their own signs that guided pedestrians to services within their own buildings, but didn’t give any clue how to get to the rest of the system.

So the city took control of developing PATH-wide signage. Some city councilors wanted signs to be blatant, calling for street signs like the type seen high aboveground. But many owners of the PATH loudly objected, saying street signs might fool people into thinking the PATH was public space.

Moreover, proprietors weren’t eager to direct consumers out of their building and away from their shops and services. It seemed keeping people lost in the underground made good corporate sense.

Another example of an inadequate network: the “Mid Levels Escalator”:http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/travel/sophisticated/07ST-HONG.html in Hong Kong, which has spurred wondrous development alongside it but as a result has become more of a shopping excursion, with frequent stops for chances to shop, than a functional transportation node.

The Las Vegas (and Disney World) monorails are in fact owned by the private sector. However, I don’t think that these highly unique settings are adequate precedents for turning over the business of mass transit to the private sector. Note particularly:

“But beyond that, officials say the system will need about 15 million passengers a year buying the $3 one-way ticket to break even.” And that’s for a four mile long line!

The frickin’ Brown Line el, which rivals only the Lexington Avenue subway in overcrowding, carries a mere 13.6 million passengers a year. Both NYC Transit and CTA are dead broke, and capacity enhancements to each (Ravenswood platform extensions and the Second Avenue subway) are stuck if they don’t receive major new federal subsidies in TEA3.

The streetcar systems of US cities, and the rapid transit in Hong Kong and Tokyo, only turn(ed) profits because of property speculation along the lines. Once all the land was developed, and once mass automobility broke the systems’ monopoly on land speculation, the systems started going broke. Transit has negative marginal profitability; its profits depend on its ability to “capture the value”:http://www.vtpi.org/smith.htm of ancillary development (i.e., positive externalities) that result from its construction and use: in particular, great urbanism and the profitable economic concentration of cities.

The same goes for Las Vegas: it only goes to the casinos that paid for it. It will have little real impact on the nightmarish traffic congestion along Las Vegas Boulevard — it does not serve the platoons of cars arriving via I-15, the boatloads of low-wage employees arriving for their shifts from far-flung housing tracts,(1) or the countless joyriders. The monorail does not address the fundamentally broken pattern of land use (not to mention the broken social dynamics)(2) in deregulated Las Vegas, nor do the casinos’ altogether minor attempts to address the monstrous traffic (the monorail, the elevated walkways, the mere presence of sidewalks) ultimately prove anything about the Enlightened Self Interest of the Invisible Hand — except perhaps that it’s always too little, too late. Gambling options closer to home and the end of the (government subsidized) cheap water, cheap land, and cheap oil that have fed Las Vegas for decades may eventually pull the plug on the juggernaut of its growth.

The business of moving people, with their impossible demands for creature comforts, is simply not profitable; witness the perpetual bankruptcy of the airline business,(2) of Amtrak, of Greyhound, of every city bus system in history, heck, even of the Cunard Line. Sure, tiny segments of passenger travel may be profitable: namely, high-priced business travel and sightseeing circuits. Similarly, privately run road networks, like the toll highways around Orlando, in South Orange County, and around Toronto or Northern Virginia, may appear to be profitable but don’t take into account the negative externalities of pollution, sprawl, and the wasted time of having thousands of drivers drive themselves — or the public cost of building and maintaining the extensive network of “feeder roads” that bring drivers to the tollways. On the other hand, having to pay bus or train drivers for eight-hour shifts (not just the four peak hours of rush hour) make the labor costs of running transit almost prohibitive — except for lines in 24-hour cities which can generate consistently high demand at all hours.

Essentially, I would argue that transit provides benefits to too many people but costs to too few. Auto transport imposes broad costs on society, but pretty much solely benefits those inside the car.

# These social dynamics may not ever be of interest to the market, but thoughtful consideration of social equity is necessary in a democracy.
# The airline industry has, at best, broken even over its entire history — subtract the mainline carriers’ $billion losses from the discount carriers’ $million earnings and they’re still gushing red ink right now — not to mention the broader subsidies to airlines: the airline bailout, defense subsidies that prop up Boeing’s and Airbus’ R&D department, “free” airspace, externalized air pollution costs, the military apparatus that secures cheap kerosene, etc.

The Trib reports on cons and pros:

Gerald Roper, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said that the problems experienced by cabs, delivery trucks and other business-related vehicles will only get worse downtown if there aren’t consequences for jaywalking. “I watch tourists who obey the signs,” Roper said. “I just think it is people who are in the city all the time who are used to violating because they know the corners, they know the cops.”

Ald. Thomas Allen (38th), chairman of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, said cracking down on some of the city’s worst drivers would be a better use of resources than targeting pedestrians. He also questioned the efficiency of having traffic aides leave their posts to chase jaywalkers and then write them tickets. Instead of concentrating on easing downtown congestion, he said, the city should be sending more help to the neighborhoods. “Give me some of those traffic aides,” he said. “I could give half a dozen locations where we could use them out here. We have people driving to work who need to get to work, too.” If the jaywalking crackdown makes it to the council for a vote, “I don’t think it would be received very well,” Allen said.

Roper, despite his co-chairmanship of “Business Leaders for Transportation”:http://www.metroplanning.org/businessleaders doesn’t seem to understand that businesses choose downtown Chicago not because it’s the easiest city in America to drive in, but because it’s a pleasant environment to _walk around_ in. That walkability means easy, convenient access to nice restaurants, plush gyms, luxurious apartments, and oh, trainfuls of competent worker bees.

Hilkevitch adds:

The city’s proposal focuses on reducing traffic congestion downtown by ticketing those pesky pedestrians who jaywalk in the middle of blocks or cross the street at corners against traffic signals. The city apparently sees such actions not as no-no’s, but as crimes against a humanity of street-clogging, pollution-belching automobilists… Aldermen immediately blasted the plan as short-sighted, unworkable and, uh, plain stupid. If Velasquez is so desperate about what to do about congestion, he should get to work on building a pedestrian component into Chicago’s traffic program… “I thought the last 40 years taught us that making the city faster for cars only made it more unpleasant for people,” Chicagoan Carl Wasielewski wrote to Getting Around. “But a great metropolis like Chicago still insists on looking more like Houston than Paris.” CTA riders and Metra commuters outnumber Loop drivers. If there is a need to let a handful of cars turn right at an intersection where 100 or more pedestrians are trying to cross a busy downtown street, the city should start with better training for its 303 traffic control aides.

What Wal*Mart dreams of

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Neighbors gathering in the street… gabled houses and picket fences sheltered by trees… striped awnings shading corner stores… this was life before Wal*Mart paved it all over for a 50-acre Supercenter, right? Oddly enough, this mistily maudlin illustration of idyllic small-town bliss appeared in a propaganda advertisement placed by Wal*Mart in the New York Review of Books in April.

80% of Americans would probably never allow their children to walk the dog in the street out of a well-founded fear of traffic, but Brobdignagian corporations like Wal*Mart continue to use the visual vocabulary of walkable American neighborhoods (a way of life that said corporations bulldozed decades ago en route to greater profit) to cloak themselves in a comfortably gauzy veneer of Pax Americana. Yet Wal*Mart is the exemplar of the economy that has “progressed” and “expanded” to the point where the friendliness and comfort of this scene have been deemed insufficiently enticing of consumer desire, and therefore un-American. After all, where in this scene could one find a GM Hummer H3, or 20-pound box of America’s Value Choice from Sam’s Club fish sticks, or a $3,000 Weber grill? Disgusting.