Category Archives: urban affairs

Funicular fulfilled

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Angels fly! Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

I first heard about Angels Flight on a visit to LA probably 20 years ago, when its reconstruction was first floated. For some reason, this silly little tidbit of local history stuck — particularly since it’s been closed for all but four of the last 40-some years. Living in a topographically featureless city probably heightened the appeal of a “mountain railway” embedded at the heart of a vast city. A few weeks ago, I finally got the chance to take a brief ride on America’s busiest funicular railway — now once again a real funicular, after an ill-fated attempt at an alternate form of traction.

Anyhow, it’s an amusing little relic of a Los Angeles where people walked home from the offices below to the houses above. Nowadays, the offices and museums are above and the transit lines and lofts are below; I hope enough people still walk that route to keep this around for a long while yet.

Two more thoughts on downtown office space

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Posted this without much comment a while back, but two thoughts:
1. About one billion square feet is accounted for on this graph (excluding Orange County). Of that, 40% is in Manhattan alone — and that doesn’t count the “just across the river” space. Even if all the lesser cities were added in, perhaps one third or one fourth of all people who work in downtown offices in America do so in Manhattan.

Compare that to the one-half of one percent of Americans who live on Manhattan. That’s either impressive for New Yorkers, dispiriting for those of us who like working downtown but want more choices than just NYC, or a market opportunity for the rest of the country.

2. It’d be better to use a graph of regional office shares to assert this point, but it appears that about 50 million square feet of office can ensure that downtown can assert retail dominance over the region. There are exceptions, of course: DC’s retail center is rather diffuse (some zone between Georgetown, Chevy Chase, and Tyson’s), and Portland has a healthy retail sector despite its relatively small office market. Still, for those looking to build 24-hour downtowns, it seems more efficient to pursue residential rather than office as the complementary use.

Today’s briefs

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More briefs. Also, this is published post #1200!

1. Tomorrow’s Census 2010 initial data release will add a new column to this here table. 11AM EST.

2. Some notes from a recent book talk by Peter Calthorpe (book review).

Two laundry-list formulas that shape VMT:
VMT = location, density, demographic, transit, policy
VMT = policy, design, investment, intent

Percent of CO2 from built environment (transportation & buildings)
USA: 62%
California: 50%
Global: 37%

Think about how the world has changed in the span of 40 years — since we will have 40 years (2010-2050) to reach the -80% CO2 target. That might seem unthinkable, but much does change. From 1960-2000:
Cars per household doubled, 1.0 to 1.9
VMT per capita more than doubled, 11K to 24K
Meat consumption doubled, but grazing land per American fell from 1.35 acres to 0.16 acres thanks to feedlots

Each of these techniques will halve transportation CO2 emissions:
55 MPG standard
30% biofuel content
Smart growth
All are needed.

Regarding a slide about some silly building: “we need design as if pedestrians existed… instead, we see design as if magazines mattered”

Chris Leinberger: in recent survey, 25% of people said they considered walkability in their current house. 60% say they’ll consider it for their next house! (That’s a lot of demand chasing a little supply)

[Look up in Economist US GDP as % of GGP over past 10 years, very striking decline, overall decline narrative from Friedman and Tom Paine]

How do we talk to Republicans about these matters?
– libertarian rebuttal: drivable suburbia is “a coercive, dictatorial set of circumstances”
– sustainability measures that resonated in Utah: health impacts of air quality on children; land(scape) consumption, housing choices for children and seniors, fiscal conservatism
– my thought: are there low-carbon streetcar suburbs that vote Republican? Can’t point to Brookline or Oak Park or Bethesda or Rockridge or even Houston Heights with these people since it’s all culture war, all the time with them. Sure, “small town America” images might work, but more specific examples are needed.

3. Hath hell frozen over? “The 801 New Jersey Avenue [Wal-Mart] store would cover 75,000 to 80,000 square feet of the ground floor of a five-story mixed-use building. The remainder of the floors would be made up with 315 apartments as well as additional retail. The site is currently a parking lot.” [h/t Urbanturf]

4. One key way in which the extension would be operationally superior to an additional NJT tunnel [adapted from comment at Market Urbanism]:
The two proposal’s “dead ends” have quite different contexts. The ARC tunnel’s Herald Square dead-end would still have to figure out how to distribute a huge stream of passengers within the already overwhelmed Penn Station area. Instead, the extension’s Secaucus dead-end is at the Lautenberg station — making use of an already-built white elephant built to distribute passengers between the various NJT lines. A subway, with its higher-frequency and higher-capacity service, probably also activates greater TOD opportunities in the intervening areas, between the West Side Yards and Secaucus. The result is more balanced access improvements for more people — and all the better if it is indeed cheaper.

5. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s recent physical move to the northern suburbs is only the most overt manifestation of a metropolitan daily newspaper chasing readers in the city’s affluent suburbs. Even though most of these papers are locally stereotyped as liberal, they really reflect the tastes of their city’s favored quarter suburbs, long taking a cluck-cluck view of city government and banning anything that could possibly offend the business elite.

6. Oh, speaking of which, here are some maps (with commentary) of some cities’ “favored quarter,” as illustrated by where the highest proportion of advanced degree holders live in various metros. Atlanta, in particular, has a very clear 90-degree arc of northern neighborhoods and suburbs which have considerably higher levels of education and income. Historically, these favored quarters have been able to use their outsized political clout — with vehicles like newspaper editorial boards — to demand better infrastructure, which consolidates the area’s advantages. This theory, which is an extension of sociologist Homer Hoyt’s “sector model” of urban development, doesn’t necessarily play out in all cities (e.g., the Twin Cities have a halo of wealth and a bit of a southwesterly tilt), but it’s interesting to see how prevalent it is.

Atlanta

(Why focus on graduate degrees? These are the people who theoretically have the highest levels of capital and therefore the greatest locational choice. Interesting to note, per the recent Brookings “State of Metropolitan America”, that the best educated parts of metropolitan America are the dense suburbs — what Claritas, the demographics firm, has long called “Money & Brains.” The least educated part of America’s metros, with half as many college grads, are the exurbs — now riddled with foreclosures, but once key to Karl Rove’s 2004 realignment. I mentioned this over on Kaid’s blog recently.)

Data from 2005-2009 American Community Survey, generated using the NYTimes’ “Mapping America.”

7. Two interesting themes from the new Michelin Guide to Chicago:
– A map of starred restaurants shows that the highest density is in the near north side — not surprising, given that it’s also the densest area for dining (between its high population density and near-monopoly on hotel rooms). However, it’s quite fascinating that Logan Square and Lincoln Park are tied among the neighborhood community areas, with 3 restaurants apiece, and that there’s nothing of note from Lakeview north — confirming my long-held suspicions about the bland north lakefront.
– Strange to see “street team” guerilla advertising for the Bib Gourmand honorees, but that is indeed quite an impressive array of $20 dinners on offer. It’s this kind of creative but casual restaurant that’s sorely missing in DC.

8. Wow: Vancouver’s Olympic Village [my photos thereof] just went into receivership — and since the city fronted much of the cost ($740M), they now take ownership. Assuming that the city settled for $40M in cash plus ownership, that’s still $1.2M in debt on each of the 580 unsold/unrented residential units. No wonder that they were asking at least $1000 per square foot on the units.

An interesting affordable housing experiment is underway a little bit north, where removing parking is seen as key to affordability: “Not providing parking has two benefits. It lowers the cost of the units, since a single parking stall typically costs $30,000 to $40,000 to build downtown; that saving will be passed on to the buyer. As well, Mr. Gillespie believes the lack of parking will act as an automatic filter to keep out better-off households.” The land is essentially receiving a writedown, since it’s bank-owned by the progressive Vancity credit union; the projected unit mix is 45% workforce ($29-36K income), 4% Habitat, and 7% community workers. Yet “The Downtown Eastside’s most vocal advocacy group says it is opposed to the project because, even though its ownership is geared to low-income households, it will still bring gentrification and increased property prices to the neighborhood.”

And we’re back: demographics

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Well, hello there! No, I haven’t forgotten about the blog, but a lot of other things have been getting in the way. Anyhow, I’m going to try to work through this backlog of great ideas that I’ve been meaning to share by posting a few thoughts & ideas every few days.

Seven for 17 December, and heavy on demography:

1. The trade-offs of moving to DC, per Travel & Leisure: well, I gained better transit, intelligent locals, monuments and museums, and lost on pretty much every other count. Can’t say it’s too far off the mark, honestly, but

2. So, why does this feel like so much smaller of a city? Because it is, and somehow it didn’t really sink in until I ran some numbers via the ever-useful FreeDemographics.com (albeit Census 2000, of course). Why a little storefront food co-op could succeed in Logan Square but maybe not on Capitol Hill (where the H Street Community Market recently threw in the towel after years of organizing):

Dill Pickle Food Co-op: 87,979 people and 28,926 HHs within 1 mile
H & 15th NE: 42,252 people and 18,355 HHs within 1 mile

And why aren’t there more specialized businesses around where I live now, even though education and income levels are so much higher? Part of me thinks that it’s because ambitious people here all become star bureaucrats, rather than going off to open new businesses — it’s a comfortable life, and the cost of living is such that one really needs a desk job to get by. (Hence the general lack of hipsters.) Demographics is another reason, though: a Cafe Lula or Revolution Brewing counts on drawing from a fairly large area, and there just aren’t nearly as many people since the city itself peters out quickly and isn’t that dense to begin with. So while Columbia Heights is in some ways similar to Logan Square — it has a respectable 74,513 people within one mile and is the last bastion of multifamily density before the city dribbles out into the bungalow belt — it only has half as many residents within five miles (643K vs 1,338K).

3. Over at Human Transit, interesting counterpoint by Jarrett Walker to Patrick Condon’s advocacy of a streetcar (essentially bus-speed) transit option for western Vancouver, instead of a rapid transit alignment along Broadway. This is a difficult corridor to parse: it’s a high-ridership route with two high-density stretches (UBC at the west edge and central Broadway from Kitsilano to Mount Pleasant/C-Drive) separated by a long stretch of low-density residential, so both at-grade and grade separation have merits.

In any case, the argument reminds me of the shift in Chicago’s mass transit ridership patterns over time. The self-contained, highly walkable streetcar communities that Condon advocates resemble the Chicago of yore: essentially an endless series of walk-to-work, walk-to-shop small towns knit together with slow(ish) streetcars. (The Surface Lines were still faster than today’s buses, though, because there wasn’t much traffic then — and way faster than they would be in mixed traffic today. I’ll grant that streetcars are sexy, but buses do have much greater operational flexibility.) Tourists may think of Chicago as the city of the “L,” but unlike NYC or DC, surface transit ridership has always accounted for the vast majority of transit riders in Chicago.

Contrast this environment with the modern city, where rapid transit to downtown plays a much greater role in the transit system (even though actual downtown employment hasn’t grown all that much). Thus, the demand for rapid transit (“L” to downtown, cars to big boxes) has increased relative to the declining market for local transportation (buses, walking to local stores). Why? Perhaps exactly the same capitalist tendency towards gigantism that has created so many other sustainability dilemmas in the first place.

4. Population decline in a “growing” neighborhood [GGW]:

When a neighborhood with low vacancy gentrifies, the resulting population loss can be quite steep indeed. Paris’ population is down by a fourth since its peak in 1921. The largely Latino neighborhood I lived in last time the census figures dropped had added literally thousands of loft apartments from 1990-2000, but smaller households completely canceled out those gains:
Households: +6,557
Occupied housing units: +6,221
Population: -268
Household size: -18.7% (-0.57 persons per HH)
Median HH income: +153% (for ZIP)

The 6,000 new apartments, and the new shops drawn to the new money, were quite visible to casual observers — but the quiet absence of one person from every other house, dozens of people from every block, was invisible to all but the census takers.

5. The Hubert Humphrey Metrodome’s roof collapse sounded familiar — and for good reason. A few years ago, I was in Vancouver when the air-supported roof of BC Place collapsed during high winds, and indeed JJ Lee from the CBC points out that the roofs were of the same design. And yes, the same firm later designed the tensile-fabric roofs atop Denver International Airport and Canada Place.

6. Puzzling: why is it that everything in Copenhagen and Tokyo costs more, except for building and operating rail transit? Alon Levy brings some numbers to this discussion in some Streetsblog comments about NYC’s transit unions. Part of the reason in Copenhagen is that their metro is driverless, which also means that it (like Vancouver) can run at fantastic frequencies at all hours — an essential enabler of car-free lifestyles.

7. Since I’m planning a car-free trip to LA (with my parents, who probably never took the bus despite living in LA for decades), here’s a Frugal Traveler quote:

To be honest, I had expected getting around Los Angeles by bike and public transportation to be a barely tolerable chore — a money-saving second-best way to see the city.
Why, then, was I feeling so elated about my trip and smitten by a city I had never particularly liked before? … These were true Los Angeles moments — moments that most visitors, stuck in freeway traffic behind the steering wheel of their rental car, never get to experience. Or, at most, happen only when they stop their car at a taco or banh mi truck.

He stayed around Santa Monica-Venice most of the time. I’m going to try basing us in Hollywood; we’ll see how that works out.

Speaking of LA, “Here’s the sordid history of the Los Angeles Green Line, the ugliest duckling of all light rail lines,” by “Wad.”

She’s a real beauty

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String of pearls Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

I moved to Chicago on an idle whim — and before I knew it, I’d spent thirteen years here, amidst a fantastic community of people who care about bikes and food and thriving neighborhoods. It’s been a blast (of Arctic air!), but now I’m moving on to new frontiers in Washington, D.C.

Not much about the blog should change, since this blog isn’t all that Chicago-centric anyways.

Neighborhood tours

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Today’s links.

1. Lee Diamond’s celebrated Chicago neighborhood bike tours go online. Particularly worth a look: Hyde Park — contrast with my own campus and neighborhood tours. And while you’re there, swing by the area’s best playgrounds.

2. Interesting maps from the USDA showing the impact of urban sprawl in the 1990s, among other things.

3. Jeff Wegerson puts together a frequent-transit-service map for Chicago (via Human Transit) — or rather, a series of maps of transit stops that see service every X minutes.

4. Those on-street bike parking corrals in Montreal’s Plateau cost about $5000 each. At that price, they’d be quite affordable for larger landlords or SSAs — oh, in cities that actually own their curbside parking, that is.

5. Blair Kamin calls the new park at Adams & Sangamon “a good end product because they ran a good process. They didn’t impose their design. They worked closely with the West Loop Community Organization, which polled neighbors on their preferences.” Quite a bit different from some other park-use proposals I’ve seen recently, I’d say.

6. Random: I think North Korean propaganda is hilarious, and now they’ve launched a Twitter feed.

7. Chris Leinberger calls the Infrastructure Bank proposal a triple win. I’d add two additional wins:
– The interest rates being paid out on bonds right now is just unbelievably low. Investors are desperate to invest in anything that guarantees even a modicum of income right now — even the sketchiest of junk bonds. The Infrastructure Bank presents a golden opportunity to raise billions of dollars for investments that will eventually lead to higher productivity. Now, if only Republicans understood that borrowing money to build for the future is a wiser investment than borrowing money to buy bombs.
– The bank will add a big push for cost-effectiveness in transportation spending, which the private sector will demand if it’s to match funds. The most easily monetized infrastructure proposals are more likely to be urban/suburban than rural, simply because there will be more fee-paying users. As long as the bank balances cost-efficacy with appropriate environmental considerations (and perhaps with the ability to tap into value capture), metro areas will tend to win from this proposal. (Contrast that to the established pattern for state DOTs, which take tax receipts from metros and splash out the cash on exurbs and rural areas.)

8. Dave Schlabowske from Milwaukee writes that, on average, it’s drivers, not bicyclists, who are the scofflaw criminals on city streets:

Get ready for a big shock, but the fact is that people riding bikes are more law-abiding than people driving cars. The percent of people riding bicycles that made illegal maneuvers (ran red lights, rode on sidewalks, or rode against traffic) through the intersections where we did the counts varied from 11% to 48%. To say it another way, the majority of people who ride bikes obey the law. This definitely runs counter common perceptions… In some speed studies, the median speed is at or just below the posted speed limit by a mile or two per hour, which means that in the best case scenario a little less than half of the drivers are breaking the law by speeding… before Whitefish Bay installed the in-street yield to pedestrian signs, 94% of motorists failed to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk. The study then checked twice after the signs were installed and a there was a media campaign to alert people about the law requiring motor vehicles to yield to pedestrians. In the final check, the yield compliance rate increased to 39%, which is a big jump, still not very good odds if you are betting your child’s life when they walk to and from school… [B]efore Whitefish Bay installed the in-street yield to pedestrian signs, 94% of motorists failed to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk. The study then checked twice after the signs were installed and a there was a media campaign to alert people about the law requiring motor vehicles to yield to pedestrians. In the final check, the yield compliance rate increased to 39%, which is a big jump, still not very good odds if you are betting your child’s life when they walk to and from school.

9. David Rider in the Toronto Star investigates how the well-meaning Toronto a la Cart program to bring ethnic street food (in carts! not trucks!) failed.

Nurturing innovation

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This month’s “urban issue” of FP features Margaret O’Mara warning that “you can’t build a new Silicon Valley just anywhere.” I was immediately reminded of one of the countless SV replicas out there, the Hong Kong Science Park:

Hong Kong Science Park

As O’Mara writes, “It turns out that sparkling facilities alone aren’t enough to create a high-tech ecosystem. The essential error is in thinking that Silicon Valley can be packaged into ‘innovation in a box’ that you can simply build overnight, unconnected to its surroundings, to the culture, to a moment in history.” That success has much more to do with freeing and feeding human capital than with creating a tidy physical setting.

Broad government policy can indeed nurture an innovation culture — witness the Research Triangle — but the manicured office park really has little to do with it. Creating Research Triangle Park (an initiative usually credited to then-Governor Luther Hodges, but obviously involving others [full story]) was undoubtedly a far-sighted achievement for its time, and the park thrived by catalyzing existing pools of talent within the context of a fast-urbanizing area. In retrospect, it seems that RTP’s strictly separate-use 100-acre corporate campuses (the archetypal nerdistan, to use a phrase from none other than Joel Kotkin) are a relic from a time when suburban campuses were thought to be free of stress and distractions. Today, that setting seems to encourage siloization compared to a more urban, mixed-use environment like the increasingly popular NCSU Centennial Campus down the street. (Centennial was always a long-off vision while I was a campus brat, but it finally now feels sort of like a real place. Interestingly, I doubt that anyone back in the 1980s thought that having the state farmers’ market on campus would be a selling point.)

(The same FP issue also has another dreary city ranking, and Christina Larson writing about Chongqing, Chicago on the [inland] Yangtze. Except, well, it has the population of California and is adding a million people a year.)

Oh, and since I’m writing about suburban offices (and since I keep looking for this info), here’s a graph comparing American downtowns, by office space — a useful proxy for white-collar job concentration.

For blog: downtown office space

July 2010 data from Cushman & Wakefield.

Food trucks, elaborated

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Responding to a challenge to my brief expression of puzzlement over why everyone’s suddenly infatuated with food trucks, to the point where some bloggers are gushing that they “can’t see the downside.” (Such expressions of skepticism have been met with exasperated astonishment, as if I’d attacked motherhood and apple pie. Geez, no. I haven’t even cancelled my Time Out subscription.)

First off, I’m not alone here. Plenty of people have already complained about food trucks causing pollution, unfair competition, and blocking parking or loading zones or no-standing fire lanes or crosswalks; this has been extensively covered by media in NYC [Brownstoner, Times, The L] and LA [LAist, Daily News, Daily Press, Times, YoVenice]. Even Mayor Bloomberg agrees [Daily News]: “The little [vendor] stand is now getting to be these enormous trucks with generators… We are moving stores into the street. And they sit there and they park and they take up parking places and they block traffic.” Placid PDX (where most food carts are in corrals on private land, bearing a striking resemblance to Singapore’s “hawker centres” or Hong Kong’s Cooked Food Centres) has seen battles, while DC has already enacted extensive regulations in advance of their arrival.

Second, my complaint isn’t about street food, or fast food, much less food (of course). It’s about trucks, which I’ve never loved. Food trucks, in particular, present a lot of external costs that threaten many great qualities about our urban retail districts: mixed uses, economic and social diversity, walkability, stability, fiscal sustainability, and livability. Street food existed for thousands of years before foam plates, diesel generators, and V8 engines.

I love street food, and adventurous stuff at that; I’ve spent weeks this year subsisting on the stuff: chestnuts in Guangzhou, durian shakes in Singapore, alfajores in Buenos Aires, currywurst in Vienna, scrapple in Philadelphia, lemonade in Glencoe. I’ve done more than most to advance local food in Chicago, as treasurer of its only food co-op, community gardener, champion of a public market in WPB and consistent advocate of its efforts to get food (particularly a coffee stand) and other vendors to enliven the Polish Triangle and Mautene Court, and even a supporter of an outdoor food market in my backyard. Immigrant street food entrepreneurship is even in my blood: my mother and her siblings used to sell Fall River chow mein sandwiches outdoors to lines of factory workers on no-meat Fridays.

Vendors in other cities pay ground rent to transit agencies (as in Vienna, where they’re at many tram stops) or public-market authorities (as in Hong Kong), which in turn pay for services that these businesses use, like trash pickup. These costs aren’t incidental; residents and businesses within the Wicker Park Bucktown SSA already spend $150,000 a year cleaning litter from its sidewalks, even without any food trucks — who will, because they don’t pay local property taxes, use those services and leave local taxpayers footing the bill. I’ve lived in the midst of really trendy neighborhoods like WPB for eight years now. I like having lots of shops and restaurants within walking distance, as long as they largely contain their noise and customers. Vendors with carts or booths or whatever already set up shop by the dozens outside my apartment, at a thronged weekly farmers’ market and with pushcarts selling elotes, ice cream, slushies, and fried dough every day. Food trucks with loud generators and littering crowds idling outside my window is not part of what I signed up for — Bloomberg’s quote above seems to indicate that he also sees the distinction — and noise and trash are not an integral part of city life. (You want more people living in cities? Make them pleasant to live in.) Call this a NIMBY reaction if you will — but recognize that I am no paper tiger, and have on multiple occasions done face-to-face combat against real NIMBYs on behalf of making Chicago more urban, walkable, and livable.

I want to see retail energy (and economic opportunity), round-the-clock mixed uses, and local economic diversity spread throughout the city, instead of hyperconcentrating even further in existing transient activity nodes. Innovative restaurants — started by exactly the same kind of person who might now just start a food truck instead — traditionally have catalyzed new retail districts and extended the activity hours of other districts (since a fixed-premise restaurant has the incentive of sunk capital costs to try extending hours). Merely piling more businesses into every available inch of, say, Clark & Belmont or Milwaukee & Damen won’t help (1) those of us who live nearby and enjoy sleeping on occasion, (2) people who legitimately need to pass through [including thousands of cyclists and pedestrians every day], (3) people who live a little further out who want more options over there. I’d love to live in a city where great food’s available around every corner, instead of falling all over the place at a few overwhelmed intersections.

Of course Chicago should certainly make it easier for people to open new businesses or try new business ideas: Singapore can get a food stall (it has nearly 20,000 on public premises alone) up and running in two weeks. Giving some people privileged access to commercialize choice bits of public space — as food trucks do by showing up around offices at lunch, around nightclubs at midnight, and otherwise feeding off a few little transient pockets of density — isn’t necessary. “Selling” that space at non-market-determined prices — parking meter rates here don’t reflect market clearing prices for retail square footage and in fact don’t accrue to the public — really gives the trucks an unfair edge on non-mobile businesses. (Maybe location franchises could be auctioned, instead of setting license fees by citywide fiat.) Enforcing the proposed rules requiring that food trucks keep their distance from existing businesses will by definition be difficult, and probably a low priority for cops who can’t be bothered with hundreds of existing laws.

Finally, as a cyclist and a pedestrian, I recognize that having more vehicles on the streets — particularly ones plying areas with high levels of foot traffic, and quite likely lots of drunk people stumbling around — will necessarily negatively impact road safety. (Deaths from cars and trucks outnumber gun deaths in much of the north side.) In a world where cities are finally now understanding the value of reducing vehicle traffic and returning public space to people, sending dozens more trucks out there just to feed a passing yuppie whimsy seems like a step back to me.

Quick: 31 July

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A couple of recent thoughts:

1. “Chicago’s transit system–the country’s second largest with an average 1.8 million riders every weekday–faces some of the nation’s most dire challenges. It has more than $7 billion in unfunded maintenance needs. On parts of the system, for example, trains engineered to speed along at 70 mph now must slow to a 15 mph crawl because the fragile rails can’t handle faster speeds. ‘They’re going at the speed of a horse and buggy because the rails are literally eroding and coming loose from the ties,’ says Ben Forman, research director for MassINC, a nonpartisan, Boston-based public policy think tank. ‘When transit breaks down as it has in Chicago, cities lose a big part of their core.’ ” [Zach Patton in Governing]

2. Dig up the Deep Tunnel? The Philadelphia Water Department, faced with the prospect of an $8 billion bill to deal with combined sewer overflow, has instead presented the EPA with a $1.6 billion green infrastructure plan that seeks to effectively de-pave 1/3 of the city’s impervious surface. Shades of Growing Water here… [h/t Feather O’Connor Houstoun in the same issue of Governing]

3. I’m know it’s so very trendy, but I really don’t understand the fascination with littering Chicago with food trucks. I’ve found them quite annoying in NY and LA:
– they don’t pay rent for the valuable public space they take up
– they unfairly compete with fixed-premise restaurants, particularly since Chicago suffers from many miles of empty storefronts
– they only go to trendy areas which already have lots of shops and foot traffic, thereby merely overcrowding existing transient hotspots and potentially preventing new areas from emerging
– they leave clouds of diesel fumes and noise in their wake, since they run generators even when idling
– they generate mountains of trash in said areas’ already-overflowing trashcans, since there’s no capacity for onboard dishwashing and few sidewalk recycling bins
– they’d be yet more unwieldy vehicles careening through the streets, killing people in crashes.

I certainly don’t dispute the overall goals to have broadly available, inexpensive food and easing the way for entrepreneurs to open foodservice businesses. However, these goals frankly have nothing to do with adding more smelly trucks to already choked streets. Seems like we’d be better off making it easier for people to open small restaurants — perhaps through establishing public markets, or “hawker centres” as Singapore’s government (which counts getting rid of itinerant food vendors as a key public health victory) insists on calling them.

4. A recent conversation turned to imagining the office drama at the planning department in West Hollywood, “America’s First Gay City”: the setting almost seems worthy of a TV series on a gay cable channel. Perhaps a workplace sitcom riffing on “Parks and Rec,” with hilariously micromanaging interior decorators staffing the design review commission, or a drama combining the personal dramatics of [well, just about any gay drama] with a noirish view of (lightly fictionalized) viciously seamy municipal politics. Unlike popularizations of planning like SimCity, this would expose planning not as a bland technocracy, but as a bunch of jealous hacks playing out their inter-personal political dramas across a bigger stage.

Anyhow, the thought reoccured to me upon finding that the vice-chair of WeHo’s transportation commission is perhaps better known as the former author of Boi from Troy, a blog combining Log Cabin Republican political views with a passion for local college football(ers). Actually, I’m pretty sure that WeHo is a pretty well governed place, and its fussy attention is evident in some pretty thoughtful streetscapes — but it’s still funny to imagine.

5. Where in today’s Republican Party are honest-to-god “fiscal conservatives” like Peter Peterson and David Stockman and Bruce Bartlett? What I see on Capitol Hill now is a group of nihilist zombies, holding even the smallest of bills hostage as fiscal death (most notably the recent $34B unemployment extension) while simultaneously seeking to blast a 100X bigger hole in the budget with their sacreder-than-Jeebus tax cuts. These people can’t be serious, and yet they are.

Bartlett: “Republicans have a completely indefensible position on taxes. In their view, deficits cannot arise from tax cuts. No matter how much taxes are cut, no matter how low revenues go as a share of GDP, tax cuts are never a cause of deficits; they result ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY from spending—and never from spending put in place by Republicans, such as Medicare Part D, TARP, two unfunded wars, bridges to nowhere, etc—but ONLY from Democratic efforts to stimulate growth, help the unemployed, provide health insurance for those without it, etc. The monumental hypocrisy of the Republican Party is something amazing to behold.”

Cycling Rantzausgade

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Cycling Rantzausgade

Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Click on the link for a video of a retail street in the Nørrebro area in western Copenhagen. About one block behind is a chokepoint (as it crosses a greenway) which doesn’t allow cars or motorcycles past — only buses and cyclists can go through — but the shops still do fine with just local traffic circulation. The video stops at the intersection with Aboulevard, the main artery into Copenhagen from the west: it’s not a freeway, it has separated bike lanes, and during my quick observation about 25% of the vehicles even there were bikes.

This is what I mean by cycling there being an "effortless revelation."

What I’m reading today

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[This started short and got quite lengthy. Maybe I’ll break off parts later.]

1. Citywide bike sharing arrives in the Midwest this week when Nice Ride launches in Minneapolis, using Bixi technology. (I had hoped to be there for the launch, but it looks like I’ll be there in July instead.) Interesting: (1) BCBS is the lead sponsor and (2) the city is not resting on its laurels (the article finds that the communitarian Minnesota culture is the key factor); the bikeway network is due to grow by 30% this year.

2. Jeff Speck in Architect uses the same taxonomy of New Urbanist critics — which he calls Lib[ertarian], Mod[ernist], and Saint — that I incompletely delineated in an earlier study of “Additional Myths About New Urbanism.” I used right, avant-garde, and left, but the themes are the same. Nice point in his final paragraph, addressing the Saints: new urbanism is a reform movement, not a revolutionary movement. We can’t fix everything all at once since we don’t aim to; it’s incremental change, not an entirely new world order.

Which reminds me: an offhand remark by Andres Duany about how crowds of suburban teenagers can “love the city to death” — suffocating the diversity of uses and people in the Sunbelt’s few-and-far-between urban oases — has drawn a storm of the same old Saint/Mod criticisms (only this time some bloggers are taking it personally!) about NU being exclusionary, authoritarian, static, hopelessly middle-class and middle-aged and middle-brow.

The answer to such critics is the same. Reform takes time, places evolve, and diversity must be managed as it’s actually not the natural order of human ecology. The same critics enthralled with “emergent, incremental, accretive” urbanism haven’t the patience to let Kentlands’ trees grow in, don’t understand that New Urbanists seek not to take away great places but to create new places that will, in time, evolve into great ones. Or, as I’ve said before, “today’s Old Urbanism was yesteryear’s New Urbanism, and therefore that today’s New Urbanism, in due time, will be tomorrow’s Old Urbanism… time is the most necessary ingredient to create the ‘authentic urbanism’ that many critics of New Urbanism cite in false opposition to NU.” In other words, give us a hundred years.

Of course, Duany doesn’t speak for the entire movement, and his admiration for civil libertarian’s bugaboo of Singapore — which actually does a better job than the USA of guaranteeing its citizens human rights like health, housing, education, and safety, not to mention protection from rights violations — is not exactly a plea for tyranny. I disagree with Duany about democracy’s utility: not a surfeit of democracy per se, but rather a fake populism that empowers a vocal [small-c] conservative minority, has impeded urban evolution.

3. Speaking of history and democracy, Charles Siegel writes about “Unplanning” over at Planetizen, arguing to some extent that planners caused the auto domination of American cities — whereas politicians should have kept them in check. While that may be true around the margins — different cities on the same continent have chosen rather different paths towards relative auto domination, as Patrick Condon (links to PDF) points out — my own reading of history (relying on Peter Norton here) says otherwise. Auto domination was a conscious political choice made in the 1920s, before the era of professional planning (or rather, traffic engineering), by political elites who sided with affluent auto drivers in their fight to claim road space from working-class pedestrians and middle-class transit riders. Indeed, overt attempts to politically legislate exactly the slow-traffic conditions that he outlines failed miserably: a 1923 initiative in Cincinnati (placed on the ballot with 42,000 petition signatures) that would have mechanically prohibited autos from going faster than 25MPH went down to defeat after a furious campaign by the Auto Club and newspapers.

4. More history: an oral history documentation project of LA Chinatown during my grandfather’s era.

5. From The Atlantic‘s special city issue, a reminder by Benjamin Schwarz that “Manhattan never was what we think it was” — or what Village writers like Sorkin and Zukin think it was. The bohemian, deindustrializing Lower Manhattan (itself hardly static) that so many exhibit a false nostalgia for was “pretty much limited to the years of the LaGuardia administration,” and itself was quite an exception within a vast urban “agglomeration of mostly self-sufficient, inward-looking, lower-middle-class communities.” Yes, Jane Jacobs wrote convincingly about how that city worked, because she lived in it. Yet many take the wrong message away from Jacobs: the look and feel of the industrial city were just the backdrop; her principles say nothing about post-industrial gentrification. Jacobs loved watching systems emerge and evolve from market interactions; heavy-handed intervention was most certainly not her style.

Yet the paralyzed political climate that has resulted from empowered neighborhood “activists” (see above) has stunted urban evolution — always driven by markets’ creative destruction — in the name of this faux “authenticity.” These “activists” don’t realize that the problem they seek to solve isn’t with architects or planners or even with developers, it’s with “all that is solid melts into air” capitalism itself. There are ways around this, and I’m excited to see that authors like Matt Hern get this and are doing something about this: shutting down streets and setting up collectives to reclaim space, not just a setting, for society. The planners, cops, and Tories he antagonizes turn out to be mostly reasonable people, doing pretty good work within a flawed system larger than all of them. Sure, he has his share of “can’t we all just get along” platitudes, but even those are grounded in a sense of possibility and progress. Perhaps it’s due to his base outside the Greenwich Village snowglobe, in a peripheral city simultaneously tossed about by globalization, blessed with a surprising degree of autonomy, and relatively unweighted by hidebound tradition. It’s a much fresher take on “finding real place” than I found in either Zukin or Sorkin’s books.

6. More authenticity: Hong Kong, which made an interesting decision to conserve and rehabilitate one of its original public housing blocks, will now preserve Wing Lee street. It gained notoriety principally for being an actual movie set, the only place where directors could recreate a feel of 1950s tenement life.

7. Just nudging urbanism along in California could cut CO2 emissions in half — and by 75% over a business as usual scenario, according to new research by Peter Calthorpe. The household savings angle is an interesting one to push: the less people spend on cars and oil, the more they’ll have to spend on houses — preserving the property values which are so incredibly paramount to California politics. Jarvis League, are you listening?

8. “You want to know who Sarah Palin is? She’s the False Maria in Metropolis! That’s who she is.” — Peter Trachtenberg

9. The world’s thirst for oil has outpaced humans’ capacity to “safely” (if we ever could) drill for (and burn) it. Sickening pollution is intrinsic to oil; the act of driving is drilling. And as we’re finding out, drilling technology has advanced faster than spill-cleanup technology. Boycotting one company won’t help; they all have tar and blood on their hands. Alexandra Paul at HuffPo:

There is a story about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if he stung the frog, the scorpion would drown as well. So the frog agrees to be carried on the scorpion’s back across the river. Mid-river, the scorpion stings the frog, dooming the two of them. As they are sinking, the scorpion explains, “I’m a scorpion; stinging is my nature.”

Ocean drilling is the nature of oil companies. It is what they do, even if it dooms us all. We can be angry about how they are ineffectively dealing with their mess, but in the end, BP is drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas for one reason only: we need the oil they provide.

Oh, please.

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Oh, please. Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

What purpose does this stop sign serve? There is no cross traffic to stop for at School & Clifton in Lakeview.

This stop sign, and thousands more throughout Chicago, exist not to promote traffic flow but to make drivers obey the speed limit and yield to pedestrians. Instead of creating more and useless rules (which do have consequences — like impacting the way bikes move through the city), how about honoring and enforcing the ones that we already have?

As a cyclist who respects safety and order, I resent being obligated to constantly break the law in order to stay safe. I find it unconscionable that regulations have turned cautious road users into outlaws, while rewarding dangerous behavior (like zooming between stop signs, something today’s cars do with ease). Street regulations — like laws about, say, marriage — should change to accommodate harmless and socially accepted behavior.