Category Archives: urban planning

The basin isn’t always so placid

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Blossomania! Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

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

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

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

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

quick quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Man behind the (sprawl) curtain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool ideas from TRB (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Late November shorts

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Indeed, it hit 70F today, so I did indeed wear shorts!

1. mqVibe looks interesting: it rates neighborhoods “in terms of edginess, residential, burbiness (i.e., how many chain businesses dominate the blocks), and other dimensions,” according to John Hendel in TBD. The rankings of local neighborhoods appear about right; will have to check out other cities’ rankings to see how it differs vs. Walk Score.

2. Old news, but since Fox News has instituted a rule stating that any discussion of global warming should be preceded by a “discussion of the debate,” I suggest another new rule: any report about radio waves (like those involving mobile phones) must also include a segment where a man in a tin foil hat presents the debate about whether such devices are actually government mind control waves. Hey, if you’re going to distort the science…

3. Street enclosure ratios make all the difference in the world — they could make even the worst excesses of mini-mall LA avenues look human scale. (Original: David Yoon)

4. “[J]ust about every one is complaining about bikes and stop signs. But the fact of the matter is, those stop signs are there to regulate speed, not right of way; two way stops actually do a better job of that. And bikes have a hard time beating the speed limit.” – Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger. Indeed, the 4-way stop is actually a very poor way of regulating right of way. In many cases, it’s difficult to tell who has the right of way, since “first to approach the intersection” and “first to get to the stop bar” are often different.

Mexico City: thoughts

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First impressions that I scribbled down about Mexico City:
– Wow, it is indeed high up. Bring some nasal spray to combat the sniffles.
– A great number of buildings are indeed askew, which did not help my occasional difficulty in descending stairs.
– Speaking of stairs, their metro is the only place where I have ever seen metal escalator treads worn down by heavy pedestrian traffic. Stone, sure, but wow!
– Also the only other place, besides Tokyo, where subway passages are given lanes — and the arrows have been planned to point you in the most direct route, getting everyone out of one another’s way. (This confused me at first in Tokyo, since the directional markers often added to the general confusion over whether to walk on the left or right.)
– The only useful thing about Polanco is its street names — scientists and poets.
– After being thoroughly disgusted with Polanco, I had no appetite to venture even further out (half an hour past the subway!) to the manufactured Edge City of Santa Fe. I’m pretty sure that the Google Earth view is more interesting, anyhow. Of course, it’s classic sectoral urbanism — the favored quarter just follows Reforma out, and out, and out… and demands more infrastructure as it goes.
– Subsidized gasoline must explain, to some extent, the popularity of monster SUVs and ancient gas-guzzlers alike.
– Something about the scale of the blocks downtown, their early-20th-century stone architecture, the wall-to-wall commerce, and the nonstop crowds reminded me more of Shanghai than of other large Latin American cities I’ve been to.
– Note that it’s early 20th century architecture; even though the city was settled almost 800 years ago, it was tiny up until the 20th century (and the postwar years in particular). In 1900, it scarcely extended for a few blocks past the Alameda.
– The overhead cost of providing so many security guards everywhere must add considerably to the cost of doing business. It is pretty reassuring, though, to have a few cops standing around on every block downtown.
– Amusing photo: Martha on an Ecobici! It’s heartwarming that bike-sharing is what the mayor of Mexico City shows off to foreign celebrities.

October shorts

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It’s no longer shorts weather, but quick links endure!

1. Capital Bikeshare just turned one, and surprisingly has doubled its initial ridership projections and is currently running an operating surplus. [via GGW/WashCycle]

2. Economists like Ed Glaeser (and Ryan Avent, although I haven’t read his new treatise; reviewed by Rob Pitingolo in GGW and Lydia in CityPaper) often make the mistake of overly simplifying how housing markets work. Instead, numerous other important factors complicate matters, including:
– as Rob points out, housing is a bundle of goods whose utilities vary for different audiences
– housing construction can induce demand, particularly by adding amenities to a neighborhood
– housing construction can also remove amenities from a neighborhood, like a low-rise scale, thus changing other intangibles included in that bundle of goods
– construction costs don’t increase linearly; rather, costs jump at certain inflection points, like between low- and mid-rise
– housing and real estate in general are imperfect markets, since land is not a replicable commodity
– the substantial lag time for housing construction, even in less regulated markets, almost guarantees that supply will miss demand peaks

Pro-active planning remains the best and most time-honored way of pre-empting NIMBYs. Get the neighborhood to buy-in to neighborhood change early on, and then they won’t be surprised and upset when it happens.

3. Very interesting to see (via Dan Mihalopoulos/CNC) that Inspector General Joseph Ferguson has put a lot of sacred cows on the table for increasing revenue in Chicago — particularly several implicit subsidies to drivers. A downtown congestion charge, tolls on Lake Shore Drive, a commuter income tax, privatized parking enforcement, higher water/sewer fees, and higher garbage collection fees all would substantially impact suburbanites, single-family homeowners, and drivers.

4. How important are street enclosure ratios? As this gallery of reconstructed L.A. traffic sewers shows, they’re so important that almost nothing else matters if you get them right. (Photo-illustrations by David Yoon.) Back when I was reading comments on LEED-ND 1.0, a lot of complaints centered on the street enclosure requirement; I think that thinking about such urban design factors is just foreign to the architects & engineers who typically do LEED submittals. Yet it’s absolutely fundamental to defining urban rooms.

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.”