A very long time ago (it looks like June 2000), I wrote a college paper about the history of Illinois Center and Lakeshore East. Since someone asked about it, I’m going to post it. There may be more in “City Building,” the recent monograph of SOM’s urban design projects.
Note: the footnotes and formatting are broken. That happens.
Once again, the killjoys are looking too narrowly at a fun event. DC may have many acres of park space, but the vast majority of it is inaccessible to its residents on a daily basis — cut off from the city by highways, hillsides, rivers, and too often security fences. Unlike metered parking spaces, those park spaces aren’t located right at the heart of the neighborhoods where we work, shop, and live.
More broadly, Streetsblog DC calls Park(ing) Day a “global demonstration about all the ways we can use curbside space besides automobile storage.” It’s a chance to have a thoughtful dialogue about what else we could use curbside space for, and to get a chance to see just how huge cars are relative to the other elements of our urban environment. We don’t often get a chance to see just how much other stuff can fit into the space occupied by one car — a dozen bikes? a picnic table? a kindergarten class? a City Council?
San Francisco has made Park(ing) Day permanent in many locations throughout the city by allowing businesses (and residents!) to rent curbside spaces annually. Many of them have become elegant sidewalk cafes, some house bike parking, one has a curious dinosaur themed garden. All of them offer something rewarding and engaging to walk past, and many offer the city’s economy more of a boost than yet another parked car would.
It’s not as if street parking has always had the Divine Right of Kings, either. Way back in 1924, in a paper entitled Suggestions for Relief of Street Congestion, a Chicago engineer supported banning curbside parking entirely: “It seems unreasonable that a comparatively few people can utilize the most valuable street space in our cities, practically at will, for their own pleasure and convenience and to the serious inconvenience of thousands of their fellow citizens.” (Norton, Peter. 2008. Fighting Traffic. Cambridge: MIT. p. 141.)
[posted to GGW]
A few notes I took at Charles Waldheim’s speech (the “LU vs. NU throwdown“) at CNU 19 in Madison:
1. Charles Waldheim didn’t show the same fangs towards NU in his talk that he has in his articles.
2. More about the “hegemony” of NU? Perhaps in theory, but anyone who talks like that merely shows how divorced ivory tower academics are from the practice of building tract houses, strip malls, and office campuses. It’s a huge world out there.
3. Waldheim takes credit for certain projects which aren’t quite what they seem. The High Line is a gold-plated park which works in that particular high-density context — but as Jane Jacobs points out with her discussion of small blocks vis-a-vis Park Avenue and Rockefeller Plaza, any new north-south route within the oversized Manhattan grid will create exceptional value. That goes double for the High Line, since NYC pursued a density-transfer approach that stacked even more buildable value along the High Line. It’s a proto-NU approach.
His slides only showed the Lower Don Lands project in Toronto as anything on the site (excepting the UDA-designed project just upstream) that included new urban fabric — and the urban design was by Ken Greenberg, who is a bona fide New Urbanist. Their proposal is a prime example of placing Buildings In Space without regard to the pedestrian connections or urban space between them; the landscape doesn’t allow the nodes of fabric to be contiguous, and the buildings’ jaunty angles don’t appear to have any rhyme or reason. Taking credit for the TTC’s carbon efficiency, and by extension the hydroelectric plants upstream, is manifestly cheating.
4. To complement point #1, he didn’t show the sorts of plans featured in the various LU books and journals — of fragmented separate-use, low density pods isolated by shards of landscape, resembling nothing so much as 1980s golf-course or marina subdivisions.
1. Is WaPo Style really writing about “hipster glasses”? [Original article by Ned Martel.] I had a bear of a time with my most recent glasses purchase, ultimately reverting to special ordering a pair of frames that I’d seen a while back in Chicago. They’re a tad larger than my last pair, with which I was explicitly rejecting the aviator-sized frames that were then just coming into vogue. I’ve never liked that style: the outside corners hide the cheekbones and magnify any under-eye puffiness.
Glad to hear that “the nation’s public wonks[‘] glasses are getting smaller and smarter,” although as long as I’ve known MSNBC’s foxy Chris Hayes, he’s always worn little, squarish glasses. (Hopefully, this is the only article which compares him to Eric Cantor and Milhouse.)
2. “Flood insurance is the federal government’s second-largest fiscal liability after social security,” writes Jay Gulledge for Pew Climate. Unfortunately for the Know-Nothings, that particular ledger item will not magically decline anytime soon.
3. Speaking of the Know-Nothings, the Skeptical Teacher decries how their maddening contempt for science continues to spill into ever more policy matters. In particular, unverified anecdotes appear to be the basis of public health policy.
4. Hmm! A new idea for a DC bicycle tour, maybe incorporating interpretive performance art: famed local sex scandals. I’d add Marion Barry’s hotel room(s), the 14th St whore march, and infamous bygone strip clubs.
The Bixi bike share system chosen by NYCDOT is a proven platform that addresses a lot of concerns that New Yorkers might have about bike sharing. Thefts have been low in recent Bixi installations; 0.0002% of bikes checked out in London over the first year never returned. The footprint of the system is pretty well centralized, which will ensure that plenty of daily users are around to foot the bill.
My principal concern with launching bicycle sharing in NYC is that it will be very difficult to keep the bikes/spaces balanced, the biggest operational problem that’s emerged in urban bicycle sharing. Alta has acknowledged its challenge in DC and it’s been a leading complaint in London (watch the striking daily inflow/outflow here); so far, these are the two biggest CBDs that have bike sharing. The operational environment for rebalancing in all other bike-share cities is far simpler than in Manhattan.
Bike share works best in areas of medium-high density and very high mixed-use, since it requires that a large number of people circulate bikes around the system, around the clock. That way, the bikes naturally circulate themselves without much intervention. Many European and Asian cities are organized in a way that’s fairly conducive to bike sharing. Their density curves are not that steep, and many neighborhoods have 18- or 24-hour street life. Moving a lot of people to a single point — i.e., very high density, single-use concentrations, is a job most efficiently done with transit whether that’s shuttle buses for sports stadiums or rail feeding a CBD. The capacity numbers speak or themselves: at any given moment, ~1200 people can use Capital Bikeshare, while Washington Metrorail runs enough trains at peak to move 153,000 people at once.
Even in London, the City is overwhelmingly mid-rise, and high-rise, office-heavy Canary Wharf is outside the bike share footprint. North American bike sharing programs so far are either in comparatively small cities (Minneapolis, Denver, a fraction of Toronto) or in cities with an exceptionally “European-style” mid-rise and/or mixed-use core (Washington, Montreal, that fraction of Toronto).
A bike share system attempting to serve Manhattan’s highly centralized employment density will be quite difficult to manage. DC and London both struggle with office cores twice the size of Montreal’s; NYC has a CBD that is seven times as large. A vast number of docks will be demanded within the office cores, where street space is already at a steep premium. Rebalancing vehicles will not be able to easily cycle bikes amidst streets already clogged with delivery vehicles. Without an ability to rebalance bikes, it will be difficult to find bikes in Brooklyn, or open docks in Midtown, during the day. Paying customers who are thus kept out of the system will get very upset.
What might work? Unfortunately, we can’t know which sites will have a fairly balanced flow of coming and going throughout the day, but that could be inferred based on observation of adjacent land uses. A high-density or vertical racking solution like the (as yet theoretical — I’ve only seen a mock-up) Bike Dispenser might come in handy for swallowing, or ejecting, vast quantities of identical bike-share bikes at key locations like rail terminals.
A class that I’m in this semester will investigate bike share rebalancing worldwide; keep an eye on the class blog for updates and the final report.
I recently got to ride with Tom Bertulis on Boston’s “Hubway”; he pointed to Seattle’s helmet law (among the few for adult cyclists in North America) as a serious impediment to introducing bike sharing there. I have to admit that although I wear a helmet 99% of the time with my own bike — since I keep helmets near my bikes and typically plan such trips — I often neglect to when riding bike share. Tom Fucoloro from Seattle Bike Blog notes bike share’s exemplary safety record, and (as Tom B. also did) Mexico City’s repeal of its helmet law in favor of bike sharing, to argue for at least modifying Seattle’s law.
Currently, the price of gas in the District of Columbia includes 18.4¢ in federal tax and 23.5¢ in local taxes. As many have noted, the rising per-gallon price of gas has reduced the purchasing power of excise taxes on gas, particularly as the rising price finally is inducing some price elasticity (i.e., more efficient cars and a switch to untaxed fuels like ethanol or electricity). Some have advocated that instead, the tax should be levied as a sales tax, or a percentage of the price.
Indexing gas taxes to the historic price of gas (as converting the tax to a percentage tax would do) makes the inflation-adjusted decline in gas taxes even more stark. It appears that retail prices were around 19¢/gallon in the 1930s, when 4-5¢ state gas taxes were in effect around here, plus the 1¢ federal tax; that implies that there was the equivalent of a 41% sales tax on gas during the nation’s deepest-ever economic depression. An equivalent tax on today’s typical DC gas price of $3.60 (of which $0.419 is tax) would result in a tax of $1.30/gallon and a “new” gas price of $4.48. To get back to such rates would require an 88¢ increase in the gas tax — not far off from Tom Friedman’s 2003 proposal for a $1/gallon, $110B-in-revenue “Patriot Tax.”
Of course, had gas taxes always been levied at these rates, prices would have been higher earlier, demand would thus be lower today, and the resulting prices would probably also be lower. Strange how that works.
[comment added to Matt Johnson’s post at GGW; the original post has the real and nominal gas tax rates in DC, Md., and Va. He also points out that cutting all of the “extraneous” pedestrian and bicycle programs from the USDOT budget would recover a tiny fraction of the money that could be raised by indexing the gas tax appropriately.]
I have little more to contribute to the discourse over the debt-ceiling debacle — part of the never-ending 2011 budget cutting season (partly a result of this Congress’ record low productivity and thus inability to pass even the most routine of budgetary measures) — so here’s a few quotes I’ve relished from this most recent debate between prudence and insanity:
Perhaps best of all, David Brooks:
If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases… This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.
But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.
The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.
The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.
But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures…
But while Reagan nostalgia endures, a number of Republicans have begun to admit the obvious: The Gipper would no longer be welcome on the GOP team. Most recently, Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (Calif.) called Reagan a “moderate former liberal . . . who would never be elected today in my opinion.” This spring, Mike Huckabee judged that “Ronald Reagan would have a very difficult, if not impossible time being nominated in this atmosphere,” pointing out that Reagan “raises taxes as governor, he made deals with Democrats, he compromised on things in order to move the ball down the field.”
The Economist‘s editorial:
Now, however, the Republicans are pushing things too far… The sticking-point is not on the spending side. It is because the vast majority of Republicans, driven on by the wilder-eyed members of their party and the cacophony of conservative media, are clinging to the position that not a single cent of deficit reduction must come from a higher tax take. This is economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical…
America’s tax take is at its lowest level for decades: even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when he needed to do so. And the closer you look, the more unprincipled the Republicans look…
Adam Levitin, a bankruptcy attorney in California, foresees a disaster in the newly rewritten Balanced Budget Amendment (and correctly wonders just how enforceable the amendment could be):
Here’s the true lunacy of the bill, it would require a 2/3s majority (by rollcall vote) in both houses for any bill to increase revenue. Let me repeat that again: any tax increase would have to be approved by a 2/3 majority in both houses. That’s a federal version of Proposition 13, the state Constitutional amendment that destroyed California by requiring supermajorities for tax increases. It effectively gives a selfish minority the ability to stymie actions that benefit the whole.
Robert Bixby, executive director of the original deficit hawks at the Concord Coalition, echoes the sentiment:
The whole point of a balanced budget amendment is to ensure that future generations are free to make their own fiscal decisions. It is inconsistent with that freedom to forever mandate a particular level of spending or to permanently favor spending cuts over revenue increases as the manner of managing these decisions.
A full schedule and maps have been posted for next week’s (free) events in Madison — both at Monona Terrace and at the Urban Project Lodge, where you can work hands-on with other urbanists on advancing the cause. See you there!
A few notes from yesterday’s Brookings event unveiling “Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America.”
– Over the course of the recession, household incomes have fallen by $2000 and now gas costs have increased by $1000. That’s quite a squeeze!
– By 2050, America will add 130 million people — equivalent to the 2010 population of every state west of the Mississippi.
– Interesting distinction (which they explore in the report) within the Sunbelt between Western and Southern cities. I knew (having grown up in a southern suburb) that Southern cities lagged in transit coverage, but it’s really quite striking just how awful the buses are down there.
– 70% of metro Americans have transit access at home, so when people say “I don’t live near transit, it doesn’t benefit me” they’re probably lying. Put more nicely, that’s a teachable moment, and agencies could market their services better.
– The online mapping tool‘s “travel time” feature kind of reminds me of Mapnificent, but with less elegant geography and with some other data layers available.
– Sec. LaHood, answering a question about how to sell his fellow Republicans on the mere idea of investment, underscored that “debt is one priority among many.”
– These are the “biggest cities” for those of us who have specialized occupations, despise long commutes, and refuse to drive to work; i.e., metros ranked by the number of jobs reachable by the typical transit served household within a 45-minute trip (and their metro population rank in 2010):
New York: 946,058 (1)
Boston: 346,424 (10)
Chicago: 317,096 (3)
Washington: 277,092 (7)
San Francisco-Oakland: 240,819 (11)
Los Angeles: 225,838 (2)
Philadelphia-Camden: 202,724 (5)
Milwaukee: 135,829 (39)
Minneapolis-Saint Paul: 130,967 (16)
Houston: 126,364 (6)
Seattle: 117,441 (15)
Baltimore: 106,384 (20)
Pittsburgh: 102,333 (22)
Three bigger themes worth exploring:
– Households appear to be increasingly sold on the value of transit access, but it seems that corporate decision makers need to learn about the value of transit accessibility. Regional chambers of commerce would be a good platform for this education — one example that comes to mind is the Metropolis Pledge — and perhaps also commercial real estate brokerages could play a role. Once upon a time, I worked for a company that was in the process of relocating a large number of workers away from transit; their internal surveys showed that many workers were displeased with the move, but employees were only consulted after the decision had been made.
– Last mile circulation does not appear cost-effective with standard metrics like farebox recovery ratio or passenger loads, according to Keith Parker from VIA in San Antonio. Yet this segment of the transit market is the prime PPP opportunity, whether in shuttle buses or TOD or whatever, since the last mile is where the real value capture opportunities lie.
– From an urban design standpoint, there’s been some discussion at past CNUs about workplace New Urbanism, and to broaden the typical definition of “mixed use” from the usual (residential with some retail and maybe a bit of office, all of which is fairly high-rent). It’s a little disingenuous to say that all workplaces can be brought near transit — many of the low-skilled industries that Brookings identifies as lacking in transit access are probably hopelessly dispersed or just rural (agriculture, forestry, mining, repair, construction). Seems like there’s plenty of scope to bring many mid-skilled industries (manufacturing, TCU) into the TOD fold.
The other day, I mentioned the Republican Party’s role in pioneering huge federal subsidies for national infrastructure investments, spurring centuries of enduring economic growth — and how it’s turned its back on that heritage, now attacking the mere notion of federal investment as “socialistic.”
Take a moment to closely consider the Pacific Railway Act ad the contrast to today’s small-bore politics gets even sharper. 1862’s Republican-dominated Congress wasn’t just preoccupied with a handful of terrorists on the other side of the world; it faced an enemy that had just stolen half the country and was just a few months into battling (and, at that point, winning!) an unfathomably costly and bloody war. That Congress allocated precious federal resources to literally lay the groundwork for a greater future for America — even at a time when it was unclear whether America even had a future.
Moreover, those first Republicans chose to create a giant federal entitlement scheme for snooty higher education — the Morril Land Grant Act — at a time when few Americans could possibly have comprehended widespread college enrollment. That investment, reinforced over the years by state appropriations, now spins off almost incalculable economic gains for the nation. They financed all this federal largesse with, naturally, new income taxes on the rich.
Later, in the Reconstruction years, the transcontinental railroad was lauded for creating publicly funded, make-work jobs for veterans — a noble cause which today’s Republicans denigrate as “buying jobs with borrowed money.” Yet that was never the point of the railroad: those employed veterans were building useful, lasting infrastructure, not ditches. Today, that same infrastructure continues to spin off billions of dollars in value, and continues to create private-sector jobs in ways that its builders could not have foreseen: the fiber-optic backbone paralleling the tracks makes possible companies like Amazon and Qwest, its sheer intermodal shipping capacity underlies UPS’s world-renowned logistics, the diesel-engine business was the basis for GE’s leading position in gas-fired electric turbines. Infrastructure investments don’t pay off next week, and they might not even pay off next year, but they ideally leave lasting benefits for the next generation. However, today’s GOP has made it clear that their vision for government is one that pays off their base now, while damning future generations (of taxpayers, of Medicare beneficiaries) to a nasty, brutish, and short life.
Since driving is in decline, perhaps removing car lanes for bike lanes could free up room on space-constrained urban streets. How much more traffic could these streets serve? In spite of grumblings to the contrary, bike lanes are much more efficient at moving vehicles than traffic sewers are. (Remember that bikes are vehicles, too.) Consider first that a single road lane can typically move at most 1,000-2,000 cars per hour — the upper end for expressways and the lower end for arterials. (Local streets move fewer than 1,000.)
Removing one car lane can create enough space for two buffered bike lanes, or for one bidirectional cycletrack. Each of those lanes, in turn, could easily move almost twice as many vehicles as each car lane:
[T]he saturation flow for a single 1-m (3.3 ft) to 1.2-m (4-ft) bicycle lane appears to be between 1,500 and 5,000 bicycles/hr with a majority of the observations falling between 2,000 and 3,500 bicycles/hr. (D. P. Allen, N. Rouphail, J. Hummer, J. Milazzo, TRR 1636)
In other words, converting one lane to a cycletrack can quadruple the capacity of that lane of traffic. It’s like adding three lanes of traffic, just with some paint. The inverse of that statement: even if the lane “looks” 75% less busy than the old lane of traffic, it’s still moving about as many vehicles and just about as many people (since average car occupancy is ~1.25).
Earlier, I’ve pointed out that young Americans aren’t quite in love with driving. Now, via WashCycle, a link to a 2006 Pew study (predating the current recession and $4 gas) with longitudinal evidence of general cooling in America’s love affair with the car. In 1991, people who “like to drive a great deal” outnumbered those who “consider [driving] a chore” by 50%; by 2006, those numbers had flipped. That cooling wasn’t limited to the young, either: “This decline over the past 15 years in enjoyment of driving has occurred among men and women, young and old, as well as in all regions of the country.”
(Page 4 of that report sets out reasons why people enjoy or dislike driving. It might be a worthwhile exercise for marketers of other modes to identify targeted responses to those rationales.)
west north 