Regional briefs

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1. After having looked at literally thousands of plans for New Urbanist developments around the world, I learned to to groan and roll my eyes whenever one had either (a) a green semicircle or (b) a “promised rail transit line” somewhere on the plan. These were cliches that every plan seemed to have, and those promised transit lines never actually seem to materialize.

Now, here we have a plan that was designed around a “promised rail transit line” — so much so that the retail and high-density residential are at the middle of the neighborhood, much to their detriment, instead of along the arterial at the edge — and now the promised transit is coming so late in the game that it’s facing NIMBYs from within the walkable neighborhood: “Rockville City Council votes to reroute CCT out of King Farm.”

Unlike yesteryear’s streetcar suburbs, we now can’t put the tracks in first. Today’s cost-effectiveness measures rightly demand that transit go where people live today, instead of where they might be living tomorrow.

2. A thought: bikeshare came in quite handy for a short trip out of town — I left via bus, from Chinatown, and returned via trail, into Union Station, and bikeshare is perfect for trips like that (different start and end points, falling outside usual transit operating hours).

While I was in Crystal City a few weeks ago, I noticed that there’s a bikeshare station near the airport access road ramp — which gave me an idea. Since National Airport is right next to the Mount Vernon trail and already has bike racks, couldn’t I use bikeshare to get to a flight out of/into DCA? Many flights — late weeknight or early weekend — fall outside Metro service hours.

The trouble is, all of the stations are on the west side of the CSX/GW Parkway corridor and the trail/airport are on the east, with few ways to cross. The two ways to do this now (until MWAA decides to add a bikeshare station within DCA, perhaps as an employee incentive) appear to be:
– Exit the Mount Vernon trail at the Aviation Circle “cloverleaf” and park the bike near the Crystal City metro. Walk back along the trail and Aviation to the parking lots and the airport.
– Ride around Crystal City, looking for a hotel with an airport shuttle parked out front. Return the bike near the hotel and hop on the shuttle. Tip the driver. (I don’t feel all that guilty about using hotel services since I do frequently stay in hotels, but others might disagree.)

3. Sadly, that brings me to this (during Restaurant Week, no less): “goddammit, DC is the worst food scene ever. anywhere else in the US this is just airport food and airport prices!” — seen on Wonkette

4. It seems that the most popular uses of Capital Bikeshare so far are for entertainment trips, rather than work trips. The densest routes are within the DuPont-Logan-U Street triangle, with intra-Capitol Hill and DuPont-Adams Morgan-Columbia Heights as other important corridors. I’m also surprised at how many trans-Potomac trips it’s getting, given that the pricing structure discourages such long trips.

Also interesting from Arlington’s transportation blog: planners are now soliciting public ideas for how to improve bike routes parallel to Columbia Pike. The Pike itself is undergoing a transformation into a transit boulevard, with wider sidewalks but without bike lanes; perhaps bike boulevards alongside the road (as along Shattuck in Berkeley or Broadway in Vancouver) can help make the corridor work better for all modes.

5. An updated version of a comment defending the notion of a new high-speed rail corridor in the Northeast from uninformed attacks at Megan McArdle’s blog.

1. New Jersey includes a lot of rural areas, like Cape May. The metropolitan counties that line the Northeast Corridor have a population density of 982/sq. mi., and growing (unlike Germany) to a projected 1,248/sq. mi. by 2040. Japan is blanketed by solidly profitable high-speed rail, reaching even its most distant corners, and has a population density of only 870/sq. mi.

2. High-speed rail turns operating profits all over the world, from France and Spain to Taiwan; in fact, even Acela generates an operating profit. Amtrak’s proposal for a new high-speed Northeast Corridor predicts an operating surplus of nearly $1B a year in 2040, and the medium-speed continuation south to Charlotte is similarly expected to turn a net profit.

Acela, in fact, is quite profitable for Amtrak. Preliminary 2010 figures put the operating margin at 29%, or $130.7 million, and revenues grew 16% over the past year. The rest of the Northeast Corridor regional services run at about break-even on this basis. (Amtrak excludes OPEB, capital, and other costs, so these are not readily comparable to airlines’ financial reports, and airlines obviously don’t report profitability on a corridor or route basis.) To put 2010 into perspective, airfares in some northeast city pairs (Boston-Washington, for instance) have been exceptionally low, the NEC was washed out by the Rhode Island floods, and the northeast’s intercity bus market has grown tremendously — and yet Amtrak’s existing and slow services are doing just fine.

3. No, high-speed services will not repay their capital costs. Very few passenger transportation investments do. The first railroad boom in America was underwritten by a giant speculative bubble which cost investors dearly, even after receiving immense federal subsidies in the form of land grants. Similarly, most older rail transit systems in the USA were built by real estate developers, hucksters, or both. Over the course of history, airlines have lost their investors countless billions even though they only pay a fraction of their capital costs — and create significant negative externalities (pollution) while operating with less than amazing reliability.

The subsidies that the public sector extends for infrastructure are repaid to the public in that they enable productivity gains that lead to greater economic growth down the road, so to speak. Which brings us to:

4. A growing population and growing economy (the Northeast’s GRP will double by 2050, assuming no constraints [like traffic] to growth) creates more demand for passenger travel. How do you propose to shoehorn ever greater passenger numbers down I-95 and through JFK? Or do you intend to stop economic growth in the Northeast, and thus for 20% of America’s economy? Isn’t unconstrained economic growth the Republican mantra?

Or, if you do wish to allow the Northeast to continue to grow and therefore assent to spending billions on transportation corridors, why would you not want to spend public funds on the mode which can deliver the most capacity, at the highest speed, with the best safety and reliability record, between the highest-value (highest productivity) center-city locations, at the least cost? Right now, we’re coasting off of infrastructure investments made 50 or 100 years ago (no new Hudson road tunnels have been built in 53 years, and no rail tunnels in the past century) — that’s only possible for so long before new investments need to be made to maintain and upgrade what’s there.

Moving 50 million riders a year, as a new Northeast high-speed rail line could do, would cost vast fortunes to do in cars, buses, or planes. Consider that the DCA-LGA-BOS airline shuttles move just 3 million passengers a year, that their use is eroding, and that the billions being spent on the region’s airports will just maintain today’s unacceptable delays. I-95 is about 450 miles from Boston to Washington. Adding surface-level HOT lanes to improve bus service in Virginia is costing about $136 million per mile; going to a double-deck format could almost double that. Doing this for the entire corridor would easily cost as much as a new railroad — Amtrak puts the cost of an entirely new NEC high-speed line at $70 billion — and at much lower speeds and much less safely.

5. Overspending on rural roads has persisted far out of proportion to need or any sense of equity. The Illinois DOT has long spent 40-45% of its statewide funds within the Chicago metro, even though the metro accounts for about 65% of the population, well over half the cars and fuel tax revenue, and has higher per-mile construction costs (due largely to that heavier traffic). As a result, bike lanes in Chicago carry more people over more potholes than smooth interstate highways downstate.

“Handshake houses” rooted in ancient villages

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air shaft Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Baishizhou is a chengzhongcun, a rural village that was conveniently in the way of Shenzhen’s urban explosion. The landowners in the village sold their houses piecemeal and mid-rise walk-ups rose in their place — turning what were already narrow village footpaths into tenement-like airshafts. Shenzhen residents call these “handshake houses,” since one could ostensibly shake hands with one’s neighbors across the “street.”

The buildings are ultimately temporary, their residents even more so, but the infrastructure and the settlement patterns that it fosters are much more permanent.

The contrast between the small-scale development within Baishizhou and the megablock development that the city government has pursued right outside the old village’s walls is incredibly clear in the satellite view.

Like the expanding cities of the industrialized world at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, Chinese villages are being absorbed into new urban structures. As in the West, the current rapid urbanization in China follows regular geometric patterns. Wide and straight roads form a large-scale grid of city blocks that accommodate sizable building footprints with high land utilization. If villages are encapsulated into the new urban fabric, the new regular urban pattern is interrupted by an obviously older pattern of narrow irregular pathways, small blocks and the occasional historic structure, frequently an ancestor’s hall or a shrine. Literally translated, ‘villages within a city’ can easily be spotted on drives through the recently built city extensions in Guangzhou and Foshan. The reasons why villages have become encapsulated into the expanding cities and why villages were not simply erased is related to historically defined [peasant land] rights [granted to village collectives in the wake of the 1949 revolution]. – P. C. Bosselmann et al, “The Future of a Chinese Water Village.” Journal of Urban Design 15:2 (2010), 248.

Thanks to Chris DeWolf for pointing me in this direction.

More views: approaching this point and the large-scale high-rise complex at the village edge.

Park(ing) Day All Year

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Sidewalk plus Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Rebar in San Francisco has made a global brand out of Park(ing) Day, wherein curbside space is appropriated for the day as public space for pedestrians. That action has convinced the city to allow a few cafes to rent out their curbside spaces for additional seating, and Rebar thoughtfully created this buffered zone for Caffe Greco in North Beach.

Using the curbside space for seating appears to be popular in French-speaking countries; I’ve seen it recently in Switzerland and Quebec. However, it appears to be difficult to do in Chicago, since said public space is no longer controlled by the public. (I would think a private vendor would be more inclined to take a “rent check,” but the lack of imagination all around has not been encouraging.)

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.”

Housing types

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Roger K. Lewis makes a less than compelling case for more family housing in DC-area TODs. Well, sure, greater housing diversity leads to more social diversity, which is always a good thing. This should probably be another lesson to learn from Vancouver (which requires a set percentage of “family housing”), although more could be done to ensure that such units aren’t restricted to penthouse apartments, giant empty-nester townhouses, or social housing.

These units also should not come at the expense of other, smaller DUs. Particularly in sunbelt areas like DC, the huge growth in smaller households — singles, couples, single-parent families — has not been adequately accommodated for in the past two generations of housing construction. Decades of severe disinvestment in cities, the places friendliest to smaller households, and the widespread imposition of snob zoning that discriminates against smaller units has undersupplied the market nationwide. That’s resulted in suboptimal outcomes for countless people who’d rather not be living with flatmates or housemates, who already find relatively few choices in the housing market, and who constitute much of the market demand for TOD.

Already in the District, less than 1/10 of households are couples with children. Even improving the local schools won’t do much to change this situation, since we’re in the midst of a baby bust (PDF warning): 1/15 of all new households in the entire region are couples with children — they’re almost outnumbered by single dads and roommate households (two very non-traditional household types), and they’re wildly outnumbered by singles (5.5 times as many) and childless couples (8.5 times as many). Delving further into the data, a cluster analysis published by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (the Bay Area’s MPO) shows that the market sectors that most value TOD attributes — transit quality, mixed uses, and regional access — really aren’t very child-centered. As far as their priorities for planning go, schools are pretty far down the list.

For blog: TOD market segments

In some ways, the District’s tiny households are just pointing the way towards America’s demographic mix circa 2050. Yet the District’s housing stock doesn’t reflect its tiny households; as planning director Harriet Tregoning says, “Part of the challenge is to right-size our housing stock so we can have the type of housing that matches the needs of our residents.” Much of that will involve building smaller units; one-third of the District’s housing is sized for the aforementioned families with children (Census 2000 SF3, number of bedrooms per unit):

DC unit sizes

– Speaking of townhouses (and “ground related housing”), here’s Townhouse Center — a website about, well, townhouses, including a blog and a useful library. (Via Mouzon.)
– And speaking of weird housing, two people have mentioned recently that I could escape high D.C. housing prices by living on a sailboat. (One of them also, not coincidentally, had a great deal on a sailboat.) So, I checked it out, and sure enough Gangplank Marina offers “liveaboard” slips just a mile south of the Capitol, in the re-renewing Southwest Waterfront neighborhood. The slip rental fee would end up around $600/month, plus utilities, and then of course there’s the small matter of learning how to sail and care for a boat.

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.”

Daley’s neglected big picture

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Mr. Daley’s classy and necessary decision to hang it up after 21 years in office was the right move — for himself and for Chicago. It truly is time for someone fresh and new to lead this great but troubled city. – Greg Hinz

The reign of Richard II was, in many ways, fine for Chicago. Yes, the city turned a corner from the post-industrial abyss it faced in the 1970s and 1980s. He was the right mayor to consolidate a broad political coalition and manage some truly remarkable shifts in the city’s demographics and economic base, but the wrong mayor for a new era of governance that requires extending those gains through smarter government.

Mayor Daley completely lacked any notion of strategic thinking and openly defied any outcomes-based planning. His small-bore, project-focused mentality prevented policies from taking root. He rewarded political connections and shrewd negotiations, not actual lasting change; he focused on what could be done this month, discouraging anyone from dreaming about the next decade.

Lynn Becker doesn’t mince words, either: How can you preserve and rebuild a great city on a single man’s whims?

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.