a different Bucktown parking gripe

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The Bucktown Community Organization recently voted, 11-5, to support a zoning change requested by a developer proposing a retail and parking structure at 1615 N. Damen Ave. I stayed away since I’d had a long day at the office and didn’t particularly want to sprint back home just to get into a shouting match over parking, so now I’ll just vent like a typical paper-tiger blogger.

From a traffic, transportation demand management, land use, safety — from every single standpoint, this is a singularly awful place to put a parking garage. In fact, the forthcoming WPB plan unequivocally states: “In identifying locations for possible future parking lots, we concluded that the one location that is not appropriate is in the area of the Six Corners intersection.” We want people walking past our neighborhood’s shops to get to Milwaukee, North, & Damen [MN&D] — as opposed to driving right there; we can’t fit any more cars at the neighborhood’s most congested spot; and frankly, the neighborhood deserves better. State & Washington, or Michigan & Chicago, don’t have parking garages hulking over them, and neither should MN&D.

In the grand scheme of things, the number of spaces (around 100?) is pretty marginal; this is a good/bad or bad/good thing, depending on your perspective. It’s too small to materially affect “the parking problem,” and probably too small to really impact traffic flow in the area. (I guess the developer finally paid up and hired someone to do a traffic study, but no one’s actually read it — and of course the BCO couldn’t be bothered with such details.)

The “parking problem” is absolutely not one of under-supply. WPB’s plan recommends metering and better managing 1,200 on-street parking spaces and working with the owners of the 2,400 off-street parking spaces within WPB to better utilize their spaces. That’s 3,600 parking spaces right here in the neighborhood — the size of an 8 1/2-block parking lot, the size of a parking garage that could fill all 65 floors of 311 S. Wacker, twice the size of the Cumberland Avenue parking garage — and none of it is more than a 12-minute walk from MN&D. There’s very little economic rationale for standalone parking garages outside large downtowns and airports, and the same economic rules hold for Bucktown: construction costs are sky-high, and the competition is practically giving it away (free or for $0.25 an hour). The developer acknowledges this, and has claimed in earlier meetings that he wanted to do something better for the neighborhood than just another mixed-use building. I naturally stated that a mixed-use building would be ideal there and that there are many other ways to really give something back to the entire neighborhood.

Here are a couple of ideas, most of which are tax-deductible:
* Spruce up a nearby park, like Wicker, Ehrler, Churchill, Park #529 (Wabansia) — or create new parks, at a Bloomingdale Trail entrance or in one of the “living room” spaces identified along Milwaukee in WPB’s plan. This could be accomplished through a donation to the appropriate park Advisory Council (or TPL, for Bloomingdale) or to the Open Space Impact Fee fund for West Town.
* Help to establish a neighborhood bike share. Six locations would cost under $500K.
* Make retail space in the building available at below market rate for creative new businesses or neighborhood arts organizations; for example, moving the (nonprofit) Around the Coyote into a storefront gallery.
* Implement intersection improvements at MN&D, consistent with the recommendations of the WPB Plan, that will significantly enhance pedestrian safety and even traffic flow.
* Adopt the Damen station.

Use less… oil?

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Less Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

It’s come to this: an oil company (2nd largest American, 20th largest in the world) wants you to join them and "leave the car at home more."

Okay, this is surreal: Chevron has a a two-page spread version touting how 60% of its head-office employees are "riding bikes, and finding other ways to get to and from work." They even have a bus wrap in DC. Gee, I had no idea that I was doing Big Oil a favor by bicycling..?

(Chevron print ad in 15 Sep Wall Street Journal; obviously an expensive ad buy since it took up the four-page centerfold.)

Want to buy some swamp land?

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Not to denigrate the proud and sturdy neighborhood of Hegewisch, but this bothers me: a $28,000-per-house TIF subsidy (reported by Alby Gallun for Crain’s) to build nearly 1,000 houses in the Calumet swamps sounds like one of the worst wastes of taxpayer dollars ever. A TIF designed to bring industrial jobs back to a community slammed by de-industrialization is instead literally shoring up the sagging fortunes of some downtown developer. Said developer thinks that houses will sell for an average of $194,000 in an emptied-out neighborhood with foreclosures selling for $55,000, on the site of a trailer park that’s 80%+ vacant despite whole houses available for less than $28,000 — and just two miles from sites where the city spent funds from the same TIF to reclaim entire vacant subdivisions (apparently Everglades-style land speculation scams) for their proper use as wetland habitat.

Thank goodness that the golden age of TIF might just be coming to an end: the Central Loop TIF, “Daley’s favorite honey pot” (Greg Hinz for Crain’s), will indeed ride off into the sunset as planned this December. It’s not that TIF is a bad idea, but the city has short-sightedly used it to pay for individual development projects (for which many sources of private capital exist) and not for long-term, value-adding investments in neighborhood infrastructure (which requires public commitment).

In (resort) town without my car

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A good chunk of my vacation was spent in Jasper and Banff National Parks, the jewels of Canada’s Rocky Mountains. It was an interesting trip, partly because it was the first family vacation in a while that didn’t involve any cars — and in a very rural location, to boot. There were certainly troubles, but it turns out that, like Los Angeles (a streetcar metropolis which no longer has streetcars), the entire infrastructure for mass tourism in Banff was set up by and around the railroad. Especially in and around Banff, the Canadian Pacific built an extensive network of railroads, trolleys, hotels, resorts, towns — even a vast network of hiking trails leading uphill to refreshing teahouses. The rails now just carry Chinese container-loads, the trolley lines are now bike-and-bridle trails, and the roads are now crammed with lookalike rental RVs, but the spirit of William Cornelius van Horne’s railroad settlement hangs over the place just the same as Henry Huntington’s spirit permeates Santa Monica.

Our society will need to re-learn these techniques of place-making, not only to respond to a post-car future but also to a growing population that doesn’t want to drive while on vacation — or at least needs an antidote to the mind-numbing stress of the suburban daily grind. The century-old remnants of railroad tourism around Banff, though, are not unusual: many of North America’s resort towns were carved out of the scenery by (not just around!) railroads looking to drum up passengers; CPR’s president was not alone in declaring, “if I can’t export the scenery, I’ll import the tourists.” Many resort towns in the northeast retain their compact, railroad-era fabric: Kennebunkport, Wildwood, Key West, Santa Fe, and Santa Barbara, to name a few. Countless other American resorts grew up entirely in the sprawl era, as well — Daytona, Gatlinburg, Hilton Head Island, Palm Springs, Scottsdale, Branson — and higher gas prices have socked many of them, with Branson attractions (for example) reporting 10% declines.

Ski resort towns are the big exception to the postwar era’s resort sprawl, but possibly only due to basic practicality: the same challenging terrain that skiiers demand makes servicing sprawling development (almost) prohibitively expensive. Similarly, a lot of yesteryear’s resort towns were built on environmentally sensitive lands, and their ability to sprawl has been limited by environmental regulations or land protection. However, the ski towns just might offer us a way out of the mess. I know of at least one new consulting firm started by people who cut their teeth building (immensely profitable) ski towns — and have now moved on to the bigger challenge of building real towns in the suburbs.

Some early initiatives to promote wide-scale car-free travel have appeared in progressive (and scenic) jurisdictions. Quebec recently debuted, to much fanfare, a province-wide Route Verte network of scenic bike routes — complete with a network of certified-bike-friendly B&Bs along the way. Switzerland has gone even farther, incorporating walking and boating routes into a new national route network.

[Adapted from a comment left at TNAC Daily, title is a play on the Car-Free Day {yesterday!} slogan, In Town Without My Car]

Even less

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Even less Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Hey there! Long time no blog. Well, I was away for about a month and such.

The U.S. government is about to spend $1,000,000,000,000 or so buying up "toxic sludge," much of which finds its physical form (in however convoluted a manner) as now-worthless suburban sprawl. What if the nation had, ten years ago, decided that we spend a trillion dollars along these principles instead? Would we be better off today? Now, just how efficient are markets at optimally allocating capital again?

(This poster is on the side of the Denver Dry Goods building, an early rehab completed by Jonathan Rose Companies.)

Globe

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Among the nice things about vacationing in Canada is seeing the Globe & Mail. Two fragments from Friday’s (5 September) issue:

Marcus Gee: “For years, the LDP [Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party] has been less a political party than a machine for distributing patronage, rewarding supporters with subsidies, contracts, and other pork.” And how does this differ from the RDO?

John Ibbitson writes of the US election: “Karl Rove… got his former boss, President George W. Bush, re-elected in 2004 by persuading enough Americans that their nation was divided into two camps: Decent folks with conservative values and plenty of common sense; and dangerous, urban liberals who would impose Big Brother at home and expose the country to danger from abroad.” The choice in this election could not be clearer for America’s cities.

Back to school

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This somehow passed me by (although CBF did report on it): Saint Xavier University, on the southwest side, will launch a campus bike sharing scheme this fall.

“Over the summer, the University will install the SXU Green Bike Program, providing 65 European pedal bikes that can be automatically checked out 24 hours a day, seven days a week with a Cougar card and returned to any of several computerized docking stations around campus. The first 15 minutes between docking stations will be free, and patrons can use cell phone technology to more easily arrange for a bike.”

I’ll see how it works on an upcoming visit to London, where “OYBikes” are available throughout the west end. The procedure sounds a bit fiddly — check online for available bikes (stands only house three), push some buttons, call in, enter two randomly generated codes, tug on the lock — but the price is right (£10 initial deposit, first half-hour free, £8/day). One interesting bit: they’re shaft-driven (and thus chainless).

OYBike also sites bikes at many train stations run by French utilities group Veolia, which in turn has introduced its own sharing scheme.

Edit 1 October: the Sears Tower has started a free bike share scheme, with tenants reserving time online for three bikes — or two shared I-Go cars.

Edit 20 October: there are 75 campus bike-sharing/bike-lending programs nationally, according to the AASHE (protected link; Google cache here), but St. Xavier’s is the first such “smart” scheme. Most others rely on cheap student labor with manned check-out desks, which seriously impede spur-of-the-moment and short-trip use but which might be appropriate for occasional weekend use.)

Modest punishments

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Since the citizenry (as exhibited, for example, in blog comments following the incident at Seattle’s Critical Mass in July) is crying out for a vigilante response to the menace of bicyclists blocking traffic, I hear that state legislators have passed a bill declaring “inhibiting the free flow of traffic” to be a capital offense — punishable by cruel and unusual forms of the death penalty (like, for instance, having one’s bones crushed by a speeding car and then left to bleed to death in the middle of the road). Let’s see what kind of “appropriate” punishments have already been meted out just in the first few minutes after the new law’s passage:

double parking
Double parkers, like the violator being dealt with here, no longer receive “the Denver boot.” Instead, the “Spanish boot” was applied: “high boots made of spongy leather had been placed on the culprit’s feet, he was tied on to a table near a large fire, and a quantity of boiling water was poured on the boots, which penetrated the leather, ate away the flesh, and even dissolved the bones of the victim.”
(photo: toner/Flickr)

Tow Away Zone
For the crime of standing in a No Parking/No Standing/Tow Zone, the delivery truck driver was “estrapaded”: “they raised the victim, with two hundred and fifty pounds attached to his feet, to the ceiling by means of a capstan; he was then allowed to fall several times successively by jerks to the level of the ground, by which means his arms and legs were completely dislocated.”
(photo: Thingo/Flickr)

red light runner
The driver of this car, which ran a red light and caused a crash which tied up traffic, was executed by the wheel: “a rope was attached to each of the limbs of the criminal, one being bound round each leg from the foot to the knee, and round each arm from the wrist to the elbow. These ropes were then fastened to four bars, to each of which a strong horse was harnessed… These horses were first made to give short jerks; and when the agony had elicited heart-rending cries from the unfortunate man, who felt his limbs being dislocated without being broken, the four horses were all suddenly urged on with the whip in different directions…” You can guess how that ended.
(photo: SFPD via SF Weekly/The Snitch)

blocking the crosswalk
This driver drove past the stop line and into a crosswalk, thereby blocking the free flow of pedestrians through the intersection. The driver will be dragged “from the prison to the place of execution upon an hurdle or sled, where they are hanged till they be half dead, and then taken down, and quartered alive; after that, their members and bowels are cut from their bodies, and thrown into a fire, provided near hand and within their own sight, even for the same purpose.”
(photo: Brother Grimm/Flickr)

(Gory medieval execution details excerpted from The Middle Ages Website)

Cross purposes

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The Twin Cities have an image problem. A national survey conducted by FutureBrand on behalf of the corporate community — facing the prospect of a critical labor shortage in a “creative class” economy — found that Americans have a fairly negative perception of the area. In particular, respondents “describe the area as quite conservative,” ranking it second most conservative, second least liberal, and last on an array of positive attributes like sophisticated, cultural and artistic, unique, multicultural, livable, youthful, economically vital, flourishing and vibrant, alive, fun and exciting, when compared to six peer areas (the others being Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Denver and Seattle). So, the corporations looked to the area’s large advertising industry to help with a comprehensive branding campaign, “aiming to change perceptions of our community, attract and retain talent as well as visitors.” Little & Company provided some fresh-looking, if somewhat predictably boosterish, creative to introduce the brand as Minneapolis Saint Paul: More to Life.

Looking up

Ironic, then, that the exact same ads which attempt to dispel “too conservative” prejudices by trumpeting the area’s performance artists (among other things) are being used as talking points for media covering… the Republican National Convention. Someone [h/t Wonkette] even amateurishly pasted an elephant into several of the spots in an effort to make the campaign relevant to the right-wing hoohah.

And the capital bill gets worse

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Of course the capital bill from hell (or at least deepest, darkest Southern Illinois — close enough) has morphed into an even worse beast. We have Governor Goofy in charge; what else was I expecting?

The old $34 billion capital bill [pdf] lavished $16.4 billion on IDOT’s Pave All Illinois program, and an additional $1 billion for local governments to sign right on over to the paving companies. Because, you know, drivers are driving less, so we need even more roads to entice them to drive more again, or something like that. The bill also allocated $5.3 billion into transit and rail, which is about half of the money needed just to bring Northeastern Illinois’ transit system back into adequate condition.

The new, improved, 26.5%-smaller capital bill [pdf] might address some of the equity concerns that I had by removing the Chicago-money-suck (er, casino) from the funding plan, but now the funding levels are $14.4 for his pals the asphalters and $3.4 billion for transit and rail. For those keeping score at home, that’s a 12.2% cut in cement — and a 35.8% cut in rail and transit. The funding ratio went from a dreary 3:1 to a dismal 4.2:1.

Yeah, thanks a lot for nothing, G-Rod. Keep it coming.

Of course, there’s a lot that’s fundamentally wrong about the pavement emphasis in the bill: roads are simply the wrong answer. Roads are the wrong emphasis for a bill that G-Ro(a)d ostensibly keeps rah-rahing as a way to create jobs; mass transit generates many more jobs per dollar. Further, IDOT has infamously assumed that the nonstop VMT growth of the past 50 years will continue forever in a straight-line fashion, and thus that the demand for roads will insatiably grow into perpetuity — long after everyone is spending 24 hours a day driving. Of course, they’re wrong; VMT growth hit a wall several years ago and recently went into sharp reverse.

vmt growth has hit a wall

(Courtesy Joseph Romm/Climate Progress/Gristmill)

Playing chicken

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1. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because s/he has the right of way in the crosswalk, dang it! [Photo: Chris Brunn, via Flickr]

Northwest Chicago Drive with Care Rally-2.jpg

2. Something’s amiss here: Michigan’s governor now bikes to work, while Illinois’ governor still takes a private jet. [Tim Jones reporting in the Trib via bike blog]

3. How good is the bike business these days? Clever, a utility-focused shop in Portland, is going on a two-week hiatus — partly because they’ve plumb sold out.

4. Why is Mexican food ubiquitous in Chicago but scarce in NYC? The quick answer is that Illinois has the third-largest Mexican population of any state (after California and Texas) whereas New York is 11th, between Georgia and North Carolina. But this surprised me:

Hispanic/Latino population of New York City.: 2,267,827
Mexican: 260,622

Hispanic/Latino population of Santa Ana, Calif.: 351,894
Mexican: 254,794

(Source: 2006 Census ACS)

5. Of all the neighborhoods in Chicago, the office of tourism chooses to highlight Wicker Park in its Summer in Chicago promotion — and does a pretty good job of it.

6. “Broadway Boulevard” will add about 3,000 sq. ft. of open space per block (about half an acre in total) using semi-temporary treatments, at a cost of about $2M/mile. The Times describes the treatment thusly: “painting the bike lane green, buying the chairs, tables, benches, umbrellas and planters and applying a coat of small-grained gravel mixed with epoxy onto the pedestrian areas, which will set them off from both the street and the bicycle path.”

7. A recent Obama-on-the-trail puff pieces in the Times displayed this bit of transect-awareness on the candidate’s part:

Many of the regional distinctions in the United States, he said, “in terms of culture, politics, attitudes, people,” have been muted. After 18 months of traveling extensively across the country, he said, “the biggest differences have more to do with rural, suburban, urban, as opposed to north, south, east or west.”

8. Alderman, there might be a reason why you’re not in the real estate market research business — or, apparently, the “reality based community.” Tom Corfman in Crain’s:

Alderman Anthony Beale (9th) prefers a smaller development of about 200 homes with prices between $350,000 and $500,000, well above the 2007 median price of $124,500 in Pullman… “We are going to build a suburban community within the city,” says Mr. Beale, whose ward includes the Ryerson site. “We’re looking at curved (streets), a gated community, the attached three-car garage.”

9. Someone arrived at this blog yesterday looking for “why cities grow to the west.” What I had heard is that, in Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes at least, prevailing winds blow from the west. Therefore, the freshest air to be found in an industrial city would generally be found in the western part of town. Obviously, this is not always the case (in NYC, still fresher air can be found by the ocean, which is southeast, and many other cities there are still-stronger “nice” draws like lakes or hills to the east), but it might partially explain why the “favored quarter” often sits west of town.