A park in ten minutes

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18:16 Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Here’s a photo of Pilsen’s newest park, created (for the most part) in just ten minutes on Friday by a small group of local volunteers. More photos I took documenting its rise (and fall) are in this Flickr set.

Meg Gustafson took some great photos of the temporary (but very professional) Bloomingdale Trailhead park, just two blocks from my home, and other Flickr users have uploaded hundreds of photos from around the country of other public spaces temporarily liberated from cars. Props to TPL (like other land trusts, typically a pretty staid group) for embracing this bit of urban direct action. CBF was not so lucky, though.

A bicycling mayor

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On August 25, Donovan Slack reported in the Globe:

Now, the mayor has discovered bicycling.

Menino purchased a silver Trek road bike [the photo shows a Lime cruiser] three weeks ago and has been riding it regularly through his Hyde Park neighborhood. Each weekday at about 5 a.m., the 64-year-old mayor straps on a black cycling helmet and an arm band with red reflector lights and sets off alone on a leisurely, 45-minute pedal. He acknowledges that another public crusade is brewing.

“We’re going to do more in our city with bikes,” Menino decreed upon his return home from a ride yesterday…

“When I get more experienced at this, I’ll be able to ride the whole city,” he said, visibly excited during an interview in the kitchen of his Chesterfield Street home.

Not even a month later, Matt Viser reports…

A newly converted cyclist himself, Menino will announce today the hiring of a bike czar, former Olympic cyclist Nicole Freedman, and a first phase of improvements to include 250 new bike racks across Boston and an online map system. In the next several years, Menino said, he plans to create a network of bike lanes… Paths could also be constructed to connect the Emerald Necklace system of parks, and the mayor is looking at facilities like showers, bike storage areas, and automated bike rental systems that make wheels instantly available to anyone with a credit card.

That was fast. (The photo of Menino on his Lime should go on the cover of Trek’s new 1 World 2 Wheels advocacy materials.) Even compares favorably with San Francisco, where the mayor and seven of eleven supervisors rode in Bike to Work Day this year — where, at the peak of rush hour, inbound traffic on Market Street was 54% bikes, 42% cars, and 4% taxi, bus, or tram.

Passages

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One of the questions that our SSA commission has been wrestling with has been what to do with Mautene Court, a tiny, overlooked plaza just northwest of Milwaukee and Ashland. It was a stub street turned into a failed plaza, but construction all around it led to its recent closure. I’ve found a few examples of interesting precedents for this kind of “passage park”; most connect two streets, and Mautene has the potential to connect through the lot behind it to rapidly growing Division Street.

* Liberties Walk in Philadelphia. [My photos.] “Part of real estate developer Bart Blatstein’s plan to build an upscale artists’ community on his large property holdings in Northern Liberties. Blatstein designed [it] to be a mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented retail and residential corridor that would fit with the neighborhood’s architecture.” [PlanPhilly] A semi-critical article from when the plan was announced: [City Paper]

* Chess Park in Glendale, Calif. [Photos from Flickr] “The park is located in a previously underused passageway which runs between two retail shops in the Brand Boulevard business district, connecting a city parking structure to the bustling streetfront shops, restaurants, and theaters on Brand Boulevard, Glendale’s main thoroughfare.” [ASLA 2006 Awards]. An hour-by-hour photoessay about a day in the park’s life is in the September 2007 issue of Landscape Architecture magazine.

* Fruitvale Transit Village in Oakland, Calif. [My photos.] This one’s a little more problematic, a handsome two-block pedestrian street developed by a local CDC that was a bit too ambitious with the retail. Read more in New Urban News.

* The Distillery District in Toronto [photos] [previous post on business mix] is a historic industrial complex that has been renovated into an immensely popular, pedestrian-only arts and entertainment village, with galleries, shops, restaurants and cafés, performance and creative spaces, and now (after many years of development) high- and mid-rise condos. (Québec also has a number of lively pedestrian malls despite the bitter cold, like art-stall-lined Rue de Petit Champlain in Québec or restaurant-lined Rue Prince-Arthur in Montréal’s Plateau: [photo 1] [photo 2] [photo 3])

* In a more socioeconomically comparable neighborhood, Mozaic in swanky Uptown Minneapolis is a 2.5 acre site being developed as retail, entertainment, condos, and a boutique hotel in mid- to high-rises surrounding a half-acre plaza with “interactive fire and water garden.” [Flashy official site]

Another idea that’s been brewing, in a somewhat similar vein, is the notion of building a public market in the neighborhood — a citywide destination that promotes local entrepreneurs. I’ve always been a fan of a good market, but most of the famous ones are the cavernous, established downtown markets. So, I was surprised to find a 40-stall public market squeezed into about 10,000 sq. ft. in Viroqua, Wis., population 5,000. It’s not incredibly sophisticated, but it’s a great venue for entrepreneurs and a smart reuse of an existing space — an auto dealership with wood-truss vaulted ceilings, opened in 2004. Midtown Global Market is a better-capitalized new public market housing 60 larger vendors within an old Sears in South Minneapolis. Unlike those areas, though, Wicker Park has the added advantage of being termed as one of the higher-income “food deserts” in recent research (see presentation from Mari Gallagher here) — a neighborhood comparatively underserved by grocery stores.

Perhaps most interesting to this neighborhood is the Epicurious Garden [my photos], a stylish new food hall (think linear food court, or tiny and chichi public market), with ten small foodie businesses, recently opened a few doors from Chez Panisse in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. Most of the vendors face a short passage and offer takeout; around the edges are a wine bar, a classical tea house, a small garden (which still manages several seating options), and a cooking school.

Deregulation

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CarFree USA links to a video documenting how a busy Dutch intersection functions without any traffic controls:

Ted White explores the “shared space” concept in greater detail in Baltimore’s Urbanite. He points out that both the stop sign and stop light were invented in Detroit — ca. 1915 and 1920, respectively! The entire 1890s bicycle craze had passed by that point, and for decades urban streets had been happily and safely shared by pedestrians, cyclists, horses, and whatnot. Traffic regulations only became necessary once Model As began choking the streets, since cars’ size and speed makes them nearly incapable of civilly sharing the road.

As I’ve argued before, traffic controls were invented to tame automobiles — and requiring pedestrians and cyclists to follow the same rules is like playing a game of foursquare on a polo field. The old rules don’t work when you change the underlying space. Remember, the term “critical mass” comes from another Ted White, describing how cyclists just randomly self-organize at uncontrolled Chinese intersections. (Since China has fewer cars, they also have fewer traffic controls. Funny that.)

Sure, some of this is possible thanks to that weird Dutch libertarian streak, and a little bit more to the much more stringent regulation of driving licenses in the Netherlands, but actually, even here in the U.S. studies have found that decades of over-engineering roads (wide lanes, soft curves, no trees or other visual distractions) have resulted in faster, less attentive driving.

A lot of people won’t believe that it works, but already:
– If you’ve ever driven in, say, Boston and Texas, you’d be sure that Boston has higher car crash and pedestrian fatality rates: Boston drivers are maniacs with death wishes, half the intersections don’t even have street signs, etc., yet the pedestrian death rate in Orlando (with extensive, suburban-style traffic controls everywhere) is three times higher than that in Boston.

– Another example of Dutch deregulation that did successfully translate to the U.S.: the self-checkout lanes in many big-box retailers today were brought to the U.S. by Royal Ahold, a supermarket operator based in the Netherlands. It’s counterintuitive, but self-checkout actually reduced shrinkage (theft): employees steal more than customers, and self-checkout puts fewer people in contact with cash drawers.

How to get involved

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The Neighbors Project offers How to call the shots in your neighborhood:

If you’ve ever wondered who made the decision to put up the giant flag or rip up a street or cancel your favorite parade, chances are it’s your neighborhood association. They’re usually quite powerful.

Coming soon: part two, in which we demonstrate how to stage a coup of your neighborhood association, or alternately to start a brand new one and seize the reins from the old one in order to create a bitter neighborhood feud!

Trib: just plain lazy

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From an article by Jon Hilkevitch and Josh Noel in today’sTrib:

“It’s what they do with the money they have that concerns me,” said Grace Graham, 58, of Rogers Park as she waited to board the Red Line at Berwyn. “The government needs to step in and do an audit…

Nowhere in the article do the reporters bother reporting that the government DID step in and do an audit. A million-dollar, 650-page audit, no less. WTF?

Jobs on the line

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Francine Knowles at the Sun-Times writes (kinda) about the angle I’ve been pushing: transit cuts will devastate downtown’s accessibility, and thus its economy.

If the stalemate isn’t satisfactorily resolved quickly, employers and workers will be hurt, warns Jerry Roper, president and CEO of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce.

“A lot of people are going to suffer,” he said…

If the changes do go through, low-income workers would be hard hit, contends Aaron Gellman, professor at Northwestern University’s Transportation Center. If the cuts and fare increases are short-lived, workers will make temporary adjustments and find alternative routes, he said. But if they become permanent, that could restrict the supply of workers in certain locations, he said. Employers might be compelled to help subsidize workers transportation costs, he said.

More employers could consider relocating to the suburbs, said John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Telecommuting probably would expand, he said.

I’ve gathered that Challenger is rather well respected in the HR field.

Roundup

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* New photos here and on the way. Wicker Park Critical Mass and my recent trip out west, for instance.

* I’ve spent far too much time lately rebutting right-wing arguments against transit funding on various blogs. Most of those responses have been crossposted (for my own reference, which is the primary reason why I have this blog) as comments under various earlier posts tagged “transit.” (Another good rebuttal: MPC’s in Friday’s Trib. However, one bus really = about 34 cars; 43 passengers per hour on CTA buses divided by 1.25 per car. An even better one: the Sun-Times’ editorial, pointing out that the tax increase amounts to $33 a year for Cook residents.)

You want to talk “backdoor fare increase”? The Economy League study of SEPTA that I’ve mentioned, examining substantial [but smaller!] cuts proposed, found that riders would pay $2.20 in higher fares, longer waits, and more driving for every $1 that government “saves” by cutting SEPTA. To pay that much via the “backdoor fare hike,” you’d have to charge up $880 in bills every day.

One common theme has been “privatize the damn thing,” as the public has little confidence in CTA’s ability to manage its current system, much less invest to renew it. However, words of caution from the libertarian-leaning City Journal‘s Nicole Gelinas:

While the private sector has a role to play in building, upgrading, and maintaining public infrastructure, it can never assume the public sector’s ultimate responsibility—financial and otherwise.

* I’ve also spent a lot of time on the phone with reporters lately. Published articles to date: Mark Lawton from the Booster on WPCM; Matthew Hendrickson from the Chicago Journal on WPCM; Nara Schoenberg from the Tribune on CCM. (Even though I didn’t get quoted in the last one, it was by far the best of the interviews: well over an hour on topics ranging from political theory to winter riding. She’d never heard so many people say “it changed my life.” One line: “the utopian eco-cyclists who pioneered the party/protest/prank in this city point to numerous achievements.”)

Forthcoming (with photos!): Chicago Tribune on car-free living, and Sierra Magazine on eco-jobs.

* Apparently, the whole Dutch-bike trend is really taking off among Manhattan models, a rather influential crowd I don’t pay much mind to. Gillian Reagan reporting in the NY Observer, quoting George Bliss of the Hub Station:

“[Lela Rose ha]s really inspired me, and now I’m focusing on the tricycle child carrier as a product for upscale women in SoHo. … That’s the niche, professionals and models because, you know, if you go to a cocktail party, you’ve got to have something to talk about. ‘Green? What’s green? Oh, bicycling!’

Ms. Rose’s paean to her bike: “it sounds ridiculous, but I don’t go anywhere anymore without bringing the bike, because to me it’s like my car. At a minimum, it’s the best way to get around. It’s for the environment. It’s great for health reasons. For me it’s just a great way to get a better peace of mind. I could go on and on about the benefits of bike riding.”

(Disclosure: I once rented a bike from George — a 50-lb. single-speed with a coaster brake — at his prior location at SoHo’s west edge.)

* MTC recently held a workshop on Smart Parking on “parking policies to support smart growth, focusing on providing strategies for interested local jurisdictions”; the presentations are online.

* A 2004 report on TDM strategies from FHWA has many interesting case studies focusing on special events and large employers.

* Socialized car insurance in B.C. (PDF from VTPI) offers the province a unique way to fine-tune the costs of driving — which might be why B.C. was among the first places to experiment with eco feebates. Another VTPI paper (page 10) demonstrates how increasing fuel economy standards could actually increase the social costs of driving by encouraging more of it.

* Dallas has a streetcar. How did I not know that?

* Here’s an interesting approach: Louisville, Colo. tested a proposed zoning designation by running six examples of ground-related multifamily housing around Denver past the code. Interestingly, all of them exhibit the kind of quasi-Dutch modernism that I saw a lot of around there: blocky massing, bright colors.

Pound-foolish

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Fran Spielman reports at the Sun-Times about a new hybrid vehicle commitment by the city: “The 300 new Toyota Prius, Camry and Highlander hybrids will replace old Ford Crown Victorias driven by city inspectors and other non-safety employees.”

From FuelEconomy.gov:
2000 Ford Crown Victoria (gasoline): 10.2 tons/year CO2
2007 Toyota Highlander Hybrid 2WD: 7.1 tons/year CO2
2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid: 5.4 tons/year CO2
2007 Toyota Prius: 4.0 tons/year CO2
Assume that 100 of each Toyota will be purchased. (I think they’ll use this as an excuse to buy up to the Highlander SUVs, though, as a Prius is way smaller than a FCV.) Average of the Toyotas: 5.5 tons/year CO2.

Savings over 300 cars: 1,410 tons/year CO2
Forcing 100,000 riders off CTA: 29,500+++ tons/year CO2

AAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH.

In other news, it looks like a bike share program will happen “very soon”; however, a March RFP asked for the costs for 500, 1000, and 1500 bikes — not far beyond the 750 bikes envisioned by Adshel. From Libération: “Daley a indiqué que la ville de Chicago envisageait d’installer «très prochainement» un système de location de vélos en libre-service…”

Hyperinflation

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posted at Capitol Fax Blog

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CTA’s fares have been going up — in fact, since the 1984 RTA Act, much faster than either the rate of inflation or the cost of driving! That’s because Chicago sales tax revenue have trailed inflation (much less expense growth) since 1984, and the budget’s got to balance somehow. Oh yeah, and operating costs have declined over 10% in real dollars since 1984.

Just because the cost of gas is going up does not magically mean that the cost of transit service should increase at the same rate. Indeed, what you pay to drive is not at all indicative of the real cost of driving. Cars, collectively, are the #1 source of air pollution in our region — but even though asthma hospitalization rates along the Dan Ryan are four times higher than the national average, gas taxes don’t pay for the (also bankrupt) Cook County Hospital. Nor do your gas taxes pay to keep our troops guarding their oil, rebuilding taller levees to protect New Orleans against rising seas, or for funeral costs when children get killed in hit-and-runs. Nope, even we non-drivers pay those costs of your driving.

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In fact, some calculations: according to AAA’s annual cost-per-mile estimates, the real cost of driving has dropped 9.9% since 1997 (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile, as of next week, cash CTA fares will have increased 59.6%. (Not counting the 63% increase, the increase has been 17.6%.) We riders are already paying far more than our share.

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Sources:
* AAA, “Your Driving Costs 2007”
* CTA, “President’s Report on CTA’s Fares and Proposal for the FY2004 Budget”
* CTA, “Revised CTA Fare Structure Effective September 16, 2007”
* Motor Trend Auto News, “Despite Higher Gas Prices, 2005 Driving Costs Nearly Unchanged From 2004” (historical cost estimates from AAA)
* Westegg.com inflation calculator (to inflate to 2006 dollars) and BLS CPI projection (to inflate to 2007 dollars)

Colonizing Cermak

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Alby Gallun from Crain’s reports on a potential “creative industries” focus for the heroic loft buildings of the Cermak Bridge landmark district:

Yet the property’s prospects are brightening as city officials consider a proposal that could fill Mr. Mumford’s buildings with a new class of tenants: graphic design firms, fashion designers, dance companies and other artsy businesses. The plan would turn the gritty neighborhood into a “creative industries district,” potentially employing as many as 1,600 people.

They also provide the full PDF report, from ULI’s panel.

Interesting follow-on by David Gonzalez in this an NYT piece:

Such is the New York factory in the 21st century. The smokestacks are gone, taking jobs (and pollution, sometimes) to places where hands are cheap. But according to advocates for industrial development in the city, newer specialty companies like Mr. Horgan’s occupy a growing part of the city’s industrial landscape, along with makers of food products, especially for the burgeoning ethnic market. Many other firms that make construction materials, furniture or lighting have also grown in response to increased demand for environmentally friendly buildings.

“The most important thing we found was the need for more and smaller industrial spaces,” said Adam Friedman, executive director of the New York Industrial Retention Network, which assists manufacturers with space and advice. “Big guys like Farberware and Swingline left the city. What survived here are the niche manufacturers where proximity to their market makes a big difference…”

“We’re thinking of a trust for industrial space,” [Ron Shiffman, a veteran planner and chairman of the Industrial Retention Network] said. “The same way we realized we have to save small farms, I believe we are going to need to save places for manufacturing in urban areas.”

…which reminds me of an idea that I had, to buy development easements from artist-studio buildings so that they can remain artist studios in private hands, not to be resold for other purposes and without the public necessarily buying the building or land. (A land trust could work the same way, but sounds more expensive.) I’m not sure exactly how this works — perhaps just through a standing purchase option? — but it’s an interesting thought.