Summer driving

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(slightly less edited version sent to Gristmill)

Gasoline supplies right now are plumbing historic lows, just as May and the “summer driving season” are about to roll around. This fact has the industry types at the WSJ’s Energy Roundup abuzz with predictions of $4/gallon gasoline, should the inevitable disruption (refinery fire, hurricane, Iran war) occur. As in years past, areas with higher cost gasoline, mostly the blue states along the oceans and Great Lakes, will see the highest prices.

Some hope that record margins (known as “crack spread,” heh heh) will lead refineries to crank up gas production, but in any case, there’s perilously little slack in America’s already-taut gasoline supply chain. Blogger Robert Rapier points out that gasoline supplies right now are lower than they’ve ever been (at least since current records began, in 1991), besides a few Labor Day weekends when supplies are drawn down after all that summer driving.

I never quite understood the concept of a “summer driving season,” anyways. Why waste a glorious summer day cooped up inside a car stuck in traffic? This summer, let’s all escape gloomy gas prices (and the inevitable media moaning about such) and have a Summer Walking Season instead.

Olympian sports welfare

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A rant on the Olympics, written as a blog comment for nowhere in particular.

hey folks, cynicism and negativity have nothing to do with why I oppose an Olympic bid. (personally, I don’t usually read blog comments for fear of all the whiny, sourpuss snark.) I have worked professionally as an advocate and activist in this city for a decade now, even getting unceremoniously thrown out of a community group for offering constructive dialogue rather than the knee-jerk reaction preferred by its leaders. so, here’s my constructive solution: drop the Games bid and instead think creatively about how we can work here to fix our problems today.

if we want to invest billions of dollars for transit or housing or parks, we could raise it ourselves instead of wishing upon Washington’s or the IOC’s stars. and trust me, a billion dollars spent on better moving Chicagoans around will have a much greater long-term economic impact than even two billion spent on moving Olympian hordes around — and, mind you, the feds only paid half of SLC’s and Atlanta’s bills, so we’d probably be looking at a billion dollar bill anyways. want to raise a billion dollars?

besides, repairing our existing transit system (for starters) will result in greater economic impact than building new. for instance, a 2003 study estimated that $X spent on road repair will create 21% more jobs than $X spent on new road construction. “fix it first” — leveraging and enhancing prior generations’ investment in infrastructure — is fundamentally more cost effective than building new from scratch, just like renovating an existing house is cheaper than knocking it down and building new.

to sum it up in a bumper sticker: NO sports welfare!

John King on “Instant urbanism”

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John King, the Chronicle’s urban design critic, recently wrote “a two-part series”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2007/04/09/MNGPBP56AD1.DTL on New Urbanist suburban infill in/around Denver and the Bay Area — pointing out that Denver is far further along than self-congratulatory San Francisco in creating good urban fabric in suburbia. He has this response to the elite critics of NU:

A cynic would look at projects like these and dismiss the lot. They’re not Paris in the 1920s, or North Beach in 1950s, or SoHo in the 1970s. Cue up the intellectual scorn.

But the fact is that American expectations are being redefined — and the suburban landscape where most people live is following suit. This is, after all, a world where people want what they want when they want: music on their iPod, old movies or television shows on their DVD player, newspapers via the Internet.

Why shouldn’t urbanism be available on demand as well?

The thing is, there’s a difference between buildings and megabytes. One is ephemeral, the other isn’t. You can watch a grainy snippet on YouTube and move on, but a poorly designed building stays right where it is, looking more faded and false by the day.

The suburbia of the future will be more dense than today, with a more varied set of options. And that’s a good thing: There’s a limit to how far a region’s population should sprawl, or how much land should be consumed. Fighting change is absurd. Sneering at it is equally absurd.

On my long-term projects list is an effort to catalog today’s “historic, gritty” urban neighborhoods when they, too, were brand spanking new — with shiny new buildings and tiny trees, they, too, looked pretty silly.

How we got here

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Some old Break the Gridlock policy statements (most of which I wrote, all PDFs) that I found in the stacks, linked here so that they’re indexed:
* “Response to initial draft of city’s new zoning”:https://westnorth.com/freelance/BTGonZoning.pdf
* “Central Area Plan response letter”:https://westnorth.com/freelance/btgCAPltr.pdf
* Zoning for Transportation Equity Coalition’s “City in a Garden or a Parking Lot?, latest version without cover art”:https://westnorth.com/freelance/CityInGarden8NC.pdf
* ZTEC’s “one-page factsheet”:https://westnorth.com/freelance/zfactsheeta.pdf

ZTEC was largely responsible for getting the city to back down on a proposed increase in parking ratios during the 2002-2004 code rewrite. I don’t think that my letter on the Central Area Plan ever had an impact, but I still like it anyways:

bq. The people-friendly modes that we advocate are space efficient, thereby conserving the Central Area’s most scarce resource; create street-level vitality, enhancing the key to the Central Area’s unique character; and, best of all, are self-reinforcing. Busy sidewalks are safer and more pleasant to walk down; busy bus lines have more frequent, reliable service. Busy roads, on the other hand, merely create traffic congestion that maddens everyone. If total traffic is to grow, should that growth improve or paralyze the surface transportation network?

In short, walking, cycling, and riding transit create positive feedback loops: an increase in traffic yields better conditions (safer, livelier streets with better transit service). Driving creates a negative feedback loop: an increase in traffic degrades conditions for *everyone*, drivers, walkers, cyclists, and transit riders alike.

Woah! 2

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Preliminary 100% results from “the runoffs”:https://westnorth.com/2007/02/27/elections-woah/ indicate that *five* incumbents have been defeated:
2nd: Fioretti over Haithcock (wide margin)
3rd: Dowell over Tillman
16th: Thompson over Coleman (conceded)
24th: Dixon over Chandler
32nd: “Waguespack”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/463696414/ over Matlak

Added to the three decided in February and the one open seat (15th, won by Foulkes), and that’s nine new faces — 18% of the 50! We have some great new aldermen, too, with plenty of opportunities for a fresh urban agenda.

All relative

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James Lileks on an old photo of a Minneapolis hotel: *This is the city that was smaller than the one in which I live today, but seemed so much more bigger.*

Was it television? Automobiles? The city seemed bigger because people filled its public realm in a way we only see in the very largest cities today. Have people left out of free will, or coercion?

RTA Act

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Just for future reference:

(70 ILCS 3615/4.03) (from Ch. 111 2/3, par. 704.03)
Sec. 4.03. Taxes.
(a) In order to carry out any of the powers or purposes of the Authority, the Board may by ordinance adopted with the concurrence of 9 of the then Directors, impose throughout the metropolitan region any or all of the taxes provided in this Section. Except as otherwise provided in this Act, taxes imposed under this Section and civil penalties imposed incident thereto shall be collected and enforced by the State Department of Revenue. The Department shall have the power to administer and enforce the taxes and to determine all rights for refunds for erroneous payments of the taxes.
Continue reading →

Seaside sold?

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Following up on the resort front, it’s interesting that Canadian ski operations giant Intrawest up and “bought” the town of Seaside last year. (Not really: just the cottage rental operation, i.e., the “hotel” operation side.) Intrawest has a “Placemaking”:http://www.placemaking.com division whose job is to build adorable little apres-ski mountain villages at its resorts, and it’s recently sought to diversify its portfolio in recent years — including investments elsewhere on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

According to Leah Stratmann in the Defuniak Herald last March (cutely titled “Selling Seaside by the Seashore”):

bq. [T]owns are not generally for sale, yet rumors about the sale of the “town” of Seaside swirled around south Walton County like a windstorm last week… “Like Seaside, Intrawest believes in creating a complete community experience. Like Seaside, Intrawest believes in the value of preserving a community’s sense of place. But beyond philosophy, Intrawest has solid processes, resources and experience at the ready for a successful rental management program. We believe our business approach will provide Seaside even more success and stability.”

It’s interesting to think that maybe “ownership” of Seaside might translate into a stronger commitment to placemaking throughout its operations.

Measuring healthy places

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A follow-on to the “Healthy Places Act”:https://westnorth.com/2006/12/31/three-in-brief/ from San Francisco’s department of public health:

bq. The Healthy Development Measurement Tool is an evidence-based practice to consider public health objectives in land use planning. It provides land use planners, public agencies, and community stakeholders with a set of metrics to assess the extent to which urban development projects, plans and policies affect health.

And an interesting resource: some great “metro area profiles”:http://diversitydata.sph.harvard.edu/profiles_main.jsp compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health, including (school & residential) segregation and poverty indices by race/ethnic group.

“Stay on Track”

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4 April editorial in the New York Times:

But any mass-transit renaissance will come to a grinding halt unless a commensurate investment is made in upkeep and expansion. As Libby Sander reported recently in The Times, Chicago’s elevated train system, known as the El, appears to be near a breaking point. The second-largest public transit system in America after New York’s is suffering from rising commute times as the century-old system deteriorates… Once a system begins to break down, it can hurt the quality of life and economic growth of a city.

29 January editorial in Crain’s Chicago Business:

Chicago’s rapid transit system is rolling toward a disastrous tipping point. So far, riders have stuck with the elevated train system as service has gotten worse and worse… At some point, ridership will plummet as commuters abandon the trains for more reliable transportation and businesses depart downtown for more accessible locations. The effect on the city’s economy will be devastating.

Only Mayor Richard M. Daley can save the train system. So far, he’s mostly ignored the deterioration of service as trains swell with downtown office workers commuting from the gentrifying neighborhoods of the North and Northwest sides — a predictable side effect of the middle-class renaissance he worked to hard to foster.

(emphases added) This is the biggest point I’ve wanted to make about transit funding: without transit, downtown Chicago would cease to exist. Without downtown Chicago, Illinois might as well be Iowa or Indiana, some generic slice of rich Midwestern prairie. This isn’t just a city issue.

It might be interesting to calculate some rough figures on this topic: what would happen if 20% of downtown jobs disappeared? or if 20% of CTA riders started driving? The cascading impacts down the line — property values and tax revenue, income tax, sales tax, air pollution, stormwater and heat island impacts from parking — would be astonishing. It’s also not entirely unprecedented: look at, say, Philadelphia, where poor transit was one factor in the decline of a CBD that now accounts for just a third of the region’s office market.

And a curious 29 March entry from the Economist (which has direct experience in congestion pricing):

But there is something odd about the way that many of Chicago’s leaders talk about [transportation] problems. They invariably try to link their suggestions to grand or abstract ideas, such as being a “global city” or winning a bid to host the Olympics. _The simpler need is to get goods and people moving_… The public debate over making drivers pay to use the roads has been as shallow in Chicago as in the rest of America. The argument tends to revolve around whether it makes more sense to use tolls and private enterprise to pay for better roads, or instead to keep charging taxpayers for a system that just limps along. By contrast, not much is said about the role that prices might play in altering the behaviour of both companies and commuters.

There you go: we need price incentives that cut car and truck traffic while raising revenues for rail.

Major paper mention

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I somehow never noticed that Inga Saffron, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architectural critic (and blogger), referenced my old Promenade Plantée photos in a column of hers about the Reading Viaduct Project back in February 2004:

bq. The Penn design teams were partly inspired by Paris’ success in transforming an elevated train trestle near the Place de la Bastille into an elegant, 2.4-mile-long landscaped path called the Promenade Plantee. (Excellent photographs can be found at http://homepage.mac. com/paytonc/promenade.) Such obsolete viaducts are fast being transformed into sky parks in cities around the world. New York City is working on plans to convert Manhattan’s High Line, which runs through Chelsea, into an elevated park.