NYC lagging on public space

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Robert Sullivan got a prime op-ed page placement for this paean to PPS’s principles. The irony is perhaps that his research was funded by Saturn, the GM division, and written up for Dwell magazine. Hmm.

The simple and elegant cure for the loss of New York’s inner pedestrian is to open up car-clogged streets and public spaces. Another of Mr. Schaller’s surveys, sponsored by the citizens’ group Transportation Alternatives, showed that 89 percent of people questioned on Prince Street in SoHo got there by subway, bus, foot or bicycle, and that the majority would gladly give up parking for more pedestrian space.

With a million more New Yorkers scheduled to arrive by 2030, true sustainability requires the city — or at least its residents — to make a bold move. Some neighborhoods are already working on it. The Ninth Avenue Renaissance Project, sponsored by a coalition of residents and businesses, has held community workshops on converting Ninth Avenue from Lincoln Tunnel access ramp to boulevard.

The now chic Meatpacking District plans to bring back a space that, since the area was a Native American village, has been a natural gathering place for people without combustion engines: wider sidewalks, public seating and a piazza in the restaurant-surrounded open field of paving stones could be more like Campo dei Fiori in Rome and less a spot for crazed U-turns. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the city’s Department of Transportation has replaced parking spaces near a subway station with rows of bike racks.

But these are tiny steps. Boston’s mayor has endorsed converting Hanover Street in the city’s North End into a car-free pedestrian mall. Why don’t we do the same in part or even all of SoHo? In Los Angeles, some traffic lights are programmed to change for approaching buses (a signal in the bus alerts the light). Why can’t the same happen on 14th Street?

Pittsburgh revolts against transit cuts

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Last year’s state bailout of Pittsburgh’s transit agency has expired, so PAT has proposed a 25% cut in service hours to fix an $80M operating deficit. Needless to say, “riders are ticked”:http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07023/756042-147.stm.

SEPTA in Philadelphia has “used capital funds to patch its 2007 budget”:http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/nation/16243384.htm — sound familiar?

Demographics killed the suburban star

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Virginia Tech researcher Arthur C. Nelson argues in a JAPA article that, shockingly, the end of suburbia (by the mid-21st century) will not necessarily be foretold by Peak Oil — but by the momentum of America’s current monumental (if somewhat under the radar) demographic shift towards smaller households living closer together.

To get from where Americans live today — 54% in larger-lot single family houses, 21% in townhouses and small-lot singles, and 25% in attached housing — to where they’d prefer to be living (assuming an increase in 34 million housing units by 2025), will result in net demand for 53 million attached houses, 52 million townhouses, and negative 22 million single family houses. Yes, negative. By some accounts, many cities are already oversupplied with single-family houses on larger lots.

This transformation of Americans’ cities by 2025 will cost our nation $30 trillion. The result:

[O]ver half of all development on the ground in 2025 will not have existed in 2000, even more important is that by 2025 much of society will have been spatially rearranged. An increasing number of empty-nesters, young professionals, and others will choose the city and first-tier suburban locations over outer suburban ones. According to Fishman (2005), they will drive up housing prices beyond the reach of many existing residents who may then be pushed to the suburban fringe and exurbs. Rising energy prices and declining demand for suburban homes on large lots may reduce the value of these homes, yielding important implications for the future.

Larry Frank’s SMARTRAQ research in Atlanta, examining one of the poster children of 20th century sprawl, finds that “about a third of metro Atlantans living in conventional suburban development would have preferred a more walkable environment.” Re-housing one-third of suburban residents would get us a long way towards the built environment that Nelson foresees a generation from now.

Ugh

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Busy month, notably owing to a full winter travel schedule. (Chicago’s a nice place to leave in the winter.) Now, I’m almost sure that my hard disk has crashed — thus wiping out most of the photos from the past few weeks, too, at least since the last backup. Oh well.

Among the photos to be posted earlier which will likely never make it: one of the “multimodal signs”:http://www.commuterpage.com/carshare.htm marking Zipcar spaces in Portland. Nice to know it’s not just a PDX thing, though.

Yum

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John and Dottie mince no words:

bq. If we had to sum up the taste, overall, of inexpensive American Chardonnay today, we’d say the single most notable smell and flavor is pineapple, with syrupy sweetness, some acetate or nail-polish remover, far too much alcohol and a bizarre overlay of unintegrated acidity, as though a big sack of industrial-strength acid mixture had been dumped into the tank at the last minute to compensate for the lack of natural acidity.

NW sightseeing

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Seeing as I’m leaving for there in a few hours, thought it would be useful to post something I wrote in July in response to a request for a sightseeing itinerary along the Cascadian coast.

All three cities have new “instant neighborhoods,” light-industrial areas near downtown that are rapidly becoming mixed commercial-residential. It’s quite interesting to compare the varying approaches between and within the cities. Here’s an interesting “Seattle Times article”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2003/0202/cover.html
on the three.

* Portland downtown, generally (what districts or buildings?)
* Orenco Station

A light rail tour of Portland is quite doable. A quick overview of what’s “around the east-west MAX stations”:http://world.nycsubway.org/us/portland/max-blue.html and a “quick restaurant guide”:http://www.extramsg.com/uploaded_misc/portland_tipsheet.html are both online.

Most of the new neighborhoods surrounding downtown can be covered using “the Portland Streetcar”:http://www.portlandstreetcar.org/map.php. Several gentrifying neighborhoods (like Hawthorne on the east side) aren’t on either line, but are easily reached using the “Frequent Bus”:http://www.trimet.org/bus/frequentservice.htm network. (I prefer MSP’s name: [Say Hi to] “Hi Frequency Service”:http://www.metrotransit.org/serviceInfo/hi-frequency.asp)

* Vancouver, downtown, residential towers

Vancouver’s downtown peninsula is very small and incredibly walkable. Most of the new towers are on or toward the waterfront, particularly along the downtown peninsula’s south edge (facing False Creek). There’s a bike rental place on Marinaside Crescent; I’d suggest renting a bicycle and taking it for a trip around the entire peninsula. Just inland is Yaletown, with some of the newest towers and (in fact) new mid-rises. Another, less successful clump of new high-rises is around Coal Harbour, on the northwest corner of downtown right by Stanley Park. Many of the suburban municipalities have also encouraged similar development around their transit nodes, so it’s worth taking SkyTrain, SeaBus, and the B-Line rapid buses out to sites like Metrotown, Lonsdale Quay, and Richmond Centre to see how other jurisdictions have done things differently. (Richmond Centre is also more like Hong Kong than Hong Kong, which is amusing.)

South of False Creek are a set of neighborhoods also worth investigating. Granville Slopes, on the south bank of False Creek, was state of the art in the 1980s — feels like a leafy suburban PUD — and shows what would’ve happened to the rest of downtown Vancouver had the city not discovered New Urbanism. Kitsilano is a yuppie area to the southwest; around Arbutus & 11th is a new low- and mid-rise, mixed-use neighborhood built on a former brewery site in the ’90s. Granville Island is a kitschy but still interesting take on a festival marketplace — less tourist-focused than the usual US version.

The city has a helpful set of publications outlining areas they view as “urban design achievements”:http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/currentplanning/urbandesign .

In Seattle, the hot new urban neighborhoods are Belltown (between Pike Place and Seattle Center) and South Lake Union (up Westlake from downtown). There’s interesting stuff, but as the Seattle Times article makes clear, the story’s much bigger in Portland and Vancouver.

Denver

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I think I’m getting better about “uploading trip photos in a timely manner”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/sets/72157594419601104, although more will certainly trickle in over the next year. Some things I noticed in Denver:

* Street-runing LRT along Welton Street is resulting in gentrification of a historically Black main street, with surprisingly good retail occupancy. Not many intact Black main streets are left out there, so it’d be a shame to see this disappear.
* South Broadway has what looks like a Motor Row, also threatened by development.
* What is up with the giant arched atria in every 1980s building? Wells Fargo has by far the most ostentatious of the bunch, even more so than the performing arts center, but sheesh. Was it city policy at the time?
* Stapleton, slightly to my surprise, is in the metro’s unfavored sector (northeast; “MARC”:http://www.metroresearch.org/projects/national_report_region.asp?region=9 has favored/unfavored sector maps). In fact, to get there from downtown you take “Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard”:http://www.sallygreene.org/mlk.htm. Apparently, it’s not a big challenge for retail leasing — there’s little competing new retail along the corridor, and a large population base — but they’ve done an admirable job with addressing the “schools issue”:http://www.sellstapleton.com/schools.php through choices like charter schools.
* Add Boulder to the short list of places where driving has declined considerably. Mode split of downtown commuters, 1999 to 2005: drive alone 59% to 36% (-39%), transit 14% to 34% (+143%). Walk/bike accounted for 14% in 2005, carpooling for 9%.

Urbanism : suburbanism; Bucktown : Schaumburg

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Katharine Grayson reported a while ago in the Chicago Journal about a survey on “social capital”:http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/primer.htm in Bucktown and Schaumburg. Actually, my household participated in the research; I got a letter and my brother did the phone interview.

Curt VanderWaal, a professor of social work at Andrews, said one quote, offered by a 40-year resident in a telephone interview, seemed to sum up that finding: “The whole neighborhood identity is changing. That’s a challenge. It’s not like a neighborhood that has to deal with a lot of crime. The larger issue here is economic and cultural identity.” […]

She did note, however, that residents in Bucktown are also more open to having affordable housing built in their neighborhood than their Schaumburg counterparts, though only about a quarter strongly agreed that it was necessary.

What is somewhat surprising about the study, however, noted VanderWaal, is that residents of Schaumburg are just as happy—if not more pleased—with their neighborhood than Bucktowners. There are, of course, some key demographic differences, he said, including that the suburban residents are more likely to own their home and have lived in the neighborhood longer. They also have more children. However, he said, they also are more likely to believe that their neighborhood is tight knit.

What’s also important to note, however, is that Bucktown residents are more likely to spend a social evening with their neighbors—and have friends that live just a few blocks away.

It’s an undergraduate project, to be sure, but the two neighborhoods differ in so many ways that it’s difficult to impute any differences found to one factor or another (notably neighborhood form, which they mentioned — several Andrews professors have admirable New Urbanist inclinations). One confounding factor is governance, notably with regard to schools. It would be far more prudent to have chosen two neighborhoods within the same municipality: say, comparing “old” Wheaton or Naperville with new subdivisions a mile or two away, or maybe more interestingly, someplace like historic Kenwood with modernist Prairie Shores.

Three in brief

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* MTC, the Bay Area’s MPO, has a “Pedestrian & Bicyclist Safety Toolbox”:http://www.bayareatrafficsignals.org/toolbox/Index.html of education, enforcement, and engineering tools at various price points: from brochures to bike boulevards.

* The Pew Climate Center has published “reports on buildings”:http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-in-depth/all_reports/buildings/index.cfm that I should read, notably “this one”:http://www.pewclimate.org/policy_center/policy_reports_and_analysis/buildings/index.cfm

* Another worthy cause: Obama and Solis cosponsored an APHA written bill to spend more federal money so that planners can examine “healthy places”:http://www.apha.org/nphw/2006/pg_newsletter_4-4-06.htm, including sponsored research on the built environment’s role in health and local Health Impact Assessments. It turns out that CNU board member Dhiru Thadani heads the Washington practice of “ASG”:http://www.apha.org/nphw/2006/pg_newsletter_4-4-06.htm, which rents office space from APHA.