After a puzzling delay, IDOT’s drive less. live more. campaign finally launched last week. It’s a basic, but handsome site, which offers some basic info about transportation choices: facts, transit schedules, etc.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Americans actually are “driving less”:http://www.cnn.com/2006/AUTOS/11/30/gas_prices.reut/index.html.
The Midtown Greenway is a sunken rail-to-trail-with-future-rail traversing the diverse (and dense, by Twin Cities standards) neighborhoods of South Minneapolis, from yuppie haven Uptown, through Midtown and past the Midtown Exchange, crossing the Hiawatha light-rail-with-trail, and eventually landing in Longfellow. The trail very nearly links two major park systems: the Chain o’ Lakes to the west and the Missisippi River on the east. Current proposals would put either LRT or a streetcar along the south half of the former freight ROW, as part of a LRT service to the near southwest suburbs.
There’s no view whatsoever — neither the babbling mountain brooks of Denver’s flood control ditches nor enchanting murals on the concrete retaining walls — and the plants have died. Still, the rhythm of all those bridges crossing overhead looks pretty neat at bicycle speeds.
As with all grade-separated trails, it’s not cheap: a good number of the bridges have been replaced, a new grade-separated crossing is underway at Hiawatha Avenue, and a CCTV/”blue light” security system had to be installed. Yet the trail is definitely encouraging new investment, like the lofts on the left.
Earlier, “I blogged”:https://westnorth.com/2006/11/23/safe-streets/trackback/ a photo of a PSA ad promoting safe driving around pedestrians. Today, Hilkevitch’s “front-page column”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0612180161dec18,1,413615.column?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true in the Trib offers details on the overall “Safe Streets for Chicago”:http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalContentItemAction.do?BV_SessionID=@@@@1658248418.1166469198@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccdaddjjfemidgcefecelldffhdfhg.0&contentOID=536939798&contenTypeName=COC_EDITORIAL&topChannelName=Dept&blockName=Transportation%2FMaking+Chicago+Pedestrian+Friendly%2FI+Want+To&context=dept&channelId=0&programId=0&entityName=Transportation&deptMainCategoryOID=-536895918 strategy, including:
* a Mayor’s Pedestrian Advisory Council, to launch in January
* design strategies, like bulb-outs, median refuges, raised crosswalks (“sleeping policemen”), and zebra crossings
* motorist stings, with EMC/TMA and police cooperating to catch speeders
* road diets (four to three lanes)
* installation of more pedestrian countdown signals
* greater education
The last point is perhaps most important: the driving culture can, in fact, be changed, given enough education and enforcement.
Our SSA commission will be meeting with the police department at some point to discuss sites for camera installation; I’ll ask whether the red-light cameras are smart enough to catch other infractions, like intruding on crosswalks and not yielding before turning, and whether sting operations can be set up at our intersections.
It’s a truism that American houses are growing to be elephantine; many articles on McMansions point out that the average new house in America has grown in size by 46.63% since 1973. Yet the story isn’t that simple: in fact, house sizes in recent years have grown at below trend — little more than 1% a year, a big slowdown from the mid-1980s. Also, the size of multifamily apartments is reported separately and in a different fashion (in size brackets rather than exact numbers), which makes it impossible to figure out how average new dwelling sizes are changing as multifamily grows as a share of American housing starts.
|year|size|% growth*|
|1973|1660|–|
|1976|1700|0.80%|
|1979|1760|1.18%|
|1982|1710|-0.95%|
|1985|1752|0.82%|
|1988|1995|4.62%|
|1991|2075|1.34%|
|1994|2100|0.40%|
|1997|2150|0.79%|
|2000|2266|1.80%|
|2003|2330|0.94%|
|2005|2434|1.49%|
|1973-2005|+774|2.12%|
Note: Size is in square feet, average for new construction. Source: U.S. Census, “data set C25”:http://www.census.gov/const/www/charindex.html. Sample was readjusted in 2005, with the effect of tilting sample towards Sunbelt, so results are not directly comparable to earlier years.
% growth: annualized rate, over past three years.
Mayor Bloomberg recently announced PLANYC2030, a — yes — comprehensive plan and sustainability plan for New York City rolled into one.
The clearly stated goals for 2030 include
* reducing GHG emissions 30%+ (considering the age of the building stock, this is bigger than the 2030 Challenge’s goal of carbon-neutral new buildings by 2030)
* cleaning all contaminated land
* making 90% of waterways safe for recreation
* build one million new homes
Again, a few Chicago departments have shown that they’re capable of setting quantifiable long-term targets with real-world significance (e.g., families helped instead of dollars spent), reporting on their progress, and achieving them — Housing and Bicycle, for example. Yet where’s the climate change planning effort?
From the Economist, 9 Dec:
bq. The term ‘food mile’ is itself misleading, as a report published by DEFRA, Britain’s environment and farming ministry, pointed out last year… It transpires that half the food-vehicle miles associated with British food are travelled by cars driving to and from the shops. Each trip is short, but there are millions of them every day.
(Incidentally, this is the first post I’ve made from a BlackBerry. Scary.)
A volunteer effort to map out geometrically compact Congressional districts with a simple algorithm reports that “Illinois has some of the weirdest districts I’ve seen.” While this particular guy defines compactness slightly differently from me (he minimizes distance to center of district, I’d minimize the perimeter to area ratio), it’s still a neat exercise.
Perhaps that weirdness accounts for the status-quo result reported by “Garance Franke-Ruta”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061106&s=franke-ruta111006 in TNR:
bq. [besides Duckworth] “six other Democratic challengers also went down to defeat in Illinois, and the only new Democratic congressman elected in the state won his race in an open contest in a traditionally Democratic district.”
From the front page at WSJ.com:
bq. CONGRESS RUSHED to a messy end of 12 years of Republican rule, sending Bush a $45.1 billion tax-cut bill laden with provisions benefiting oil, coal and health-care interests.
As the Billionaire slogan goes, “Hey Congress! Put your mouth where our money is!”
“David Roeder”:http://www.suntimes.com/business/roeder/152528,CST-FIN-roeder29.article in the Sun-Times casts a skepitcal glance at the Green Exchange:
ECO- ECHO: In Logan Square, there’s an alderman, Manny Flores (1st), who has insisted that anybody who wants to redevelop the old Cooper Lamp factory, 2545 W. Diversey, at least replace the 125 jobs lost when it closed last year. This stance has been somewhat inconvenient for developers, who see any usable old factory inside the city as a place to live, not as a place to make something.
Despite this obstacle, an affiliate of Baum Realty Group Inc. bought the 250,000-square-foot building for $7.5 million in 2005.
With Flores’ blessing, principal David Baum has announced plans to turn the building, a familiar sight to drivers stuck on the Kennedy Expy., into a kind of Merchandise Mart for businesses that promote environmental sustainability. He calls it the “Green Exchange”:http://www.greenexchange.com/ and his marketing materials say he has tentative lease deals with Greenmaker Supply, which provides ecologically friendly building materials, and a so-called “green” printer, Consolidated Printing Co.
Baum has asked for zoning that would let him build “live-work” units in the building strictly as residents for people who have a business on the property. He has stressed that he wants most of the space to be commercial because it’s cheaper than residential to refurbish.
Just liked this phrase from Charlemagne last week:
“But, by golly, we [Europeans] are green and cuddly, like a Martian teddy bear.”
Grr. Libby Sander writes in the New York Times about our local preservation battles:
bq. What people do want, [Alderman Ted Matlak] said, is room to grow. To accommodate developers looking to build structures whose dimensions fall outside the parameters of zoning requirements, Mr. Matlak said he frequently changed the zoning of a particular lot. According to city tradition, aldermen have exclusive authority to change zoning requirements — often called spot zoning — to allow construction that would otherwise violate the city’s zoning ordinances.
Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Manhattan Institute’s “Center for Rethinking Development”:http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter01-04.html writes:
bq. Speaking of the problems of development to Newsday in 1989, Charles Moerdler, former city housing and building commissioner and a partner in the law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, said, “There are two schools of thought. One is for a developer to present a chamber of horrors and then compromise to make people think they won something. And the other is not to get them aroused and united in the first place.” Moerdler thinks the second strategy is preferable.
west north 