The site’s geared towards engineers (and written just as poorly), but USDOT’s new “BikeSafe site”:http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/index.cfm features pretty comprehensive lists of “engineering, education, and enforcement countermeasures”:http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/treatments.cfm (with “case studies”:http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/case_studies.cfm) and, well, “ways bike crashes happen”:http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/crash_factors.cfm.
L for Loser
Eric Zorn gripes about the stale retort that is “get a life”:
“Get a life!”–translation: “Go devote your energies to something real and productive!”–may well be useful advice to science-fiction cultists, but very few of us are entitled to dispense it with scorn, given the way we spend OUR leisure time… [Saying] “get a life” reveals such a paucity of wit, lack of imagination and inability to offer a reasoned response that I was moved, on the spot, to announce a new rule of engagement: “In any debate, the first person to hurl the insult `Get a life!’ is the loser.”
I’ve been told this a few times when screaming “shut up” at loud motorcycles aimlessly revving at intersections. Well, no, I have a life; it’s not like I’m aimlessly driving up and down the street just to annoy people.
Dallas growing up
The Dallas Morning News is running an ongoing series called “Uptown Aspirations,” on the sudden emergence of a high-style mixed-use quarter — “emphasizing streets, blocks and squares”:http://www.guidelive.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-victory_0625gl.State.Bulldog.2125c9.html — adjacent to its 9-to-5 downtown of gaudy PoMo contraptions. Some articles are appropriately critical of developers’ hesitant first steps to learn an urban language; others fawningly gush over the arrivistes (particularly “the W hotel”:http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/pt/slideshows/2006/06/whotel_2006) with the boosterism you’d expect from Big D. Still, Victory Park’s concept of a $4 billion new luxury neighborhood (with a plan by Elkus/Manfredi of point towers atop streetwall blocks) that “embraces density, clustering buildings together that relate to each other and to their surroundings… where individual buildings talk to one another in a shared language instead of shouting at the top of their lungs” sounds like a big step forward for one of America’s paragons of sprawl. As David Dillon, the architecture critic writes, “It’s basic stuff, yet so rare in Dallas that it seems exotic.”
The package is a rare comprehensive review of a case study of how urbanism has a way of showing up even where it’s least expected — namely, in sprawling, polycentric Sunbelt cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and L.A., who supposedly owe their appeal to their rejection of traditional urbanism — and thus, why we need New Urbanism more than ever. Showy modernism has not worked for Dallas, riddled with freeways and one-off look-at-me architectural statements; indeed, only a wealthy impresario can afford to take a financial risk on something as basic as building a public square. (In contrast, the developer of a nearby shopping center claims that his lenders required parking in front, an urban mistake that will be with the area for decades to come.) The spontaneous flowering of urbanism in the Sprawl Belt shows why the attitude of some anti-New Urbanists (“why do we need new urbanism? doesn’t the old urbanism suffice?”) smacks so much of élitist Eastern Establishment provincialism: most Americans live in an environment where there is NO urbanism, where old urbanism simply does not exist; 75% of America was built within the past fifty years. The alternative to New Urbanism isn’t old urbanism, it’s sprawl.
Three side notes:
1. Ross Perot, Jr. is the developer; EDS, the company founded by his father, developed Legacy Town Center north of Dallas. Now, which former presidential candidate has done more for NU: Gore or Perot?
2. The earlier plan described by Dillon’s article (low-rise, brick, still around an arena) somewhat reminds me of the Arena District in Columbus: essentially two stadia, an office campus, an entertainment complex, and many apartments/condos, but wrapped up in brick and placed on nicely sized blocks adjacent to downtown. That project’s patron is Nationwide Insurance, wanting to build an urban neighborhood to retain its own workforce. Like Victory, it’s pretty relentlessly upscale and sanitized.
3. Victory was running ads for condos in Dwell magazine a few months ago.
Why CCM has maps
[posted to CCM list]
Me to this list, 24 April 2003:
Hear, hear! I don’t think “anarchy routes” are ANY fun. There’s always
dilly-dallying about where the ride’s going to go, the ride ends up going
in circles and ends up in the same old parts of town that pretty much
replicate my daily commute. (We live surrounded by architectural splendor!
Let’s go and see it!) We end up being really antagonistic, inertia keeps us
on streets for really long and boring (and bus-schedule-wreaking)
stretches. The ride loses its energy fast as people who don’t have anything
to look forward to make other plans and ditch the ride — not that there
was much energy to start with, since the ride has no common (or consensus)
vision to begin with. “Anarchy” is capricious, frustrating, and boring.This is not to say that a lot of planning has to go into a ride to make it
great. Gareth’s totally impromptu, sketched-on-a-paper-napkin map the time
the French Cycling Sisters showed up a few summers back totally rocked.Okay, so maybe I’m a stickler for order and responsibility and planning.
But hey, in my experience, those sure beat the alternative.
Also, the “anarchy map” privileges the individuals up front; no one else gets any say in where the mass goes. With pre-printed maps, the entire group gets a chance to read, vet, and vote on the maps.
Sundance in West Loop?
Thomas Corfman in Crain’s Chicago Business reports on a rumored new art house cinema in the West Loop:
bq. Sundance Cinemas LLC is close to signing a letter of intent to open a six- to eight-screen theater in a 266,000-square-foot, multistory development proposed… at 1137 W. Jackson Blvd… Called Metro Center 290, to play up the location along Interstate 290, plans for the project also include a specialty grocery store and a health club.
Not necessarily any closer to me than the Music Box or Landmark’s Century Centre, but at least on the Blue Line (a block from Racine/Congress). Yet… why not at Block 37?
Primary sources
Two neat sites that uncover what should be common knowledge:
* Crain’s put up a “Market Facts”:http://www.chicagobusiness.com/marketFacts.html page to complement this week’s issue, featuring interactive maps of Chicago community areas devised by CNT using ESRI data. Several show 2000-2006 (est.) changes in population, race/ethnicity, and income, although the usual caveats about midyear estimates apply. One shows how much money each CA spends on gas in the aggregate (pretty shocking to think that my neighborhood spends $70M on gas a year — that could buy one hella lot of single-speed bikes); another, MP3 player ownership. I can probably personally attest that far more than 1,905 West Town-ners own MP3 players, judging from the rush-hour crowds boarding the Blue Line.
* Austin has an exemplary “downtown redevelopment”:http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/downtown/ info portal, with printable posters highlighting what’s under construction, the standard GIS viewer, a monthly newsletter, PDF downloads of major planning reports, tourist maps, and building permit data. The city’s collection of “demographic maps”:http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/census/maps.htm also answer plenty of unusual (but good) questions, like where McMansions or apartments are being built, who voted how on municipal propositions, how fast taxes are rising, and where immigrants, single mothers, voters, and the educated live.
Smart growth self-tours
The Greenbelt Alliance offers up a few turn-by turn “self-guided outings… through neighborhoods around the Bay Area, highlighting “good developments”:http://www.greenbelt.org/whatwedo/prog_cdt_projectsummary.html and pointing out opportunities for even more” — a good template for those wanting to do a “Tour de Sprawl”:http://www.northstar.sierraclub.org/tour-de-sprawl (Twin Cities link, or try “Athens, Georgia”:http://www.bikeathens.com/activities/tds/index.html)
I’d talked with local Sierra Club people about doing one, but the requisite two or three meetings never happened or the right people just didn’t come together; it might be fun to assemble one for next year’s Spaces & Places.
Start riding
CICLE in LA offers more than some “neat woodcut stickers”:http://www.cicle.org/cicle_content/pivot/entry.php?id=396#body and “PDFed propaganda”:http://cicle.org/properganda/properganda.html (although sadly not their splash logo of “We are alternative energy”). The “Start Riding”:http://www.cicle.org/cicle_content/pivot/entry.php?id=469 section includes several basic tutorials and “g-mapped routes”:http://www.cicle.org/cicle_content/pivot/entry.php?id=698 that could conceivably be inputted into a common resource, like “Bikely”:http://www.bikely.com.
YIMBY in LA
bq. The Alliance [for a Livable Los Angeles] uses several strategies to achieve its mission including candidate forums during election times, bringing the “Making Los Angeles More Livable” presentation to community groups, and organizing the Y.I.M.B.Y (Yes-In-My-Back-Yard) Brigade.
(I realize that I have a couple of incomplete posts from last year about reurbanizing L.A. Maybe soon.)
Bicycling vs. hockey
A “new journal article”:http://www.vtpi.org/pucher_canbike.pdf investigates Why Canadians Cycle More than Americans:
bq. In spite of their colder climate, Canadians cycle about three times more than Americans… Most of these factors result from differences between Canada and the United States in their transport and land-use policies, and not from intrinsic differences in history, culture or resource availability.
1% or more of residents bicycle to work in only four of fifty states (Oregon, Arizona, Montana, and D.C.), but that number bike in 8 of 12 Canadian provices and territories!
Wrinkles in inclusionary offsets
[posted to pro-urb, about inclusionary density bonuses]
“isn’t it the case that pro formas often start to look a whole lot sweeter when one can find ways to add units to the project?”
Not necessarily. As I understand it (having talked pretty extensively with developers as part of a process examining inclusionary requirements here), the increased economies of scale gained from higher density fall apart once you approach/cross certain thresholds — the incremental increase in housing units may not result in a sufficient increment in profit.
One developer claimed that on one project, a doubling of FAR was still insufficient to offset a 20% inclusionary requirement. The neighborhood had a strict height limit, and packing additional bulk below that line was neither possible nor desirable. Other de facto limits occur elsewhere: single family houses are indeed more profitable than townhouses; high-rises run into various engineering problems as they cross certain heights.
Additionally, construction costs per unit are much higher at higher densities, so the “free land” granted by the density bonus is worth less as a percentage of the total unit cost; and the usual trick of building smaller, uglier “affordable” houses doesn’t work when the “market” houses are 400 sq. ft. studio apartments.
That same developer, though, thought that relief from parking requirements *would* be an effective way of mitigating the cost of high-density inclusionary units. Meanwhile, a payment in lieu fee has proven quite popular with high-rise developers, which might indicate that it’s underpriced.
Zoning code reviewed
Other blogs give you movie reviews. This one reviews zoning codes every once in a while; here, Chicago (“synopsis”:http://egov.cityofchicago.org/webportal/COCWebPortal/COC_ATTACH/zoningcode_highlights.html | “full text”:http://w14.cityofchicago.org:8080/zoning/default.jsp), as posted to pro-urb.
1. Urbanism: good. Nothing groundbreaking, but even the 1957 ordinance wasn’t bad. The new, finer grain of residential districts, required rear open space, contextual (averaged) front setbacks, new building envelope specifications, and Pedestrian Street designation have all worked very well. Some difficult sites (like acute-angle “flatirons”) are now once again developable.
However, nothing can stop cut-rate construction con artists from making a buck off a housing bubble; enforcement of building and zoning codes alike has been a problem, including brazen violation of height limits, shearing off of promised ornament, and parking garage bloat. Law enforcement, as you might have heard, has never been among Chicago’s strengths.
(Question: how well have urban pattern books fared, given today’s shoddy standards? I liked the “Norfolk pattern book”:http://www.norfolk.gov/Planning/comehome/Norfolk_Pattern_Book/residents.html, and I’m aware of the Prince’s Foundation work in teaching craftsmen, but even our prized, design-guidelined historic districts get the same schlock as anywhere else. I can’t imagine that a mere pattern book would’ve stopped the developers of “this”:http://flickr.com/photos/tags/ugliestbuildingever.)
2. Simplicity: fair. Not having to deal with those endless pages of uses makes a difference, as do the illustrations, but honestly the old code was pretty straightforward. Several new practices were introduced that create some basic level of design review, including “type 1 rezonings” (attach a site plan) and the lower PUD thresholds.
3. Process: poor. The alderman still zones however’s best for his campaign fund (e.g., pro-developer or pro-NIMBY), context and best practices be damned. Of course, the code could not have changed this. We also have absolutely no tradition of forward planning here; stuff just happens, and as a result transit routes traverse dying industrial and overpriced single-family areas while developers go wild with high-rises a mile away.
Having some rather intransigent aldermen on the drafting committee did not help [the principal authors’] job any. Farr & Associates wrote the pedestrian streets language and contributed elsewhere.
bq. _Dennis McClendon_: The bonus for green roofs must be particularly cost-effective, because every developer now claims it. Personally I’m dubious about the effectiveness of these little squares of chia pet
My favorite still remains the acre of sod atop a west-side home-improvement big box, adjacent to the 10-acre asphalt slab. Yep, that’ll show ’em.
west north 