A recurring theme of this blog is that we miss so many opportunities to better utilize excess pavement space that so many of our cities and towns have.

In some cases, that simply means we should reduce or remove travel lanes in favor of more on-street parking, wider sidewalks or better provisions for street trees. These are all simple things that can greatly increase our quality of life, and minimize the destruction that planning for high-speed, high-capacity traffic has done.

In other cases, it means getting creative, and using our spaces more efficiently for more hours of the day. When we talk of the 3-legged stool of community building that is design-policy-management, this is often the “management” portion that too often gets neglected.

How about some examples?

One of my all-time favorites is Belden Alley in San Francisco. By daytime, this is a typical service alley like so many in any downtown or urban area. By nighttime, however, the alley transforms. Restaurants actually open onto the alley, and move tables and chairs out onto the pavement space. Bollards are placed at the alley entries so that vehicles cannot drive through. The space becomes alive with people relaxing and enjoying the evening.

The same condition exists in various ways in older cities throughout the U.S. A key component of a recent master plan that we co-authored in downtown Evanston, IL emphasized better use of the alleys as pedestrian ways, building upon a small successful couple of local examples. Other cities with increasingly active urban areas have experimented with this approach, which incidentally helps with safety as well by providing more activity in otherwise dark areas.

But we need not stop at just alleys. Our streets themselves deserve the same kind of thinking. Again, by thinking creatively about how to manage space, we can create more life, and more pleasure in our cities. A great example is the Cicolvia phenomenon. Begun in Bogota, Colombia, the idea was borne to shut down a large amount of the city’s streets (or portions of streets) for most of the day on every Sunday. On the temporarily-closed streets, people ride bikes, jog, walk with their kids, play games and much more. I had the chance to observe this in both Bogota and Medellin in Colombia, and it’s truly one of those experiments that the people who live there find great enjoyment from. Just think of our own over-sized streets, and how easy it would be to close them down for a “slower” Sunday to get out and simply enjoy life in the neighborhood or the City.

The possibilities are endless – the only hurdle we have to overcome is the assumption that all pavement space must be for vehicles all the time. Ray Bradbury eloquently wrote about this in the short story, The Girls Walk This Way,

“We drive… and drive… and drive and come home blind with exhaustion. We have seen nothing, nor have we been seen. Our total experience? Six waved hands, a thousand blurred faces, seventeen Volkswagon rears and some ripe curses from a Porsche and an MG behind.” And later: “Now we must remember that drama and theater are not special and separate and private things in our lives. They are the true stuffs of living, the heart and soul of any true city. It follows we must begin to provide architectural stages upon which our vast populations can act out their lives.”

Belden Alley

Evanston, IL - better utilizing aleys

Ciclovia - Bogota, Colombia

Ciclovia - Bogota, Colombia

Over on the Switchboard blog written by Kaid Benfield, he writes today about a free downtown circulator that Baltimore has recently put in place. (pasted below) This is a great heads-up to those cities that are cutting back on transit in tough times. I’ve thought for a while that we need an entirely new service model for transit in most American cities, and will write about this more in future posts. The reality is the current system in most cities is so completely unsupported by fares that we might as well have completely free zones in order to encourage denser, walkable development. And then, we need to find a new revenue/service model that works for other day to day service. What Baltimore is doing is very encouraging – let’s hope more cities follow their lead and really begin to see transit as a tool for economic development.

Kevin

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/free_downtown_transit_could_be.html

Last week Baltimore launched the Charm City Circulator, a free bus route that connects the city’s downtown with neighborhoods east and west and with other transit routes.  At a time when many transit providers are having to cut back on service, Baltimore is betting that the new service will entice economic activity.

Even better, the Circulator has a dedicated lane through congested areas and, by putting seven buses on the Orange Route (route above), the first of three planned, free Circulator routes, the city will be able to offer service at 10-minute headways. Neighborhoods served by the Orange Route, in addition to downtown, include the city’s popular Inner Harbor, Little Italy, and the University of Maryland’s Baltimore campus.  The fleet consists of environmentally friendly diesel-electric hybrids.

Writing on the web site Autopia, Zach Rosenberg reports that the system is funded by a 16 percent tax on parking, which will raise about $5 million annually, and that its underlying logic is compelling:

“Despite the high costs and massive subsidies implicit in driving, forking over a relatively small fee to ride a bus or subway is a psychological barrier to getting people out of cars. Even the most efficiently run buses can be crowded and slow, but by running at frequent intervals on dedicated lanes between fixed stops — as the Circulator does — delays can be kept to a minimum. The bus might not stop next to, or even near, every rider’s point of origin or destination, but it ensures a measure of proximity for most riders.”

The Charm City Circulator’s own web site stresses the environmental benefits:

“We service residents, downtown employees, students and tourists and anyone else who wishes to ride. The shuttle is intended to reduce congestion and greenhouse gas pollution by offering a convenient, reliable and eco-friendly form of public transportation.

“We’re not only dedicated to offering a stellar form of public transportation that links critical parts of the city—we are interested in doing it in the cleanest way possible. That’s why we’ve chosen 21 DesignLine 2009 EcoSaver IV LF Hybrid Electric vehicles—the first fleet of this type in a major metropolitan area. The Charm City Circulator is one part of Mayor Dixon’s vision of a ‘cleaner, greener Baltimore.’”

The Orange Route serves an east-west corridor, as can be seen above.  When introduced, the Purple Route will serve a north-south corridor will run all the way from Penn Station in the north to Federal Hill in the south. The U-shaped Green Route will run from City Hall down through Fells Point and then up to the Johns Hopkins University’s East Baltimore campus (see photo set).  The routes intersect each other at several points and also connect to other forms of transit, including trains, light rail, buses and water taxis.

Portland has long had a free downtown zone for its regular light rail service, but has had to cut back recently to address budget shortfalls.  Several cities in Europe have free transit zones.  Washington has popular circulator bus routes that link downtown with nearby neighborhoods and that link to but are operated separately from the main Metro transit system; the DC Circulator is not free, however, but operates on a reduced fare system.  Baltimore’s bold venture into free transit service is an exciting initiative well worth following.

Kevin Klinkenberg reviews Kansas City street design and the importance of getting the details right. By comparing and contrasting two sections of Westport Road, he looks at how each of the street designs work, the details of each and then show why one is so much better than the other.

Click here to watch video

Building upon previous posts on Path to Prosperity, here’s something simple and inexpensive that can help rebuild the market for successful, walkable communities. Again, it follows the principles of de-prioritizing long-distance fast traffic, and focusing on what works to create balance in a particular neighborhood. Success stories like this are popping up all over the country as cities rethink the policies that crippled their downtowns and older neighborhoods for decades.

The Return of the Two-Way Street

By Alan Ehrenhalt | December 2009

Why the double-yellow stripe is making a comeback in downtowns.
Over the past couple of decades, Vancouver, Washington, has spent millions of dollars trying to revitalize its downtown, and especially the area around Main Street that used to be the primary commercial center. Just how much the city has spent isn’t easy to determine. But it’s been an ambitious program. Vancouver has totally refurbished a downtown park, subsidized condos and apartment buildings overlooking it and built a new downtown Hilton hotel.

Some of these investments have been successful, but they did next to nothing for Main Street itself. Through most of this decade, the street remained about as dreary as ever. Then, a year ago, the city council tried a new strategy. Rather than wait for the $14 million more in state and federal money it was planning to spend on projects on and around Main Street, it opted for something much simpler. It painted yellow lines in the middle of the road, took down some signs and put up others, and installed some new traffic lights. In other words, it took a one-way street and opened it up to two-way traffic.

The merchants on Main Street had high hopes for this change. But none of them were prepared for what actually happened following the changeover on November 16, 2008. In the midst of a severe recession, Main Street in Vancouver seemed to come back to life almost overnight.

Within a few weeks, the entire business community was celebrating. “We have twice as many people going by as they did before,” one of the employees at an antique store told a local reporter. The chairman of the Vancouver Downtown Association, Lee Coulthard, sounded more excited than almost anyone else. “It’s like, wow,” he exclaimed, “why did it take us so long to figure this out?”

A year later, the success of the project is even more apparent. Twice as many cars drive down Main Street every day, without traffic jams or serious congestion. The merchants are still happy. “One-way streets should not be allowed in prime downtown retail areas,” says Rebecca Ocken, executive director of Vancouver’s Downtown Association. “We’ve proven that.”

The debate over one-way versus two-way streets has been going on for more than half a century now in American cities, and it is far from resolved even yet. But the evidence seems to suggest that the two-way side is winning. A growing number of cities, including big ones such as Minneapolis, Louisville and Oklahoma City, have converted the traffic flow of major streets to two-way or laid out plans to do so. There has been virtually no movement in the other direction.

Minneapolis opened its First Street and Hennepin Street commercial areas to two-way traffic on October 11, hoping to pump some life into a stagnant corridor. It’s too early to draw any firm conclusions, but the early responses were mixed. First Street is home to several nightclubs, and some of them complained that bringing in two-way traffic made it difficult for bands with large trucks to park. “The city has royally screwed us,” one club manager declared. The city basically shrugged those complaints off. Its planners claimed the clubowners were making self-interested arguments that ignored the common benefits of a healthier street life.

Before World War II, one-way commercial streets were pretty rare in the United States. People frequented downtowns in which buses and streetcars negotiated two-way traffic, and they got off to shop at the stores that lined both sides of the street. Those who drove could park right along the sidewalk.

After the war, a couple of things happened. Civil defense planners, taking seriously the threat of nuclear attack, worried that residents trying to escape would create gridlock on the crowded two-way streets, imprisoning themselves in smoldering cities and causing many more casualties. The arterial streets were the only escape routes they had. Making them one-way, on an alternating basis, would speed things up and save lives. Or so it was thought.

But atomic bombs were only one factor that made civic leaders and transportation planners partial to one-way streets in the postwar years. They were worried about congestion, period. Some thought that the frustrations of moving through downtown the old-fashioned way were driving people to do their shopping in the suburbs. More mobility might mean more customers. Others, in those pre-Interstate days, cared mainly about the satisfaction of the suburbanites themselves. These people were using the arterial roads to commute in and out of the city, and there was little dispute that one-way streets could get them back and forth more quickly.

By the 1970s, though, there were new urban realities. Large portions of the Interstate Highway System were built, so nobody would have to flee the Soviets on gridlocked city streets. More important, downtown retail customers were shopping at suburban malls no matter what the local chamber of commerce did to try and stop them. Downtown had begun its long, familiar decline. The one-way streets fashioned in the 1950s and 1960s were still pretty good at whisking people out of central cities, but far fewer area residents wanted to enter the cities in the first place. Many downtown one-way streets became miniature speedways that served largely to frighten anyone who had the eccentric idea of strolling down the sidewalk.

Anyone who travels a lot to the center of big cities has had an experience like this: You arrive at night, and start looking for your hotel. You find it, but you can’t drive to the entrance because the street is one-way the other way. Finally you come to a street that goes the way you want, but once you get close again, the signs won’t allow you to make the turn you need to make. You can waste 20 minutes this way. And as you keep driving, you notice that the streets are empty anyway. Any reason that might have existed for turning them into single-purpose speedways simply did not apply anymore.

Meanwhile, local governments were slowly learning that the old two-way streets, whatever the occasional frustration, had real advantages in fostering urban life. Traffic moved at a more modest pace, and there was usually a row of cars parked by the curb to serve as a buffer between pedestrians and moving vehicles. If you have trouble perceiving the difference, try asking yourself this question: How many successful sidewalk cafés have you ever encountered on a four-lane, one-way street with cars rushing by at 50 miles per hour? My guess is, very few indeed.

So over the past 10 years, dozens of cities have reconfigured one-way streets into two-way streets as a means of bringing their downtowns to life. The political leadership and the local business community usually join forces in favor of doing this. There are always arguments against it. Some of them are worth stopping to consider.

Among the critics are traffic engineers and academics who were taught some fixed principles of transportation in school decades ago and have never bothered to reconsider them. Joseph Dumas, a professor at the University of Tennessee, argued a few years ago that “the primary purpose of roads is to move traffic efficiently and safely, not to encourage or discourage business or rebuild parts of town . . . . Streets are tools for traffic engineering.”

If you agree that streets serve no other purpose than to move automobiles, you are unlikely to see much problem with making them one-way. On the other hand, if you think that streets possess the capacity to enhance the quality of urban life, you will probably consider the Dumas Doctrine to be nonsense. That is the way more and more cities are coming to feel.

There are other arguments. It’s sometimes said that more accidents occur on two-way streets than one-way streets. The research that supports this claim is decades old, and to my knowledge, has not been replicated. Even if you accept this argument, though, you might want to consider that, at slower speeds, the accidents on two-way streets are much more likely to be fender-benders at left-turn intersections, not harrowing high-speed crashes involving cars and pedestrians.

Finally, there are complaints from fire departments that it takes them longer to reach the scene of trouble when they have to thread their way around oncoming traffic, rather than taking a straight shot down a one-way speedway. I can’t refute this, and in any case, I don’t like arguing with fire departments. But I have to wonder how many people have died in burning buildings in recent years because a fire truck wasn’t allowed to use a one-way street.

I wouldn’t argue that two-way streets are any sort of panacea for urban revival, Vancouver’s experience notwithstanding. And I understand that they are not always practical. Some streets simply are too narrow to have traffic moving in both directions; others have to be designated one-way because their purpose is to feed traffic onto expressways.

What I would say is this: When it comes to designing or retrofitting streets, the burden of proof shouldn’t fall on those who want to use them the old-fashioned way. It should be on those who think the speedway ideology of the 1950s serves much of a purpose half a century later.

Peter Park has certainly been on the vanguard of Planning Directors in the last decade or so, first in Milwaukee and now Denver. This article profiles his current thinking and what they are doing now in Denver in terms of planning and zoning.

Park: Milwaukee’s former planner embraces rail as key to urban development
11/16/2009

By Marc Eisen
For WisBusiness.com

Peter Park, the star urban planner behind Milwaukee’s downtown revival, returned to Wisconsin Friday to discuss the lessons he’s learned in his new work as Denver’s planning chief.

“We need to look at transportation and development together. They’re not separate,” he told a gathering of several hundred environmentalists at the Promega Corporation’s Biopharmaceutical Technology Center in Fitchburg.

Park, 46, is working the land-use side of the most ambitious transportation project underway in the United States — the $4.7 billion FasTracks program. It promises 119 miles of light-rail and commuter-rail tracks by 2017, including 70 train stops that are expected to be the focal point of new residential and commercial development in the Denver area.

“Doing all this at once is crazy and scary,” Park admitted. “But if we’re going to grow [the transit system], now’s a great time for it.” Metropolitan Denver’s population of about 2.7 million, he noted, is expected to hit 4.3 million by 2035.

Park’s talk to the “Bringing Bioneers to Wisconsin” conference was a stark reminder that Wisconsin’s marquee cities, Milwaukee and Madison, are laggards in sorting out their 21st century transportation systems.

Suburban protests killed a planned light-rail connection between Milwaukee and Waukesha County in the 1990s. A proposed commuter rail connecting Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha with Chicago’s Metra rail system is facing similar fire. Transit planning in Dane County has proceeded at a snail’s pace, though the Dane County Board has just approved a skeletal regional transportation authority. In both cities, conservatives and talk radio hosts raise the cry that rail construction is a costly boondoggle that will do little to relieve highway congestion.

The Denver area followed a very different script. In 2004, voters approved (by a comfortable 57 percent to 43 percent margin) the $4.7 billion FasTracks plan funded by a .4 cent sales tax. Led by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, 31 mayors in the seven-county Denver region endorsed the plan. In the balkanized world of Wisconsin’s regional politics, such shared vision is, in a word, inconceivable.

It was Hickenlooper who set his sights on luring Park away from Milwaukee. Park had captured national attention for turning Mayor John Norquist’s expansive vision of walkable, neighborhood-focused development into the nuts and bolts of city policy.

“Peter and John saw eye-to eye on almost every planning and development issue,” says Stephen Filmanowicz, a longtime Norquist aide.

The mayor and his planner’s work included the Riverwalk path that enlivened street life (and new housing) along the Milwaukee River; the audacious leveling of the Park East Freeway spur and replacing it with a neighborhood-friendly boulevard; fashioning the upscale Beerline neighborhood out of an industrial brownfield; and devising a new downtown plan and zoning code that banished suburban standards and stressed downtown housing, mixed-use streets and a streamlined approval process for developers who had the right ideas.

“I need more than two hands to count the number of times that someone brought in a plan for a strip mall or some other ill-conceived project and walked out with a decent urban plan after Peter took out his pen and started drawing,” says Filmanowicz, who worked in the planning office before becoming Norquist’s press secretary.

Shortly after Norquist resigned as mayor in 1993 to become president and chief executive officer of the Congress for New Urbanism and moved to Chicago, Park accepted Hickenlooper’s job offer and headed to Denver to run a planning office roughly four times the size of Milwaukee’s.

Whitney Gould, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s formidable architectural critic, summed up Park’s work by saying he “has made Milwaukee a national model of how to reinvent communities battered by freeways, demolition and suburbanization.”

Gould added that Park’s admirers even compared him to Baron Georges Haussmann, the famed planner who remade Paris in the 19th century.

Much of Park’s Fitchburg speech, as well as his comments in an earlier interview, focused on the mechanics of restoring urban character and rejecting the suburban alternative of multiple car lanes, sprawling surface parking lots and segregated land uses.

“Urban streets, squares and blocks make for unique urban places,” he said. “It’s a matter of seizing opportunities rather than managing growth. We can fundamentally reshape our growth pattern, but we need to plan and engage our communities up front.”

Park added with a disarming candor: “I’m a planner, but it’s not like I’m an expert. I know a couple of things, but I need to know what folks think about their neighborhoods. What’s important to this place?”

The irony, he said, is that the most attractive neighborhoods in both Denver and Milwaukee are products of the old streetcar lines that once served city neighborhoods.

“When people say transit-oriented development is new, I wonder what’s that about?” he said. “Do they know South Pearl Street [in Denver]? That’s where streetcars used to run, and it’s one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city.”

Streetcar lines (some 300 miles in Denver) ruled at a time when homes were smaller, shopping was nearby and parking was relatively scarce because of high transit usage. But while those transit lines are long gone, their DNA remains to shape modern day life in the neighborhood, according to Park.

“I see my job as extending that urban fabric into the newer parts of the city,” he said. To this end, the 70 proposed transit stations stops weigh heavily in Denver’s planning.

Park and his planners want the stations tailored to their surroundings. A station serving the downtown business district would look different than one serving an urban neighborhood. Same would be true with a small-town Main Street and college-campus stations. Each would have its distinctive feel.

The goal is anything but radical. Park sees transit stations catalyzing private investment. He believes developers will want to put housing and stores near them.

That’s not so much the case with bus stops and their flexible siting. “With a bus system it’s a little more fuzzy,” Park said. “Certainty is what really matters, especially as we pull out of this great recession. Those who build really want certainty.”

Of course, there’s never certainty with development. Markets change, economies shift, political favor reverses and 50 other things can go wrong. FasTracks has had its own bruising encounter with reality, according to press reports.

The recession has punctured the revenue expectations for the new sales tax of four cents on a $10 purchase. Projected construction costs, meanwhile, have soared to almost $7 billion. Analysts say that the financial double whammy will necessitate either a referendum on another sales tax hike or a slower construction schedule that will stretch beyond the 2017 completion date now envisioned.

In the interview, Park grimaced when he acknowledged the financial complications, but basically was unperturbed. The recession has battered the suburbs worse than it has the older downtown neighborhoods, he pointed out.

“It’s the those big houses that sit on the market the longest,” Park said. “I think it’s a good thing is that a lot of folks are realizing the virtues and values of the not-so-big house.”

In any case, Denver is already enjoying a big surge in transit ridership. Federal data shows ridership almost doubling, from about 5 percent of city commuters using transit in 2004 to 9 percent in 2008.

Park is optimistic. “You got to be!” he said with the bright confidence of man who thinks he sees the future.