One of the absolute best examples of this is the Envision Baltimore newsletter that I receive every week in [...]]]> I love how the internet has democratized information. With the advent of blog and social media tools, any person or group who has a passion can advance causes or ideas in a thorough, professional manner.

One of the absolute best examples of this is the Envision Baltimore newsletter that I receive every week in my inbox. An initiative of TND Planning Group, and my friend Stuart Sirota, the newsletter is a fantastic collection of articles, links and photos about urban design and planning issues. A good portion of it focuses solely on Baltimore, but there’s always  a solid collection of items relevant to people anywhere.  On thing I particularly like – the newsletter focuses on the complete range of policy, management and DESIGN issues that affect a city and region. It always seems to take me several days to wade through all the information in just this one newsletter, while most others I see get deleted right away.

Check it out and sign up. Or – create one for your community. It’s a great template for what urban activists in every city could do to be effective.

http://www.envisionbaltimore.org/

This is current-day downtown Atlanta, as seen from a hotel in Midtown.

Atlanta, like so many [...]]]> When I was a kid, I used to sketch out designs for futuristic cities in my notebooks. Complete with domed arenas, skyscrapers and fantastic highway intersections, they looked a lot like, well, a lot like this:

This is current-day downtown Atlanta, as seen from a hotel in Midtown.

Atlanta, like so many American cities is visibly awash in automobile infrastructure – wide streets, freeways, on-and-off ramps and parking. Lots and lots of parking. Take a close look again at the photos and just notice how much real estate is given over to temporarily storing cars. And, this is a city with a fairly robust rail transit system. MARTA certainly has its flaws, but as the last true subway/heavy rail system built in America, it’s more than most cities have.

When I took these pictures a couple weeks ago, and when I was walking around, I noticed something else. Or, I should say, I noticed the absence of something. In the middle of a typical weekday, in the largest city in the Southeast, there’s virtually no one walking around. Despite a fantastic array of economic activity (the sheer numbers of hotel rooms, bars, restaurants, offices, apartments, etc is more than impressive), there’s little to no LIFE.

If we were honest with ourselves, we’d just admit that the entire system is designed for that to be the case – it’s no accident. The roadways are all sized for the 10 hours a week that people scurry on and off the freeways to get to far-flung destinations. (incidentally, that’s 6% of the week, leaving 94% of the time they are dramatically over-designed for.) Garages are all sized to handle the load of cars at the peak time. Transit systems are designed to deal with what is left – those who cannot afford to drive, and the handful of people who choose not to. Sidewalks are an afterthought at best, as the pedestrian environment is really only for conveying people from a parked car at one end to a destination a short walk away.

I can say with experience – most of the walking in this area is depressing. If you don’t have to walk, you wouldn’t, as you are presented with a series of blank building walls, panhandlers, wind tunnels and cars zooming by at 30-40 miles per hour on city streets.

We assume every trip is a car trip, and then design our systems to assure that’s the case. This is the modern city. This is the dilemma.

At one time, even this part of this city was a walkable, vibrant place. But over the course of a few decades, it was transformed into a place with great numbers of stuff, but no people. No joy. No wonder. No wonder, in fact, that people don’t walk.

Without life on the streets, there’s very little reason to want urbanity. Eventually, people realize that they’re making a trade-off that’s not enjoyable, and will simply choose to live or work somewhere else. If you don’t have the upsides of vibrancy, excitement and convenience in the middle of the city, all you have are the downsides (noise, traffic, expense, lack of space).

Those fantasy cities of my youth were fun to draw and imagine, but even then, I never imagined them as being devoid of people.  We can certainly get carried away with the flavor-of-the-moment in terms of urban fixes (stadiums, highways, entertainment districts, high-rises), but we should never forget the fundamental element that keeps people coming back to cities: other people. Without that basic element of life (other life), we might as well sit at home and watch TV.  Cities are not statistics.

As we conceive of the next wave of urban repair, I’d encourage every planner, every architect, every elected official to ask: what does this do to actually get people out on the streets? Would I walk more or less because of this change? What would it take to get me and my friends and family to walk more? Until we examine every project and detail through these kinds of lenses, our cities will not give us joy and pleasure, and they will in turn never return the kind of investment they aspire to.

A lively setting: people walking, talking. Store owners chat with customers on the sidewalk.

EXT: A NEIGHBORHOOD CORNER STORE

20 years later, same location. A lonely street: buildings boarded up or turned into low-rent uses. Few people seen walking around. Generally dismal.

It’s a common theme or scene in so [...]]]> EXT: A NEIGHBORHOOD CORNER STORE

A lively setting: people walking, talking. Store owners chat with customers on the sidewalk.

EXT: A NEIGHBORHOOD CORNER STORE

20 years later, same location. A lonely street: buildings boarded up or turned into low-rent uses. Few people seen walking around. Generally dismal.

It’s a common theme or scene in so many movies. (The movie Back to the Future comes to mind for me) The old neighborhood, once thriving and lively, is now a virtual ghost town. We’re left to think this simply is how life is. The sands of time turn what was once something good into something bad, through the mysterious process known as change.  It’s inevitable, right?

Or is it?

Today’s feature: how to bring about this change, in 3 simple steps. Want to ruin your neighborhood, town or city? Then all it takes is to follow the method outlined below, as countless places have done.

1. Change the streets so it’s safe for cars to drive really fast
2. Force new buildings to ignore the street
3. Welcome any and all development – it’s all good

Need some more direct guidance?  Just look at the intersection of 39^th and Broadway, in Kansas City, Missouri. At one time, this intersection was one of many thriving, walkable places in Midtown Kansas City. Serviced by streetcar lines running east-west and north-south, the streets were a lively mixture of transit users, pedestrians and cars. Visiting it today, it’s virtually impossible to imagine that scenario. Here’s what happened:

1. The streets were modified so that cars could drive really fast. Streetcars were removed, parking lanes removed on 39^th street, and both roadways maximized the number of traffic lanes.
2. Development regulations (primarily zoning) put in place over the years emphasized suburban-style approaches. Buildings were to be set back from the street, parking minimums were required, and entries were shifted to parking lots instead of the street.
3. As the city became less prosperous over the years, the mentality that any development is good development took over. In the name of rebuilding, generous tax incentives were given, and city officials became weary of putting any restrictions on developers, for fear that it would drive investment away. A poverty mentality settled in.

So what are the results? 3 corners of the intersection have been rebuilt in the last decade, and not a single corner has a door along the sidewalk, in the middle of the city. The intersection has gone from being a lively, urban crossroads to a no-man’s land that feels unsafe and ugly. It’s a place to get through, instead of a place to get to. Despite the good intentions of many people, this is nothing but a colossal failure of planning and zoning. Cue the images:

A Walgreen’s sits on one corner, in the typical fashion that suburban-style drug stores dot the landscape all over America. But it’s ok, it has a wonderful “pedestrian amenity” on the corner. That clearly makes it all better.

The new Gomer’s liquor store across Broadway turns a blank side to both streets, and has its entry on a parking lot. The building it replaced was dilapidated, but at least it had several entries facing the streets.

A new Jimmy John’s opposite 39th Street replaced a horrible Popeye’s Chicken a couple years ago. Only problem – the building sits back off the street, behind a parking lot. Note the lovely fence along the sidewalk, clearly there to protect the parked cars from the unruly types plying the sidewalk.

In many circles, it’s considered radical thinking that areas such as these (again, in the middle of the city) should be bike and pedestrian-friendly, and that we should take direct measures to make them so. For example, make the cars slow down, put back the on-street parking, place buildings and entries along the sidewalk, provide quality transit, and on and on.  Heaven forbid! How will people get around?!

But the truly radical thinking was to willfully destroy so many places to begin with. Through acts small (like this example), or large (ramming freeways through urban neighborhoods), we purposefully ruined thousands of neighborhoods, towns and cities, in an effort to be “modern.” We took models of human settlement that have worked for thousands of years, and forced a radical new paradigm that suggests we should have a lifestyle assisted by a machine.

If we’d laid out a plan to destroy our cities, we could hardly have done any better. If the city fathers of Kansas City had hatched a plan forty years ago to ruin this intersection, they could hardly have done better. If you want to do the same for your town, just follow the three simple steps.

Just a few blocks to the east - what 39th Street used to look like

Unfortunately, that’s where a lot [...]]]> In the urban planning profession, we talk a lot about the importance of public transit. At any given public presentation or meeting, you’ll hear people talk incessantly about how we need to offer real alternatives to driving, and how all development should make itself either accessible to transit or transit-oriented.

Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of the talk ends. We don’t offer much in the way of new thinking in terms of how to actually provide the service, or how to encourage people to do the one thing that is the mainstay of all transit in the U.S. – ride the bus. We don’t do this, because, frankly, even most planners rarely ride a bus.

We don’t avoid the bus because we’re hypocrites, or at least I don’t believe that to be the case. We don’t ride the bus, because, let’s be frank, riding the bus in most cities sucks. If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere where frequent bus service exists (increasingly a rarity), it’s still the last transportation mode of choice. In most of America built in the last 5-6 decades, you probably don’t even have much of an option for bus service.

But for the sake of this piece, let’s assume you actually live somewhere that has regular access to some sort of bus system, and it can get you to many of your destinations. In that case, your journey starts with a walk, sometimes 5-10 minutes, waiting outside in whatever weather you find yourself, and dealing with buses that are often off-schedule (if you even know the schedule). Once the bus arrives, you get to ride on a jerky vehicle that stops often, takes 2-3 times as long to get to your destination as driving, and probably has people riding on it that you’d rather not share a vehicle with. That is, if there’s anyone on the bus at all – so many routes have only a handful of riders.

For this pleasure, you get to sift through your pockets and loose change to come up with the $1.50 or so to take the ride, or perhaps you have a monthly pass for frequent riders. Oh, one last bit of fun – if you’re not familiar with the bus, you may not be sure it’s going to take you where you exactly want to go.

Despite efforts of many transit agencies to make buses more comfortable and colorful, embrace GPS technology (albeit slowly), improve bus stops, and add special routes, it’s no great mystery that the service still is the last choice for most people wanting to get from point A to point B.

I’ve long advocated that we need to fundamentally rethink this service that makes up the backbone of nearly all transit systems in the country. The systems we have today are essentially the forgotten descendant of streetcar systems that existed in a previous era, and need a fundamental makeover. Could we have a reality TV show that’s “Extreme Transit Makeover”? Probably not – doesn’t sound like a big hit for the Nielsens.

Nonetheless, one of the many transformations that transit systems should consider is to simply make basic bus service free.

But how can the bus be free, you ask? After all, someone has to pay for it.

It’s true. Nothing is ever free. But my proposition is that the basic city bus service that so many places fund would be better off as a basic municipal service, like fire or police.  Fund it through a dedicated tax of some kind – sales, property, etc, and don’t bother to charge for the ride itself. Allow me to elaborate.

Consider first that most bus systems come nowhere near being able to pay for themselves through farebox revenue (the money you pay to ride, either as a single ticket or a monthly pass).  The overwhelming majority of bus systems take in about 20% of their total revenue through the farebox. Some take in quite a bit less, and a successful handful take in closer to 30%. Most urban rail systems do a bit better – they often average closer to 50% of total revenue through farebox, for what is decidedly a premium service.

Would a 20% cut in revenue be painful? Certainly, if this was a zero sum game. Transit agencies are notoriously poor at being able to monetize their assets and services, and this would force many to think in new and more entrepreneurial ways to raise revenue, even if tax revenue made up some or all of the gap. The farebox systems do actually cost money (the equipment on the bus isn’t cheap), so there would be a modest decrease in expenses. But yes, transit operators would have to adjust, even as free ridership brings more customers into the system. And clearly if bus service was free, more people would ride. The good news: more riders equals more customers for premium services, and more customers to advertise to.

A common critique of any proposal to eliminate individual out-of-pocket cost is that people do not value anything they don’t have to pay for. It’s true to a degree – our human nature values things more that we have to pay substantially for. But, really, will people value riding a bus any less if they don’t have to shell out $1.50 a ride, or $30 a month? Do we really think today’s riders feel that kind of ownership of their ride?

A few small cities and agencies have taken the leap and do provide a free system, though they are admittedly special cases. Numerous mountain towns, for example, offer totally free bus service, and they are well-used by locals and visitors. Island Transit in Whidbey Island, WA has a free system throughout the island. But for the most part, the idea has never taken hold in more run-of-the-mill cities and towns, let alone big city transit agencies.

In recent years, many cities have adopted free circulators or special discounted routes, especially in their downtown areas. This if often done to speed up service in more congested areas, since the slowest part of bus service is the act of collecting money during boarding. For my part, the act of removing the payment process from the boarding process is reason enough to at least consider how to provide a free service. Anyone who’s ridden a bus knows just how frustrating this is to deal with.

If the idea of a totally free system seems too radical, imagine what could happen with a hybrid system. Transit agencies could choose to make all of the slow feeder routes free, and charge for the more premium services, such as express buses. Want a quick ride? You pay a substantial premium. Willing to wait? You can ride for free. With this proposition, agencies would only charge for routes where they have the physical ability to set up a pre-pay system, much like rail lines. This of course is a primary feature of true BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) lines, as pioneered by the system in Curitiba, Brazil, and now in place in many parts of the world. The theory: if you don’t have the physical room to set up this service, make it a free line.

BRT station in Curitiba, Brazil

BRT in Bogota, Colombia

There’s a host of other transformations that transit agencies can take, and some are gradually doing. A list that’s certainly not all-inclusive would be: smaller buses that operate more frequently, instead of big, empty buses; making the bus itself a more informal, fun experience with music and even wi-fi; using creative paint jobs on the buses to give them a whimsical character; contracting out operation of the lines, instead of it all being run by a centralized agency.  The list could go on – what are your ideas?

Smaller buses in Bogota, Colombia

Smaller, creative buses in Medellin, Colombia

It’s high time for a revolution in bus service in this country, with a fundamental rethinking of the transit model that we inherited generations ago.  Far too many agencies are still focused on moving people around who have no choice, instead of attracting new riders or discretionary riders into the system. And most agencies still don’t understand variable pricing and value-added services, like most customer-driven businesses inherently undertake. Instead, transit agencies rely on a combination of a 19^th century service model and funding from the state/federal teat to get them by, all the time providing a service that is subpar at best. It’s time for a change.

One of the biggest challenges facing our cities and towns is to deal with the sheer amount of suburban repair work needed. 50+ years of suburban [...]]]> Today we have a guest post from Eric Brown, of Brown Design Studio. Eric is a long-time New Urbanist, based in Beaufort, SC.  He can be found at www.brownds.com

One of the biggest challenges facing our cities and towns is to deal with the sheer amount of suburban repair work needed. 50+ years of suburban investment with the most world’s most prolific economic engine means that there is much work to undo.

Post real estate melt-down, many commissions have been focused on this type of repair work. In many cases, it is much like the power went off and simply left half-finished developments lying about.  Our goal is to try to repair these areas as best we can and set them up to grow into a type of meaningful place. This begins by tackling the process of transformation of the ever common cul-de-sac.

Ironically, or perhaps not so much so, the word cul-de-sac means “bottom of the bag” in French. So the bottom of the bag in this case, gets you the residential equivalent of a fast food drive through, easy for cars but bad for humans.

Our case study example here looks much like a typical bottom of the bag below but with a slight “upgrade” of a green space in the middle as a feature.  Also, as a more advanced version of the cul-de-sac, it actually has alley ways feeding some of the lots.

That little green circle is nicer than pure concrete or asphalt, but does little on its own.  The lot structure is still driving the form of the house placement and you will still end up with something like the next photo, a nicer bottom of the bag.

What to do?  Well, in many of these types of repair projects, we have many limitations on what we can do.  Often, our project is already entitled or zoned and the client does not wish to go back into that arena.  Other times, much of the actual infrastructure is already in as is the case here.

Our one solution was to begin to define the former bottom of the bag into a multi-use place. Cars use this place but also kids, bikes and humans in general.  It becomes a place that social things happen in as well as a simply visually pleasing space.

We use three basic techniques:

1.  Make a place beautiful.  Places that are not visually appealing are not valued as highly as other places.  Here we add a squared up center green with a large oak tree planting (and other small details such as lighting etc.)

2. Define the place (space): A place must be defined or enclosed in some manner.  Here we focus moving the building form and mass around to create walls for our new space.  It’s the same number of houses, but they are moved around to create something of value.

3. Approach of the space:  This is the one that most designers overlook.  Every interesting space has some type of approach to it.  Here we use a row of palmetto trees to create a tighter street section and rhythm that then opens up to the main space.

This simple fix costs very little in actuality.  We also kept existing utility runs and really only changed some lot lines, house placement and a few ornamental design moves inside the right of way.

As an alternate, we also looked at another version.  This is a more involved approach as we moved the right of way a little and actually carved out a small block structure in the former cul-de-sac parcel.  Our main goal here was to generate more value by fronting our homes on a more controlled common green vs. a less desirable suburban second tier arterial road.

We used the same basic principles as above but just modified the plan so that 8 of the 12 homes faced the value generating space vs. 4 in the other example.  Since this is a real world project, our client and design team will now have to weigh out the extra value generated in sales of our approach vs. the extra design and engineering needed to convert to this scheme.  Our earlier example, needed almost no additional engineering or approvals.

There is hope to punch out of the bottom of the bag.  Breaking the cul-de-sac is easy to do from the point of view of a designer of real world solutions to this large problem.  Here, remember that our three main principals; Beautiful Places, Defined Places and Anticipation of a Place were used to build extra value out of typical suburban post-meltdown wreckage.