I love the snow, and what it does to life in cities. So much of our lives gets consumed by activity and noise, it’s refreshing when we’re forced to have much of that go [...]]]> This one is especially for my readers in the Kansas City region (but hopefully for others of you in northern climates).

I love the snow, and what it does to life in cities. So much of our lives gets consumed by activity and noise, it’s refreshing when we’re forced to have much of that go away. Mainly, it’s wonderful just how quiet the city gets when vehicles can’t travel very well. We forget just how much of the noise of life is vehicular, except when a snowstorm comes and takes most of that away. It’s so… peaceful. Which of course makes you think.

You may wonder what a snowstorm can say about walkability and how we live our lives. Well, since we own this bit of cyberspace, let me share a few thoughts.

For one, it doesn’t take much of a weather event to reveal just how fragile our existence is. And how dependent we are on our machines. For so many, life just shuts down completely. That’s not always bad, except that it’s a forced choice, not a conscious one.

And it also reveals just how much of the “panic” that comes with a big storm is because of our auto-dependency. For example, if you live in a place where walking is the norm, a storm is just an inconvenience – you can still get to the store, the local bar, to work, and the kids can even get to school. But in a culture where all those things require a vehicular trip, we either shut life down completely or over-purchase on our vehicles for winter driving ability. Again, I kind of like how life quiets down from a storm, but not when it’s forced upon us.

Another thing that’s been at the top of the mind of Kansas City, MO residents in particular is snow plowing. Yes, the bane of our existence – we live in a city that is inept at plowing its streets (even though most of the same complainers don’t bother to clear their own sidewalks). But while I’d concede we live in a poorly managed city, is that really the root of the problem?

Like so many of our fiscal issues, it’s impossible to ignore the impact of how our cities are planned and built. KCMO is an extremely spread out municipality, with very low overall population density. This particular pattern of development is extremely expensive to service, with many more lane-miles of roadways than similarly-sized cities that are more compact. While the city contains certain areas (the urban core) that are fairly compact, it has extensive square miles of land that are low-density subdivisions or rural areas. All of those parts of the city still demand municipal services, regardless of their plus or minus contribution to the general fund. It’s nothing new or groundbreaking, but the reality is that the pattern of development we’ve primarily built in the last 50+ years is a money-losing proposition for city governments. It seems strange with all of the fees on new development and new tax revenue to say this, but those are all short-term hits that don’t even come close to paying for the long-term expenses of repair, maintenance and basic services.

It’s a funny catch-22 that the more compact and walkable a city is, the more likely it is able to provide quality municipal services, such as clearing, cleaning and repairing streets. Even though, you may need your vehicle even less!

Topic for another day: should municipal services be tailored to efficiency of the neighborhood, or in planner jargon terms, to Transect Zone?

So, what is the bottom line? Enjoy the snow. Let life slow down a little. But if you care about how quickly or effectively your street gets cleared, start paying to development and land use issues in your city.

Transit City: the TTC’s plan to build a network of light rail, extending dedicated transit infrastructure to many of Toronto’s neighbourhoods that lack it, thereby increasing residents’ quality of life, reducing our collective [...]]]> Here is an article I wanted to share with you from the Torontoist over there efforts to become a transit city.

Transit City: the TTC’s plan to build a network of light rail, extending dedicated transit infrastructure to many of Toronto’s neighbourhoods that lack it, thereby increasing residents’ quality of life, reducing our collective environmental footprint, and redressing a major backlog of transit development. Transit Cities: the term applied at a symposium held last week to cities that don’t just have transit but integrate it properly into the urban landscape, making good on the promise that transit expansion seems to hold but on which it doesn’t always deliver. Designing Transit Cities was its name, and bringing planners, academics, advocates, and the public at large up to speed on the opportunities and pitfalls of transit expansion was its goal.

The day-and-a-half-long symposium, co-sponsored by the City of Toronto, the Canadian Urban Institute, the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto, the Toronto Society of Architects, and various transit agencies, brought in experts from around the world to outline the successes and failures they’d seen in other cities’ transit expansions, and extrapolate some lessons for Toronto. Panel discussions dealt with everything from intelligent planning to community advocacy, and the symposium managed to cover a lot more ground than such events often do. (Though, as local transit guru Steve Munro suggested on his blog, this ground was perhaps well-trod, a rediscovery of ideas that have been discussed for decades.)

Though the speakers came from a variety of backgrounds, some themes did emerge quite clearly, providing a consensus view on the relationship between transit planning and urban development.

(Read more)

Park: Milwaukee’s former planner embraces rail as key to urban development
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.