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.

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.

This is an excellent post that reveals again how markets and market preferences are not stagnant – they respond to many variables. And, in this case, we see what might be a minor trend for now, but something to consider strongly for the future.

Click the screenshot on the left to go to the post from the National Resources Defense Council’s Switchboard blog: “Never mind the Prius – the new chic is going car-free entirely”

The following was written by Kaid Benfield and originally posted on the Switchboard, the NRDC blog:

As many readers of this blog already know, Orenco Station was built as one of the country’s first new, suburban transit-oriented developments. It’s on Portland’s MAX light rail line in Hillsborough, Oregon, and comprises some 1,850 housing units and a town center that includes 68,000 square feet of neighborhood-serving, ground-floor commercial space (with lofts above) on a total of 190 acres.

The now-iconic community was one of the first choices we made while researching NRDC’s book of smart growth success stories, Solving Sprawl (Island Press, 2001). What I liked about the development from the start was that it was quiet and suburban, with lots of single-family houses and open space, giving suburban residents much of what they seek, but in a nonsprawling form incredibly convenient and oriented to transit. Relatively new at the time, it was receiving a lot of attention, including an NAHB community of the year award. Although Orenco did not set out to follow new urbanist design principles, the results were certainly similar to those advocated by new urbanism, and the design movement has certainly claimed it as one of its own.

In fact, the community is featured in a front-page story in the September New Urban News written by publisher Robert Steuteville, because new research shows Orenco to be achieving some remarkable results in performance. The new work continues the research led by Bruce Podobnik at Lewis and Clark College, who first published a study on the development in 2002. Steuteville reports that the new study, which compared Orenco to three other neighborhoods in the region with differing design and location characteristics, “will be published in an upcoming urban research journal.”

For now, the results are summarized in the New Urban News article and in another article in Builder, written by Teresa Burney. Of the other neighborhoods studied, Burney reports that two of the neighborhoods were urban (one poor and long-established; the other middle-class and also well-established, but hilly and lacking in sidewalks). The third was a suburban middle-class development of cul-de-sacs.

Steuteville’s article includes tables of findings, one quite remarkable: Fifty percent of residents of Orenco Station report walking to a store or shop 5 or more times a week; that is ten times the rate of the cul-de-sac neighborhood. (The other two apparently were not surveyed on the point.) In addition, 67 percent of Orenco residents say they use mass transit at least once a week; the cul-de-sac neighborhood is also within a quarter-mile of a light rail station, but only 42 percent report using transit. One reason may be that “Orenco Station has pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, while the Beaverton suburb has few sidewalks.”

While a strong majority of Orenco residents report using transit more frequently since moving there, they tend not to use it for commuting to work more often than do the residents of the other neighborhoods. In fact, they use it for commuting a little less than the others, although their use of single-occupant vehicles for commuting is no higher (and lower than that for the Beaverton cul-de-sacs), because they walk, bike, carpool, or use “combination” modes of commuting more frequently than do the others.

Michael Mehaffy, who was a project manager in the development of Orenco Station, speculates that the transit commuting number may be low because many of the community’s residents work at an Intel facility “right on the community’s doorstep” but not on the MAX line, likely resulting in short car trips (still good for reducing carbon emissions). One must also keep in mind that this is metro Portland we are talking about: Orenco’s relatively “low,” 15% mode share for transit commuting is still three times the national median.

Beyond transportation habits, the community’s level of social activity has apparently risen substantially since 2002, when the development was still relatively new (and unfinished?). By wide margins, residents of Orenco Station outpace those of the comparison neighborhoods in reporting more friendliness, more “community,” and more group participation than their previous communities. Steuteville believes the new study is the first of its kind to show big differences in social activity between new urbanist neighborhoods and more conventional development, and also the first to show such a high rate of walking to stores.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog’s home page.

In his seminal book “Great Streets”, Allan Jacobs wrote “given a limited budget, the most effective expenditure of funds to improve a street would probably be on trees.”

I couldn’t agree more.

This is not simply an exercise in greenwashing or tree-hugging. In fact, when planning for cities one of the more damaging paths to go down is to think that green is always good. It’ll be interesting in fact when the current phase of green fancy dies down so we can start to have more rational discussions of what “green” is appropriate in a walkable environment and how much.

But I digress.

Street trees, on the other hand, are a simple intervention that is almost universally of value to walkability. And by street trees I do not mean ornamental, fruit, or flowering trees. Instead, I’m referring to the kind of tree that actually grows tall and provides shade over the sidewalk and the street. The virtues of these trees (or as engineers like to refer to them – fixed hazardous objects) are so numerous that it’s a wonder we often don’t have more rigorous programs for planting and maintenance. Here’s just a few:

-they provide shade and comfort for pedestrians
-they cool the pavement, extending its usable life (moderating temperature swings reduce cracking/swelling)
-they add beauty to the walking experience

And I’m sure we could go on.

Of course, there are important design issues to consider. First, try not to do too much; a consistent spacing of the same species not only provides a better canopy, but is more harmonious in appearance.

Second, be careful about the space needed for a good quality street tree. A minimum space is usually needed for long-term health (and sidewalk protection), but overdoing it in width is also unnecessary. High quality trees can very often work in 4 or 5′ grates or lawns. Again, match the species to the design goals and don’t fall back on one-size-fits-all solutions.

One other important thing about trees is that people love to volunteer time to plant them. So in terms of an effort that can be undertaken with fairly minimal expense, consider establishing a tree fund that volunteers can implement. It need not be brain surgery to lay the groundwork for a quality tree canopy.

Finally, a note on maintenance. Simply planting trees alone and letting them grow will not achieve the desired result. Trees do need some form of maintenance, including watering, fertilizing, and especially pruning. Limbing them up as they grow so that the trees grow “over” pedestrians (and building signs) is critical. Sometimes volunteer groups can do this, but often this kind of long-term effort requires a dedicated paid person or persons.

Below are two examples of tree use in the Kansas City area. The top example is that of the Westport area, home to many different shops and bars. The bottom picture shows a more residential setting in the Brookside area, south of downtown Kansas City.