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.

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.

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.