Old Cities, Good Ideas

The Ritter's/Giolitti Paradox

2011-07-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

Today, instead of trying to explain the problem of the American city using facts or figures, I’d like to share two personal anecdotes that really put the problem into perspective. These stories both happened over three years ago, but the contrast they set up will be around for decades more unless we begin to overhaul our urban fabric.

South Bend, Indiana. It’s 8:00 PM. We decide we want some good old-fashioned American custard. Of course, Ritter’s is the place to go. We schlep to the student lot, where we wade through a sea of SUVs and Camrys until we find our vehicle. We hop in, and proceed to make our way to Mishawaka, a “nearby city” that has been swallowed by South Bend sprawl. The trip is only about 6 miles, but we are hindered by awful roads, badly-timed traffic lights, a poorly planned street grid, and the general congestion that pervades suburbia. We make it though, and are excited for our custard.

We grab our desserts. Ritter’s does not have any indoor seating, so we choose seats at a round, prefabricated concrete table that is coated with some sort of wear-resistant compound, but is still covered in stains. The table is located in the middle of a vast “patio”, lit by sky-high stanchion lights that hum loudly as they beam down upon us. War of the Worlds, anyone? The concrete patio where we sit is in the middle of a delicious parking donut, which of course, in typical South Bend/Mishawaka fashion, is quite empty.

The Ritter's in Mishawaka. From Google Maps.

We have a simply fabulous vantage point from our concrete divan. Looking across an isolated field between the many stores (What’s next for this empty spot, another Wendy’s?), we see one of America’s other pinnacle organizations: Hooters. We don’t see any of the girls, but we do see… another parking lot! How convenient. From our vantage point, we also spy an IHOP, a Panera, a Houlihan’s, a steak restaurant, a tanning salon, a hotel, and a roller rink. Each one wades, just like we custard eaters, in a massive parking lot that is, at most, at 15% capacity.

Behind all of these we glimpse a metal roof reflecting a sea of fluorescent lighting. We realize that the source of the eerie white halo permeating the night sky is none other than Meijer, a Midwest hypermarket chain rivaling a WalMart SuperCenter in size, quality, and American charm. This Meijer measures roughly 350’ x 300’, and features an even larger parking lot.

Ritter’s and most of the other stores we can see front “North Main Street”, an apropos name for an American road that connects Walmart to Target and Meijer. How convenient that one road links everything together… we could even do all of our shopping and eating for the day by walking because everything is so close.

North Main is the perfect street for walking. It has no streetlights. It is four lanes wide with no shoulders and an occasional median. The road has a very safe and comfortable grassy slope to walk on along each side. We can perch ourselves on the soft footing as cars whiz by at our elbows! North Main features no crosswalks, curb cuts, or pedestrian signals, and routinely intersects with other major four-lane arterials that feature dual left turns and a never-ending flow of vehicles. All those turn lanes sure allow for some fun high-speed traffic.

Wisely, we decide that if we want to go further, we will drive to our next destination, even if it is just around the corner.

---------------------------------------------

Rome, Italy. It is 8:00 PM and we decide to take a studio break for some delicious Italian gelato. Of course, Giolitti, arguably Rome’s best-known gelato, is the place to go. We walk out of studio and proceed up Via Monterone. The road is only about 14’ wide from wall to wall, and we have to squish against the buildings every time a car passes. Luckily, all of this occurs at a very low speed and with low frequency, so we do not mind the tight squeeze.

We proceed through Rome’s streets, passing four other gelatarias… we’re out for the best tonight. We also pass multiple churches, restaurants, bars, wine bars, banks, boutiques, and even a post office. As we go, friends pause to buy odds and ends that they need for the next day—this is Italy, there’s no rush! We reach Giolitti’s after our excursion of about five blocks, perhaps a ten-minute total walk. We enter and buy our delicious gelato.

But now, where to eat that gelato? Giolitti has a fantastic dining room with 19^th Century decor. There are also some tables outside under calm lighting. The tables sit halfway into an 18’ wide pedestrian-only street, through which people constantly flow. The city is alive—people make their way home from work, off to see friends, or out to see a show or do a “passeggiata” around the city, chatting and people-watching. We are never alone.

Gelataria Giolitti, Via degli Uffici dei Vicari, Roma. Picture from here.

We decide to move a little further before finding a place to stop and eat our treats. We make our way just a few short blocks and find ourselves in front of the Pantheon, the masterpiece of Hadrian that has been standing nearly nineteen centuries. There are knots of tourists everywhere, not only admiring the building from below, but sitting in the restaurants that ring the space in front, or on the tiered steps leading up to the Bernini fountain that sits in front of the ancient building. This is a piazza, and it is hopping all the time.

We settle down on the fountain steps amidst the tourists, the pigeons, and the occasional beggars. The vibrant atmosphere is exciting, and there are people overflowing from every corner of the square, but we cannot help but feel that we are someplace contained, enveloped, almost intimate.

Why this feeling amidst such a crowd? Perhaps because Piazza della Rotunda measures just 150’ x 250’. It feels like a living room of the city, complete with a comfortable divan (the fountain steps), encircling walls, and a feature piece. It is also one-third the size of the Meijer building in Mishawaka, and perhaps one-fifth the size of Meijer’s cavernous parking lot.

Piazza della Rotunda, while it is touristy, is a microcosm of Italian life. It is full of people who live, work, sleep, eat, and play within walking distance. This scenario is repeated countless times throughout Italy, even in the tiniest country towns. Even more, it is a way of life that began centuries ago, and despite all of the conveniences of modern life, thrives in a way that is unimaginable to those who have never experienced it. We must ask: what is more sustainable? What should our future look like? Are Ritter’s and Meijer really our microcosm?

Mishawaka and Rome at the same scale (I swear), with Ritter's and Giolitti marked off. Bet you can't guess which is which. Both from Google Maps.

As the Romans Did

2011-05-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

I have been flipping through 6,000 Years of Housing by Norbert Schoenauer. Don't let the flat-sounding title scare you - this book is extremely engrossing and has really been making me reconsider the fundamentals of our homes today. I originally bought the book because it is full of detailed house plans for houses stretching back, well, 6,000 years, and those can be pretty hard to find.

One quote I read the other day while going through the chapter on Greek and Roman housing caught my attention:

"Inevitably, Rome experienced traffic congestion. During the reign of Julius Caesar the street network of Rome had already become clogged with traffic. To ease the congestion and the conflict between pedestrian and vehicular movement, Caesar banned most carts from the city streets during daylight hours." (page 128)

Rome spent untold sums building roads to distant provinces, to keep itself politically and economically connected. Even so, its leaders realized that a robust downtown would never survive if it was choked with traffic. 2000 years later, we haven't learned our history and are back in a position where freeways constrict and choke our downtowns. Will we learn from Caesar, or from our modern-day Korean counterparts, and start making cities for people again?

It's the Little Things

2011-05-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

This article from Streetsblog shows how simple changes along a street, including bike lanes, bus line improvements and pedestrian safety enhancements, can have dramatic impacts. In fact, the results were synergistic: vehicular incidents fell, buses moved faster, more bikers came, and on Second Avenue, cars actually moved more quickly than before the changes.

Across town at Times Square, air quality is way up (40% decrease in pollutants!) with the Broadway plaza project. Turns out idling cars are bad for humans - who knew????

These images from nearby Herald Square tell the story:

(via here, which provides an excellent analysis, and originally from the NYC DOT)

The change is drastic. On the left, about twenty vehicles occupy the entire space. They hold probably 30-50 occupants. On the right, I'm guessing about two hundred people are actively using the space. And they're spewing out a lot less toxic gases (hopefully... unless they ate at the Burger King at the corner of 34th and Broadway).

Yet even with news articles and spectacular results like these, New York decision makers continue to bend over backwards for cars in Manhattan at the expense of everyone else.

Urban(e) Connecticut?

2011-04-26T18:05:00.001-07:00

Here is an interesting article by Philip Langdon from New Urban News about Connecticut's hopes for applying TOD and other principles of sustainable urbanism to its cities.

Connecticut stands out among the majority of the other states because it lacks a singular large urban center. The top five cities (Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, Stamford and Waterbury) each have between 110,000 and 150,000 residents. Four of these (every one but Hartford) are directly connected to New York City by Metro North transit lines. This fact, plus tax incentives that encourage large corporations to settle in Connecticut instead of New York, have made the economy of Connecticut's cities fairly robust.

There is significant cross-pollination between jobs and housing in the region, driven in part by transit. In my home city of Stamford, there are several large accounting firms and investment banks that attract reverse commuters from New York City and State, at the same time as a significant number of Stamford residents commute into Grand Central Terminal.

Unfortunately, like Stamford, all of Connecticut's cities suffered significantly from '60s and '70s era urban renewal. The goals and ambitions outlined in New Urban News are great. My hope is that this grand vision of revitalized downtowns does not pale in comparison to the daunting face of their current state.

This photo of New Haven (from here) reveals how Connecticut treated its cities during the 20th Century - a veritable gutting by the blunt force of highways.

A Bit o' History

2011-04-18T19:00:00.001-07:00

A coworker shared the following excellent link, which brings you to a slideshow about "urban renewal" in Stamford, CT:

http://hnppinc.org/Archives.htm

I am going to be working on a bunch more articles on Stamford, my new hometown, and its "urbanism". I use quotes around that word because, outside of a tiny historic nucleus, somewhere upwards of 80% of the city's buildings were destroyed in the '60s and '70s. What was put in their place is great if you're a big corporation or a chain store, but absolutely horrible if you're searching for an actual city.

For now, the link above is a great start .

(Sidenote: the name of the development company that put up many most of the largest buildings is an unbelievable oxymoron - the Stamford New Urban Corporation)

If it's not for cars, it's a waste of our money!

2011-04-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

For the past two weeks, I have grown more and more confused by the signs popping up all over New Canaan, CT, where I work. Dotting front yards everywhere are signs that say, in one way or another, "Vote YES and support our roads" or "Build sidewalks, pave roads, vote NO".

Finally, I picked up a little card at the local sandwich joint today and ascertained what the heck is going on. According the card and this article, New Canaan recently approved a $4,000,000 road funding project. The money was to go to general road projects, and especially toward repaving some of the roads damaged most severely by this year's awful Northeast winter.

Parallel to the road repair issues, there has been an ongoing debate about adding sidewalks down Main Street as it leaves the heart of New Canaan. Even outside of the downtown area (where it is a true urban street with well-defined street walls, parallel parking, low speeds, and other good stuff), Main Street remains fairly narrow (see map/satellite) and is lined with stately older homes. It connects to an important town park, and heads toward the school campuses south of town.

New Canaan is a town full of runners, walkers, and other pedestrians, as well as bikers. In the mornings, I'm constantly amazed by the number of early bird exercisers on the roads connecting Stamford, Darien and New Canaan. The latter two towns are two of the wealthiest in the nation, and they are places where kids tend to roam free on the streets and where walking the dog sometimes looks more like a catwalk.

So you'd think a simple sidewalk in a extremely wealthy town would be a no-brainer. Not so - apparently "New Canaan Citizens for Responsible Spending" are up-in-arms over the proposed use of the funds for sidewalks. Now, the town is forced into a rather confusing vote, which brings me back to the signs. This vote is to repeal the referendum allowing the $4,000,000 appropriation to be used partially toward sidewalks... so voting "yes" means you want a repeal and therefore are against sidewalks. A little tricky.

The bigger issue here, though, is the underlying attitude that comes through in the quotes and arguments from the sidewalk detractors. Our nation has come to see personal vehicles as the only primary form of transportation. Anything and everything that threatens that supremacy is verboten. In several of the articles above, the concerned citizens worry that making Main Street slightly narrower will be "more dangerous". For whom? The folks that speed down the road and take its winding turns too quickly?

Particularly interesting is one man's objection: "This end [of Main Street] was meant to be more residential, but it’s become more of a thoroughfare." (from here) We take this point of view for granted in America now - once a highway is in place or a road is widened, we cannot remove any capacity or promote any other type of use, even for highways that sit unused during rush hour. We have adopted a paradoxical view of "mobility", one which strives to increase vehicle access, parking, and traffic flow to the detriment of absolutely every other mode of transportation. Even better, the quote above points out that the street's character and how it is used have changed over time. Apparently, that evolution is no longer necessary.

Imagistic Juxtaposition

2011-04-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

(Top photo is mine. Bottom image is from http://travelleity.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html)

Trying to kickstart my blog into gear again, I am posting two images of urban covered walkways. The top one is on Greyrock Place in Stamford, my new hometown. The bottom is from Bologna.

There are many comments to be made here, but I'll leave it at one: in Bologna, the street and walkways function together as a place. You can comfortably walk, bike, drive, shop, eat or relax there. Are any of these activities comfortable or safe on Greyrock Place?

American Denovation

2010-12-11T07:49:00.001-08:00

"Denovation" - that's my catchy title for what the U.S. is engaged in right now. Our policy has become worse than the status quo, because we are actively engaged in setting back progress. Yes, we are in a terrible economic situation - but we'd rather butter everyone up by continuing a healthy tax cut than make meaningful policy decisions. We should find money by eliminating waste, scaling back entitlements and reforming tax policies that promote gaming the system. The last thing we need is disinvestment in our futures.

Case in point #1: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's single-handed defeat of years of planning for the "ARC Tunnel", which would have doubled train access from New Jersey and points south and west to Penn Station in Manhattan. Christie's initial point was noble - the Feds needed to prevent this project from becoming another eternal, bloated boondoggle, the bill for which would be on New Jersey's tab. He could have turned this into an example of holding the federal government accountable (gasp) for its numbers, but instead, he engaged in political grandstand and rejected the project altogether. What could be worse for the future growth of a region dependent upon transit?

Denovation goes further - we all hate paying a lot for gas, but higher gas prices help stimulate efficiency, from the design of vehicles all the way down to simple daily habits like trip chaining. Where is our federal government on this issue? The federal excise tax on gas, as it's called, has been virtually stuck at 18.4 cents per gallon since, wait for it, October 1993. This is despite the fact that, during that 17+ year span, the Consumer Price Index is up about 45-50%. Even if we raised the tax to 27.6 cents today, we would effectively have the same gas tax as we did in 1993.

There is no better evidence of our denovation than the world outside us. While we fret about investing in new infrastructure, China's trains are breaking records left and right and they plan to have over 8000 miles of track on the ground by 2012. Our other neighbors in Europe are coming up with ingenious ways to harness energy, while here, innovation in renewable energy is consistently on the chopping block.

What gives? Is it our representatives who are more concerned with getting reelected than with making the hard decisions we need? Is it cronyism and the almighty dollar that put corporate lobbyists and special interest groups ahead of the good of the nation? Are we too proud to look outside our borders for solutions? Do we all really love our cars to death?

FLW and Form-Based Codes

2010-06-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday night, I attended the “East End Planning Conference” in downtown Riverhead, New York, which was jointly sponsored by AIA Peconic (Eastern Long Island) and APA New York. The series of presentations and discussions gave a good look at how form-based codes, Smart Growth, and traditional urbanism are growing here on Long Island, the “birthplace of suburbia”.

Though short, the conference did an excellent job of tying together the many strands of what makes traditional planning and urbanism tick. It moved from the broad to the fine, starting with talks on regional comprehensive plans, then moving to village master plans and community efforts, and culminating with a discussion of architectural and urban guidelines, form-based coding, and what has worked so far in the region. As a lifelong Long Islander, it was exciting for me to finally see all this work being done here, particularly in light of the ardent NIMBYism that tends to permeate this place.

The part of the night that most engaged me came near the end, when much of the audience had headed home. A group of planners and urban designers gave a nice synopsis of the form-based codes and graphic design guidelines they had already produced on Long Island. They discussed how these codes tended to “nudge” designers and builders in the right directions rather than dictate style; they even contrasted the local codes they produced against pattern books, which give far more detail about architectural language. Long Island is largely auto-oriented and full of crumbly old ‘60s and ‘70s sprawl, so the goal is to make its urban form better without quibbling over style.

After these presentations, an older local architect jumped up and gave what I would best describe as a stump speech for starchitecture. He declared that “architecture is poetry” (a nice sentiment I think we can all buy) and then went into a tirade about how form-based codes as presented would entirely stifle the creativity of architects. He said that poetry was impossible under codes like these. To prove his point, he invoked Frank Lloyd Wright, rhetorically asking whether any of his works would have been possible under a form-based code. His words were met with stifled applause from about half of the audience, most of whom were older architects like himself. The presenters gave a well-reasoned response about how their projects were more about building density and public space while allowing stylistic freedom, but it was clear the poets in the audience were not impressed.

I wish I could call up Mr. Poet now because the morning after the conference, I woke up with a realization: most of Frank Lloyd Wright’s large body of work WOULD have been possible under a form-based code. I immediately thought about the Robie House, which most Americans would probably recognize as typical Wright. While it did re-interpret notions of horizontality and verticality and utilize new motifs in decoration, roof expression and floor plan, the Robie House works quite well with the urban language of old Hyde Park: it is two stories with a roof, it utilizes masonry construction and it has similar setbacks to the other buildings nearby. Although it has whole walls of windows, the fenestration is such that the scale and quality of each window matches nearby homes.

Wright’s Oak Park homes are similar; to the untrained eye, they could easily blend in with nearby late 19^th and early 20^th Century architect-designed or pattern book homes. They are not alien forms with fractured masses and random elements. In South Bend, the two Wright homes elegantly match the urban pattern of their streets. The DeRhodes House on West Washington Street (1906) sits among its neighbors respectfully, with the same height, scale, setback and materials as multiple nearby residences. The Usonian Herman T. Mossberg House (1948) is outside downtown in an early auto-oriented suburb. It sits far back and low from the street like other nearby homes. It is not an “in your face” rule-breaker, but the subtly unique work of a master.

Despite the age and experience of the architect who spoke, there seemed to be a flaw in his understanding of cities and urbanism. When he referred to Frank Lloyd Wright’s amazing creativity being stifled, he was most likely thinking of his more iconic, fanciful buildings like the Guggenheim, Fallingwater or Taliesin West. The problem is that these are all object buildings, the Guggenheim an urban foreground building, and Fallingwater and Taliesin two rural villas in the landscape. Form-based codes are primarily concerned with the urban fabric, the everyday “background” buildings that make up the guts of the city.

The funny thing is that in traditional cities, object buildings were indeed distinguished from their neighbors, just as Wright did when he made a museum out of an inverted nautilus shell. Take the Guggenheim’s nearby neighbor, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While it is a Neoclassical masterpiece partially designed by McKim, Mead and White, it is also an object building, just like the Guggenheim. It is not part of a street wall, it has four exposed sides, it is of a different scale (in footprint and height) than the nearby fabric and it is one of precious few buildings in Manhattan that is set back from the street more than a few short feet. The Guggenheim shares many of these same qualities, showing once again that Wright understood the city. Of course, basilicas, castles, city halls, post offices, obelisks and other types of foreground buildings worldwide are architecturally distinct from the fabric around them.

The disconnect in today’s practice between the lessons of the city and what architects are producing reveals something about the state of the architecture profession. Most architects turn all of their projects into foreground buildings. They want style and flair (like The Nanny?), pizzazz and pop, regardless of what they are designing.

Most clients, especially homeowners, are seeking a comfortable, homey, and familiar place to live or work or shop, and not necessarily some avant-garde, never-before-seen creation born from the computer. The awful irony behind architect’s attempts to avoid guidelines and maintain a vaunted sense of “poetic” license is that the architect is fast becoming obsolete in everyday construction. After all, why spend extra money paying a designer when the tract home builder or floor plan book can give you a product closer to what you actually want?

Playing Catch-Up

2010-05-23T17:32:00.001-07:00

Sorry to all 7 or 8 of my loyal readers for an eternal absence (by blog standards, anyway) - I have just finished the busiest time I've had in my life since graduation last May. In the past five weeks, I moved out of home and into my own apartment (WalkScore is still 0, unfortunately), traveled to Providence, Upstate New York, and South Florida, was a groomsman in the wedding of two of my closest friends, and I have been tutoring math and SAT prep four days a week after work. I have also been working on an article for Living Urbanism, the next volume of which will be published sometime in July.

But with all that said, there is no excuse for letting my blog go for so long. I will be on the lookout for good articles and posts over the next few days and will hopefully come up with some ideas for posts of my own. For tonight, you can check out this enjoyable video that puts a new spin on "traffic".

Every Little Thing That We Do

2010-03-08T04:32:00.000-08:00

A very local article I read this weekend reminded me of how every single time we build anything, it alters our landscape and has a cumulative, cascading effect far beyond what the eye can see. I know this is a simple observation, but it is so crucial that we cannot recognize it enough.

The article is about the alewife, a type of herring that lives out in ocean waters but, like salmon, migrates to freshwater streams for spawning. The article talks about a lengthy project to build a rock ramp over a small five-foot dam in one of our local downtowns. The dam has prevented alewife from using that river to spawn (the Peconic) since Colonial times... yes, Colonial times.

You see, even before the Industrial Revolution, humans were having minor impacts on the species with whom they coexist. Of course, humans are like any other animal; they impact their ecosystem, occupy a certain niche, and affect their physical environment.

The problem is that now, our impacts have accumulated to huge levels, and they continue to escalate day by day. A dam or two in the 1800s has become ten or twenty dams today. A turnpike that divided a forest habitat in the 1920s has become four arterials, two superhighways, and three local roads criscrossing that habitat today. Even when we don't develop land for buildings, we are impacting the environment with the runoff from our roads, the fumes from our vehicles, the overfishing from our recreation, and the waste from our lives.

Every choice we make has an affect on dozens upon dozens of others in the world wide web of life. Yes, there are many consequences to driving the extra mile, adding the extra lane, and loweirng the thermostat another degree. We just have to convince people of the truth.

"Complete Streets" in New York

2010-02-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has tried to walk, run, bike, roller blade, take a bus, or use any form of transportation besides a good old gas guzzler knows that cars are king throughout 99.9% of our great country. Most roads are designed for high speeds, offer no sidewalks, crosswalks, or bike lanes, and frequently do not have protected bus stops. Ironic for a nation that many people claim is "free" and "mobile" - only if you have the ability to drive and finance your own vehicle.

The "complete streets" movement is just one factor of sustainable urban design, but it is a crucial one because it can be enacted incrementally, and it offers remediation for both urban and suburban streets. Essentially, the goal of a complete street is to accommodate multiple forms of transportation in the same cross-section. The elements can adjust by location, and might include sidewalks (narrower or wider), bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, bus bulbs, planting strips, on-street parking, and more.

Complete streets are, of course, visible all over Europe, especially in places like Paris and London and many of the German cities. There, street sections are not necessarily narrower, but there is less wide-open space for cars and more dedicated areas for parking, walking and biking. One particular element is "bulbing" or "necking down" - streets get narrower at intersections or at crosswalks to discourage speeding. Here in the States, streets tend to be of uniform wide width, and can feel like oceans of pavement for pedestrians trying to cross on foot.

Luckily, there is a National Complete Streets Coalition, which provides tons of information on complete streets legislation and projects. New York City recently released a stunning design manual for complete streets. This 250+ page tome offers dozens of alternatives and lots of images to show off the results. This photo I took shows an example of a completed street, Bleecker Street at Perry Street in Greenwich Village:
To me, this is almost picture-perfect urbanism. The variegated buildings, the street with dedicated bike lane (in bright green, all across NYC) and parking lane, the picturesque street trees, the busy stores and shops, the pedestrians... it exudes a feeling of good urban life.

We're Blossoming!

2010-02-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

I love this video about pedestrianizing Broadway in Times Square from Streetsblog. No, not for its sappy music or human-interesty feel. I love it because in it you can actually see the United States moving outside its comfort zone and experimenting with better urbanism. We are cautious and tentative, but we are also ready for something new.

The video shows off the project's initial success. It also reminds us that this one move took decades of advocacy, suffers much criticism from a few despite general public approval, and is still a heartbeat away from the chopping block. We knew reshaping our collective mentality would be difficult; Times Square, if it is allowed to remain and is improved over time, may finally become the archetype we need to bring better urbanism throughout the U.S.

The Devil is in the Distance

2010-02-06T06:29:00.000-08:00

I spent part of the work day yesterday riding to Home Depot with an extremely nice contractor named Jose. Jose is laying tile at the place where I work and he needed to go pick up some more materials, so my boss sent me with the credit card. Jose is a middle-age Dominican man who has been living in the U.S. for over 20 years - his English is very good, and his three children all know English better than they know Spanish.

We talked about a lot of different things during the fifteen minute ride to Home Depot, but one of the most surprising topics that came up was Jose's view on the urban planning in North Carolina. We were talking about how he spent 2008 in North Carolina doing work because there was not much work here on Long Island. He was going on about how much cheaper it is to rent and buy a house down South, but then he made a very astute observation:

"Everyone there [in North Carolina] tells you that where you have to go 'is close, it's very close'. But it's not close, they just mean that it takes a short time to get there. You always have to get on a highway and go 70 or 80 miles an hour to get to where you want to go. When I lived there it seemed like I spent $40 a day in gas for my work van because everything is so far apart. It's not like here."

Jose's comment is right on, and it reminded me once again that planning effects everyone, and that everyone actually grasps planning's effects on some level.

But Jose's observation also nails down a design flaw intrinsic to sprawl that has a cumulative effect on our lives: distance. When we design low-density, auto-oriented places with little regard for location efficiency, the distance a person must travel every day grows exponentially. Even if the time needed for travel stays the same (10 miles in Charlotte tends to take the same amount of time as 2 miles in Brooklyn), the mileage itself is the problem.

A phone interviewer asked me once what I thought was the biggest problem facing world societies with regard to the environment. My answer was that we will have to grapple with the sheer quantity of energy we consume and will continue to consume.

We in the developed world are extraordinary energy wasters at present, and the evidence is all around us: excessive packaging, wasted food, unnecessary lighting, buildings that act as sieves instead of as envelopes, lengthy commutes, the list goes on. Imagine a world where we continue on our present track toward more waste, more exurbs, and lower quality construction. Then imagine that for a few billion more people, and then imagine that some of our developing country friends are trying to jump on board with our ways.

Even if we find some miracle, clean, abundant energy source, the simple fact that our lifestyles require so much unnecessary energy is going to damn us. Acquisition, generation, and transmission will always have some costs (environmental, monetary, social, etc.); the hungrier we become for more energy, the more we will pay.

The answer to the problem is "waste not, want not". As a society, we have to understand that we cannot continue building our cities further and further out into the greenfields. The further we place ourselves from the necessary things in our lives, the bigger energy hogs we become. In essence, as Steve Mouzon pointed out in his Original Green blog, there is a bit of a fallacy behind efficiency as a panacea. More miles per gallon is a nice idea, but it will never solve the energy problem if we are all driving ten times as far to get where we are going.

Minimizing your Footprint

2010-01-27T18:58:00.000-08:00

Check out this comical parking video from failblog.org.

Of course, this could only happen in Europe... in America our cars "need" luxurious two car garages with plenty of room to open both doors and still have enough space to keep the lawn equipment, Christmas decorations, and unwanted furniture along the sides.

I wouldn't advocate that we all have garages like this man, but his example shows just how compact we could really be if necessary. The question is: when will we Americans find the golden mean? Why is it that we are stuck on hyperdrive, demanding huge houses, huge bedrooms, huge garages, huge yards? When will we begin to emphasize quality over quantity?

Voila! Cities in Seconds!

2010-01-04T20:15:00.000-08:00

One of the catchphrases I heard for the first time at CNU 17 in Denver was "instant urbanism". People used it constantly, especially in the NextGen discussions and presentations, and I think it is an important topic for us to mull over as urbanists if we step back from ourselves for a moment.

You can probably imagine what instant urbanism is even if you have never seen the phrase before. We have instant everything in the U.S.A. - instant coffee, instant oatmeal, instant internet, instant cosmetic surgeries, you name it. Instant urbanism is just like these notions - a development, neighborhood, or even city that pops up bewilderingly fast.

At Notre Dame for example, we now, rather suddenly, have our own "city" just south of campus. Within the span of three years, the site now known as Eddy Street Commons morphed from decrepit parking lots and homes to a vast construction site to, voila, an entire "Main Street" and multiple side streets of homes and businesses. Retrofitted malls, greenfield developments, and many other New Urbanist projects have sprung up over the past ten years at the same light-speed rate.

There is definitely an air of excitement among traditional urbanists about these places; here we have production builders who have suddenly "converted" away from sprawl, a public that really digs urban environments, and even serious attempts at good traditional architecture.

So what gives me pause? Once past the initial excitement over these places, I find them somewhat discomforting. Like everything else in our culture, buying ourselves brand new cities and applauding them as traditional feels like a cheap, fleeting, and disingenuous solution. It rings awfully close to adjustable-rate mortgages, derivative trading, Cash for Clunkers, and all the myriad other "quick fixes" that have come to characterize today's society.

For starters, there is an air of phoniness about these places. They are uncomfortably similar to Main Street USA at Disney World, where the false fronts all back up to one large, flat-roofed warehouse building. In many cases, this is in fact true, as multiple facades actually mask one continuous building or a parking garage.

Secondly, there is a perennial scale issue. At Eddy Street Commons, practically every building is a full four stories tall, and worse, they all seem to line up at the same exact height because floor-to-floor heights are standardized across the project. The same was true at the redeveloped Belmar Mall in Denver.

Perhaps my main criticism of championing these New Urban projects is how they turn their backs on the places we already have. Eddy Street, for example, is a beautiful project, but a similarly sized investment for South Bend's struggling downtown would have down the city wonders and gotten a lot more bang for the buck. Why? Because for all its awfulness, South Bend is a place, and by place I mean it is a long-term, continuous, enduring physical location and human institution. Despite all of the urban erosion, the crime and other issues, and the bad attempts at urban renewal, the echoes of what South Bend was and what it can be in the future are still there, in the fabric of the city and in the fabric of the people.

And this brings me to perhaps my main point: the only way to reinvent ourselves with true sustainability at heart is to build from the places we already have, not to try and make new ones. The latter pursuit is what doomed every form of 20th-Century Utopianism, from Radburn and Le Corbusier right through suburban sprawl. In every case, the designer thought his vision of how cities should be was right and set off to build it from scratch, each time with little or no success. In every case, these projects were built outside struggling, dirty, never-quite-perfect cities that, lo and behold, continued to thrive and still remain the places where we want to live and visit.

So why think greenfield New Urbanism is the complete opposite? Why are the Habershams and I'Ons, the Stapletons and the Celebrations any different than Radburn? Sure, they are a thousand times more respectful of good urban design, of walkability and tradition, and of what people actually want. But the zeitgeist that drives them is eerily similar to every other failed planning movement: we can make place overnight, by design.

The biggest irony? I'd wager that in fifty years, we'll still be looking at the South Bends of the world as real places we want to improve, while the Celebrations slip into obsolescence and unimportance like their Utopian forerunners. Maybe there's a derivative I can trade based on the future success of our cities...

Even the Ivy League Doesn't Learn...

2010-01-04T19:03:00.000-08:00

I was disappointed to read of a soon-to-be architectural monstrosity in New Haven. The Downtown New Haven blog reported on "Lord" Norman Foster's proposal for a new School of Management at Yale. My absolute favorite image (if you're looking for a reason to vomit):
This is the street frontage along Whitney Avenue, one of the most prominent arteries leading out of New Haven's core. How's that for good urbanism?? I guess Yale is trying to compensate for the fact that it dared to hire Robert Stern to design a traditional residential college over on Prospect Street. "Oh I'm sorry your lordship, we did not mean to offend."

This one's personal for me because my daily commute by foot for one whole summer took me past the very spot where this behemoth will soon loom. Whitney Avenue is a variegated corridor, a continuation of urban Church Street which forms the southeast side of the New Haven Green. As it moves north, Whitney becomes an avenue of stately homes, who have maintained their beauty, value, and grandeur despite decades of anti-urban interventions that have managed to insert themselves onto the street.

Perhaps the biggest crime about this new building is that it will be directly across from the eat-your-heart-out, jaw-droppingly beautiful Gothic-inspired Peabody Museum at Sachem and Whitney:

There are a whole lot of really good comments on the New Haven Independent's article about Foster's project. My favorite one brings up an excellent point about 20th Century buildings that I think the majority of laymen would understand:

"Have the enthusiasts of "shiny new" glass-and-steel architecture still not noticed that its only appeal is the fact of being shiny and new? That when modernist buildings are no longer new, they have nothing going for them? Concrete and steel do not age gracefully like brick and stone. They just start to look like an old appliance or a beat-up car."

To close, and to prove the point that brick-and-mortar buildings age gracefully, here are some of my personal shots of buildings up and down Whitney Avenue:

Note of Interest: The last image, the purple mansion, is the home where George W. Bush was born.

Poison on Wheels & Freight Trains Runnin'

2009-12-16T17:54:00.001-08:00

Next time you see someone online raving about the wonders of the car and pretending it has no drawbacks, send them this image and link:

(You can read the article about the NYC Health Department's study at Streetsblog.)

Outside of the major gridlock zones (i.e. Midtown), the map above represents an almost perfect trace of the interstate highway system in the New York City area. These ribbons of dense truck traffic are literally stifling people with their noxious fumes.

Think about that, and then watch my new favorite TV commercial.

This brings me back to America's plan for nationwide HSR, and begs me to ask yet again: why invest trillions to connect far-flung American cities with high-speed passenger rail for intercity travel?? Freight travels a much longer distance than we do on a regular basis: an article at "Car Free in Big D" (one of my favorite blogs on the web) mentions that the average meal travels 1500 miles to arrive on your plate. Why not dedicate some more effort to improving and expanding our rail freight system?

Even better, how about targeting long-distance trucking on corridors that have parallel rail lines? Shipping companies are saving a few bucks to ship with their own trucks instead of using one of the major rail lines - but this comes at a major environmental cost, safety cost, and health cost to everyone. Even worse, these trucks degrade our highway system at many many times the rate of a typical passenger car. At the very last, the companies that ship by truck should contribute to this maintenance nightmare.

Think about it -billions of dollars so that people can get from Minneapolis to Chicago in less time, or a fraction of that toward moving more freight by rail?

What the People Really Want

2009-11-22T18:07:00.001-08:00

A common argument by anti-New Urbanists and Smart Growth opponents is that form-based codes dramatically limit the freedom of property owners. Stylistic cues, height limits, porch requirements and build-to lines are stifling, anti-democratic, and downright dictatorial rules, or so the argument goes.

My parents just bought a home in a cookie-cutter subdivision in Vero Beach, Florida. As in virtually every South Florida gated community and in many neighborhoods throughout the United States, their new home falls under the jurisdiction of a homeowner's association. The avowed "free marketeers" who think that any form of centralized planning is verboten often praise these associations. They are local, responsive, and practically self-limiting, and the stakeholders have far more say in decisions than they would at a city or county level.

So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my parents' homeowners covenants and found the following statement:

The Architectural Review Committee does not seek to restrict individual taste or preferences. In general, its aim is to avoid harsh contrasts in architectural themes and maintain harmony between all residences to preserve and enhance values of the Properties.

In tamden with this succinct statement is a two page list of "architectural standards" that constitute a simplistic form-based code: materials lists, front door type standards, color choices, minimum roof slope, etc. Despite the freedom to do whatever they want in their small corner of the world, these homeowners continue to embrace a restricted architectural palette.

But to me, the true marvel of this code is its source. The vision of a unified yet varied community of homes came not from an architect or planner or from some top-down master plan. It came from the local developer and builder who set up the rules, implemented them in the homes it built, and passed them on to the homeowner's association.

So what's the deal? If categorically non-urban sprawl builders are freely imposing Smart Code-like limitations on themselves, and if homeowner's associations are maintaining and even strengthening these rules, why aren't NU and Smart Growth more universally accepted? To put it another way, why do the histrionics of sprawl supporters trump the tacit support for Smart Growth-like ideals already in place?

Is it a matter of an ad campaign? Connections to news media? Grassroots coalition-building and community awareness events? How do we quash those who rail against creating human environments that everyone already understands and loves?

Great Animation

2009-11-17T09:12:00.001-08:00

Go here: http://students.washington.edu/zvs/the-block/

This is a concrete way of showing anyone and everyone what traditional urbanists mean when they talk about how much our cities lost during the 20th Century.

An American Piazza?

2009-11-10T19:41:00.000-08:00

The public space of a car-dominated culture.

This friendly car park is at Illinois & State in downtown Chicago, only three blocks from Michigan Avenue and four blocks north of the Loop. Surely an exorbitantly valuable piece of property, even in today's economy. Imagine turning this into some sort of urban plaza with low-rise mixed-use buildings and three levels of parking beneath. If only we cared as much about public space as we did about parking our cars.

Nice Summation

2009-11-10T19:34:00.001-08:00

This editorial in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (posted at Streetsblog) expresses in layman's terms why many us of traditional urbanists pine for European cities. If I had to pick one article about urbanism and New Urbanism to give to Joe American, this would probably be it.

Visions of a Division

2009-10-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

I went with a friend to the Museum of the City of New York two weeks back. The museum is located in a beautiful building facing Central Park at 5th & 103rd. After enjoying an exhibit on Manhattan before 1609, we left the museum and walked one block over to Madison Avenue to look for a place to eat and to head for the subway at 96th & Park.

What met us as we walked south on Madison Avenue was a startling transition. No matter how many times I looked at a map of Manhattan in my life (there's even one on the wall across from my bed at home), it never once clicked in my mind that the Upper East Side and Harlem are right next to each other. That's right - the toniest neighborhood and the most notorious neighborhood sit side by side. I was curious. What divided these two distinct zones? Would there be some sort of 'ragged', blended edge, or would there be a clear marker?

The answer, as with any question of this type, is multi-layered. First and foremost, Harlem is characterized by the misled "slum clearance" movement of the 1960s, in which blocks of mixed-use walk-up buildings were replaced by midrise towers in parks. Anyone familiar with Le Corbusier understands this type of planning, but to see the contrast in street vitality and urban life is striking:
This first photo is taken facing north on Madison Avenue midblock between 98th and 99th, looking toward Harlem.

This second photo is taken in the exact same spot as the first photo, except facing southbound on Madison toward 98th and the Upper East Side.

Locator map. Without even drawing the Nolli, you can see from the air how slum clearance rewrote the face of Harlem while leaving the Upper East Side untouched.

Four factors contribute to the abrupt shift, and the same four factors have prevented any portion of Harlem from slowly becoming the Upper East Side, or vice versa:

The Corbusian "projects" - they exist only in Harlem. South of 96th Street, the street grid is virtually uninterrupted. The fabric was almost never violated and looks the same as it was originally platted. North of 96th, the opposite is true: it is rare to see even 6 to 8 blocks of historic fabric along any one avenue without it being interrupted by towers in a park.
Street grid interruptions - created by the towers in a park parks.
An elevated train line - south of 97th, the principal rail artery leading to Grand Central Terminal is underground. North of 97th, the rails are elevated, and to make matters worse, they are elevated on a stone-walled embankment instead of a permeable structure. If the towers in a park parks and the hospitals weren't bad enough for creating divisions, this effectively cuts the Harlem community into two isolated parts*.
Two large hospital complexes - Mount Sinai Medical Center (which is between 98th and 99th where I'm standing) and Metropolitan Hospital (which fills out two blocks further east) act as giant roadblocks and dividers. They create single-use blocks with monolithic, and frequently uninviting buildings, with hardly any street-level interest.

Area map. Pictures taken from yellow mark. Mount Sinai Medical Center is the left red complex and Metropolitan is the right. Cross streets in blue (with 97th in purple). Notice how few cross streets there are north of 97th. From 97th south, not a single cross street is interrupted.

What lessons can we learn from this? Firstly, and the most obvious, is don't do towers in a park. Secondly, don't interrupt the street grid, and thirdly, if you have to have an elevated train, make sure its structure is permeable.

But I think one issue that even good urban planners might miss in their grand schemes is the problem created by the hospital complexes. Urban, governmental, and education projects have increasingly become fortified entities through which people (and cars) cannot pass. These impenetrable islands drain life out of their immediate surroundings. And here, they have helped to bitterly and uncompromisingly divide two different neighborhoods. There is no chance for that nice-looking intact urban block north of Mount Sinai to become part of the Upper East Side. The hospital is a veritable barrier to the natural ebb and flow that might have occurred in this area.

Even if the population as a whole is beginning to understand walkability as a concept, government leaders, religious leaders, hospital CEOs and school superintendents might still be under the impression that a hermetically sealed place is best. Going forward, we'll have to look for good examples of permeable or semi-permeable institutions. We need to show how "liner retail" can be applied to places like hospitals, as both good for the city and as a moneymaker for the hospital. Most of all, we must be ready to fight what is now a prevailing mentality about how places like these "should" be designed.

*Note: In case you're wondering, the change in the train line from tunnel to elevated is not a deliberate backhand to Harlem's collective face. North of 96th Street, Manhattan's topography quickly drops off into what was formerly a tidal swamp and creek. This area was filled in as the city grew northward to create more developable area, so it is considerably lower than areas directly to the south. Hence the change - Park Avenue falls while the rails stay at relatively the same elevation and become an elevated line.

Awesome Website

2009-10-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

If you've got some time to kill online and you're a city buff, a history buff, a subway/train buff, an architecture buff, or you just like New York, go to Forgotten NY: www.forgotten-ny.com.

Be forewarned: it is entirely possible to spend several hours here, sifting through thousands of photos, articles, neighborhoods, and streets of the Big Apple.

Wasilla and Werdau

2009-09-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

I saw two different photos of important government buildings in the past 24 hours. First, the City Hall in Wasilla, AK (Kunstler's "Eyesore of the Month" last month):

(from http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200907.html)

Contrast that beauty to today's featured image on Wikipedia, the town hall in Werdau, Germany:

Speaking beyond the pure architectural merits of each building (if you can say Wasilla's city hall has merits?), I can see two different arguments that might develop about the sociopolitical ramifications of these two buildings:

1. Wasilla's building represents a free-market economy in the context of a limited government. It is humble, blends in, cost little to build, and is not presumptuous enough to place itself at the end of an axis, in a town square, etc. Werdau's building is a symbol for the imperial and local power of the German Empire (in control during its construction). It is a heavy, lavish, and architecturally significant building that dominates its neighbors. It is an expensive building that places itself above the commoners of the town.

2. Wasilla's building does not ask for respect; in fact, it invites disrespect. It looks almost transient, as if it is a temporary site for the city offices while a better building is being built elsewhere. Imagine a seven-year-old Wasillan visiting this place on a field trip - would they have any belief in the merits of good government after visiting it? Would anyone respect the U.S. Senate if it was housed in a building this nondescript? Werdau's building views the government as an important element in the town's cultural fabric and daily life. Here, even visitors would be tempted to step inside, perhaps encountering something about how the government works.

Obviously, the form of government and its actual power in society is not determined by the building in which it is housed, but vice versa. However, shouldn't respect and dignity surround any government? Even the most limited laissez faire government is there for a reason and a purpose, and great care is taken to maintain it by the people. Shouldn't our buildings at least reflect that simple notion?

The State of Architecture Elitism in 2009

2009-09-18T05:49:00.001-07:00

The NY Times architecture critic released a story on the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas. Nicolai Ouroussoff is your typical high-brow avant-garde architect who pooh-poohs any attempt at traditional design, but I was happy to see his criticism of the location of the new stadium in the middle of Dallas-Fort Worth's endless urban sprawl. He pines for an earlier proposal that had the stadium located in a "more contained urban setting." This location would have spurred the revitalization of older historic landmarks in need of new life.

I give Nicolai kudos for actually caring about the city, and I think it shows how far the mindset of the architecture establishment has changed in the past few decades. Even the pure-bred modernists, the ones who give absolutely no creedence to using a brick or a cornice anywhere on a building, no longer dream about skyscrapers in the park or a fractured urban fabric.

I decided a long time ago that strict traditional architectural style was the least important feature of New Urbanism, and that if we could arrive at a human-scaled, traditional city and fabric, the architectural details could be in any style and work as long as they kept to the idea of a form-based code. When I visited Stapleton and Belmar in Denver, I was pleased to see that the designers had been more daring in their style, allowing large openings and new materials, including metal balconies, columns, etc. The places both worked because the architecture was consistent (in Stapleton, consistent by neighborhood) among the buildings as, reflecting a respect for placemaking and consistency of form.

For me the most unfortunate part of Nicolai's article comes at the end, where he makes a remark about the jumbovision screens that loom over the field. Noting that the screens are so huge that they have already gotten in the way of a punter's kick, he states "It’s a nice irony that for all the space, there may not be enough room at Cowboys Stadium to play a game." This remark signifies a major problem with (Post)Modernist thinking (as opposed to its style). If a building is anything, it absolutely must be useful. We can argue venustas and perhaps firmitas (maybe temporary buildings are more practical?), but if a building doesn't even make the cut of utilitas on day one of its life, we have a real problem. And rather than decry an astonishing functional fault in the building, Nicolai makes light of it, like a playful little architectural joke. I just finished reading From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe, and while it is over-the-top in its romance novel-y journalistic flair, it points to the notion of 'irony in architectre' as one of many scholastic constructs that have made the profession so out-of-touch with reality. Twenty-eight years after writing, Wolfe would be sad to see that our avant-garde still thinks this way and is still trying to impose its will on the public.

Water, Water Everywhere...

2009-09-12T19:33:00.001-07:00

A very important article about more industrial abuses shows us, again, that we are ruining our environment at an even faster rate than we can imagine - and this time it's water, our lifeblood. Just another victim of the pollution caused by the very unnatural, toxic and lethal ways we make things today... and the industries that shirk their legal and moral responsibilities all in the name of making a few bucks.

Getting the Most Bang for Your Billion Bucks

2009-09-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

The third and final entry in a group of posts about high-speed rail.

The vision for American HSR is a bold one, and like any bold move we must be sure that it is a wise one before we thrust ourselves into it. As urbanists we are all for increasing modes, uses, flexibility, efficiency, and sustainability - so is HSR the best use for our money?

I asked myself one simple question to answer that important question. As Americans, we commute an average of 13 miles each way each day in our personal vehicles. This totals 6,760 miles per worker! Even more, most of us live beyond comfortable walking distance from our schools, stores, libraries, parks, etc., so every single time we need to go to those places, or our kids or grandparents need to go to these places, we get in a car. With that in mind, which of the following would have the greatest impact:

1. Eliminating some of the daily trips that quickly rack up to thousands of miles with a few simple bus or train routes in each city? or
2. Eliminating the occasional long-distance trip that people might or might not take between cities that are hundreds of miles apart?

I don't have research to back it up, but I'd bet every dollar I wish I had that the former would have a MUCH greater impact on how much we travel and on changing our lives than the latter would, AND it would almost certainly cost less in infrastructure investment.

The bottom line: just because HSR is a good idea does not mean that it is the best use of such a large amount of public investment. I'd rather see it implemented with a combination of improvements to local transit, short-distance/high-volume rail, and other improvements.

LEED is a Work in Progress

2009-08-31T06:14:00.000-07:00

A good New York Times article today discussing some of the kinks in LEED, specifically how some LEED certified buildings perform with regard to energy and water usage ("life cycle costs" in LEED terms). Newer versions of LEED seem to be taking this into account by requiring higher minimum numbers of energy credits so that "gas guzzler" buildings can't qualify by getting all their credits in sitework and materials and ignoring energy completely.

The USGBC plans to continue raising the bar, and the article cites that it is considering moving more toward the Energy Star model, in which buildings only get kudos for energy usage for the year or period in which the award is given.

The bar for LEED will also inevitably get higher and higher as we move forward. A presenter at CNU 17 described an aggressive track for increased standards that many are pushing the USGBC to implement. With this model, the standards for LEED Gold today will ultimately become the standards for simple LEED certification over the next decade. Concurrently, net zero energy usage for buildings would become a requirement to attain a higher-tier award like gold or platinum, and ultimately would be demanded of any LEED certified building.

The time is now to start pushing designers and builders with more stringent requirements. The fifth paragraph of the NYT article from before describes how "builders covet LEED certification" as a major marketing tool and a way to obtain tax credits. LEED has become so recognized by the general public that developers are now pursuing certification to attract clients. This is great - we want sustainability to be "in", the norm, the next cool thing, but as long as it's the right kind of sustainability. The USGBC needs to tweak the standards higher and higher starting now and over the next few years now that it has the collective attention of the nation. If this does not happen now or soon, LEED risks being lost forever in the growing greenwashing market.

High Speed Rail: A "Case Study"

2009-08-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

This is the second part of a group of posts on high speed rail (HSR) in America.

I recently completed a four-week grand tour of the East Coast of the United States - well let's be honest, four weeks of couch surfing with family and friends. At different points on the trip, I tried to imagine making the journey without a car, either by plane or by train... and each time I realized that it would be nearly impossible.

I'll chronicle one leg of the trip, a long jaunt I made from Hilton Head Island, SC to Lewes, DE, 655 miles total:

I made the trip in 11.5 hours including several stops for food and services (both automotive and personal). I drive a Ford Escape that gets about 23 miles to the gallon at highway speeds - certainly not efficient but definitely not a gas guzzler. I ended up spending about $75 in gas, plus one toll, $12 for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, for a total of $87. The trip was easy because it only passed through one urban area, the Hampton Roads area (Virginia Beach, Norfolk, etc.). I did experience about twenty minutes of rush hour delay there, but otherwise, it was smooth sailing at 70-75 mph.

What if I tried to make this trip via the new HSR as proposed?There is a line shown along the East Coast, but neither Hilton Head Island nor southern Delaware are anywhere near it. In order to use the proposed HSR for this trip, I would have to:

1. Secure ground transportation to Savannah from Hilton Head Island. Even if I could find someone like a family member to make the two-hour round trip on my behalf, the trip is 40 miles each way, or approximately $10 in gas. There is no public transit option, but a company does offer shuttle bus service from Hilton Head to the Savannah airport for the stifling price of $49 each way (but only $93 round trip).
2. Take the train from Savannah to Washington, DC, the nearest HSR station to Lewes. As of today, this route costs $90 on a regular Amtrak train. It would have to cost the same if not far more for a higher-speed connection. The trip takes 11.5 hours currently, unknown for HSR.
3. Somehow get from Washington to Lewes, a distance of 116 miles. There is a Greyhound bus from Washington, DC to Dover, DE which takes 4.5 hours or more at a cost of $31. Even so, Dover is 40 miles from Lewes, which requires another 80 mile round trip by a willing friend for $10 in gas cost. A private company does offer seasonal service between DC and Rehoboth Beach, near Lewes, but it only runs on Friday and Sunday evenings at a cost of $45.

Whew - lots of details. The bottom line: the simple nature of my point-to-point journey renders HSR useless to me. Even if HSR took only 9 hours instead of 11.5 to get from Savannah to DC, the two long legs on either end add 5 hours at minimum, making the trip 25% longer than it took by car. Even if HSR cost the same $90 that Amtrak currently charges, the car/bus trips on either end add $50 at minimum, for $140 total compared to the $87 it actually cost me. Imagine if I was traveling with three other passengers: add $130 in fares for each of them for HSR/bus, but add nothing because a car is a car and there is no added cost for more people.

Of course, I am not factoring in things like maintenance, depreciation on the car, and insurance. These do add to the cost significantly, but remember that the Amtrak cost is also incomplete because it does not include the large subsidies we pay to it through our taxes to keep it running.

I can see an argument for HSR implementation, namely that highways have been encouraged and subsidized for ages while rails were left by the wayside. We need to now "catch up" the rails to the roads, so the argument goes. This view sounds nice, but remember that roads only need to be maintained, while individuals maintain their cars. If we somehow managed to build a rail network connecting almost every town in the country in some way, we would then have to buy massive amounts of rolling stock, hire massive numbers of staff for operations and maintenance, and maintain good enough schedules to make the trains viable. For a country of our size I really believe this to be impractical, even if gas were to rise dramatically again in price.

Again, my point is not to denigrate HSR completely. I am simply finding it harder and harder to justify the need to create an extensive network across our massive nation. If there is major intercity travel between cities "short-haul routes" like Savannah to Atlanta or DC to Richmond, or Chicago to Minneapolis, then I am all for their improvement. However, shiny new (or improved) rails through swaths of wilderness are extremely expensive, and if all they do is serve occasional travelers, I don't find them worth it.

Next time: what should we do instead of or before implementing such an extensive HSR network?

The Question of High Speed Rail: Concerns

2009-08-29T06:33:00.000-07:00

The first of several parts of a series of posts on high-speed rail in the United States.

High speed rail (HSR) is the most important component of Obama's recovery package. Folks all over the country have been crowding town hall style meetings with signs, chanting "No we won't!" at their senators as security tries to escort them out of the room...

Luckily, HSR isn't the hot-button issue of the day. It is a true sign of the bizarreness of government finance when a program that was recently guaranteed $13 billion in funding pales in comparison to the size of other programs.

On its face, HSR sounds like a real no-brainer. Just a few track upgrades and new alignments here, an upgraded station there, and some new rolling stock and voila!, we'll cut carbon emissions, reinvigorate our cities, and save money on gas. In no time, we'll obviate the need for short-haul flights and long-distance car trips between cities.

I have two major concerns about the HSR proposals. Firstly, a massive HSR network seems a lot like the USA buying the proverbial cart before the horse. When announcing his HSR vision, President made the following statement:

“Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination." (NYT, 4/16/09)

Setting aside how impressed I am that someone close enough to the President managed to write an intelligent statement about sustainable transportation and walkability, there's a major problem here: what public transportation? How many cities in the US have even a marginally good bus, subway, or streetcar system that will be able to "make the connection" to the train? Without first answering this serious question, we risk creating a system based on park-and-rides, or worse, a system that no one uses because they have to get in the car to use it anyway.

My other concern is the sheer cost of the system and the benefit that might or might not result. The preliminary funding is $13 billion - a tally of preliminary proposals by forty states shows that already, there are requests for $103.5 billion in funding from the federal government.
The above map from the Wall Street Journal shows what rail lines "could be upgraded" by the government's HSR program - it makes no claims as to how far the allocation of $13 billion will go and what additional funding may be necessary. And to me, that's very scary.

My main concern with this map and with the costs given is that there seems to be no connection to reality or to hard numbers, and the planning is shaky at best. Will there be enough people traveling between Louisville and Indianapolis to make HSR feasible? Why doesn't the East Coast line connect between Savannah and Orlando? Why is there no connection from Pittsburgh and/or Buffalo to Cleveland???

Visiting family in South Florida made me realize how far existing train lines are from accomodating HSR. It looks easy for the red line on the map to connect Orlando to Miami - there are lots of big population centers along Florida's east coast, and there's already a major train line there. Should be a piece of cake. The problem? The line is already busy with freight traffic, has only one track for a lot of its length, and is chock full of grade crossings. These three things are big road blocks HSR - Amtrak users already know the feeling of being shunted aside and made to wait on a siding because freight traffic has right-of-way. Higher speed traffic is typically prohibited on lines with grade crossings, and eliminating many or all of them would be a gargantuan task. Building a new track through virgin land might be easier, but that will move the trains far from the Atlantic coast, far from where anyone lives, begging again the question of connectivity.

I don't want to denigrate the HSR vision and the factors that motivate it because I think it is all being done with the best of intentions. We are indeed decades behind other developed nations in providing alternative means of transportation, and we need to fix that soon. My worry is that the leadership of the entire program seems faulty, throwing around pie-in-the-sky numbers and "drawing with Sharpies" on maps, with little indication of actual conditions on the ground. If it's not $13 billion, is it $103 billion, is it $200 billion, or what? Would our money be better spent on funding research for a type of long-distance, electric-powered rental car for intercity travel?

In the next few posts, I will delve further into many of these issues, particularly the connectivity problem with regard to local transit.

Awesome Project

2009-08-13T06:10:00.001-07:00

Every now and then you found a project that really makes you smile and have hope for the future of urbanism.

This Sacramento Railyards project looks absolutely awesome. It has everything an urbanist could want to start: abandoned but very usable historic buildings, a brownfield/infill site, adjacency to downtown, and an economy ready to grow again (how many LEED credits do we have already?) Even better, Sacramento is building a new transit hub just across the tracks from this project.

But what really made me like the project was its plan:

This plan is smart, compact, and easy to understand - because it is a grid that actually cites the exact urban fabric (even the scale!) of downtown. Unlike many newer projects with all sorts of funky twists in the roads, odd-shaped plazas, and streets that never run for more than a few blocks, this plan is actually good. It doesn't try to be anything more than a warped grid, and that is certainly commendable. It even includes a "Regent Street"-type avenue with a gentle curve that, if done right architecturally, could become something really special.

Bravo to this one.

Your Vote Counts

2009-08-10T18:03:00.001-07:00

Dwell Magazine solicited submissions for a design contest called "Re-Burbia", for innovative solutions for sprawl remedy. They picked twenty finalists, one of which was submitted by a CNU regular, Galina Tahchieva of DPZ, who has been working on "sprawl repair standards" for the SmartCode for several years. You can go here to see the finalists, or go directly to Galina's project. If you like it, I highly recommend that you vote for her to win (allegedly you just click the pink arrow and it records your vote). It would be great for something like this to get the recognition of Dwell and the attention of the more "avant garde" designers:As usual, there are some truly bizarre and also a few awful solutions in the running. My favorite is the first on the list, Airbia, the "suburban airship" - seriously? They tried to use dirigibles in the '30s as a new form of transportation and it failed miserably. How does this help anything?

Interesting Article

2009-08-10T17:46:00.000-07:00

The graphic below, from this article on Streetsblog, shows what Manhattan would look like if the 388,000+ people who commute in daily were to start driving to work and their cars had be accomodated on the island:

A rather jarring view - even moreso when you realize that this is what a lot of American city centers actually look like:

That's Fort Worth (top) and Jacksonville (bottom), just two examples. Freeways, surface parking, bloated streets and eroded urban fabric - but we can still save them!!

Signs of a Systemic Problem

2009-08-06T08:30:00.001-07:00

Three articles I've seen in the past 24 hours about alarming trends prove once again that there is a systemic problem with the way we live and the way we treat the world around us:

There is a growing patch of garbage in the Pacific, now about the size of Texas (ironic? see below). It is composed of slowly-degrading plastic, most of it smaller than can be seen from the surface, but large enough to be choking the ecosystem there.
Immigrant groups that move to the U.S. see large spikes in cancer incidence. Researchers are seeing it in Hispanics now and saw it in Asians a few decades ago. Maybe something to do with our sedentary lifestyle and the massive amounts of processed foods we eat? I can't posit these things scientifically, but the article makes reference to them.
Thanks to my good friend Mike B. for sending me this third article, in which it appears that recycling isn't "Texas" enough for Houston.

Maybe Wall-E was the most prescient movie ever made?

An Old City with a New Good Idea

2009-08-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

With all the talk of "freeway teardowns" going on in the CNU, I can't believe I missed out on Providence's big project, relocating an interstate along a shorter, waterfront route that will open up several new blocks in the city for infill redevelopment:

While we normally try to see waterfronts today as assets that should NOT have freeways along them, Providence's harbor is still home to refinery tanks, warehouses, docks, and other industrial uses. Moving I-195 nearer to the shore does "seal the deal" for an industrial waterfront, but it opens up an outstanding opportunity to heal Providence's downtown area. The scar of the elevated freeway can be healed with blocks upon blocks of infill, public spaces, new streets, etc. Maybe we should all move to Providence in a few years to get in on the action.

Sprawl in the Round

2009-08-05T17:22:00.000-07:00

Viera, Florida: my new favorite picture of sprawl. Looks like someone was trying to create figural public space? Too bad it's actually three rows of parking... a true homage to the car's triumph over man.

Should we charge for trash?

2009-07-26T13:37:00.000-07:00

The garbage problem in the U.S. is a big issue - of course, not an issue like the economy or war or crime, but just another one of the lifestyle issues we could easily and quickly confront.
As I took the trash out today, I realized that maybe throwing things out is just a bit too easy for us. We do pay for it in our taxes, but once that tax bill goes out the door, we have a years' worth of throwing out as much household waste as we please, literally (it's unlimited in the Town of Brookhaven as long as the bags don't weigh over 50 pounds each).

Meanwhile, on the recycling side, the Town has an every-other-week schedule that alternates between cans/bottles and paper, and a laundry list of "acceptables" and "not acceptables". You can't put any old plastic in your "CURBY" can - and you can't mix your newspaper with your mixed paper. Turning CURBY into a cartoon character may have seemed like a smart move by the Town, but he sure is discriminating when it comes to your recyclables.

Part of the answer to the problem lies in single-stream recycling. While it has its cons (one of which is the potential downgrading of paper due to contamination by the other recyclables), single-stream recycling does exactly what our culture demands: ease of use. No thought is involved - almost everything except for food can be stuck in the bin, and the garbage men will collect it later.

I learned just how much one really can recycle when I stayed with my aunt for a few days. She has somehow completely reversed the proportion of garbage to recycling that most of us use. Her main garbage pail is essentially a tiny wastebasket under her sink, right next to a giant bin for all the recycling - and it really makes sense. Each time you go to empty your wastebasket, check out how much of it is miscellaneous papers, junk mail, plastic wrappings, styrofoam, etc., and then how much is food and other non-recyclable things... you'll see that upwards of 75% is probably recyclable, yet we all just throw it into the landfill. My aunt somehow changed her mindset and sees all of these items as recyclable.

Changing to single-stream across the nation may be part of the solution, and I hope that more cities and counties move in that direction. In an ideal situation, our responsibilities as stewards of the environment would be enough to motivate us all. This is the real world, however, and in this world, the only thing that really talks is money.

As it stands now, I can do everything I can to eliminate general waste, or I can just throw absolutely everything out for regular trash collection (it's unlimited!) - either way, my household pays the same exact assessment, based on our home's value. While there's a feel-good incentive to recycling, there's absolutely no personal economic incentive to Joe the Trash-Thrower-Outer - he's not the one who lives near the dump, and he'll have moved south to Florida by the time the town has to deal with landfill capacity issues on the taxpayer's dime.

So I end with a question - does a system where one pays by volume for landfill trash, but pays nothing for single-stream recycling make sense? I could imagine a system where the household assessment remains in place, but the city/county charges say $2 per 32 gal. bag of regular trash to your account, and bills you quarterly. There would be accounting issues to be sure, but I think they could be worked through rationally. All in all, I think the only way to actually kick Americans into gear and curb their wasteful habits is money.

Sea Cliff, NY: Treasure Trove of Urbanism

2009-07-21T17:02:00.000-07:00

As a lifelong Long Islander and an urban explorer by nature, it is rare for me to discover a place I have never seen before here on the Island. It is a thousand times rarer for me to be absolutely stunned by something here, but when I visited Sea Cliff for the first time, I was floored.

I spent about two hours on a perfect Friday summer evening driving and walking around, photographing, and taking measurements in Sea Cliff because I was so intrigued by it. For those unfamiliar with the area, Sea Cliff is located less than twenty miles northeast of Midtown Manhattan on Long Island's "Gold Coast":

Tucked into a natural harbor off of the Long Island Sound, and perched atop a 120' precipice that gives it its name, Sea Cliff has always been a fairly sleepy place despite a nearby commuter rail link to New York with trips under one hour. Luckily for us today, Sea Cliff managed to survive the modernizations of the 20th Century with its amazing historic urbanism and architecture completely intact.

What struck me first as I wound around the serpentine roads leading into Sea Cliff along the harbor was Sea Cliff's tiny scale - for the first time on Long Island, and perhaps for only the second or third time ever in the United States, I felt like I was entering a piece of Europe. Like Boston's North End and Lower Manhattan, Sea Cliff operates an what in today's terms is a tiny scale - the main street of the town, Sea Cliff Avenue, measures between 44' and 48' wide from street wall to street wall:

The actual roadway at Sea Cliff is only 32' wide for two parking lanes and two driving lanes, and it is flanked by 4-8' sidewalks. This is extremely narrow even by historical standards - similarly aged towns on Long Island and in the Northeast have main streets with somewhat wider roadways as well as more generous sidewalks, generally totaling about 55-60' in sum. Compare this to 19th Century Midwestern railroad towns that might have main streets with 80-90' ROWs, and modern day arterials that are far, far wider.

Yet despite its limitations (see the cars in the picture above that actually don't fit in the 6.5-7' parking lane), Sea Cliff actually works. There was not a lot of traffic, but it did move through the town, albeit slowly when two cars had to pass. I wouldn't advocate a 32' wide four lane road today, but Sea Cliff Avenue shows that "too small" can actually be functional, and reminds us that every extra few feet we add greatly diminishes the intimacy of place a street can evoke.

It might be hard to believe, but the typical residential street in the town is even narrower. I loved this because even in a town where the main drag is 32' wide, the residential streets were still hierarchically smaller, in this case about 16-18' of pavement. They had no sidewalks, but didn't really need them since they felt comfortably sized for walking, almost as though they were pedestrian lanes down which cars occasionally traveled and parked. I documented 12th Avenue, one block south of Sea Cliff Avenue:

*A caveat to both street sections: all of the streets in the downtown area of Sea Cliff are very variegated in plan, with buildings at all different setbacks, alternations between attached and detached buildings and even building types, etc. The street sections try to give a representative view of the street's most typical character.

The architecture of Sea Cliff complements its amazing and unique urbanism. There is an excellent mix of well-executed buildings in several styles popular in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, including Queen Anne, Italianate, Tudor, and more. I'll close with a selection of some of the many amazing buildings I saw, without doing the justice to the countless others that fill every street in the historic town.

The fire station (left), my favorite building and a simply awesome example of half-timbering in brick, was finished in 1931. The town library (right) must have formerly been a church, and sits a few steps above Sea Cliff Avenue, with its own wooded plaza out front.

Some of the mixed use buildings downtown. The left building is an example of the beautiful polychromy throughout the town. The right building shows the adaptation of detached housing into mixed use streetfronts, with a single (or sometimes double) story extension filling up the former yard to meet the street wall formed by its neighbors. This happens frequently in small towns throughout Long Island. I also loved that the storefront was nothing other than an architect's office!

More polychromy (left), not in the best shape but still stunning. Finally, a typical local house (right), featuring a tower, which are quite common in Sea Cliff due to its excellent vantage point. There are excellent views across the harbor to Port Washington, and also across the Long Island Sound to New Rochelle, which is developing quite a skyline these days.

The Suburban Lawn: A Single-Use Paradigm

2009-07-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

As a recent graduate, forced into early retirement by the job market, I find myself once again doing a job that I loathed from about fifth grade until I started at Notre Dame: mowing my family's oversized front lawn. My father is looking down on me now, chuckling to himself that the job he assigned to me 13 years ago is still mine - and we even have the same walk-behind lawn mower.

When I was just 10 years old, I swore each and every Saturday morning that I would never, ever have a lawn when I grew up - it wasn't worth the wasted time to me as a kid. Today, at 22, I realized that I still would never, ever have a lawn, but I realized that a $210,000 education had given me an ideological reason for my gripe: lawns are single-use constructs, and if I have learned anything at all about good architecture and urbanism, that is a big no-no.

The lawn perfectly encapsulates the conflict of what we are trying to achieve by building sprawling suburbs. When we "drive till we qualify" and plop ourselves on a half-acre in a brand-new exurb subdivision, we are signing up for what looks like a match made in Heaven: a new home close enough to all the conveniences, yet also right out there in Nature, with lots of open space and room to breathe. Similarly, with a personal lawn, we want Nature at our doorsteps, literally, yet we want it just so:

"Your first impression … and it stays with you … is one of quiet, spacious beauty. The gently curving streets with modern lighting are uncluttered by cars … Everywhere you look, your eyes rest on the loveliness of well-kept lawns, majestic shade trees, fruit trees and flowering shrubs."
- 1950s ad for Levittown, PA, from http://web1.fandm.edu/levittown/one/f.html

The essential problem with suburbia, one that the public at large is finally beginning to realize, is that you can't actually have it both ways. You don't get to live out in the "quiet, spacious" country, yet also live amidst manicured surroundings with easy access to culture, commerce, and education. In a case of 'something's gotta give', both sides end up giving, and suburbanites are left with neither the pleasantries of true country living nor the perks of living in the big city.

Similarly, the manicured private lawn is another failure to link the true nature of the country with that of the city. A lawn is inherently unnatural, for Nature does not produce anything single-use on its own. Indeed, our lawns are constantly trying to go back to a natural state, with weeds and dandelions cropping up as soon as the first rains come. But because we want the lawn just so, we spend weekends toiling to keep it unnaturally single-use. And unlike a farm field, which is also single-use and somewhat unnatural, the lawn provides absolutely, positively no benefit to us other than aesthetics and the occasional football game or family gathering. For that, we are willing to invest countless dollars and hours, use harmful chemicals, and consume what would likely be replaced by a thriving ecosystem. What's worst, we claim to have a piece of Nature in our yards, when in fact the entire thing could not be further from a legitimate ecosystem.

The irony of it all is that cities typically feature great and expansive urban parks that allow for exactly what uses we do get out of our lawns: picnics, strolls, games for all ages. Since these parks are communal, they can offer us far more amenities than individual lawns, and the grass that we must maintain there gets a constant stream of use instead of the occasional pickup game. We can argue whether the cost to maintain the manicured communal park lawn, both economic and environmental, is indeed worth it, but such cost is surely not worth it for each and every household in the U.S.

Surely in today's world of "green" thinking, where a magic convergence of concerns for economy, energy, climate, and environment are moving common sentiment away from large-lot sprawl, we can put some serious thought into foregoing the green parcel that made William Levitt fawn. There are tons of more sustainable options like rain gardens, native plantings, permeable courtyards, and the simplest, a much smaller patch of green for each home. Let's hope for a better understanding of the diversity that characterizes good ecosystems as much as it does good urbanism.

Isn't This Era Over?

2009-07-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

I visited a developer's website today looking for information on a new local PRC (Planned Retirement Community). The following image is from their featured project, a 55+ community on Long Island (company's name removed):

When is this era going to be over? I see about a thousand things wrong with this picture, and I'll detail the most egregious:

Isolationism, in this case for retirees. The project is geographically isolated from anything besides other homes, and some light industrial uses. It has no amenities whatsoever within comfortable walking distance, despite the website's bragging about how close residents are to "one of the most picturesque waterside villages on Long Island".
Density, in an awful way. The project places 174 units on 28 acres, or 6.2 DUs per acre gross, far denser than the typical for Long Island. The project replaced a single light industrial business and some virgin forest. This places approximately 300+ residents about 1.7 miles from a downtown and 2 miles from any supermarkets. At least most of them are no longer commuting, as job centers are much, much further away.
Deceiving arguments to dupe locals. In a 2002 article about the zoning charge from industrial to residential, the developer argued that "the development would reduce commercial traffic" as homes instead of as the larger industry that could have replaced the smaller one on site. Great argument - instead of the 50-100 workers commuting to and from work generated by the would-be new industry, we have 174 units with upwards of 300 cars leaving all day long to: go to work, go to the supermarket, go to the doctor, go to the drug store, go out to dinner, go to a movie, go to a play, go to the beach, etc., etc., etc.... but I bet that's still less than the one industrial business would have produced.
Concern for the pedestrian falls short. Even though there are "public spaces" and walks for residents around the lakes, there are absolutely no sidewalks along the "streets", which are really parking lots. Good thing nothing is nearby - even if it was, you'd have to hike across the asphalt.
Cookie-cutter architecture. All white, three unit types, all buildings almost the same size... does it get worse than this?
Blatant Photoshopping!!! You'll have to take my word since I do not want to reveal the location, but the subdivision entrance road does not disappear into green as shown - the two lane local road leading to the neighborhood is only about 100' southeast of the lower lake, and should run diagonally across the lower right corner of the picture (the lower right homes in the picture back up to a small buffer along the road)

Oy ve - I feel sorry for the isolated seniors who bought into this at the height of the market - what's going to happen if, God forbid, they can no longer drive?

Baptism of a New Blog

2009-07-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog, started July 19, 2009. Please share your thoughts, comments, criticisms, and ideas!