Tag Archives: streets

Panel: keep Washington D.C. building height restrictions, preserving height to street-width ratios

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A panel recently suggested height restrictions for buildings should remain in the older areas of Washington D.C.:

Building heights in the 68-square-mile (176-square-km) area are determined by the width of the street on which a structure fronts. The maximum height is 130 feet (40 meters), with some exceptions.The result is a distinctive low-lying skyline that showcases historic monuments and distinctive landmarks such as the U.S. Capitol, National Cathedral and the Old Post Office. The tallest structure is the Washington Monument, which stands at the center of the Mall and is about 555 feet (169 meters) high.

The National Capital Planning Commission recommended leaving intact the federal height rules for the part laid out in the 18th century. The area of wide avenues and traffic circles is home to the White House, National Mall and museums.

The commission left open the possibility that buildings in the area developed beyond the city’s original layout can be higher – but only after additional study and as long as they did not interfere with federal interests.

Another article I saw about this suggested this would restrict growth in Washington, a city whose suburban counties are growing in both population and wealth. Without opportunities for taller buildings in the city, money that could go to the city through property and sales taxes will instead go elsewhere.

But, taller buildings in or near the National Mall would change it quite a bit. These height restrictions are reminiscent of a more traditional kind of architecture. For example, New Urbanists often suggest linking building heights to a particular ratio compared to the width of the streets to create a more comfortable feeling. Contrast the National Mall with the experience of midtown Manhattan, a place busy and interesting but also full of concrete canyons and structures that tower over anything going on in the streets. These two areas serve different purposes but the experiences are quite different.

Focus less on how all of Manhattan’s 120,000 blocks can be walked and spend more time with the sociological findings

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A sociologist who has walked every block of Manhattan shares what he learned in a new book:

The result is his new book, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City. The expansive sociological study relies on Helmreich’s on-the-ground research, culled from thousands of hours of observation and casual conversations with local residents, to help parse hot-button issues like immigration, assimilation, and gentrification. But more than that, the miles and miles clocked – he wore out nine pairs of shoes in his trek across the city – come through as a sort of extensive love letter to the frenetic energy and diversity of New York…

For non-New Yorkers, the time the book spends on the outer boroughs is a fairly obvious corrective for what Helmreich sees as the tourism-generated, Manhattan-centric view of New York. And for all its diversity – the book spends hundreds of pages on the immigrant communities of the city – New York comes off as an inextricably linked web of groups that constantly must interact, change, and adjust. “It’s almost as if you dropped a hundred towns in Nebraska into the middle of the city,” Helmreich says. But what sets New York apart, he adds, is that “there’s this duality to New York that you can be in these places, but you can also be in the city.” Even those who live in more isolated pockets, such as the waterfront community of Edgewater Park in the Bronx, have a sense of connectedness…

By necessity, given the size of the city, Helmreich calls his book no more than a much-needed “introductory work” to the diversity of New York City. His method is, in some ways, a throw back to a much earlier form of social criticism, when walking was curiously in vogue for the self-styled intellectuals and elites of 19th century Europe. Think of Charles Dickens’s night walks through London or the well-dressed flâneurs of Paris. And it’s one that anyone can learn from. “If I accomplish anything besides sociology,” Helmreich says, “it’s to encourage people to walk through what I call the greatest museum in the world.”

Interesting findings that could suggest how disparate communities within a larger community understand their place in the whole. Additionally, there is a lot of potential here to detail the New York that most of its residents know, not the big money Wall Street/hedge fund world or the celebrity/glamorous crowd.

However, this article goes more for the human interest angle than the actual findings of the book. While it may be interesting to detail how a single person was able to walk the whole city, it may not mean much if they weren’t very observant or didn’t find much of interest. Rather then calling this an “epic quest,” how about thinking through what this methodology leads to compared to traditional ethnographic work that calls for spending extended time with a more limited group of people? How does this compare with other studies of American streets, such as the work of Jane Jacobs looking at places like Greenwich Village and Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia), Elijah Anderson examining street life in poor Philadelphia neighborhoods, or Mitchell Duneier analyzing how black street vendors utilize public sidewalk space in New York City? Even as New York City gets a lot of attention, this seems like a lost opportunity to highlight how a sociologist (versus a journalist or a reality TV show or an academic from another discipline) views the street-level operation of the world’s #1 global city.

No Chicago street has been officially renamed since 1968

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Honorary street names are common in Chicago but no street has been fully renamed in over four decades:

Renaming the street — rather than giving it an honorary title — would require replacing street signs and printing new road maps, as well as navigating some confusion at the post office as residents and businesses along the road adjusted to the change. Those costs, combined with the political brokering necessary to pick an appropriate honoree, make an official change a rare occurrence in Chicago. The last time a street was officially renamed was in 1968, when then-Mayor Richard J. Daley approved a push to name the former South Park Way to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

At the time, Daley was accused of political pandering, choosing a South Side street for the dedication in the hopes of endearing himself to black voters ahead of that year’s Democratic National Convention, according to a biography of the former mayor. Sound familiar? Regardless, the plan got council approval, and Chicago joined the hundreds of American cities with roads named after King.

Stony Island Avenue was the subject of another renaming proposal in 1989, when the Committee on Streets and Alleys debated naming it in honor of former Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Like Brazier, Muhammad was a leader of the black community in Chicago. According to the Chicago Tribune archives, 15 black aldermen sponsored the push to name Stony Island in his honor.

This is interesting, particularly given Chicago’s propensity to change street names prior to the 1960s. When doing some work this summer, I found out that scores of Chicago street names had changed from the early 1900s through the 1960s. See this PDF file involving street name changes – by 1948 there were enough changes to fill 164 pages. Imagine the confusion this all must have caused: as the city was growing from from just over 1 million residents in 1890 to over 3.6 million in 1950, street names were consistently changing.

On one hand, I understand the desire for consistency but shouldn’t there be room for street names to change as cities themselves change? As new people come and go and events happen, street names can’t stay the same forever.

A new way to fight pollution in Chicago: cement that absorbs smog

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Chicago is the first American city to lay concrete that absorbs smog:

There are many sustainable technologies designers can utilize these days to make a project more Earth- and people-friendly, but smog-eating cement isn’t the most talked-about – until now. The City of Chicago is pioneering the use of a revolutionary type of cement that is capable of eradicating the air around it of pollution, potentially reducing the levels of certain common pollutants by 20 – 70% depending on local conditions and the amount of exposed surface area.

Photocatalytic cement isn’t exactly news – it was developed by the leading Italian cement maker Italcementi for the Vatican in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of the Christian faith. The Seat of the Catholic Church commissioned the construction of a new church to commemorate the event and wanted surface material that would retain its new appearance despite Rome‘s high levels of air pollution.

The cement that Italcementi developed uses titanium oxide that, when exposed to natural sunlight, triggers a chemical reaction that catalyses the decomposition of dirt or grime on the cement’s surface; thus, it is self-cleaning. What further research in Europe uncovered, however, was that this cement possessed pollution reduction properties that not even Italcementi could have foreseen, capable of cleaning up smog in adjacent air – up to 2.5 meters away – by breaking down the nitrogen oxides which are the result of burning fossil fuels.

Naturally, this makes the photocatalytic cement a perfect paving material as it successfully reduces the amount of toxins expelled by vehicles and inhaled by pedestrians. Italy and other areas of Europe have already paved many of their roads with the revolutionary material, but Chicago is reportedly the first city in America to adopt it, laying down a thin, permeable pavement for the bicycle and parking lanes on Blue Island Avenue and Cermak Road.

There might be a few issues associated with this:

1. What is the relative cost of laying down this kind of cement compared to other road surfacing material? In Illinois, I’ve read before that laying asphalt is cheaper in the short term compared to concrete but more expensive in the long term because it has to be replaced more frequently.

2. Some may not like this news because if the cement can help fight pollution, people may pay less attention to the effect of cars.

Here is more information on this concrete from an article last October:

According to Nguyen, the titanium dioxide on the cement surface absorbs UV light and uses this energy to react with water vapor in the surrounding air.

The result of this reaction is a highly reactive particle known as a hydroxyl radical.

It is these unstable hydroxyl radicals that in turn decompose a host of other compounds in the surrounding air, including nitrous oxide, a harmful greenhouse gas released in car exhaust…

David Leopold, project manager for the Chicago Department of Transportation, did say the photocatalytic cement is more expensive than regular pavement, but the city expects to see considerable improvement in street-level air quality as a result…

Based on pre-installation estimates, “on a windless day up to about eight feet from the pavement’s surface, you can see demonstrated improvements in air quality,” said Leopold. “Coincidentally, that’s about the height of a person on a bike.”

We’ll see what happens if this concrete is used more widely.

Data suggests urban residents in some cities leaning toward bicycles and away from “war on cars”?

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Some recent data from Seattle, New York, and Toronto leads one writer to suggest the “war on cars” is over:

Here are some of the poll’s findings:

  • 73 percent of the 400 Seattle voters surveyed supported the idea of building protected bike lanes.
  • 59 percent go further and support “replacing roads and some on-street parking to make protected bicycle lanes.”
  • 79 percent have favorable feelings about cyclists.
  • Only 31 percent agree with the idea that Seattle is “waging a war on cars.”

The “war on cars” trope has long been a favored talking point for anti-bicycle and anti-transit types. But this survey and others seem to indicate that it might, at last, be wearing a bit thin, no matter how much the auto warriors try to whip up their troops.

Last year, a Quinnipiac poll of New York City residents showed that 59 percent support bike lanes, up from 54 only a few months earlier. Quinnipiac also found that 74 percent support the city’s sadly delayed bike-share plan. A New York City Department of Transportation poll about the Prospect Park Bike Lane – supposedly a bloody battleground of the war on cars that the New York Post insists the DOT is waging – found 70 percent of respondents liked the lane.

Toronto has also been a major front in this fight. The city’s embattled mayor, Rob Ford, famously declared that his election would mean an end to the city’s supposed war on cars. (He also said that when a cyclist is killed by a driver, “it’s their own fault at the end of the day.”) On Ford’s watch, Toronto removed some downtown bike lanes last fall, prompting protests and even an arrest for mischief and obstructing a police officer.

But the aftermath has been more constructive than martial. Tomislav Svoboda, the physician who was arrested for his act of civil disobedience, was recently joined by 34 of his medical colleagues in a call for faster construction of new bike infrastructure, asking the city council to “change lanes and save lives.” Even Ford seems to be feeling less combative. He came out the other day talking about a 2013 budget that will include 80 kilometers of new on-street bike lanes, 100 kilometers of off-street bike trails, and 8,000 new bike parking spaces.

Based on the data presented here, it sounds like these urban residents are moving toward a position where both cars and bikes can coexist in cities. This relationship is notoriously hostile as people have made zero-sum arguments: more bikes means less room for cars and vice versa.

But we could also look at why people have these opinions. Here are a few options:

1. Are bike advocates getting better at marketing or framing their cause (this is the suggestion at the end of this article)?

2. Are people generally less interested in cars (and this could be for a variety of reasons including cost and environmental impact)?

3. Are residents tired of paying for road improvements without little change in congestion (those new lanes just don’t help)?

4. Is there a genuine interest in shifting away from cars in cities and toward other forms of transportation (bicycling, more walkable neighborhoods, etc.)?

Zara devotes its full marketing budget to leasing expensive retail space near high-status brands

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Here is a way retailers can take advantage of space: locate near high-status stores.

How about advertising? Basically, Zara doesn’t do it. There is no ad budget. Instead, the company spends ungodly amounts of money buying storefronts next to luxury brands to own the label of affordable luxury:

“The high street is really divided according to brand value,” says [Masoud Golsorkhi, the editor of Tank, a London magazine about culture and fashion], who is also a consultant for fashion brands. “Prada wants to be next to Gucci, Gucci wants to be next to Prada. The retail strategy for luxury brands is to try to keep as far away from the likes of Zara. Zara’s strategy is to get as close to them as possible.”…

Zara stores cozy up to the most famous brands in the world to sing their luxury ambitions even as they profit off a brilliant, cheap, short supply chain that delivers similar fashion at a much lower price.

In this case, proximity matters. By being located near prestigious brands, Zara is pulled up more to their level. Additionally, shoppers willing to wander into the really high-status stores might then also wander into Zara. This seems to be the strategy of the shopping mall as well: utilize several important anchor stores (or anchor facilities/restaurants in “lifestyle centers“) to help bring in more customers who will then also visit other stores along the way.

I wonder: are there any streets or malls where retailers have found ways to expressly disallow stores like Zara? Imagine a high-end outlet mall where there are only high-end retailers and no middle-brow stores or aspiring stores are allowed. Leasing prices is one way to do this but this article makes it sound like firms like Zara can do an end run by paying those big sums and then not spend money on traditional marketing.

Two years of construction on Congress Parkway yields…bleh

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The Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic Blair Kamin provides an overview of what the two years of construction of Congress Parkway have yielded…and his verdict is ambivalent:

Yet two years and innumerable construction delays later, it’s hard to muster enthusiasm for the nearly complete, $20 million undertaking, which was paid for with city, state and federal stimulus program funds. That’s not because the job has failed to accomplish what it set out to do. Rather, it’s because many of those things have been done and, still, no one would mistake the new Congress Parkway for the Champs-Elysees…

Handling more than 60,000 vehicles a day, Congress became a barrier that separated the revitalized Printers Row district to the south from the Loop to the north. The recent appearance of dormitories and other academic buildings on both sides of Congress has only accentuated its identity as an asphalt moat…

For now, though, the new features remain overwhelmed by the still-intimidating width of the road and its vast field of shiny black asphalt. The cars don’t seem to have slowed down. Engines still rev. Horns still honk. Some pedestrians still jog through crosswalks to avoid speeding cars. As cars accelerate as they near the Ike, Congress feels more like a highway than a parkway…

Perhaps that will happen, but it will be more important in the long-run for city planners to keep attacking other problems that continue to make Congress Parkway a Champs-Elysees wannabe, such as the ragged building edge and a relative lack of street-level shops. The present revamp, while welcome and attractive, is but one step down a very long road toward taming the highway monster.

Several thoughts:

1. This seems like a very unique project: how many American highways with this kind of traffic end up turning into regular city streets within a few blocks? This is a reminder of what can happen when highways are imposed on the cityscape – the construction of highways in Chicago altered a number of neighborhoods.

2. I’m not sure why Kamin refers back to Burnham’s 1909 plan when talking about this road. While the Burnham Plan tends to get idealized, how much of it was actually carried out? Going further, how much of it was even realistic with the shift to cars and highways that Burnham could have only dreamed about?

3. A major issue seems to be that Congress Parkway itself is not a living street. Traffic is not necessarily an inhibitor of an interesting street. However, if there aren’t businesses along this road itself, such as shops and restaurants, this remains simply as a road to cross rather than a place to go for its own purposes.

4. Does anyone consistently do cost-effectiveness studies of highway/road projects? Kamin notes that this project cost about $20 million and took longer than expected – can we ask whether it was worth it? Should the public have gotten more bang for their buck?

5. Fairly, Kamin notes that the streetscape is not complete and some interesting design features have yet to be installed.

Living in an era before snow plows

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I have wondered this before: how did people clear roads and streets without modern snowplows? Of course, we can reconsider this every so often when an eastern or southern state encounters snow and doesn’t have the equipment to deal with it all but I’m talking about the days before snow plows even existed. Here is some insight:

That changed in the 1840s, when the first snow plow patent was issued. According to a wonderfully comprehensive history by the  National Snow and Ice Data Center, the first snow plow was deployed in Milwaukee in 1862. They write that the plow “was attached to a cart pulled by a team of horses through the snow-clogged streets.”Over the next several years, other cities adopted the horse-drawn plow, along with a sense that snow removal was a city’s problem. As the Data Center notes “the invention of the snow plow initiated widespread snow removal efforts in cities and also created a basis for municipal responsibility in snow removal.”

Of course, with great plowing comes great responsibility. Cities were able to clear main streets, but side streets and sidewalks often ended up blocked off by huge mounds of snow. Again, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, businessmen and townsfolk “complained and even brought lawsuits against the plowing companies … [claiming] their storefronts were completely blocked with mounds of plowed snow, making them inaccessible to their customers.”…

In the early 20th century, the automobile entered the picture, creating new problems and new possibilities for snow plowing. In 1913, New York unveiled the first motorized dump truck (complete with tractor tires), abandoning the traditional horse-drawn cart. In the 1920s, Chicago unveiled the snowloader, an “ingenious contraption” that “was equipped with a giant scoop and a conveyor belt. As the snow was plowed, it was forced up the scoop, caught by the conveyor belt which carried it up and away from the street into a chute at the top where it was dropped into a dump truck parked underneath.”

Industrialization and technological change brought with it new forms of snow plowing plus expectations that cities would clear the streets. It would probably be fascinating to hear more about these expectations; did they arise because streets are city property? Did cities balk at having to devote resources to clearing snow as opposed to pursuing other goals? What were the outcomes of these lawsuits between business owners and municipalities? It sounds like the expectations about snow removal arrived at roughly the same time (late 1800s) that cities started providing other services to everyone including sewers, water, and police and fire coverage. There could be an interesting story here.

If many communities are facing budget shortfalls, is there any community willing to consider privatizing snow removal? In many places, it isn’t exactly a full-time task.

Another thought: how much more difficult does suburbia make snow plowing and removal? With the variety of streets that subdivisions add to the mix including cul-de-sacs and arterial roads, can snow plows be more efficient in cities?

A movement away from one-way streets

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Even as one-way streets are found in thriving downtowns in cities like New York City, Toronto, and San Francisco, there is a movement away from one-way streets:

St. Catharines was only following the example of hundreds of cities in the United States and Canada that have been shutting down their one-way streets since the 1990s. In Ottawa last week, planners announced they are considering the two-way conversion of several streets in the shadow of Parliament Hill. Two-way roads would help to “‘normalize’ the streets, by slowing traffic, creating a greater choice of routes, improving wayfinding, creating a more inviting address for residential and commercial investment and improving safety for pedestrians and cyclists,” according to a plan drafted by consulting firm Urban Strategies Inc. In 2005, even Hamilton, Ont., began to end its addiction to fast-flowing urban streets by cutting the ribbon on two-way traffic on some of its most prominent thoroughfares…

“The one-way is designed to maximize efficiency for the car; that’s its purpose,” said Larry Frank, the UBC-based J. Armand Bombardier Chair in Sustainable Urban Transportation Systems. As car culture bloomed beginning in the 1930s, and city dwellers ditched their apartments and townhomes for suburban ranch houses, one-way streets became the “mini-freeways” that could speed them to and from work. According to U.S. urban development advocate John Norquist, one-ways were also particularly attractive to Cold War-era planners because they allowed speedy evacuation in the event of a nuclear attack.

The effects on urban cores were immediate. In small towns, the conversion of Main Street to one-way was usually the first harbinger of urban blight. A much-quoted statistic holds that 40% of the businesses on Cincinnati’s Vine Street closed after it became a one-way. By the 1980s, one-ways had become potent symbols of urban racial divides. In dozens of U.S. metropolises, poor black neighbourhoods were severed by loud, dangerous one-ways jammed with mainly white drivers speeding to the suburbs. “It’s environmental racism,” said Mr. Gilderbloom.

Since they encourage higher speeds, one-ways have consistently been found to be hot spots for pedestrian fatalities. In a 2000 paper examining pedestrian safety on one-ways, researchers analyzed traffic statistics in Hamilton from 1978 to 1994 and concluded that a child was 2.5 times more likely to be hit by a car on a one-way street.

It is hard to argue with safety today. But the larger argument seems to be this: planning cities in a way that privileges automobiles is now considered more problematic than in the past. With the blooming of movements like New Urbanism, more places and planners are now thinking about others who use the streets including pedestrians, bicyclists, and businesses and residences along the street. While one-way streets may be efficient, they don’t necessarily serve all interested parties well.

There is some history here: with the rise of the popularity of the automobile in the 1920s plus the beginnings of highway construction around the same time (Federally-funded interstates came later), city planners started building cities (and suburbs) around the car. The goal was to move as many drivers in and out of the city with the intention that the ease of travel would actually bring more people into the cities. While the ease of automobile traffic may have improved, it had negative side effects: people moved out of the city and sidewalk traffic decreased. Cities tried to adapt by doing things like making certain streets pedestrian malls (Chicago’s State Street was a notorious example) but these generally proved unsuccessful.

The claim about one-way streets being examples of “environmental racism” is not one I have heard before. While I have heard of highways being used in this manner, it would be interesting to see data on where exactly most one-way streets are located.

Improving suburban roads in Montgomery County

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The suburbs are full of roads. But, as many have noted, these roads are primarily built for the fastest automobile speeds between Points A and B. Montgomery County, Maryland has put together a plan to improve their roadways:

As a result, Montgomery has actually been in the business of “retrofitting” or “repairing” the suburbs (very gradually, to be sure) since before planners began to call it that. Now, it has undertaken a pilot study on two stretches of roadway in the county to evaluate the use of green infrastructure – strategically placed vegetation and other methods that reduce polluted runoff by using or mimicking natural hydrology – along with measures to better accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists. One is an arterial road that goes through residential areas, the other a wide commercial street. Both showed there was much potential, and Montgomery is now planning to integrate more environmental features into its streets…

Note that the changes are not extensive, for the most part, but incremental: subtle narrowing of traffic lanes to slow auto speed; plantings in medians, along sidewalks and in parking lots to capture and filter rainwater; bike lanes and wider sidewalks to accommodate non-motorized users; striping to mark a people-first pedestrian lane where a sidewalk may not be feasible…

There’s a lot to like about Montgomery’s initiative, including that it brings together three relatively new and successful – but often independently successful – lines of sustainability thinking and planning: redesigning suburbs; green infrastructure; and “complete streets” that accommodate all types of users. It reminds us that the greatest potential for sustainable communities lies with the integration of ideas and purposes. I hope this kind of initiative continues to catch on.

This seems to include a number of techniques New Urbanists have talked about for years.

What I like best about this is that it is hard to argue against these changes. Generally, busy roads are either nondescript or unattractive so these changes help improve the aesthetics. Runoff is a common suburban problem and no one likes having to drive through big puddles. Carving out space for other users of the roads would appeal to a lot of people (as long as the bikers and drivers can get along – not a guarantee in some places). And this should be safer as we know that narrower roads tend to slow drivers down.

The only problem that I could envision: how much do these subtle but helpful changes cost? It might be a good amount of money upfront but then reduced costs (and perhaps even savings?) down the road (fewer accidents, fewer cars on the road so less road maintenance, etc.). Are taxpayers willing to pay to improve already pretty good roads (generally defined as very drivable and fast)?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out and how much they expand the program.