Tag Archives: urban planning

“Road diets” improve safety

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The US Department of Transportation is recommending “road diets” – limiting the width of roads and reducing lanes – to improve safety on the roads:

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced an 18-month campaign to improve road safety across the country. One of the things DOT plans to do is create a guide to “road diets” that it will distribute to communities and local governments. DOT says that road diets can reduce traffic crashes by an average of 29 percent, and that in some smaller towns the design approach can cut crashes nearly in half…

The result was a much safer road. In small urban areas (say, populations around 17,000, with traffic volumes up to 12,000 cars a day), post-road diet crashes dropped about 47 percent. In larger metros (with populations around 269,000 and up to 24,000 daily cars), the crash reduction was roughly 19 percent. The combined estimate from all the best studies predicted that accidents would decline 29 percent, on average, after a four-to-three-lane road diet—DOT’s reported figure.

These benefits alone would be enough to merit more road diets, but there were plenty of others. Bicycle and pedestrian traffic tends to soar at these sites, as the recaptured road space gives way to bike lanes or street parking that provides a sidewalk buffer from moving traffic or crossing islands, and as vehicle speeds decline (especially for high-end speeders going more than 5 miles per hour over the limit). Traffic volumes, meanwhile, typically stay even in such a corridor: some drivers diverted to other parts of the street network, while the rest quickly soak up any vacated space.

Best of all, these kinds of changes don’t cost much. When timed with regular road maintenance and re-paving, road diet policies require little more than the paint needed to re-stripe lanes. They’re about as cheap and cost-effective as infrastructure improvements get, which has led some to wonder why the technique isn’t used more widely.

This is counterintuitive: many people would guess that adding lanes to roads makes driving better. I would guess many people fed up with traffic in their community wouldn’t immediately support road diets. Yet, evidence consistently suggests that adding lanes attracts more traffic and that narrow roads prompt drivers to pay more attention and reduce their speed.

The City of Wheaton introduced this years ago on Main Street. The road used to have two narrow lanes in each direction between the railroad tracks and Cole Avenue but this was changed to two lanes in each direction with a median/turn lane. Traffic today seems to move just fine and the median/turn lane helps isolate turns and limit situations where big vehicles in small lanes presented hazards.

Toronto park also serves as a dyke to protect surrounding neighborhood

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One Toronto park goes beyond providing recreational space by providing protection against flooding:

Corktown Common Park is a beautiful urban oasis—the 18 acre park, situated in the West Don Lands district of Toronto, boasts a wildlife-filled marsh, athletic fields, playgrounds and plenty of place to sprawl out on grass or host a bbq. But the coolest of the park’s features is the one you can’t see. Built into the sprawling greenland is a plan to protect the surrounding neighborhoods from flood waters. The landscape architects from Michael van Valkenburgh Associates partnered with engineering firm Arup to build a park that looks like nature, but works like a dyke…

Because Corktown Common was developed on a flood plain, the team began by building up the area’s natural elevation. Nearly nine meters of land was added, creating a natural barrier to rising waters. “We had to make sure that the park and the infrastructure were well integrated so that in the end it didn’t feel like a piece of pure infrastructure but felt like a welcoming park that is connected to the urban fabric,” explains Mueller De Celis. This required MVVA to add an additional six meters of topography on top of the original infrastructure. It comes in the form of rolling hills, playgrounds and open green space.

The park is split into a wet and dry side. As water falls on the dry side—whether that be from rainfall, flood waters or from the water playground—it gets collected and directed through a series of underground pipes into a cistern. This water is then reused for irrigation. MVVA says it expects the water to be used anywhere from two to four times before it evaporates. Beyond sustainability, this system also has the added benefit of relieving pressure from the mouth of the Don River by slowing the water flow that dumps into Lake Ontario.

This infrastructure is masked by more than 700 trees, and more than 120 species of plants (95 percent of which are native to the area). Mueller De Celis says that as soon as the marsh was implemented, wildlife bloomed in what used to be a browned-out, post-industrialized area. She recalls one day when she was giving a tour of the park. There was construction happening in the neighborhood, as usual. “The people who were touring couldn’t hear me, not because of the construction but because of the frogs,” she recalls. In the process of building development-enabling infrastructure, Toronto has found itself with a real ecosystem in the middle of the city (no wildlife was reintroduced). As Mueller De Celis puts it: “It might be a constructed landscape, but the wildlife don’t know that.”

Building parks in floodplains is not a new idea – it can be a good use for that space and flooding then does not damage as much. But, this sounds more unique in protecting a surrounding urban area and providing space for development. And, it sounds like all of this is hidden out of sight from people in the park, making it yet another piece of important infrastructure that works best when no one notices it in the background.

Taxpayers pay 70% of NFL stadium costs, owners pocket 95% of the revenue

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Gregg Easterbrook summarizes the research on who pays for and benefits from the construction of new NFL stadiums:

Judith Grant Long, an urban planning professor at Harvard, has shown that about 70 percent of the cost of building and operating NFL stadia has been paid by taxpayers — many not even sports fans. About 95 percent of the revenue the stadia generate is kept by team owners. It’s a deeply disturbing arrangement. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College, has shown that NFL investments never generate the promised job totals or local economic activity. If there’s public money to spend in Buffalo, investments in infrastructure — schools, transportation, a replacement for the dilapidated Peace Bridge, improving Delaware Park — would have more of an economic multiplier effect than an NFL field.

This said, if there is one city where public investment in an NFL stadium might be justified, it’s Buffalo. Should Atlanta or Miami lose its NFL team, that would be a shame, but these cities would still have strong economies. Should Buffalo lose the Bills, this could be perceived as the “last one turns out the lights” moment, reducing the odds of a Buffalo urban recovery.

Public investment in an NFL stadium might be justified only if the facility is located downtown. The Buffalo News reports that 15 sites are under consideration for a new stadium. Two are in Toronto. Several are suburban, including an abandoned shopping mall property an hour’s drive from the city. One is near Niagara Falls, where the tourist activity is on the Canadian side, not the American side. One is on the Buffalo Outer Harbor, which is cut off from downtown by a freeway and doesn’t contribute to the pulse of urban life. Only downtown locations should be considered if public funds are spent.

Nobody would have believed 20 years ago that Pittsburgh and Cleveland could bounce back and have trendy downtowns. And nobody believes that about Buffalo now. But already underway on the north side of the city is a complex of a teaching hospital and medical research center that will be among the world’s largest and best equipped. Thousands of professionals will move to the city to staff the center. Add the NFL to downtown, and Buffalo might acquire the cachet it needs to rebound.

In other words, the research from recent years is consistent: building a publicly-funded stadium is not really a good deal for taxpayers. Major league teams will appreciate it and the owners certainly benefit but the money does not flow back to taxpayers. Yet, since the political calculus is such that no major leader wants to be the one that let the favorite team get away plus there are still sites that existing teams can threaten to move to (in the NFL, Los Angeles is perhaps more important as a potential city rather than an actual home for a team), taxpayers are likely to continue to help foot the bills for new stadiums.

“The Suburbs Made [Americans] Fat”

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A new study suggests the design of streets in suburbia contributed to heavier residents and other adverse health outcomes:

In prior research, Marshall told me, they found that in the most extreme cases “older, denser, connected cities were killing three times fewer people than sparser, tree-like cities on an annual basis.” Of course, people walk and bike more in dense cities, but the research on actual ties to health outcomes is scant. So Garrick and Marshall took on and have just completed a large study of how street networks might influence our health.

They looked at the three fundamental measures of street networks—density, connectivity, and configuration—in 24 California cities, and compared them with various maladies. In the current Journal of Transport and Health, Garrick and Marshall report that cities with more compact street networks—specifically, increased intersection density—have lower levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. The more intersections, the healthier the humans…

Garrick and Marshall have also previously found that people who live in more sparse, tree-like communities spend about 18 percent more time driving than do people who live in dense grids. And they die more readily—despite old research that implied otherwise. Studies from the 1950s looked at safety in cul-de-sacs and found, as Marshall put it, “You’ll have fewer crashes in the cul-de-sacs. Sure, you’re safer if you never leave the cul-de-sac. If you take into account the entire city, your city might be killing more people.”…

They also found that wide streets with many lanes are associated with high rates of obesity and diabetes. That’s most likely indicative of, as Garrick and Marshall put it, “an inferior pedestrian environment.” Similarly, so-called “big box” stores in a neighborhood indicate poor walkability and are associated with 24.9 percent higher rates of diabetes and 13.7 percent higher rates of obesity.

Dense cities promote walking and biking, so the push for healthier cities fits with the vogue push for active lifestyles—as opposed to gym routines smattered across an indolent existence. Physical activity is not just concerted exercise time and deliberate recreation. It’s about ways of life. For some people, that’s best accomplished by making things inevitably more difficult on themselves in everyday life.

This seems to make some intuitive sense though there are lots of factors likely involved. I’m thinking of Putnam’s Bowling Alone which highlighted a whole range of factors that contributed to decreased civic engagement including sprawl and the rise of television.

But, if such research holds up – and even if it takes some time to confirm things and reach a consensus – such findings could lead to a new/forgotten dimension of selling places and new developments. Part of the appeal of emerging suburbs in the mid-1800s was getting away from the dirty city, a place that was increasingly seen as physically and morally corrupt. Developers sold the suburbs as getting back to cleaner settings that were closer to nature. This research would flip this idea: cities and more urban places promote more movement and better overall health. I imagine anti-sprawl advocates like the New Urbanists would want to jump all over this and add it to their lists of reasons why American sprawl should be halted.

Designing Chicago to provide a better video game experience

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Making Chicago the setting of the new video game Watch Dogs includes changing the city to improve the gaming experience:

He described the basic creation of Chicago this way: “Essentially we started with a top view of Chicago, the actual Chicago map, which we put in our game editor, and from there we carved into it. It’s a big, empty space at first. So we start laying out roads by going with the real road and adjusting from there, making sure, for instance, that Wacker follows the river correctly, but adjusting a bit too. You also make sure roads connect properly, but we didn’t go with the Chicago grid because it was so straight, too many right angles. It’s better for the game play if you can’t see far ahead of yourself. So we curve things. Once the roads are laid down and the city reduced, you went street by street putting in neighborhoods, landmarks …”

Like many an open-world video game city, building the open-world Chicago of “Watch Dogs” became a dance between game play, accuracy and urban planning. In general, what Arriola described is the same process that created cities in “Saints Row” and “Grand Theft Auto”: Four-lane roads became six lanes to encourage driving (nobody likes digital gridlock, either), buildings were pressed together to encourage rooftop-to-rooftop leaping and only the most visually unique neighborhoods survived (albeit incongruously, mashed up against other neighborhoods).

“An open-world city in a good video game is a riff on a city, not a city,” said Brian Schrank, co-chairman of the game development program at DePaul University. “It’s a little exploitative, a little like a remix of familiar elements. You are seeing a suggestion of unending choices, but in reality a game developer is being subtle and laying out the breadcrumbs that pull you through their city.”

Hence, the isle of Chicago.

The Chicago River needed widening, and the Northwest Side needed geographic diversity, so, in the game, the north edge of the Gold Coast becomes actual coastline, the farthest northern point in this Chicago. A player can pilot a boat from the lake and around the downtown area without hitting a dead end.

See this earlier post about using Chicago in the new game.

This isn’t just the issue of creating a copy of the city of Chicago. That in itself could be interesting and/or jarring, seeing a faithful reproduction on the screen but being able to do things the average resident or visitor could not. But, this goes a step further to “improve” the city for the gamer. One way to think about it is that the city is not compelling enough as it is but needs to be tweaked to allow for features that gamers expect like easy yet unclear driving and using a boat. The isle of Chicago? A grid system of street that now curves? Urban sociologists and other urbanists are often drawn to big cities because of their dynamism – from social interactions to culture to architecture, to economic and political activity – that is plenty interesting without tweaks.

The gamification of the world continues, with the big city as yet another victim…

What does a US Army version of a US city look like?

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The Telegraph looks at a new city created by the US Army in Virgina to be used for training purposes:

The 300 acre ‘town’ includes a five story embassy, a bank, a school, an underground subway and train station, a mosque, a football stadium, and a helicopter landing zone.

Located in Virginia, the realistic subway station comes complete with subway carriages and the train station has real train carriages…

There are also bridges and several other structures which can be transformed into different scenarios.

The $96 million is designed to meticulously “replicate complex operational environments and develop solutions”.

Lots of movies portrays scenes of fighting in American streets, often facing aliens, but I assume the military has some strong ideas about what works and doesn’t work military in the average American big city. How do US cities fare in battle situations? In other words, I assume most American urban planning doesn’t think much about creating defensible positions or providing ways to best move troops and supplies. Instead, it was guided by ideas of how to create certain kinds of streetscapes, how to efficiently move cars through cities, and leaving spaces for both private and public settings.

I wonder if the Army has some advice about how better to plan cities once they start going through exercises.

Watch out for the “stroad,” the bad street/road hybrid

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A former street engineer provides warnings about the “stroad” and the havoc it wreaks on the landscape:

“The STROAD design — a street/road hybrid — is the futon of transportation alternatives. Where a futon is a piece of furniture that serves both as an uncomfortable couch and an uncomfortable bed, a STROAD moves cars at speeds too slow to get around efficiently but too fast to support productive private sector investment. The result is an expensive highway and a declining tax base.”

Marohn says he coined the term in 2011 to wake up the people who design America’s roads. “I really was writing it as a way to push back at the engineering profession and get my fellow engineers to think about the bizarre things they’re building,” says Marohn. That was why he initially wrote the word in that annoying all-cap style, which he eventually dropped. “I figured engineers would read it and wonder, what was it an acronym for?” he says, laughing.

While Marohn came up with the neologism partly in a spirit of fun, he considers stroads a deadly serious problem. Not only are they dangerous and aesthetically repugnant, he argues that they are economically destructive as well. They don’t provide the swift, efficient mobility that is the greatest economic benefit of a good road, and they simultaneously fail to deliver the enduring value of a good street — which fosters community, good architecture, and financial resilience at the lowest possible cost…

Instead, stroads create hideous, inefficient, and disposable environments that quickly lose value.

These are many of the four to six-lane commercial thoroughfares that dominate American cities, at least the less dense parts, and suburbs. These roads are lined fast food restaurants, big box stores, car dealers, gas stations, offices, and big signs that try to catch your attention as you drive by. One twist that I like here is the suggestion that this is not necessarily good for cars either because of all the traffic lights and congestion.

Two places where I have seen depictions of such stroads:

1. I recently showed the documentary Jesus Camp in class and the film features several scenes of such roads. The roads don’t look very attractive – lots of cars and signs – and they are sort of stand-ins for everyday Americana. It is one thing to see it in a film and another to realize that you drive past this every day. But, as the film suggests, America is filled with these scenes and they all kind of look similar.

2. James Howard Kuntsler, a well-known critic of sprawl, makes a note of such roads. In different contexts, he points out the absurdity of trying to be a pedestrian on such a road that is clearly meant for cars (imagine crossing all those lanes at a traffic light or walking through all of the drives in and out of business) as well as the trivial amount of “nature” that planners try to add in to make it all look better. All together, these roads just encourage sprawl.

What is the alternative to this? In a perfect world, perhaps it is connecting denser downtowns and neighborhoods with pedestrian friendly streets (nodes) with a system of faster roads or mass transit (connections between the nodes).

Jaywalkers vs. car culture in downtown Los Angeles

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The battle for Los Angeles may not involve aliens but rather jaywalking pedestrians versus cars in downtown Los Angeles:

It is not quite “Dragnet,” but the Police Department in recent weeks has issued dozens of tickets to workers, shoppers and tourists for illegally crossing the street in downtown Los Angeles. And the crackdown is raising questions about whether the authorities are taking sides with the long-dominant automobile here at the very time when a pedestrian culture is taking off, fueled by the burst of new offices, condominiums, hotels and restaurants rising in downtown Los Angeles…

The police say they are simply trying to maintain order at a time when downtown Los Angeles, once a place of urban tumbleweeds and the homeless, is teeming with people competing for pavement with automobiles. “There’s a huge influx of folks that come into the downtown area,” said Sgt. Larry Delgado of the Central Traffic Division. “If you go out there, you are going to see enforcement.”

These pedestrians are confronting not only the police, but a historically entrenched car culture that has long defined the experience of living and working in Los Angeles. With its wide streets, and aggressive motorists zipping around corners, cutting in and out of lanes and sneaking past red lights, Los Angeles is hardly built for people who prefer to walk.

Yet times may be changing. There are an increasing number of people using bicycles, taking advantage of an expanding network of bike lanes. Los Angeles is in the midst of a major expansion of its subway and bus system. Much of the urban planning in recent years, particularly downtown and in Hollywood, is intended to encourage people to give up their cars in favor of public transit, walking or biking.

It is hard to tell what exactly is going on here without some hard data about jaywalking fines in downtown LA over time. However, it does make for an interesting narrative: while many cities and places are trying to encourage more pedestrian and bike use (for its green, health, congestion, and other benefits), Los Angeles is cracking down on walkers. The issue is that LA is perhaps the prototypical car city in the entire world. The sprawling city has traditionally not had a downtown on the scale of other major cities that people would want to crowd. The metropolitan area seems to stretch on forever, crisscrossed by numerous highways. This is home to the Beach Boys singing about driving, the rise of fast food, and lots of car commercials.

Jaywalking may be an opening skirmish but this could blossom into a longer war over the heart of Los Angeles: is it really a city about cars or can it also contain dense, walkable nodes? Critics of sprawl would see a Los Angeles full of pedestrians (at least in pockets) as a tremendous success story.

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.

Anger directed at urban cyclists and city bike lanes really about fears that younger Americans don’t want sprawling suburbs?

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Complaints about urban biking and new bike lanes might be less about biking and more about what younger Americans don’t want: the sprawling suburbs.

All this sounds like a nightmare scenario if you live in the suburbs. Gas prices rise and housing prices fall, eating into liquid capital and equity. Families with the ability to move return back to the city, depressing housing prices even further. Declining property tax revenues and a fleeing upper-middle-class undermine previously excellent schools. At best, suburbanites take a huge hit on depreciating houses; at worst, they’re stranded in decaying neighborhoods, cut off by isolating new infrastructure…That’s where I see an undercurrent of Millennial resentment (we’ll spot Kass a decade or so on “grunge;” when you’re out across the county line, the news travels slower). The boomers escaped cities in decline, investing sweat equity earned in office parks into a house and two cars, the gas taxes they paid into epic interchanges, and their high property taxes into excellent schools.

And the little bastards who went to those excellent schools don’t want that inheritance. They want to ride their car shares from their rented apartments to mass transit, making the last-mile commute on shared bikes (they don’t even own bikes!) to virtual startups in work-share spaces.

From the perspective of postwar America, it looks like a whole lot of nothing, an unsettled and rootless future. Where they’re going, they don’t need… roads…

But it’s the future we’re being promised by a lot of people in position to make it happen, who threaten to reverse—to invert—what their parents spent a lifetime building. It’s scary, and not just on a merely economic level. And the people out there who are so angry about it aren’t just trying to outrun a few three-speed, step-through shared bikes; they’re trying to outrun the future, and you’re in the way.

Moser is arguing the bike lanes are just a sign of bigger trends at work, as suggested in books like The Great Inversion and The End of the Suburbs. This is really about a changed way of life, a different way of thinking about the American Dream, trading suburban spaces for new iPhones and exciting urban experiences the creative class desires. I think Moser is right to be skeptical; these changes will take time as well as a lot of collective action. At the same time, there is a lot of conversation about denser suburbs and returning to cities. Of course, this doesn’t mean such moves solve all the problems; there are still plenty of poor urban neighborhoods and suburbs that are left behind in the movement of what might be largely middle- to upper-class residents who can afford these changes.

How much irony is there here that the suburbs might have actually provided the “unsettled and rootless future” that younger Americans may now not want? Think about classic suburban critiques like American Beauty or the Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. The suburbs were viewed by many as the places to escape the problems of the city – everything from corrupt morality, dirtiness (factories, pollution, horses in the street everywhere, etc.), new populations – and yet the suburbs clearly have their own problems.