News from the [complete, walkable] Street

Byrne, Bluemenauer and Sadik-Khan at Cities, Bicycles, and the Future of Getting Around event in Washington DC WashCycle summarizes remarks by the star studded panel at the December 8 event.   New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s called for a federal framework for urban street planning, saying local frameworks are too easily tied up in red tape and applauding Cities for Cycling.

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NACTO launches Cities for Cycling The National Association of City Transportation Officials’  Cities for Cycling initiative will catalog, promote and implement the world’s best bicycle transportation practices in American municipalities.  According to the press release:  Cycling is booming in cities across the nation. Based on the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. census bureau, cycling as a share of transportation is up in major cities by as much as 72% from 2007-2008, with an average growth rate of over 30%…. From protected cycle-tracks to bike boxes and special traffic signals for bikes, Cities for Cycling seeks to share these best practices among leading cities and encourage State and Federal governments to adopt the new design treatments as standard practices, opening up funding and technical support opportunities and cutting red tape.

Mind the Gaps. Picture =1000 words. Connecting cul de sacs streets to form a grid is easy to visualize; a no brainer.  But can it happen in suburbia?   We hear the screaming already.  Maybe just easier to abandon dead houses on dead streets.  Sad.

New Urban News aggregates articles on Walkable Streets. Is it just our imagination, or was 2009 the year when Walkable Steets and the 20 minute neighborhoods became kitchen sink concepts?  And concepts that beg so many other questions: transportation policy, design standards, connecting the grid, the need for motorists,  razing freeways, multi-modality, shared streets, pedestrians and cyclists dealing with one another more intuitively.   Great stuff.

Complete streets fundamentals and policy guidance.  The National Complete Streets Coalition also has a bunch of basic tools for activists working with planners and city officials. There are FAQs, fact sheets on a whole slew of sub-issues, and  community workshops.

Walmart rejects idea of integrating store in walkable community.

Hurricane Katrina wrecked a WalMart in a Mississippi town, opening the way for new ideas about what WalMarts should look like.  Local architects presented three different plans, all with a full-size store and housing  above ground-level parking. Residents would have had views of the Gulf of Mexico and protection from hurricane-driven water. But Walmart reverted to a single-use building elevated six feet higher than the one ruined by Katrina with no on-site housing.

Byrne, Bloomberg, Moses and Videos from Chinatown

Location as Destiny? What is it about certain cities and places that fosters specific attitudes? .. To what extent does the infrastructure of cities shape the lives, work, and sensibilities of their inhabitants? Quite significantly, I suspect, writes David Byrne in his new Bicycle Diaries.  All this talk about bike lanes, ugly buildings, and density of population isn’t just about those things, it’s about what kinds of people those places turn us into… Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so. Check the excerpt for musings on what may account for developments in Hong Kong. After missing Byrne at the talking bike heads book shindig to  last week at the Baghdad, it was good to catch him being interviewed this morning by Jacki Lyden on Weekend Edition.

Making Parking Cool. Bike lane building Michael Bloomberg reaches out to the frustrated motorist trying to find a parking place.   In his opinion piece in the Daily News this week, the New York Mayor challenges app developers to make parking and parking revenue collection more efficient.   How would you like to use your mobile device to see a map of available parking spaces in your neighborhood – and also use it to pay your meter? Or how about getting a text message as your meter is about to expire, so you can get back to your car before getting a ticket?

Dead Freeway Reference Work Sarah Mirk’s discussion of  never built Portland area got the attention of a lot of folks, including us.  Now the Mercury journalist has located the study of Portland that Robert Moses did 66 years ago with all of its now very quaint-looking hand drawn map and gentle watercolors of what might have been.  Writing from the other Portland, blogger Christian McNeil provides a nice review .

Chinatown Past and Future. New talking pictures this week!   Brought to you by the Portland Development Commission and staring, among others, our own Stephen Ying, is Portland’s Old Town/Chinatown.  

And Ivy Lin,  the energetic chronicler of the neighborhood and creator of Pig Roast and Fish Tank, Ivy Lin has issued an invitation to her next premiere. Coming Together Home, the story of the Chinese interred (not interned, as the sub title suggests) at Lone Fir Cemetary screens at 7 pm October 11, 2009 at Someday Lounge.   See you there.

Reining in the energy costs of sprawl

Reining in the energy costs of sprawl

The senselessness of embedding energy-efficient buildings in energy-squandering suburban neighborhoods was driven home again by NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Houston: Texas-Sized Sprawl, No End In Sight.  Sweating with humidity and weighing in at 620 square miles – the size of Chicago, Phildelphia, Baltimore and Detroit combined – Houston forces its residents to use more energy than almost any other American metropolis.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112896915

In contrast to the energy-loving Texas city that keeps building more roads, Portland, Oregon has a proud history of tearing them down or not building them in the first place.    Sarah Mirk’s The Dead Freeway Society is a fine little history of this phenomenon, which can be forgiven for the   rhapsodic tone typical of so many accounts of Portland urban planning

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/the-dead-freeway-society/Content?oid=1676323   Mirk notes the intergenerational dynamics which have made  contrarianism mixed with public consensus building such a fundamental part of the city’s culture:   While other American cities have built, built, built, Portland’s freeway history is boom and bust: massive road projects were planned, mapped, and sold as progress by one generation, then killed by another. When current transit planners visit from exotic Houston and DC to admire Portland’s progress, what they are really admiring are the roads not built—freeways erased from the maps decades ago.

The senselessness of embedding energy-efficient buildings in energy-squandering suburbia was echoed by NPR’s Steve Inskeep in Houston: Texas-Sized Sprawl, No End In Sight.  Sweating with humidity and weighing in at 620 square miles – the size of Chicago, Phildelphia, Baltimore and Detroit combined – Houston forces its residents to use more energy than almost any other American metropolis.

In contrast to the energy-loving Texas city that keeps building more roads, Portland, Oregon has a proud history of tearing them down or stopping them in the first place.    Sarah Mirk’s The Dead Freeway Society documents this phenomenon, if a bit in the rhapsodic tone typical of so many accounts of Portland urban planning

Mirk notes the intergenerational dynamics which have made  contrarianism mixed with public consensus building a fundamental part of the city’s culture:   While other American cities have built, built, built, Portland’s freeway history is boom and bust: massive road projects were planned, mapped, and sold as progress by one generation, then killed by another. When current transit planners visit from exotic Houston and DC to admire Portland’s progress, what they are really admiring are the roads not built—freeways erased from the maps decades ago.

Containing sprawl is not without its battles.  The Cambridge, Mass-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, which specializes in research and training, has teamed up with Boston-based Northern Light Productions to produce Portland: Quest for a Livable City.    A special screening of the documentary is planned for October 14, 2009 at 7 pm Portland State University.

A recent review and trailer shows the wrangling behind the rhapsody.  Energy conservation and the reduction of carbon emissions ultimately depend on complex measures to rein in car-dependent sprawl, maintain farmland, and promote density.   Public policy reform in these areas is arduous because it forces a reevaluation of long-held individual and community values.  But it’s safe to say Portland has made progress along the road (“bike path” ?) that Houston has not even started to build.

Atlanta’s nine-day charrette looks at aging and urban design

Atlanta Regional Commission Lifelong Communities Charette http://www.atlantaregional.com/html/4921.aspxAn 

Interesting work from the nine-day Lifelong Communities charrette is now available.  Organized by Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) in partnership with Duany, Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), the charrette brought together design, architecture, planning, aging and health experts to craft six master plans which retrofit sprawling suburban sites in Georgia counties and cities. 

As André Duany points out in his opening speech http://www.monumentalmedia.com/arc/lifelong_charrette/duany_opening/ that before 1950 there were no retirement communities (and in fact he challenges us to find one.)  Retirement communities are a child of the automobile and sprawl.  

He urges his to think about what life was like in before the car.  First, the car “liberated planning from the intrinsic and  organic discipline of proximity”.  In the

Participants at the nine-day Atlanta Regional Commission Lifelong Communities Charrette  took some fundamental first steps in looking at how to retrofit six sprawling suburban sites in Georgia. Organized in February by Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) in partnership with Duany, Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), the charrette brought together design, architecture, planning, aging and health experts to craft master plans for the six sites in Atlanta and three counties.  

Not to be missed is André Duany’s opening speech (available as an hour l0ng video) in which he updates the premises of New Urbanism in the context of healthy aging and active living.  

Supporting his long held principles with fact and figures, Duany describes the fruits of car-driven sprawl:  a shrunken tax base, failing municipal capacity, gated communities,broken grids,  dysfunctional HOAs, and NIMBY-ism.   He challenges us to find a retirement community in existence before 1950.  “Suburbia only works for adults in their middle years who can afford one car each,” says Duany.   If you can’t drive you have to leave.

The call to find ways to retrofit the suburbs for aging Atlantans has yielded a rich vein of analysis,  innovation, and actual plans.  Let’s take a good look and continue the discussion here.

Health and Urban Design 1

Lawrence Frank of the University of British Columbia has been studying the impact of urban design on heath. An engineer and number cruncher, Frank has demonstrated strong links between neighborhood design and physical activity. 

SMARTRAQ partnership logo

While at Georgia Tech Frank founded the SMARTRAQ project that the city of Atlanta undertook when the feds threatened an end to highway funding until they got their air quality back in control.   Not suprisingly, the outer suburbs are a health disaster in the making; people who live a bit closer in get more exercise with downtown dwellers getting the most. So much for mowing the lawn and working in the garden, if you have to drive around all the time.

Writes Oregonian journalist Jeff Mapes in the thought-provoking chapter on public health in his recent book, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are changing American Cities :    It’s easy to see why time spent in a car can affect fitness, looking at some of the eye-popping numbers in SMARTRAQ. Between 1982 and 1997, Atlanta added 1.3 million people by urbanizing about one acre of land for every two new residents. In that period of time, the average miles driven per day doubled – to thirty-four miles.  Residents in the in the region’s outer counties were spending an average of 72 minutes in a car, often in congested stop-and-go driving.  

How do you create pedestrians?

It’s been only fifty years since automobiles with internal combustion engines took hold and we got sprawl.   Most of the folks who launched or sustained this unique-in-human-history scenario are very old (and for the most part no longer on the road) or aging (and terrified of losing their wheels).  

The demand for walkable communities, however, is still uneven.   By and large Americans love their cars.   And sprawl, with its dendritic systems of cul de sacs, non walkable connector roads, and ugly arterials, has brought suburban traffic to a halting slog.   No place illustrates this better than Greater Washington DC.  

Twice a year WalkingTown DC organizes a host of tours focussing on the history of neighborhood development, cultural history, gardens and cemeteries. Here’s the schedule May 30-31.  I love the format into which the blog post author has converted all this information.

So it’s good to see that pedestrian advocates there have planned a celebration of inner city weekend walks.  Twice a year, WalkingTown DC organizes a host of tours and invites the public.  Tours focus on neighborhood development, cultural history, gardens, cemeteries and the like.   Here’s the schedule for May 30-31.  The blog post author has presented the key information in an unusually inviting format

One way to create pedestrians is to invite people to walk.   In my hometown in upstate New York, a couple of miles of old rail line through swampland was converted to trail a couple of years ago.  People tried it, liked it, invited their friends along and now they’ve had to expand the parking lots at either end!   But still, in the midst of suburbia,  they are discovering the joys of walking and meeting neighbors along the way.  

I’m impressed by the blog Greater Greater Washington. Written by well informed citizens, it covers a range of urban planning issues across an intriguing hodgepodge of state, city, country, and  town jurisdictions and federal lands.

Update:  Why have pedestrians become nearly extinct?  What is the greatest threat to life as we want it?   Cul-de-Sacs!  Here’s a new video (less than 3 minutes!) from the Congress for New Urbanism.