Vox Civitatis the New Colonist weblog
Thursday, March 4th
The Legacy of a Town Center
I noticed Legacy Town Center on the map a few days ago. Setting out on foot, I was unable to get there (see my blog post). Reaching the "town" the way most people do, by car, I found it to have enough of what one might expect in a place to live, far more than most of what has been built in the last decade.Legacy Town Center came about pretty much because skilled workers didn't what to live without a "there." A company called Electronic Data Systems responded not by moving, but by creating a town center near the office. "These new-economy employees work around the clock and appreciate the convenience of the town center," according to an item on the EPA's web site. Other companies responded. The town center help Hewlett Packard make the decision to locate nearby.
READ MORE
Eric Miller on 03.04.10 @ 08:34 AM PST [link]
Wednesday, March 3rd
Renewing New York
This superb short from Streetfilms speaks for itself, tracing the history of Park Avenue from the time when it was a real park to its dismal, car-clogged present, and showing what New York is doing now to reinvent itself as a city for humans rather than a traffic sump.Beautiful!
Richard Risemberg on 03.03.10 @ 05:26 PM PST [link]
Active Community Transportation Act
Oregon's Rep. Earl Blumenauer has introduced the Active Community Transportation Act, which would greatly enhance the livability of cities, towns, and neighborhoods by funding infrastructure enhancements for walking and cycling. According to a press release from the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy:Americans are hungry for safe and convenient opportunities to walk or bicycle to work, school, shops, transit and other daily destinations. Nearly half of the trips taken in the United States today are within a 20-minute bicycle ride, and half of those trips are within a 20-minute walk. Further, 90 percent of transit trips begin with walking or bicycling. There is huge potential for an increased role for active transportation to these nearby destinations. No wonder respondents in a national poll said they would spend 15 times current levels on walking and bicycling (currently, less than two percent of all transportation dollars) at the expense of what they view as lopsided spending on roads. To this end, the ACT Act is strategically targeted to maximize mode shift by providing "intensive, concentrated funding of active transportation systems rather than discrete piecemeal projects."Read the details, and learn how to help, here.
Richard Risemberg on 03.03.10 @ 06:39 AM PST [link]
Tuesday, March 2nd
One George Bush You Don't Cross
I'm staying at a hotel North of Dallas and decided to take a look at the Google map to see if there was anyplace I could walk to. I noticed something called Legacy Town Center just on the other side of the George Bush Turnpike. The handy walk calculator suggested the distance was a little more than two miles. The weather was cooperating, so I decided to head out. The problem came a couple feet from the hotel door when I realized, contrary to the maps suggestion, there was no way to walk along the George Bush Turnpike the necessary distance to cross under it and off to Legacy Town Center. None-the-less I persisted. I noticed a rail line that crossed under the freeway and so headed for it, all the way collecting a good deal of Texas mud on my shoes, so much it felt as if I was wearing exercise weights. Once on the other side of George Bush (ok, technically I did cross George Bush) I could either follow the tracks to a housing subdivision or follow the freeway to the cross street. I fugured there wouldn't be a way to go through the yards of the homes backing onto the tracks, so I tried following the highway. I was stopped by a drainage ditch and had no choice but to return. I imagine this place gets a walk score of zero.
A side note, the George Bush Turnpike is fully automated. Cameras record your license number and the owner of the vehicle is billed for passage.
Eric Miller on 03.02.10 @ 09:51 AM PST [link]
Friday, February 26th
The Circle at the Colony
Suburban Dallas is not a place I expected to find myself. It's not a search for who I am I am referring to. Rather it's this sort of awareness about where I am. Right now I am sitting above a circle that surrounds a parklet in a place called The Colony, a Dallas suburb not far from Plano, Texas.Arriving at night and looking out the hotel window, I didn't quite know what was outside. I could see a circle, but it wasn't clear if I was looking at a tarp, parking, or a park. To my delight when the sun rose I discovered it was indeed a grassy knoll.
This particular knoll hasn't been here long, appearing sometime after my GPS map was created. It looks from the small screen as if I am driving through a field when I turn onto several of the roads here.
This knoll isn't designed as a town center as such an area would have been purposed for in 19th Century. It seems to be more of a buffer between commercial and residential areas. Sidewalks enter from the outside and spiral inward, ending at a sculpture wall and tiered area that looks as though it could be used as an amphitheater.
Across from the hotel, actually there are two hotels here, sits a large cluster of condominiums and townhomes. Behind them sit larger single-family houses. Between the houses and the hotel 90 degrees to the right are several commercial buildings, mostly unoccupied. Ninety degrees to the right are empty lots waiting for buildings of one sort or another to grow once the existing commercial spaces are filled.
Behind the hotel is a highway, elevated enough to block sight of the businesses on the opposite side. The highway is a toll road, one that can be avoided by traveling on the local roads on either side of it, in a design not unlike, but greatly expanded from, an urban boulevard.
Most of what's here hasn't been here long. Comparing it to what was built a few decades ago, it's undoubtedly an improvement. The houses built today are generally on smaller lots and closer together than they were in 1950-1990. The notion of public space, though it may be primarily a buffer has re-entered the consciousness of planners and developers. Yet the sustainability, though that word may be over-used, is suspect. Minor modifications could, in theory help The Colony become a self-sustaining community in that services could be accessed with minimal travel, but the distance from employment centers is so great and public transit non-existent, a rise in fuel prices could make living here difficult in the not-too-distant future.
We all know it's easier to build here on a blank slate than it would be to re-build the earlier suburbs closer to Dallas, yet those are the ones with the skeleton of public transit infrastructure, and the ones that logically should become more dense and walkable transit villages with access to the employment centers of Dallas and Fort Worth.
I will continue to add images to the slideshow below.
Eric Miller on 02.26.10 @ 03:46 PM PST [link]
Wednesday, February 24th
Free Parking: Boon or Bane?
A few maddening facts about free parking and how it becomes a sort of abuse of community:- Ninety-nine percent of U.S. car trips begin and end in a free parking space.
- The average automobile is parked 95 percent of the time.
- Parking typically represents a full 10 percent of development costs. What's more, the people who actually park only pay 5 percent of the cost of non-residential parking, meaning that public subsidies and developer capital pay for the rest.
Richard Risemberg on 02.24.10 @ 05:38 PM PST [link]
Thursday, February 18th
TIGER Grants Fund Rail, Livability, and Highway Repairs
From Transportation 4 America, a press release summarizing the disbursements of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (or, inevitably, "TIGER") grants program:The Obama Department of Transportation today broke historic ground in unveiling projects chosen in a first-ever program to award federal dollars on a competitive basis to innovative projects that address economic, environmental and travel issues at once.To read the entire press release, see the T4A site, or find the full document at the USDOT site in this very large PDF file.
The 51 projects announced under the TIGER grant program, funded by $1.5 billion included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), meet a broad array of challenges, including:
- Bridge replacements in Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Indiana that can support multiple modes of travel;
- Port and freight-rail projects to spur economic growth in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and Ohio;
- Modern streetcar construction to support vibrant urban corridors in Tucson, Dallas, Portland and New Orleans and light rail in Detroit;
- Innovative highway funding and operations in Texas, North Carolina, Colorado, South Carolina and Arkansas;
- Bicycle and pedestrian networks in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and a complete streets project in Dubuque, IA;
- The long-awaited rebirth of New York's former Penn Station as Moynihan Station.
Of the fifty-one projects funded, eleven expand support for rail freight, thirteen underwrite bridge and highway repair projects, and twenty-two fund "livability projects are aimed at giving Americans more choices about how they travel and improving access to economic and housing opportunities in their communities," including urban rail transit and bicycle infrastructure. (The full, detailed list is in the PDF.)
A significant step forward for a traditionally hidebound agency historically dominated by motoring interests.
Richard Risemberg on 02.18.10 @ 05:05 AM PST [link]
Thursday, February 11th
Old Suburbs, New Slums....
The New York Times today ran a long, musing post by Timothy Egan looking at some exurbs in California's Central Valley that are decaying even as they finish building, now that the "irrational exuberance" of the latest housing bubble has been replaced with quite rational despair.... He asks, in part, "What will these places become?"His answer seems to be "More growth":
"Yes, huge developments are empty, with rising crime at the edges, and thousands of homes owned by banks that can't unload them even at fire-sale prices.Apparently, just a lower-priced version of the same land-wasting, soul-crushing pattern of cookie-cutter pretention....
But through it all, the country churns and expands, unlike most other Western democracies. That great American natural resource--tomorrow--will have to save the suburban slums."
I suspect otherwise, and wrote a comment:
What will filling these houses anew bring about? More oil dependence, more taxes wasted on asphalt for dazed residents trapped in their cars for hours each day just to buy bread or get to their McJobs....Read the article (and, if you have all day, the many comments) on the New York Times: Slumburbia.
"Half acre lots for all!," means no community, no sense of neighborhood, no caring what goes on beyond the wall...it also means all the burden of socialization and socialbility falls on the shoulders of an already weary family...or is given over to the television set.
The cities of the future will be real cities: dense, high-quality housing in neighborhoods that don't trap you in your car; places like San Francisco, yes, or like Paris (twice the density of New York, but you never feel it); those places will survive, not just because they use energy more efficiently, but because they nurture our souls.
There's a reason that property costs more in San Francisco than in some vague lost walled suburb: the life there is more worth experiencing. The market says so with its pricing!
Want to make it affordable? Then just build more of it! More San Franciscos, more Portlands...not more zombie uncommunities where empty calories console the empty lives.
Real urban living: what humanity has been striving for over the last 5,000 years.
What should these particular dying suburbs become? What they were before: farm fields. You do have to eat, don't you?
Richard Risemberg on 02.11.10 @ 06:12 AM PST [link]
Tuesday, February 9th
Trapped by Snow
Snow has left a half dozen cities in the Mid-Atlantic and East Coast paralyzed. Watching video clips on CNN.com and elsewhere, we're shown families in large suburban homes trapped for several days without access to the world beyond their driveway. Without a car, the basic necessities of food, medical care, etc. of life are out of reach. My sister lives at the end of a cul-de-sac outside of Pittsburgh. It took more than a day for a plow to come through, but even when it did, there's no where for the snow to go at the end, except in a big pile that blocks someone's driveway. In Pittsburgh the same problem of no where to put the snow exists, but at least in many neighborhoods one can set out on foot.
Faced with relocating to suburban Texas, I found most of the suburbs have the same lack of access to basic necessities without a car. Several feet of snow in Dallas is not a likelihood, but snow isn't the only thing that can limit mobility. The price of fuel will likely continue to rise, and even without natural disaster, access to food, entertainment, medical care, etc. will become more limited by the cost of travel.
Today new communities are being built to be more walkable, but in most cases the commercial components are still not there. In many cases that's because the density is still too low to support pedestrian-oriented retail. It's important to begin to change this and to adapt existing communities to have access to amenities within a short stroll through rain, sleet or snow.
Eric Miller on 02.09.10 @ 04:07 AM PST [link]
Thursday, February 4th
Abandoned streets: an Urban Salvation?
Allison Arieff, writing in the New York Times, explores a new methodology, developed by Nicholas de Monchaux as "Local Code," for using GIS (geographic information systems) to discover, catalogue, and re-visualize abandoned streets and lots in our cities and reclaim them for environmental and social mitigation of ills caused, very often, by excessive paving and unintelligent development in the first place. Says Arieff:Indeed, this article elaborates on a new way of exploring urban structures that could make the redevelopment of our cities into living territories that nurture, rather than degrade, both the people who inhabit them and the earth they stand upon."Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.That quote is 40 years old, but I continue to be amazed by the extent to which we haven't begun to address the problem Fuller highlighted. There's a staggering glut of empty space around the country right now, unused space that's not doing anyone much good.
Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.
It's time we gave this some thought."
--R. Buckminster Fuller
[...]
The era of massive, expensive, centralized projects like the Big Dig in Boston has passed. "Now, with the ability to model dynamic systems, we can show a much more decentralized collection of resources could provide greater benefit. If, in the 19th century, it was a biological metaphor that fueled the creation of Central and Golden Gate parks, the idea that a city needs hearts and lungs to grow, there’s now a networked metaphor. The city is a dense network of relationships. The best way to provide infrastructure is to not go in with a meat ax but to practice urban acupuncture, finding thousands of different spots to go into."
Read the entire article at the New York Times: Space: It's Still a Frontier.
Richard Risemberg on 02.04.10 @ 09:51 AM PST [link]
Thursday, January 28th
Cycling & Walking Report Released
The Alliance for Biking & Walking has released a comprehensive report summarizing the state of bicycling and walking in the US, with some familiar conclusions and some that might be surprising:In these times of high gas prices, a warming climate, increasing traffic congestion, and expanding waistlines, increasing bicycling and walking are goals that are clearly in the public interest. As this report shows, where bicycling and walking levels are higher, obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes levels are lower. Higher levels of bicycling and walking also coincide with increased bicycle and pedestrian safety and higher levels of physical activity. Increasing bicycling and walking can help solve many of the largest problems facing our nation. As this report indicates, many states and cities are making progress toward promoting safe access for bicyclists and pedestrians, but much more remains to be done.The report also points out that bicycling and walking, the most responsible as well as most efficient forms of urban transit, receive federal money at levels far below even their present low levels of mode share, which may be a good reason why the cycling-walking mode share has not increased as rapidly as the lavishly-subsidized auto portion.
Read a summary of the report, with links to the full version at the Alliance for Biking and Walking website
Richard Risemberg on 01.28.10 @ 06:15 AM PST [link]
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