Vox Civitatis the New Colonist weblog
Wednesday, July 21st
Our Cities Ourselves: 10 Principles for Transport in Urban Life
In a publication released last month, urbanist Jan Gehl and Walter Hook, Executive Director of the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), together set out ten keys to building successful cities. "Our Cities Ourselves: 10 Principles for Transport in Urban Life" shows how cities from New York to Nairobi can meet the challenges of rapid population growth and climate change while improving their competitiveness.In a concise, vibrant and accessible format, the booklet promises to be a "must read" for all those involved in city design and urban planning, and forms the backbone of the ITDP exhibition "Our Cities Ourselves," which opens on June 24 at New York's Center for Architecture, before traveling to China, Brazil, Mexico and beyond.
"Cities of the twenty-first century should be lively cities, safe cities, sustainable cities and healthy cities," says Jan Gehl. "All of these qualities can be achieved if we embrace these ten principles, which means putting people first."
Cities face massive population growth, particularly in the developing world. By 2030, 60 percent of the world's population, or 5 billion people, will live in cities. The transportation sector currently accounts for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, a growing proportion derived largely from cars and trucks.
Without a significant move away from car-dependent suburbanization to pedestrian-friendly and public transit-oriented urban planning, cities will face growing difficulties financing the necessary infrastructure. As a result of inaction, preventing the two-degree rise in global warming that threatens cataclysmic climate change will be nearly impossible.
"When I was growing up, we used to think that in the future we would all be traveling around on monorails, or in flying cars. In cities with 25 million people, this sort of thing just isn't workable," says Walter Hook, Executive Director of ITDP. "Now, our dreams are full of elegant pedestrian promenades along waterfronts alive with fountains and children playing, of great bike paths connecting to public squares alive with cafes, musicians, and performance art."
Some cities are waking up to this reality, and changing direction. "Our Cities Ourselves: 10 Principles for Transport in Urban Life" showcases examples of cities reaping the benefits of integrating urban planning and design that gives priority to pedestrians and transit. It is designed as a guide to cities and countries wishing to make their cities more competitive and livable, while helping to solve the problem of climate change.
"We are thrilled to launch the 'Our Cities Ourselves' global program at the Center, but also to see this important booklet arrive. The principles outlined--and beautifully so--offer a promising future for New York and other growing cities," says Rick Bell, FAIA, Executive Director of the Center for Architecture and the American Institute of Architects' New York Chapter. "I think I speak for the architects of New York when I say we look forward to realizing these principles in our designs."
What are the ten principles of sustainable transport?
- Walk the walk: Create great pedestrian environments.
- Powered by people: Create a great environment for bicycles and other non-motorized vehicles.
- Get on the bus: Provide great, cost-effective public transport.
- Cruise control: Provide access for clean passenger vehicles at safe speeds and in significantly reduced numbers.
- Deliver the goods: Service the city in the cleanest and safest manner.
- Mix it up: Mix people and activities, buildings and spaces.
- Fill it in: Build dense, people and transit oriented urban districts that are desirable.
- Get real: Preserve and enhance the local, natural, cultural, social and historical assets.
- Connect the blocks: Make walking trips more direct, interesting and productive with small-size, permeable buildings and blocks.
- Make it last: Build for the long term. Sustainable cities bridge generations. They are memorable, malleable, built from quality materials, and well maintained.
Eric Miller on 07.21.10 @ 12:49 PM PST [link] [No Comments Yet--Add Comment]
Thursday, July 15th
New Study Shows Huge Savings to Be Found in Commercial Building Efficiency
A new study from Next 10 identifies commercial buildings as a stealth energy drain and huge untapped resource that could provide significant savings for California businesses and state government, reduce the need to build new power plants, and cut global warming pollution while generating jobs and economic growth."Up to 80 percent of the energy used by commercial buildings is going up in smoke," said F. Noel Perry, founder of Next 10. "As our state struggles to emerge from recession, relatively low-tech energy efficiency fixes could save California businesses and the state government significant money and help to generate jobs."
Untapped Potential of Commercial Buildings: Energy Use and Emissions, produced by Collaborative Economics for Next 10, examines the untapped energy efficiency potential held by existing and new commercial buildings in California, analyzes obstacles to achieving widespread adoption of building efficiencies and explores approaches to removing these barriers.
Highlights of the study include:
- Electricity consumed by commercial office buildings represents 37 percent of California's total electricity consumption. Based on the U.S. average, energy efficiency improvements could cut that usage by 80 percent.
- Only 60 percent of all new commercial building construction meets California energy efficiency standards. With a minimal two percent increase in construction costs, new buildings can be designed to use one-third to one-half less energy than they use today.
- Only three percent of all buildings are newly constructed or renovated every year.
- California has no energy efficiency standards for existing building stock, which could yield substantial savings in energy.
- Energy efficient buildings retain higher real estate value, commanding higher rents (6-7 percent) and maintaining higher occupancy rates than less efficient buildings.
- Simple energy efficiency improvements to existing buildings, such as insulating window films, yield three dollars in savings on average for every dollar invested.
- In existing buildings, split incentives, elevated hurdle rates, upfront capital costs, and an information gap diminish large-scale adoption of energy retrofits.
- In new commercial construction, a lack of incentives for developers and ineffective installation and inspection methods are barriers to energy efficiency efforts.
- Much can be achieved through actions taken at the federal, state and local levels that raise efficiency standards, align incentives, and support the broad-based application of high-efficiency products and practices.
Eric Miller on 07.15.10 @ 07:47 AM PST [link] [No Comments Yet--Add Comment]
Rational Parking Policy
Is there room in the American psyche for a rational parking policy?A few years ago, suggesting that not providing unlimited free parking for as many cars as physically possible in a development would have been seen as a heresy meriting the social equivalent of burning at the stake.
Each of these spaces costs up to $70,000 to build in 2010
But since in America all values are reduced to dollars, let's talk about costs...or rather, let's listen to my colleague Josef Bray-Ali, do so:
Until recently, I worked in real estate development, doing everything from property acquisition and permit filing to management and sales.Bray-Ali goes on to itemize the burdens that mandating excess parking lays onto both private businesses and communities, and points out that instead of a minimum parking requirement, there should be a maximum parking cap--and that parking space should be shifted to more efficient modes, such as bicycles.
One of the biggest hurdles our small company always faced was paying for the construction of mandated, and usually unnecessary, automobile parking.
Car parking requirements forced us to shrink everything--the ground-floor commercial was squeezed into a 400-square-foot space; the building had to have an extra story just so we could stuff a bunch of cars underneath. The cost on paper shot up, meaning that our four one-bedroom apartments turned into four studio condominiums--and once you subdivide a property into condos, you have to go through a whole bunch of planning hoops, bumping up costs even more.
This easy $200,000 construction project turned into a super-risky $1.2 million, four-story fiasco.
Not as wacky as it seems, once you manage to dissociate driving from the delusion of social status associated with cars: studies show that cyclists cost far less to accommodate with roads and parking yet generally spend more per capita than customers who have arrived by car--and of course you can accommodate twelve cyclists in a space that typically parks one driver's car.
In other words, accommodating cyclists is good for business.
It's also almost impossible under present development rules that mandate building only for cars.
Continues Bray-Ali:
In 2009, I stumbled upon LAMC Sections 12.21-A.4(c) and 12.21-A.16. These sections allow for something quite unique--they authorize a building owner to swap out some of the required car parking spaces for covered bicycle parking.Read Bray-Ali's entire article in the Los Angeles Business Journal: Putting Parking in Its Place.
You can fit 12 bikes in one car parking space--12 customers where only one fit before! (In city after city, when you build it, they do come.) So, swapping car for bike parking could drastically reduce the footprint of a project; small projects like the one we gave up on in (bike-friendly) Eagle Rock would blossom.
But, there are catches....
Richard Risemberg on 07.15.10 @ 07:24 AM PST [link] [No Comments Yet--Add Comment]
Sunday, July 11th
Five Hours in Oklahoma
A short trip up to Oklahoma and beyond brought a look at two sites idyllic in the proliferation of America's auto culture. The first is a Meadow Gold sign in Tulsa. The sign had been both a Tulsa and Route 66 icon since the 1930’s. Neglected and dark since the 1970s, the sign was slated to be torn down in 2004 by a car dealership. The owner agreed to donate the sign to the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture if it could remove and store the two 20-foot-by-40-foot panels. The Meadow Gold sign's new address isn't far away: the owner of an adjacent building donated land to the city of Tulsa for the sign's new home base. It was rededicated in 2009.
The second is the only realized skyscraper by Frank Lloyd Wright. More like a tall building, it is of course an urban form, and Wright was known to dislike the urban form. "To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor," he said. Well, this building is not in what most would call a city, it's in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The Price Tower was commissioned by Harold C. Price, for use as a corporate headquarters for his Bartlesville company. Wright nicknamed the Price Tower "the tree that escaped the crowded forest."
Strangely this Walt Whitman quote adorns the lobby.
Toward All
I raise high the perpendicular hand-I make the signal
To remain after me in sight forever
For all the haunts and homes of men
Where the city of the faithfullest friends stands
Where thrift is in its place but prudence is in its place
Where behavior is the finest of the fine arts
Where outside authority enters always after the
precendence of inside authority
Where the city that has produced the greatest man stands
There the greatest city stands
Bartlesville seems to have its charms, but following the poem, just perhaps that's possible its not here.
Eric Miller on 07.11.10 @ 04:59 AM PST [link] [3 Comments]
Wednesday, July 7th
James H Kunstler Dissects Suburbia
Eric Miller on 07.07.10 @ 02:53 PM PST [link] [1 Comment]
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs is one of those few people who seem to hold up well with audiences on opposite sides of the political spectrum. On the right, libertarians like her opposition to government planning and clearance. On the left she relates in her looking out for the people and places that make a city unique. This quality is in part what allowed a somewhat diverse group of authors to contribute to the book What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs. The book is the joint work of the Center for the Living City and New Village Press.
Conytibutor Janine M. Benyus is a natural sciences writer. Hillary Brown is a practicing architect. Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College SUNY in New York. Ray Suarez is a Washington-based correspondent for PBS Newshour. You get the idea. The messages of Jane Jacobs have in someway resonated with each of the books contributors.
The results are apparent. Today we think of cities differently. We understand the importance of mixed-uses and pedestrian traffic. Few would argue these points. So what more can there be to say about Jane Jacobs?
A recent New Republic article compared Jacobs with her nemesis Robert Moses and explored whose ideas may have won in the end. I'd venture that while many of Jacobs ideas about the importance of street life have won out, it's hardly an urban development that happens organically. The importance of buildings of varying ages and condition is largely still lost on us. When planners and government entities are involved (and they hardly ever are not) too often cities today are still remade Robert Moses style, from the top down, and sometimes even with a meat axe.
With that in mind, the book is an important one because while the ideas of Jane Jacobs have appeal for many people, in the end they are largely discarded in the interest of practicality and control. But as Sanford Ikeda reminds us in What We See, the city has no purpose or end in itself. Great cities enable the better part of its inhabitants to be free to pursue their own diverse interests with the maximum likelihood of success.
As a nation, we are rediscovering cities. And so we must continue to rediscover and advance the observations of Jane Jacobs. The best cities and the best neighborhoods are the ones with the widest variety of interests and the most diverse stakeholders. Anytime we use top-down planning to remake a place, the diversity of interests decreases. The ideas of Jane Jacobs will have won out only when this is understood.
What we see can help us learn to look, and understand.
Eric Miller on 07.07.10 @ 12:56 PM PST [link] [No Comments Yet--Add Comment]
Tuesday, July 6th
Pittsburgh and the Bus Stop Opera: Surprises and Challenges
by Nathan Zoob Carnegie Mellon student Dawn Weleski does her best to act surprised when Sheela Ramesh, a young Indian-American woman in bright blue scrubs, breaks the quiet of the Wood Street T station by launching into a musical theater-style song, accompanied by a three-piece string and brass band.
Up and down the platform startled commuters put down their crossword puzzles and take off their headphones to pay attention. An elderly gentleman strains to hear the music from across the tracks; near the bandstand a young man in a red leather jacket flips open his camera phone.
Read More
Eric Miller on 07.06.10 @ 01:14 PM PST [link] [No Comments Yet--Add Comment]
Wednesday, June 23rd
Restaurant Review: Grand Cafe, Minneapolis
Considering it had been recommended to us by several friends with discerning taste in food, I was very much looking forward to our dinner at the Grand Café last weekend. As consummate foodies and regular Minneapolis diners ourselves, we tend to be picky (which is not always a good thing in a dining partner, but tends to be a positive trait in a restaurant reviewer). Therefore, it is rare that I use the word "perfect" to describe a meal, but I am at a loss for a better adjective to explain my entire dining experience at Grand Café. READ MORE
Eric Miller on 06.23.10 @ 10:12 AM PST [link]
Saturday, June 19th
A Rosy Day in Dallas
Little can add to the charm of a city like a historic streetcar line. The McKinney Avenue Streetcar line in Dallas has been operating for about 20 years, connecting the Dallas Arts District (most of which wasn't existant 20 years ago) with Uptown and the West End. A handful of historic cars operate on the line including one known as "Rosy" which I caught while visiting the Dallas Museum of Art yesterday. The McKinney Streetcars experienced their highest ridership in 2009 when more than 300,000 riders took to the rails. Moreover, the group that runs the trolleys says an increasing number of commuters are using the line. While most of the cars predate the Presidential Car Commission, two Toronto PCC's are undergoing restoration for use on the line. Eric Miller on 06.19.10 @ 11:08 PM PST [link]
Wednesday, June 9th
TNC Seeks City Page Contributors
The New Colonist seeks writers to provide restaurant reviews, travel guides, travel-related articles and other material for its popular city pages. Find out more on our CONTRIBUTE page.
Eric Miller on 06.09.10 @ 11:00 AM PST [link]
Sunday, June 6th
Boondoggle
While the Rabid Right never misses a chance to complain about rail transit projects, here you see a photo of a real boondoggle, and waste of taxpayer money: the new "High Occupancy Vehicle" lanes just added to LA's San Diego Freeway, the 405, to the ten miles between the 10 and the 101.
First you have to realize two important facts: 1) "High occupancy" has been defined as a mighty two passengers per car for this project (the typical passenger load for a car in the US being 1.2 passengers on average).
2) Despite the motorheads' constant insistence that they "pay for the roads," and so should be able to exclude transit, cyclists, and everyone else from them, in fact, car and fuel fees and taxes never pay for more than 50% of the building and maintenance of any road, and usually much less--meaning that driving is at least as highly subsidized out of general taxes (also paid by cyclists and transit riders) as the most luxurious rail transit project. (See some sample figures from good ol' conservative Texas here.)
Now, this pseudo-HOV lane cost nearly ten billion dollars to build, and stretches ten miles--if I read Metro's document correctly, the $10 billion was for only the northbound lane. (The other was apparently already there.) So nearly $100 million per mile.
A light rail system (let's be frugal now) would cost, on average, $50 million per mile--but that's for two tracks, accommodating two-way traffic. A freeway lane has an effective capacity of about 2,400 passengers per hour--so let's be generous and double that for the pseudo-HOV lane, to 4,800.
A two-track light rail line can carry around 24,000 passengers per hour; that's both ways, so let's cut that in half to 12,000. (Some figures.)
So, nearly three times the throughput at one-quarter the cost per direction. And far less pollution, far less noise, and far less stress for riders (which lowers public health costs)--plus, property values rise around rail transit stations, which improves the economy in general, and tax receipts to cities and counties in particular.
The trains I ride in LA are usually nearly full, even during off-peak hours--I was just on the Gold and the Red lines today (Sunday).
The HOV lanes? Take a look: I made the photograph around 9:30AM on a Friday.
One of these days we need to start making sense in this country.
Richard Risemberg on 06.06.10 @ 06:44 PM PST [link]
Thursday, May 27th
Cycling in Portland, April 2010
Last month, Gina and I took our bikes onto the Coast Starlight and enjoyed a luxurious (and low-polluting) train ride to Portland, Oregon, where we visited friends, family, and one of our Bicycle Fixation retailers, and most of all explored what they're doing up there with bicycling and transit to remake it into a prosperous, clean, and happy little city.We fell in love with the place, and we think they're doing a lot of things right...read all about it, and view our slideshow, right here:
Richard Risemberg on 05.27.10 @ 12:57 PM PST [link]
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