New American Paradigm

Streetcar Architecture

A funny thing happens when you change transportation infrastructure like Portland, Oregon has; building design adapts to it.

Portland's future and its past intersect at 28th Avenue and East Burnside.

A hundred feet or so from an old red brick trolley barn -- long since converted to offices -- workers are constructing an eye-catching, four-story condo with ground-floor retail.

Stunning as it is with its protruding, stucco-boxed balconies, the Sunrose Condominiums traces its pedigree right back to the trolley barn era. A century ago, many buildings on commercial streets served by streetcars were built with storefronts flush to the sidewalks and with one or two stories of apartments or offices above.

The interesting thing about this is that many cities, my own included, are trying to force development into these old standards.  But what we're finding is that the market naturally heads in that direction when you bring back the old transportation techniques.

In addition to being more aesthetically pleasing and environmentally sensitive, this type of development is also inherently more sustainable.  The retailers on the bottom floors have built in customers, and also nighttime residents with a vested interest in keeping an eye on criminal activity in the area.

Separating uses not only forces us into cars, but it creates a system unfairly gamed in favor of big business over small.

Sprawl Repair

Even if the age of sprawl is behind us, the effects of development into exurban and rural areas is with us for a long time.  But what do we do to make what's already done better?

We've talked previously about the perils of sprawl here, here, and here.  Galina Tahchieva, a planner with Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., gave a presentation on the subject at the Congress for the New Urbanism convention in Denver.  Ruth Walker has the highlights:

1. Improve connectivity of the streets by imposing a grid on them and looking for ways to connect the dots, and the cul-de-sacs.

This is perhaps the most obvious.  Cul-de-sacs have come to define sprawl in the same way gridded streets define urban areas.  I actually grew up on a cul-de-sac which might make a person think I'm sympathetic; but in fact it made their absurdity more obvious.  In order to get to the library and shopping area 50 meters from my house, I had to walk a mile eventually ending up on a busy arterial with no sidewalk.  Small wonder people drove everywhere.

Light Rail Of the Future - ULTra

Ever wonder what the future would will look like if we grow brains and actually thought about what sensible transportation solutions would look like?  I know this looks like it's some futuristic utopian system that you might see at a World's Fair or Epcot Center... but this has actually been built at Heathrow Airport and opening this fall.

Peter Calthorpe, author of The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, said of the project:

"All the advantages of New Urbanism - its compact land saving density, its walkable mix of uses, and its integrated range of housing opportunities - would be supported and amplified by a circulation system that offers fundamentally different choices in mobility and access. Smart Growth and new Urbanism have begun the work of redefining America's twenty-first century development paradigms. Now it is time to redefine the circulation armature that supports them. It is short sighted to think that significant changes in land-use and regional structure can be realized without fundamentally reordering our circulation system."

Transportation: A Tale of Three Cities

Miles O'Brien, former CNN spaceman/science reporter, teamed up with PBS to produce a series of documentaries on America's infrastructure crisis called Blueprint America.  It's a great series (editorial note: I've only watched a couple so perhaps the rest is all trash with crayon graphics and O'Brien on a cell phone) but one in particular stands out with a compelling narration of how transportation and land use choices affect cities.  To illustrate the impact of these decisions, O'Brien tells the story of NYC, Denver, and our bike-happy friends in Portland.

Perhaps most importantly, the series is done in a way that is easily digestible for people who are not subscribers to Municipal Government Monthly.

Alas, no video embed feature was available, so you'll have to go to PBS to see it here.

The New York Times review points out something that I think is true, but would have been lost on the target audience.  It wanted more depth on the differences in each community which might make certain changes impossible in others.

Mr. O’Brien ties the transportation situations in Denver and Portland to local attitudes toward suburban development. It is certainly valid but seems simplistic: what about geography, energy sources, differences in local economies? And what does any of this civic history have to do with the future of our infrastructure, which is supposedly the point? It often feels as if a longer, more discursive report on urban planning had been shoehorned into the “Blueprint” format.

What do you think?

George Will Defends Sprawl

George Will is sad.  It seems he expected the only Republican in Obama's cabinet not in charge of blowing stuff up (shout-out to Secretary Gates) to be more reliably in favor of conservative principles, like the right to build whatever you want, wherever you want ugly strip malls and McMansions.  Unfortunately, Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood, uses words that Will finds depressing like "transformational" and "Portland."

What the WHAT?  He writes:

LaHood, however, has been transformed. Indeed, about three bites into lunch, the T word lands with a thump: He says he has joined a "transformational" administration: "I think we can change people's behavior." Government "promoted driving" by building the Interstate Highway System—"you talk about changing behavior." He says, "People are getting out of their cars, they are biking to work." High-speed intercity rail, such as the proposed bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, is "the wave of the future." And then, predictably, comes the P word: Look, he says, at Portland, Ore.

Why Are Americans Driving Less?

Infrastructurist has the details on some great news.  Americans are driving less, ending a steady climb in vehicle miles traveled since... well forever.

 

But it brings up an interesting question.  Is this really a change in behavior or just a reaction to increase in unemployment and reduction in discretionary trips.  Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight fame, takes a stab at digging into the stats.  Even though he was wrong about the Oscars, he's right about everything else.  He figures:

The Conservative Case for Transit

All too often support for transit is seen as a liberal weenie tree-hugger phenomenon.  While I share the view that protecting the world we live in is a moral imperative, It makes it too easy for conservatives to dismiss it in favor of their SUVs.  However, there's actually a very compelling argument for public transportation rooted in conservative principles.  David Schaengold of Plumb Lines makes a nice case for transit and neourbanism that I've made previously here and here.

Consider how small businesses are affected by Americans’ dependency on cars. Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most Americans drive to every store they visit. This means that store visits are often discrete trips that must be undertaken consciously and planned out ahead of time. As a consequence, shoppers will want to visit stores that carry the most diverse inventory—Wal-Mart, Costco, et al.—and avoid shops that specialize in one particular kind of good—the local paint store or flower shop, for instance.