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.

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?