Tag Archives: urban form

car-free cities

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The Guardian has a nice run-down on the state of car-free developments around the world:

  • “Oslo revealed plans to ban all private vehicles from the centre by 2019″
  • “Helsinki has ambitious plans to make its “mobility on demand” service so good that nobody will want to drive a car in the centre by 2025”
  • “Paris’s car-free days have successfully reduced high pollution”
  • “New cities – such as the Great City on the outskirts of Chengdu, China, and Masdar near Abu Dhabi – plan to focus on mass transit or electric cars as alternatives to gas-guzzling private cars.”
  • “Venice is often cited as the largest car-free city, but they have it easy, with canals and rivers instead of streets.”
  • “Hamburg, on the other hand, is currently making waves by enforcing an auto-ban on a number of urban roads to develop a network of route for pedestrians and bikes that link parks and open spaces together.”
  • “Madrid, too, is focusing on the city at a human level, and recently hatched a plan to pedestrianise the urban core and expel cars by 2020.”
  • “Dublin and Brussels are also toying with the idea of kicking the habit through city centre diesel-car bans, with similar ideas proposed by Liberal Democrats in London following the VW emissions scandal.”
  • “Milan is offering public transit tokens to residents for every weekday they surrender their cars”
  • “Rome is slowly progressing with parking bans.”
  • ” Copenhagen. Unsurprisingly, large swathes of the Danish capital have been closed to vehicles for decades, with bicycle infrastructure reaching into every corner.”
  • “Every week in the Colombian capital [Bogota], over 75 miles of urban roads are shut to vehicles.”
  • “In Hyderabad’s IT corridor (dubbed “Cyberabad”), a recently launched weekly car ban marks a first for Indian cities”
  • in South Korea, a Suwon neighbourhood recently trialled a full month ban in September 2013, which inspired the wealthy Sandton area of Johannesburg to hosts its own car-free experiment last month.”
  • “Portland hopes to [have] 25% of trips made on two wheels by 2030.”
  • “While modal share for cycling just scrapes an average of 2% in the US, in Davis [California] it’s 20%.”
  • “Alongside the expansion of the subway system, segregated bike lanes are slowly creeping into North America’s fifth largest city [Toronto], and there are whispers around a potential car-free street during rush hour.”

Here in Philadelphia, we’re asking if a bike lane is still a bike lane several years after the paint wore off…

self-parking cars

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This article in Governing makes the case that a big impact of self-driving cars will be on the amount of land used for parking:

First, self-driving cars need less room to self-park, making it possible to squeeze more cars into a garage — up to 60 percent more, according to Audi. Second, parking garages would no longer have to be located downtown — drivers and their passengers could exit the vehicles in the city and the cars would self-drive to the garages on the downtown’s periphery. Third, with garages capable of storing more cars, cities wouldn’t need to devote so much space for curbside parking, freeing up valuable land for public transit, pedestrians and bicyclists, and reducing the congestion that comes from drivers searching for a place to park…

Self-driving technology can park a car so precisely that lanes with a width of three meters are adequate, leaving just 10 centimeters of space between the mirrors of parked cars, according to Audi. By packing more cars into less space, the company says that the amount of parking can be reduced by as much as 60 to 80 percent in some cases.

Richard Florida on where we live

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Richard Florida has an interesting survey on why people in the UK choose to live where they live. Some results are not too surprising. People tend to stick close to where they grew up and close to friends and family when they are younger, then gradually disperse as they get older. Housing cost is a big driver in middle age, then people get a little more choosey about type of housing and proximity to nature in older age. A couple things were surprising though – being close to work, schools and public transportation were all relatively unimportant.

I am very different than these people. Being able to live car-free is an over-arching driver for me. For me this is the only ethical choice, but I also believe it is the obvious choice for mental and physical health. Practical car free living also means being within walking distance of my job, stores and restaurants, and ultimately a decent elementary school although that’s not a factor for my family quite yet. So I picked the closest neighborhood that meets these criteria and has a housing cost I could afford. A little bit of gardening space is important to me, but that is surprisingly easy to find. Great parks, playgrounds, public squares, and easy access to Amtrak and the airport are icing on the cake. I don’t get in a car more than once a month or so, but car share, taxis and Uber are all there when I need them. I think bicycling is a wonderful way to get around on streets that are designed to be safe for it, but our U.S. street designs are not safe so I don’t do it much.

package delivery robots

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Here come the package delivery robots. I don’t know that this couldn’t work in a quieter urban residential neighborhood. This would work great on several narrow streets I have lived on in Philadelphia, where post office and UPS/FedEx trucks typically double park at the nearest intersection (often blocking crosswalks, fire hydrants, bike lanes, etc. because there aren’t other options) and then walk in. Urban areas can take a number of forms other than high rise towers and central business districts, which is what (most likely suburban living) authors of articles like this always seem to be picturing.

September 2015 in Review

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What did I learn in September? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-11):

  • The Environmental Kuznets Curve is the idea that a developing country will go through a period of environmental degradation caused by economic growth, but then the environment will improve in the long run. Sounds okay but the evidence for it is weak. (-1)
  • The Inca are an example of a very advanced civilization that was wiped out. (-1)
  • Consumerism and the pursuit of wealth are not sufficient cultural glue to hold a nation together. (-1)
  • Climate may be playing a role in the current refugee crisis, and the future may hold much more of this. (-1)
  • North and South America would have enormous herds of large mammals if humans had never come along.  (-1)
  • The U.S. clearly has lower average life expectancy than other advanced countries. Developing countries in Asia and Latin America are catching up, but life expectancy in Africa is still tragically low. (-1)
  • People get away with criminally violent behavior behind the wheel because police do not see it as on par with other types of crime. (-2)
  • People are still suggesting a false choice between critical and creative thinking. This is not how the problems are tomorrow will be solved. (-2)
  • This just in – an extreme form of central planning does not work. (-1)

Positive stories (+9):

    • Pneumatic chutes for garbage collection have been used successfully on an island in New York City for decades. This technology has some potential to move us closer to a closed loop world where resources are recovered rather than wasted. (+1)
    • Scientists and engineers could learn some lessons from marketing on how to communicate better with the rest of humanity. (+1)
    • There is new evidence from New Zealand on economic benefits of cycling and cycling infrastructure. (+1)
    • There has been some progress on New York City’s “lowline“, which is what a park in space might look like. The only problem is, it looks to me like a mall. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the exciting science fiction future may look a lot like malls in space. (+0)
    • The U.S. Surgeon General thinks walkable communities may be a good idea. The End of Traffic may actually be a possibility. (+3)
    • Peter Singer advocates “effective altruism”. A version of his Princeton ethics course is available for free online. (+1)
    • Edward Tufte does not like Infographics. (+0)
    • The unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes he has found the key to happiness. (+1)
    • The right mix of variety and repetition might be the key to learning. (+1)

Philadelphia rowhouses

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I didn’t realize just how unusual the Philadelphia rowhouse is. Baltimore is really the only city that has something similar on a similar scale, with D.C. a distant third. I didn’t grow up here and was skeptical at first, but now I am living in my third one and I am completely sold. They are high density, yet low rise and to me, don’t feel as cramped as high rise apartments would. They are pretty social – people sit on their front stoops and get to know their neighbors, especially in good weather. They have back yards big enough to enjoy but small enough to be low maintenance. They are not conducive to driving and parking (a source of frustration to many), and are extremely walkable as a result. People walk to their jobs and shopping. Kids walk to school. There isn’t a whole lot of open space, I admit, but a few good parks and trails within easy walking distance make up for that.

WAPO-HOUSING-CHART

happiness and boredom

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In this FInancial Times article, John Kay accuses happy cities of being boring.

Liveability and happiness are complex concepts. The happiest countries identified by the UN are those of “Jante Law”, the stifling conformity described by Danish author Aksel Sandemose: “You are not to think you are anything special, you are not to think you can teach us anything.” Yet there is much that is good about social homogeneity, shared values, peaceful coexistence and honest government. Life in unhappy countries — Myanmar, Syria, Zimbabwe — is not boring, but much of the population desperately wishes it was.

Yet boring is not enough. Security, hygiene, good public transport — the factors that enter the assessment of liveability — are necessary for a fulfilling life, but they are not sufficient for it. That is why so many young people from Melbourne or Toronto go to London or New York in search of the excitement and creativity of the great, rather than the liveable, city. For the technology writer Jonah Lehrer, cities are the knowledge engine of the 21st century. And he wasn’t talking about Düsseldorf.

The most intriguing studies of the determinants of happiness are those of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The moments at which people are happiest are when they are in “flow” — when they are engaged in a challenging task and doing it well: the lecture in which you realise the audience is hanging on your ever word, the tennis game in which every shot takes the ball where you want it to go. For many people, bringing up children is a source of endless demands and frustrations, but taken as a whole it is one of the most satisfying experiences of their lives. There is more to the good life than clean water and trains that arrive on time.

I don’t know. I like a little excitement when I travel, but I like a certain calmness and predictability when it comes to the broad strokes of my day in my home city. Then I can enjoy the fun and interesting little happenstances that happen within that larger sea of calmness. Provide some walkable streets, some small-scale commerce, some open space and some contact with nature and I think you can create this atmosphere. And I don’t know why he picks on Myanmar, they might be able to teach us Westerners a thing or two about happiness.

the lowline

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This article has some really fascinating renderings of “The Lowline”, a proposed underground park in an abandoned subway station in New York City. This could work really well in Philadelphia’s Broad State transit concourse, which is still open but looks like something New York would have abandoned decades ago.

The technology behind the project has a kind of irresistible science fiction appeal: A series of parabolic mirrors stationed aboveground collect the sun’s rays and direct them below through a series of “irrigation tubes,” which pipe the sunlight across an undulating canopy that works as a fixture to splash the light across the terminal space. In the days following its online debut, the project’s psychedelic renderings and intriguing pitch for innovative, public green space became a mini-sensation and birthed a wave of stories on sites from CNN toInHabitat to Web Urbanist. The Architect’s Newspaper said it “could become the next park phenomenon”; Business Insider reported that the “ambitious underground oasis” had “New Yorkers buzzing with excitement.”

The project has encountered some predictable challenges, which the article goes into, one of which is how to use corporate funding without it just becoming another underground mall. This is also an important step toward our inevitable “malls in space” future as a species.