Tag Archives: street design

cities need to take over sidewalks

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This article is about Denver taking over responsibility for sidewalks, rather than just putting this burden on private property owners. Sidewalks may seem like a wonky fringe issue but they are a big key to being able to implement green infrastructure effectively in cities. There are a few reasons for this. First, they are where the street trees are going to be, and street trees are a big part of the solution to urban heat and a smaller but significant part of the solution to water quality and flooding. Second, streets and sidewalks together make up a surprising portion (I’ve estimated around 40% in my city) of the pavement in a city. Curb and storm inlet design are key to how well and how fast all this pavement drains. This is because the sidewalk is attached to the curb, and the curb is attached to the gutter, and the gutter is attached to the inlet that drains the street – pretty obvious when you think about it right? But when private owners are responsible for sidewalks, those curbs that are so critical to channeling the water often aren’t built and maintained right. Finally, depending on how wide sidewalks are, they often are where there may be room for rain gardens and pollinator gardens, for cities and neighborhoods that want these things (most do in the abstract, but there has to be a good plan for taking care of them long term and they need to not be in the way.)

That’s the environment – obviously sidewalks are where people walk, roll on wheelchairs, push baby strollers, and hobble on crutches. Sometimes people ride bikes on them, particularly children and particularly when there are not safe or adequately maintained bike lanes. They need to be in good condition for all these people.

Speaking of bike lanes, then there is the whole world of bike lanes (which we should probably think of as light low-speed vehicle lanes), curb management, bus stops, delivery and contractor zones, taxi and ride share stands, street parking, and electric vehicle charging, not to mention all the other “street furniture” like trash cans, bike racks, and mailboxes. Design and maintenance of the sidewalk and curb impacts all these public uses and it makes no sense to put that burden on private landowners.

So where did Denver find the money to take on this new responsibility? Well, they are charging the private landowners by bundling the cost into an existing stormwater management fee. This makes sense because ultimately the city including the homeowners will get better and more cost-effective public infrastructure. But of course, I am well aware of the political law of gravity that PEOPLE HATE TAXES. No, I don’t have an easy answer on how to solve this one. Another thing people really hate though is the local code enforcement agency coming down on residential and small business owners on a piecemeal basis, especially for what many logically view as public infrastructure. So to summarize, there are three options – (1) enforce sidewalk codes on private property owners, (2) leave sidewalk codes unenforced and sidewalks in poor condition, except for maybe a few piecemeal complaint-driven enforcement actions, or (3) raise revenue through taxes or fees so the same public agencies maintaining the streets can maintain the sidewalks.

I’ll mention one final wrinkle though. Under sidewalks, there is typically a tangle of water pipes, sewer pipes, natural gas lines, and sometimes buried electric/communications lines that connect houses to public infrastructure under the street. So if a city “takes over the sidewalks”, it has to also figure out if it going to consider all this public or private infrastructure. For example, if a water pipe connecting the main under the street to a house is private, and the sidewalk is public, and that water pipe springs a leak, the sidewalk has to get dug up to replace the water pipe, and then the sidewalk has to get replaced. So it has to be clear who ends up paying for that or whether the cost will be shared. One thing homeowners hate and fear probably even more than taxes (me included) is large unexpected expenses.

Ha ha, did I say I was going to do some short posts?

top urban planning books of 2024

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I always enjoy Planetizen’s list of top urban planning books. My training is in engineering, but like almost everyone I am a citizen of an urban area, and besides urban planning is an umbrella that touches on many aspects of engineering, infrastructure, housing, the economy and the environment. Anyway, here are a handful of books that caught my eye. My commentary below doesn’t really have much to do with the books (which I haven’t read), but rather my off-the-cuff thoughts on the topics each book is nominally about.

  • Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World by Sara Bronin – The tide of opinion seems to be against zoning at the moment, but it is just such a basic and important tool to try to shape the types of human settlements we want to live in, and that could be different for different groups of people. I think of private zoning and building codes as one half of the coin, and public infrastructure as the other, but I haven’t really seen a book that gives them an even treatment. Someone should write that book – maybe me, some day somehow?
  • Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos by Audrea Lim. “No piece of ground goes untouched, whether it’s private property, a public right of way, or government-owned open space.” Okay, maybe this one actually attempts something along the lines of what I mention above.
  • A Paradise of Small Houses: The Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing by Max Podemski. Because I don’t really have a coherent personal theory of what is wrong with housing and the housing market in the U.S., but there is obviously a lot wrong and I would like to smarten up on this some day. But it pretty much seems to come down to needing more supply of housing whose market value matches the economic means of the majority of households, whereas there is a mismatch currently. Zoning is part of the problem. High rise living and public transportation could solve the problem if we wanted it to, but we just don’t seem to want that. Row houses and town houses with small porches, backyards, roof decks, and corner stores are a compromise in my view – these offer people more privacy and private outdoor space while allowing a pretty dense urban fabric to develop. But you just can’t mix this with universal private car ownership people, because geometry. Maybe autonomous vehicles will be the killer app that could eventually break this logjam, because they can move around in a more space-efficient way and go store themselves in out of the way places when they are not in use, which is most of them most of the time.
  • The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Save Our Time and Our Planet and Shrink The City: The 15-Minute Urban Experiment and the Cities of the Future. Relevant to the above. Basically a new(ish) way of explaining some of the concepts I mention above. I don’t think these ideas have penetrated the endlessly ignorant public discourse on “traffic” and “parking” just yet. Or is the problem just that geometry is not taught in a way that people relate to the actual physical universe?
  • On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten. Right, so where are we supposed to live again? Of course, I want to sell my coastal property just before the real estate market wakes up to the fact that it is doomed – when is this? It also occurs to me that we better consider “the Americas” here and not just “the United States of”.
  • Radical Adaptation: Transforming Cities for a Climate Changed World by Brian Stone, Jr. Sounds a bit more technical than the one above. Please, let’s not turn everywhere into Singapore, which is essentially a network of air conditioned malls, offices and high rise housing connected by subway tubes. But you could pretty much build Singapore on Mars, or wherever, as long as you have some plan to get food and water to the people there (but this might be tricky in a “climate changed world”, eh?)
  • The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play by Frank Andre Guridy. The only reason I would read this one is that Philadelphia has been embroiled in a debate about whether to build a downtown basketball and hockey arena, and I would like to be a bit more informed on the issue. I walked by the one in Washington, D.C. the other week and it seemed to fit into the city fabric okay to me. Then again, what New York and Washington do well, Philadelphia has a tendency to do in a half-assed amateurish less good way about a decade later. And when we fail to implement proven solutions competently, we conclude that the solutions themselves were unworkable from the start.
  • Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been by Jake Berman. Speaking of Philadelphia, we have such a phantom system, including some stations that were built in anticipation of train lines that never actually got built. Thinking big is also no longer a thing, which is sad.
  • Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives by Jarrett Walker. This is an update to an earlier book I haven’t read but would like to. Is this the book that all high school students or at least all undergraduate engineering and architecture students should read to have some basic literacy about transportation? Otherwise our mistaken ideas about how a functional transportation system could actually work will allow the auto-oil-highway-suburban sprawl propaganda machine uncontested dominance over our society and our land forever.
  • Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System by Wes Marshall. Slightly unfair to blame the engineering profession alone for the evil auto-oil-highway-suburban sprawl monster I mention above, but some fair points here nonetheless. If you read the American Society of Civil Engineers code of ethics for example, you might think we would stand up to some of this rather than be the nails the monster uses to hammer the lid on our society. But we would have to wake up to the fact that the propaganda exists and is controlling our minds first, then pull the tubes out of our asses and get flushed out of the matrix before we could go to work.

If I sound a little bit salty when I think about transportation design, (lack of) maintenance and enforcement, and reckless driving and lack of respect for human life up and down our society, yeah I’m a bit salty!

closing streets to cars raised business sales by 68%

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This was during four Sundays of “open streets” (which means open to humans and closed to big, heavy motor vehicles) in a portion of Center City Philadelphia. But this works because people live nearby. People don’t really have to “walk to” the event because they live there. When cars are the only practical way to get around, most of the space has to be reserved for cars to maneuver and park (relatively) safely so you can’t have space for people too. It’s obvious, sure, but 100 years of oil-highway-car industry propaganda has brainwashed us to be blind to the realities of geometry. Take your red pills, people!

May 2024 in Review

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Just realizing I never did a May 2024 post. Here it is. I also made a range of political musings in May, which I have chosen not to include below, but they are on the record for anyone interested.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: What a modern nuclear bomb would do to a large modern city. Do we already know this intellectually? Sure. Do we constantly need to be reminded and remind our elected leaders that this is absolutely unthinkable and must be avoided at any cost? Apparently.

Most hopeful story: The U.S. might manage to connect two large cities with true high speed rail, relatively soon and relatively cost effectively. The trick is that there is not much between these cities other than flat desert. The route will mostly follow an existing highway, and we should think about doing this more as autonomous vehicles very gradually start to reduce demand on our highways in coming decades.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Drone deliveries make some sense, but what we really need is infrastructure on the ground that lets all sorts of slow, light-weight vehicles zip around in our cities efficiently and safely. And this means separating them completely from those fast, heavy vehicles designed for highway travel.

the end of drone deliveries? long live drone deliveries!

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In an example of a bad headline, this article is headlined “Amazon ends California drone deliveries“. But in the first paragraph, you learn they are discontinuing them in one particular town where they have been pilot testing them. There could be any number of political or bureaucratic reasons for this. And in the third paragraph, you learn they are starting them elsewhere, in this case in a Phoenix suburb.

My take: Deliveries by small, light autonomous vehicles make a ton of sense. In my view though, we are considering flying drones because our ground-level transportation designs are about 50 years out of date. We need to evolve our thinking from “bike lanes” to dedicated lanes for all sorts of slow, light vehicles that aren’t going to cause serious injuries or damage if they run into things. They have to be completely separate from lanes designed for highway vehicles. They need to be separate from pedestrian walkways. They need their own signals (or maybe they don’t need signals at all, but only if they are nowhere near those deadly highway vehicles). They need to be well constructed, well maintained, and enforced. I would allow only zero-emission and quiet vehicles in these lanes. All of this should be cheaper and easier than continuing to feed the money pit that is our outdated transportation infrastructure system currently in place in urban areas.

Politically, at least where I live, this gets into the “green gentrification” debate, and we are losing that debate massively, having just elected a mayor who is openly hostile to anything that would reduce the amount of blood soaking our streets. This is irrational of course, when safe efficient street designs could help people of all incomes and backgrounds get to jobs and lead longer, healthier lives.

115 traffic deaths and counting for Philadelphia in 2023

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The Bicycle Coalition has a grim but nicely done map and infographic of traffic deaths in Philadelphia. 115 and counting, including 52 pedestrians, 2 scooter riders, 11 motorcyclists, and 9 bicyclists (but I believe there was a 10th since these numbers were updated.) This is the worst in 24 years, according to the site.

Public opinion tends to blame the victims – pedestrians to some extent, and certainly bicyclists and scooter riders. Public opinion thinks motorcycles are just awesome, despite how deadly they clearly are. I see a trend of people riding motorcycles without helmets, which is just taking a huge risk with absolutely no reward to go along with it. Public opinion tends to blame the police to some extent for lack of enforcement. And last but not least, drivers tend to blame other drivers, because of course every driver considers themselves well above average.

As an engineer, I blame ignorant, incompetent street design first and foremost. I blame the engineers who are not up to date on best practices, ignorant bureaucrats who constrain them even if they are, and ignorant politicians who constrain the bureaucrats and engineers. On the latter, the outgoing Philadelphia mayoral administration at least has a Vision Zero program on the books, massive failure though it has been. The incoming mayor is not known to be a friend of safe streets, and is a proponent of the corrupt “councilmanic prerogative” system that allows ignorant politicians to overrule competent planning and design decisions in our city. The poster child for the latter, Kenyatta Johnson, is set to become the leader of our city council, by most reports.

So I am keeping my hopes and expectations under control. If in some parallel universe the incoming mayor asked my opinion, I would advise her to bring in new management for our streets department (I have no personal knowledge or experience with our current streets department leadership, except to note that they have failed to design safe streets, maintain streets, or pick up garbage and recycling as effectively as other cities.) I would ask that new management to at least bring our street design standards up to the safest level our state transportation department allows. I would ask that new management to put a professional asset management program in place to keep those streets in the best state of repair possible with the funding available. I would give that new management challenging yet achievable metrics and deadlines, and hold them accountable. That’s the relatively easy stuff. The harder stuff is dealing with the police, dealing with the state legislature, and chipping away at public opinion. On the latter, if pictures of dead and suffering children in Gaza are upsetting to people, can we maybe learn something and focus on showing and telling more stories about the risk and suffering street violence is causing to our own children here at home?

September 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: “the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth“. Green growth, in my own words, is the state where technological innovation allows increased human activity without a corresponding increase in environmental impact. In other words, this article concludes that technological innovation may not be able to save us. This would be bad, because this is a happy story where our civilization has a “soft landing” rather than a major course correction or a major disaster. There are some signs that human population growth may turn the corner (i.e., go from slowing down to actually decreasing in absolute numbers) relatively soon. Based on this, I speculated that “by focusing on per-capital wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.”

Most hopeful story: Autonomous vehicles kill and maim far, far fewer human beings than vehicles driven by humans. I consider this a happy story no matter how matter how much the media hypes each accident autonomous vehicles are involved in while ignoring the tens of thousands of Americans and millions of human beings snuffed out each year by human drivers. I think at some point, insurance companies will start to agree with me an hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.

autonomous vehicle brakes and gently bumps fire truck going through a red light on the wrong side of the street

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Every minor autonomous vehicle incident is headline news, while meanwhile we just accept 40,000 Americans (and something like a million human beings worldwide) per year dying in and around cars operated by human drivers. It’s not that we should accept the risk posed by autonomous vehicles, it’s that we should recognize that it something like an order of magnitude lower than the risk of human-operated vehicles, which is huge. Every time the news reports one of these incidents, they should tell us how many people, including children, were killed and gruesomely injured since the last time they reported such an incident. We also need safe street designs and we need to stop pretending vehicles designed to be safer in highway collisions are also safe in urban environments with pedestrians and bicyclists. Something like golf carts traveling 15-20 mph would be a much safer, cheaper, convenient, and less polluting way to get around in the city.

shoddy Chicago bike lanes

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I have gone through a number of emotional stages with Philadelphia’s bike lanes, from denial to anger to apathy. They are poorly designed, maintained, and almost completely unenforced. This article talks about the state of Chicago’s bike lanes, which sound and look about the same. No, this doesn’t make me feel better about Philadelphia. Two times as much poor design and children dying is twice as bad. But this article at least does have some ideas, some of which Chicago is at least trying on a limited time frame and in a limited area.

  • “install cameras on city vehicles and street poles in two pilot areas Downtown to identify parking violators and mail them a ticket” [If people knew there were cameras on every police car, bus, and other fleet vehicle, they would clean up their act in a hurry. You could forgive a first ticket for people who agree to put a camera on their cars. Citizens should be able to snap a picture and upload it too. And this seems like a great use of AI. Computers could process all the imagery, flag ones that look like likely violations, and then a police officer could review and issue the tickets.]
  • do something about “dangerous construction zones and poor maintenance of city streets” [Amen. These are not just bike issues, they are driver and pedestrian and human issues absolutely everybody should be able to get behind.]
  • Communication. [Yes, signage can be poor and sometimes drivers and delivery people legitimately do not understand they are doing something wrong.]
  • “Improve shoddy bike lanes.” [um, yes, it shouldn’t need to be said but this is the #1 thing. Just adopt the Dutch Street Design Manual now and be done with it. U.S. cities really need some kind of loading zone, delivery, and contractor parking solution though. The way streets are designed now, these 100% necessary activities are illegal and that doesn’t make any sense. My brightest idea is to have a 15-minute parking space (or whatever time frame makes sense) at the four corners of each intersection, have these be reservable through an app, consider charging for them, and strictly and/or automatically enforce time violations.]
  • “first-time violators and anyone ticketed within 30 days of a camera being installed will be given a 30-day warning”
  • Fines that scale with income. [I’m not sure about this, but charging commercial vehicles more could definitely make sense. Charging less for a first offense, or forgiving a first offense if someone takes a refresher course or agrees to become a snitch (i.e. install a camera on their car or house) could all make sense. Community service as an alternative to paying fines could make sense. Fines shouldn’t add up to the point where anybody goes to jail unless they have hurt someone. Penalties for drivers who hurt someone should be severe in my view though, and this should apply regardless of what the pedestrian or cyclist was doing. The moral weight has to fall on the operator of the larger, heavier vehicle.]

Adding an anecdote about a crushed toddler is a nice touch in this article. We are all against that right? Or do some of us only care about babies before they are born?

Sharrows

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Sharrows are just markings telling bicyclists it is okay to “take the lane”, and telling motorists they have let bicyclists take the lane. In my experience, this can actually work okay on very narrow city streets with very slow traffic. The reason is that speeds here are low. So even if a bicyclist gets hit, that person is unlikely to die. I bike in this way, by taking the lane on relatively low-traffic, relatively slow streets. Surprisingly, the vast majority of drivers will wait patiently or change lanes and pass if they can do that safely. A small handful of psychopathic assholes will lay on the horn, scream, throw things, or spit. I would not let my children ride this way, but I feel safe enough doing it when I really need to. Those same psychopathic assholes are the ones who will kill a child crossing the street legally on foot, so not being on a bike is not going to save you from them.

Now having said all that, I agree sharrows are bad. Speed kills. Twenty is plenty, and anything over 20 mph is simply not safe for the bicyclist to be out there at all. Under 20, the hope is that the bicyclist will suffer only non-lethal broken bones and organ damage. Even in slower traffic, nine out of ten bicyclists don’t understand or don’t feel comfortable taking the lane, so they ride on the edge. Almost all drivers, for some reason, will speed up to pass a bicyclist riding on the edge. There is no room for error in this situation. Anything unexpected like an open car door, the car swerving slightly, or a pedestrian/dog/scooter enthusiast, and the bicyclist is likely to get hit hard and likely killed. If the vehicle is something bigger than a car, as it often is, the bicyclist has even less chance.

So what we need is safe, modern, competent road and street design. That’s it. Safe designs exist. We just have to design them, build them, and maintain them.

But if I were feeling cynical I would say yeah, but this is America, and we can’t have nice things here.