Tag Archives: urban form

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!

June 2024 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.

Most hopeful story: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.

self-driving cars are here

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The self-driving car hype bubble inflated and burst a decade or so ago. As tends to happen, the technology disappeared from headlines but continued to slowly progress in the background, and now seems poised to burst onto the commercial scene in a big way.

The key mistake I’ve noticed people making is they don’t seem to realize that autonomous taxis are no longer a hypothetical future technology. They exist, and you can ride in them. Waymo has been operating in San Francisco and Phoenix for a while now and is expanding soon to Austin and to a sort of awkward-to-describe-accurately swathe of Los Angeles County.

Matthew Iglesias

Iglesias says that self-driving cars have been largely excluded from freeways to date and this has limited their appeal in a business sense, but this will gradually change. Driverless trucks and buses will eventually be huge too, although organized labor will fight these tooth and nail as long as it can.

I’ll share a few more thoughts:

  • Motor vehicles kill around 40,000 people in the U.S. per year and 1.35 million people globally. There is a double standard where we accept this carnage and yet a small handful of self-driving vehicle crashes or even just nuisances are hyped in the media. Self-driving cars will save a lot of lives and property damage. Amoral insurance companies will surely care about this even if nobody else does.
  • Enormous swaths of land are configured the way they are because of cars. It’s not just all the streets and roads, it is all the parking and driveways. Most cars are parked most of the time. And it is not just the physical space those cars need that adds up to a large portion of our landscape, it is the physical space needed for human drivers to maneuver those cars into and out of parking, keep a six-foot-wide vehicle safely within a 12-foot-wide lane, and the spacing needed between cars traveling at high speed due to slow human reaction times. We also want the convenience of parking close to our homes, businesses, and schools to minimize walking. All this will change. Robot cars will be able to park themselves in tight spaces in out of the way places. This will also solve the electric vehicle charging infrastructure problem in cities. They will be able to drop us off and pick us up at our doors on command, which solves the convenience problem. They will be able to space tightly together at high speed. So, they will just take up a lot less space. This may even happen relatively fast. Then humans beings will just sit there and stare at all the space for a long time, maybe decades, but gradually and eventually we will change design standards and zoning codes so that all that space can be repurposed to other things.

VMT, traffic, and density

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This post provides evidence that increasing density (households per acre) does indeed reduce vehicle miles traveled per household. The thing is that what people experience is not vehicle miles per household, it is “traffic” and the inconvenience of parking. So even if driving per person or household decreases, the inconvenience of daily life will still increase until you get to a point where cars are unnecessary for most daily work, school, shopping, and leisure trips. I picture a curve where convenience decreases with density up to a certain point, and then increases again. People who have experienced only the decreasing side of the curve have trouble understanding what it would be like to get over the hump and up the other side. And this plays right into the hands of the highway-oil-auto industrial complex.

housing policy overview

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A blogger on Planetizen has a good overview of what many professional planners and economists believe would make a real dent in the U.S. housing problem.

We support reforms to allow developers to build more affordable housing types (e.g., multiplexes, townhouses, and mid-rise multifamily) with unbundled parking (parking rented separately from housing, so car-free households are no longer forced to pay for costly parking spaces they don’t need) in walkable urban neighborhoods, including large-scale upzoning, eliminating parking minimums, reducing development fees and approval requirements for moderate-priced infill, plus subsidizing housing for families with special needs.

Most planners also support innovative home ownership models, such as housing cooperatives and co-housing, modest inclusivity requirements (not so high that they reduce housing production), subsidies for households with special needs such as disabilities and very low incomes, and, sometimes, special regulations such as rent controls to limit rent increases.

Planetizen

This sounds about right to me. There are a couple reasons it is hard to do in today’s U.S. The most obvious is the massive political corruption driven by the construction/road/auto/oil-industrial complex. It is hard for politicians, especially local ones, to resist these forces. The second is the consumer preference for auto-dependent suburban development. I would not take this choice away from anyone. I would just stop subsidizing it and make it no longer the only viable choice for most Americans. Many people would like to try out a walkable urban neighborhood, but assume that there is not one available that they could afford. And they would largely be right. There are just not enough of them, and even in the ones we have the public infrastructure (protected bike lanes, frequent/clean/reliable public transportation, parks and trees) lags far behind what the leading cities in Europe and even parts of South America are providing. (Asia is hopeless though.)

The final issue is that you just can’t combine widespread car ownership and use with a walkable urban neighborhood. You have to get the number of cars down, then use all that space you saved for more housing, open space, and other amenities. And obviously, you have to make sure people can still get around.

So the answer is pretty clear – remove density limits (upzone in the parlance) and parking requirements (actually these last two sound a lot like a “free market” to me), then offset some of the disadvantages of urban density with excellent public infrastructure and parks. You may still need some subsidies and non-profit options to help the poor, but ideally that needs to be done at least at the metropolitan area scale if not state/federal scale. It’s a fairly simple formula but a long game and a politically difficult one.

August 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
  • Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

March 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • One large sprawling city could be roughly the economic equivalent of several small high-density cities. This could potentially be good news for the planet if you choose in favor of the latter, and preserve the spaces in between as some combination of natural land and farm land.
  • The problems with free parking, and solutions to the problems, are well known. This could potentially be good news if anything were to be actually done about it. Self-parking cars could be really fantastic for cities.
  • The coal industry continues to collapse, and even the other fossil fuels are saying they are a bunch of whining losers. And yes, I consider this positive. I hope there aren’t too many old ladies whose pensions depend on coal at this point.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

November 2017 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • I thought about war and peace in November. Well, mostly war. War is frightening. The United States of America appears to be flailing about militarily all over the world guided by no foreign policy. Big wars of the past have sometimes been started by overconfident leaders thinking they could get a quick military victory, only to find themselves bogged down in something much larger and more intractable than they imagined. But enemies are good to have – the Nazis understood that a scared population will believe what you tell them.
  • We should probably be sounding the alarm just as urgently, if not more urgently, on biodiversity as we are on global warming. But while the case against global warming is so simple most children can grasp it, the case against biodiversity loss is more difficult to articulate.
  • A theory of mass extinctions of the past is that they have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions burning off underground fossil fuels on a massive scale. Only, not quite at the rate we are doing it now. Rapid collapse of ice cliffs is another thing that might get us.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • You can get an actuarial estimate of your life span online. You can also search your local library catalog automatically whenever you consider buying a book online. Libraries in small, medium, and large towns all over the U.S. appear to be included.
  • “Transportation as a service” may cause the collapse of the oil industry. Along similar but more mainstream lines, NACTO has released a “Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism“, which is my most popular post at the moment I am writing this.
  • It’s possible that the kind of ideal planned economy envisioned by early Soviet economists (which never came to pass) could be realized with the computing power and algorithms just beginning to be available now.

 

July 2017 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • A new cancer treatment genetically modifies a patient’s own immune system to attack cancer cells.
  • Shareholders of big fossil fuel companies are starting to force some action on climate change business risk disclosure.
  • Richard Florida offers five ideas for solving poverty and what is wrong with cities: taxing land based on its improved value, massive investment in public transportation and public education, ending the mortgage interest tax deduction, and guaranteed minimum income.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • Technology is marching on, whether or not the economy and human species are. The new thing with satellites is to have lots of small, cheap ones instead of a few big, expensive ones. Even if the coal industry were to make a comeback, today’s coal jobs are going to data analysts, remote control machine operators, mechanical and electrical engineers, not guys underground with pickaxes and headlamps. But the coal can be produced with a lot less human effort (i.e. jobs) than it used to be. Iris scans like in Minority Report are now a thing.
  • Ecologists have some new ideas for measuring resilience of ecosystems. Technologists have some wild ideas to have robots directly counteract the effects of humans on ecosystems. I like ideas – how do I get a (well-compensated) job where I can just sit around and think up ideas?
  • Isaac Asimov says truly creative people (1) are weird and (2) generally work alone.

Some combination of the Trump news, the things I see every day on the streets of Philadelphia, and events affecting friends and family led me to question this month whether the United States is really a society in decline. Actually, I don’t question that, I think the answer is yes. But the more important question is whether it is a temporary or permanent decline, and what it means for the rest of the globe. I am leaning slightly toward permanent, but maybe I will feel better next month, we’ll see. Maybe I need to get out of this country for a little while. Last time I did that I felt that the social glue holding Americans together is actually pretty strong compared to most other places, even if our government and its approach to other governments have become largely dysfunctional. We need to get through the next couple years without a nuclear detonation, hope the current vacuum of leadership leads some quality leaders to emerge, and hope things have nowhere to go but up. There, I talked myself off the ledge!