WALKABLE Dallas-Fort Worth

Thanksgiving Square - Redux

2012-02-01T10:15:00.005-06:00

The issue of Thanksgiving Square came up on twitter. Really it was just somebody simply lamenting it. Which, outside of twitter is likely expressed daily. I wrote a bunch of stuff about Thanksgiving Square a while back, mostly on how its as well as the immediate 'movement' network of infrastructure was fundamentally flawed, expressed in the failings of nearly every ground floor use nearby.

There is always a fundamental overarching question to any efforts regarding urban revitalization. And that is the differentiation between "What Can Be Done?" and "What Should Be Done?" Ideally, these two should align and that is the trick. The 'Should' can often be too big of a bite to chew for many, especially sans willpower and money. Normally, one might say money is the biggest bite, but I disagree. It's usually when peoples are flush with money that they do stupid things with it. See: Dubai. It is precisely when money is hard to come by that competition of ideas is fierce and return on investment is critical.

With regards to Thanksgiving Square, it has a couple issues working against the remodel and repurposing of the space into something useful and less...ummm....pathological. First, it and its design is basically endowed. Then there is the more political issue, I suppose, of what we want the space to be. It is intended as a place of sanctity and isolation. A place to experience and perhaps meditate on how great Philip Johnson thinks he was. Unfortunately, it failed in all of these aspects and is used for smoke breaks and dog walks. Some of which is picked up. It is the only space I can think of that has a full-time attendant dealing with all of its varying maintenance issues, from mudslides, to dog poop proliferation, to clogged drains from the assortment of fountains, etc. etc.

All of these maintenance issues are symptomatic, of many things, but one in particular is the mistaken attempt to put a place of personal reflection in the middle of the city, where it will get overused and trampled. Sure, there is a place for such things, but then way make so many physical connections, to it, through it, and link subterranean space with surface space. It is a contradiction. At the same time trying to keep people out of it, while inviting people through it. It is not particularly pleasant, but as one of the few (semi-) softscapes in this part of downtown it will get used. And trampled.

Notice how many of the renowned urban plazas are little more than paving. It's the shape and scale of the space that makes it comfortable, but it is the location, the context, and interconnections that populate it. That drives demand, that fills the buildings, that activates the ground floor spaces. It is about the larger network and the space's place within that network.

We already know that it has both internal and external design flaws. It also is lacking in both internal and external demand drivers. (When I refer to external, I'm mostly referring to downtown as a whole.) Downtown can really only support a vibrant Main Street, which is little more than a functional, walkable neighborhood service street. San Francisco has 66 similar neighborhood commercial centers that are within walking distance of 5-7,000 people, precisely the population of downtown Dallas.

That nearly all of the office buildings around Thanksgiving Square depopulated is part of a broader issue that efforts in and around the site itself likely won't fix. Similarly, the success of Main Street and the critical mass, ie satiated demand, isn't enough to spill that far northward. And if it did, would it want to be in these spaces around TGiving Square? Is there an increment of opportunity above the initial and on-going capital costs?

There often isn't when there are structural, spatial, or locational deficiencies to the larger network. Herein, we sometimes presume that subsidy is necessary in these locations to "kick-start" further development. I consider these efforts like a form of urban defibrillation. You don't do it to an already alive area, where the market sees the opportunity and delivers sustainable, useful, desirable development. You also don't apply the defibrillator pads to long dead areas as it's just a waste of time.

Are the office towers around TGS long dead? Or just barely dead? The other question is, are the defibrillator pads better used on another "body" in another part of town. Or, are there even EMTs left to work on these parts of downtown when they're busy funding bridge redesigns and ferris wheel studies. All forms of decoration, attempting to wag the dog with the very tip of the tail. Integration ----> Accommodation -----> Decoration.

So absent the ability to amend the broader pathogenic network deficiencies of downtown AND absent the ability to amend anything within TGS, we're left with the very immediate context.

(The unused 'point' of TGS)

Ideas I've tossed out in the past, were to remove the leftover space at the point of the triangle that was seemingly forgotten in design and merely "shrubbed up." This area could be filled with decomposed granite and populated with movable cafe tables and chairs, similar to what have appeared in Pegasus Plaza thanks to Downtown Dallas, Inc., and usable by the public or the restaurants adjacent. There is only one restaurant currently open, Taco Borracho, which almost looks as if it is a food truck that grew up and filled in about 400 square feet (at most) of a vestibule. This place gets a lot of late night munchie crowd which could populate the 'point,' with a little lighting and some eyes on the street could be quite nice.

Another idea is to accept TGS' internalized nature, almost like a semi-private London garden courtyard, and line the walls with uses. Pop-up shops, food trucks, etc. However, this is what I call LESS BAD URBANISM, as in making things less bad through the application of stuff. It's also the kind of pseudo-urbanism that I abhor, treating symptoms rather than underlying pathologies.

Most "urban design" is of this mindset, operated under the belief that if you build it they will come. It is entirely supply side and often a shot in the dark whether it will succeed. Initial successes can often mislead until the novelty factor wears off. The burden of programming and populating becomes too difficult and unwieldy. The place is essentially on life support rather than a living, breathing organism. The reason is because accommodation was created (supply) without increased integration (demand).

The greatest return on investment comes through building proper network integration, not correcting flaws and distortions as they emerge, but creating a platform for maximizing the incalculable exponential synergistic potential. It's not about making things less bad, through top down efforts, but correcting the system's circuitry to allow bottom-up opportunity to survive and thrive.

So we need to increase local levels of integration. I've suggested that Pacific, the road along the south could be made two ways. However, there might not be the dimension to do this, particularly where the DART line converges with the road. Other options include streamlining the pedestrian routes to TGiving Square, particularly between the office buildings both north and south of the three-sided square. These areas are over-burdened with vertical circulation.

Vertical circulation is fine when the streets are so crowded that movement needs to spill upwards or downwards. Absent that population density, parallel planar circulation simply dilutes energy from the street. Furthermore, all of the infrastructure for bridges, tunnels, escalators, and elevators create visual barriers. People like to see where they're going and what is around the corner. Without that ability, people will choose other routes (if they're even there to make the choice in the first place -- again, see larger issues of spatial network integration).

Simply put, TGS is a tough nut to crack. That is, if we even want to crack it. I don't see the commercial opportunity nor will to do so because of the various systemic and physical barriers. Efforts may very well be better spent in other surrounding areas and hoping it will spill demand towards it.

Sherlock - Modern Day London

2012-01-30T12:32:00.002-06:00

I'm a bit of a Sherlock Holmes nerd. I have the complete set of Conan Doyle's original works. I also have heard a bit about the new series on the BBC, but haven't watched any of it. Until last night, when I found the first trilogy on netflix. I didn't know that it was set in modern day London. As a city nerd, I quite liked the way London becomes a character itself, as often many of the great cities of the world do when they're established specifically as the setting, not for convenience nor a Fleming/Bond sort of glamorous jet-setting novelty factor. Those places tend to be flat. There is no life behind the glitz. A mere stage set. The places doesn't live, and breathe, and pulsate, which I feel the creators of this capture in the opening montage:

Social & Economic Exchange - Failing Both

2012-01-30T12:02:00.004-06:00

As I wrote last week, the city and therefore the subset of its streets are meant to facilitate social and economic exchange. Ideally, this should be accomplished as cost and energy effectively as possible, for both the public sector providing that platform of infrastructure as well as private individuals seeking to meet their daily needs and wants (social and economic exchange) similarly as efficient.

As I also wrote last week, the manner in which we plan, design, and fund our transportation network badly fails in facilitating social exchange utilizing the work of Donald Appleyard. So that is one of the two-parts where we are failing. But what about economic exchange? When do streets perform better?

Our friends at Fortworthology and the Near Southside in Fort Worth tell us that sales receipts are up over 500% on Magnolia Avenue since the installation of bike lanes and bike parking along the street. The significance isn't so much about the addition of bicycle infrastructure and that all of a sudden bikes appear, but that the narrowing of traffic lanes, the slowing of traffic, the increase in both pedestrian and bicycle activity, creates a true center of gravity.

The main street of any neighborhood is its energy source, so to speak. If the energy "current" is moving too fast, it will be repulsive. When you slow that energy, you create a literal attractive environment, where people attract more people. It is a case of "traffic" being a net positive rather than car-only traffic which is rather universally seen as a negative. At the very best, a push-pull tension exists where the traffic is desirable for business but the mode of traffic instills a defensive posture to the buildings and their uses. Think of traffic like cholesterol. There is good and bad traffic. Bad traffic is car-only, inhuman. In a way, this is always forced traffic. Onto certain roads, in certain types of machines (cars). It isn't natural, nor is it authentic. It is also dangerous, noisy, and spatially consumptive.

Last year, sales receipts numbered about $2 million worth. This year, that number is up over $10 million. That is some return on less than $100,000 in infrastructure, yet the manner in which it was planned and designed is opposite that of the conventional modus operandi for both traffic planners as well as economic development, which adhere to a bastardized version of Keynesianism where road expansion = growth. Bigger isn't better. Better is better. Smarter is better. Legitimate grids where choice in mode and route is built into the system and the actors can be smart, making their own choices appropriate to their needs.

The outward expansion due to road expansion fools us into thinking it is growth. If it is a growth, it metastasizes like a cancer cell, feeding off the host organism. At best it is cannibalistic.

We get to this broken system in two ways, which I've spelled out a million times. One is the thoroughfare plans, federally mandated, with financial incentives for bigger roads. Meaning, cities get more money for having bigger roads. The irony is that they get more money upfront for construction projects, yet hurt their overall economy long-term. The second way, road expansion is encouraged is by the conventional formulae and projections used by traffic planners, mostly just as a supposedly objective justification to accomplish the previous money grab, to show numbers suggesting a bigger road is necessary.

These formulae are based on speed. Magnolia moves too slowly for them. They grade it an F, maybe a D if we're lucky. And meanwhile, it facilitates social and economic exchange better than just about any road in the entire metroplex. The city, as a system, cares nowt for speed, but efficiency, mostly thru time and energy. When things start moving fast, the city becomes spatially stretched, everything is further apart. Because longer distance movement is easier. The response is perfectly rational. The goals however are not.

However, in terms of the way cities are actually meant to function, Magnolia gets an A+ for both social and economic facilitation. And you begin to see why the entire system is profoundly broken, that the logical city is the exception to the rule, not the rule. Only when it becomes the rule, and we plan, design, and finance public infrastructure at the level of the urban network to achieve the specific goals of facilitating social and economic interaction, which eventually bears itself through increased opportunity for local business, embedded within more complete neighborhoods, will the market deliver the kind of cities that work for people.

The Point?

2012-01-26T09:10:00.003-06:00

TTI is the Texas Transportation Institute. Their work provides much of the basis for all planning, policy, and funding decisions that cities and states undergo. As the CEO for Cities report correctly points out, their metrics are badly flawed. As are pretty much all transportation planning metrics. The reason? Their objective is speed. If roads aren't flowing at their proposed speed, they are deemed failing. The next step is to add supply, more lane capacity. Houses and building along them be damned.

So the question remains: what is the point of a street? To answer that, you have to ask the larger question: what is the point of a city, the entire infrastructural network?

I don't even know where this dates back to, but I don't think anybody can argue with the answer: that cities (and their subservient subset of streets) are the platform for social and economic exchange.

Traffic planners point to speed as "efficiency." Which is odd, since all data points to their work being reactive to the inertia of their own creation. The recent Univ of Toronto study pinpoints this failing: for every doubling of lane capacity, Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMTs) double as well. There is a one to one ratio that emerges over time. You're driving further because you're moving further away.

Either the bigger roads made it insufferable to live near them (completely rational response) or they made it convenient to live further away (also rational). So if you believe that we are mostly rational actors within a system, traffic planning, which always suggests roads must be widened (to be "improved" - their term, their metrics), this points to the demand model of where people choose to locate further and further away from central core areas where real efficiency exists, the synergy of proximity, that Richard Florida and Ed Glaeser have recently been pointing to. People in proximity are more productive.

Furthermore, it is hardly efficient to be travelling long distances to do daily tasks energy and cost wise, for individuals as well as the public bodies spending on all that excess infrastructure. You begin to see why everyone is broke but those positioned to profit off of dysfunctional, disconnected systems. Oil companies and those facilitating "virtual" connections as a de facto replacement for legitimate interactions: Google, Apple, eBay, etc.

So what IS an improved road network? The last few posts have been examining some of those metrics where commercial opportunities are maximized through the creation and manipulation of proper networks. Now would be a good time to recall the work of Donald Appleyard, a transportation planner tragically and ironically killed crossing a street by an onrushing car.

Appleyard measured the amount of close social contacts, friends and acquaintances along certain streets in San Francisco, ie Social Exchange. As you can see in the diagram above, streets designed to move as many cars as possible have many fewer social contacts than those streets with calmer vehicular traffic, 3x more friends per person and 2x more acquaintances. Furthermore, you can visualize the reluctance to cross the street, as the diagram shows how much more "tethered" the two sides are on less trafficked streets. What would be interesting is the number of pedestrians per day on each street and add this to the total "traffic" number. They very well might be even.

However, it should be noted that he measured this in the heart of San Francisco neighborhoods, in densely interconnected grid streets. A functional network. This doesn't apply to a cul-de-sac where there is virtually no traffic and you may not know anybody at all. There is too much noise in dysfunctional systems. No order emerges. And that is half the point.

The Resilience Quotient and Malls in Drag

2012-01-25T16:36:00.006-06:00

A developer with his "mixed-use town center."

New Yorker architecture critic has a new article up on the American Scholar about his last visit with Jane Jacobs in 2004. It is well worth the read, particularly my favorite bit:

Not the least of the price we pay for having so many of Jacobs’s views become the common wisdom is the extent to which they are now co-opted by real-estate developers and politicians. They have realized that there is money to be made in shopping centers created as fake villages with pedestrian “streets” leading to “town squares,” and in “festival marketplaces” that are little more than shopping malls in drag. Developers proclaim these places to be like real cities, as if they were a natural outgrowth of Jacobs’s ideas. The term mixed use, which started as a sharp-eyed writer’s observation of what underlies an organic urban fabric, has become a developer’s mantra.

A few years ago I was consulting for a city in Nevada. They had such bad experience with past new urbanists and moreso the developers behind the new urbanists, that I wasn't allowed to use any number of buzzwords in the realm of sustainability and urbanism. They had been promised so much before in order to get entitlements, but then what was delivered was little different than the sprawl they were used to. They were tired of being lied to.

Everybody is using words like "mixed-use" as a sort of panacea. I disdain this kind of talk. In a D Magazine column, I derided developments like the malls in drag masquerading as urbanism as baking a cake with all of the ingredients but not following any of the actual instructions. All you end up with is a vat of goo. A checklist of buzzwords like "mixed-use," "live above the shop," "garage parking," "main street," etc. etc. are all bull shit. At least how the majority of urban design consultants use them. We think of these buzzwords, these superficialities as causes, goals, when in actuality these are effects. They are symptoms, by-products of something deeper (the emotional impulse towards real urbanism that I often write about. This results in form that is conducive to encouraging social and economic exchange. The result is the physical form that we call "urban."). And with all the promises of cake, they are they end up building goo.

It is my contention that there are various metrics emerging allowing us to understand the demand and resiliency of a place. As I pointed out in my last article for D Magazine, one of these metrics is intersection density. I'm currently working with a software developer in exploring whether we can tap into open source mapping data to turn this into a program, much like walkscore. For the time being, I am counting intersections effectively by hand.

In the linked D article, I included calculations of two of the premier examples of infill urban redevelopment: State-Thomas uptown Dallas and the Pearl District in Portland, OR. The baseline as figured by UConn Prof. Norman Garrick is about 225 intersections per square mile. State-Thomas has 250+ and Pearl District has well over 400.

Obviously there are limitations. You can't have a million intersections per square mile because then there would be no room for development. It would be nothing but roads, which seems to be the plan for downtown Dallas. Snark snark.

Furthermore, I've begun creating tiers for which these should be measured and then proportioned to the square mile metric. For example, since neighborhoods are by nature radial, organized around a center (even if the road network is rectilinear), centrality prevails. So instead of using an actual square, I've begun using circles. A circle with a radius of 2,979 feet equals a square mile in area. But, when using the ten-minute walk of about .45 linear miles to the center of the neighborhood, this equates to .63 of a square mile. This would be the neighborhood scale resiliency metric.

Ultimately, I want to be able to qualitatively categorize intersections into a hierarchy of values. Also, it needs a contextual metric as well. For example, Fair Park may have a strong historical grid (which it actually doesn't - but roll with me) within the .45 mi. radius, but if it is circumnavigated by a highway, or several highways and rail lines, fragmented from its surroundings, its neighborhood score could be high. Therefore, it needs a contextual resilience metric as well to tell the tale.

There is also the caveat that this is not a tell all. It must be done within the context of other analyses. For example, California required masterplanned developments in the Valley to build all of their roads upfront. Today, many of these developments exist almost like deserted towns, entire road networks, but only a smattering of houses. Who cares what the intersection density is here, because it was built with entirely artificial demand bubbling up over a boiling lending market.

For now, we'll stick with neighborhood score to look at a few malls in drag or Potemkin Villages. Note: each is mapped with a .45 mi radius from the approximate center of the "neighborhood."

First, Victory - which I wrote about how to save it for D.

Total intersections: 96

Intersections per sq.mi. (x/.63): 152

Resilience quotient (y/225): 67%

Note: State Thomas resilience quotient would be over 100%. It is also in high demand, occupancy rates are high and every little sliver of land is slowly, but surely being developed. There are a few ways to look at this number. One, is to see an area that has a high quotient, but low level of development and see opportunity. The next step would be to examine its context to see where the breakdown occurs. Second, is to look at an area like Victory and see a deficient quotient and then begin looking to its surroundings to what can be fixed to up the quotient in the neighborhood.

Looking at the map we see the breakdowns come on both sides of Victory, from the highway and the effectual super block that is the Jefferson Apartments (or whatever they're called these days). It's not actually a terrible score, but considering the amount of density built in Victory, the score needs to be higher. I expect this is partially to blame for the poor performance of the development compared to expectations. Looking deeper however, there are a number of intersections in the LoMac, or Lower McKinney, area. Given what we know about how horrid this spaghetti of intersections is, the score for this area is inflated. So we're missing a qualitative component which helps demerit this area for how truly unsafe and disruptive the street and intersection design is in this area, given that nobody walks the short .25 miles through it to the American Airlines Center.

Next: The shops at Allen and Fairview, which I wrote something here about and received a good bit of hate mail from nearby residents so proud of their new development:

Total intersections: 46

Intersections per sq.mi. (x/.63): 73

Resilience quotient (y/225): 32.4%

Verdict: Mall in Drag. You can see the breakdown comes from the poor connection to its surroundings, the highway on one side and the neighborhoods on the other that are completely ignored. It exists in a bubble, surrounded by a sea of parking, in other words, a mall without a roof. And malls are failing precisely because of their poor connections to their surroundings.

This development could likely be salvaged if the number of intersections is doubled since the density is not terribly high, I'm not sure it needs to get up to 100%. However, if it begins to struggle will the demand ever exist to instill the impetus for such infrastructural reconnections?

Park Lane Place, which I was interviewed about here and said the following:

Whether the development will flourish is something we’ll have to wait to find out. But there is reason to question Barnett’s assumption about the need to “internalize” the development. Patrick Kennedy, an urban planner and designer, has spent some time walking around Park Lane. He says a development like this one needs to do two things to succeed. “It has to be so well-designed, so lovable that the citizenry will always care for it and ensure that it endures,” he says. “The other is, it has to tie into the rest of the city, the adjacent properties, neighborhoods, street network, and transportation framework so that the improvement, stewardship, and resilience are mutually ensured. I’m not sure Park Lane successfully accomplishes either. I think the underlying logic defining Park Lane—that of convenience—undermines certainly the latter and possibly the former, as the experience is ultimately degraded by the disconnection, no matter the level of detailed design.”

Total intersections: 37

Intersections per sq.mi.: 58.7

Resilience quotient: 26%

Verdict: Ayeeeeeeeeee! Run for the hills! It has the North Park Mall on one-side and even the mall has more intersections. That isn't really why North Park is still succeeding why all other malls are failing. Instead, it is succeeding partially because of its location and partially because it exists as THE mall in the region. Any region can only support a handful of malls at best. If I were to take a stab at a ratio, it might be a 1:1 ratio of square feet per population. Meaning a 1 million square foot mall per 1 million population. And even North Park is slowly but surely repositioning itself. I expect its surface parking lots to infill eventually.

The real breakdown with Park Lane Place is not just the poor connection to its surroundings but the design on-site itself. There are very few actual blocks and convergence points created. This is further exacerbated by the changes in plane, Whole Foods and other stores are a few stories above the street level, accessed by an elevated parking garage, disconnected from everything else.

My guess is that PLP could have done a bit better if a legitimate street and block structure was created on site. However, even if it had done so, it would have been limited by its poor connections outward. Given that it has a roughly equal amount of density as Victory yet half the resilience quotient, it is pretty easy to see how this development has failed and will continue to flounder long after Victory rights the ship.

Let's contrast these with a successful development: Legacy Town Center, aka Shops at Legacy

Total intersections: 80

Intersections per sq.mi.: 127

Resilience quotient: 56%

Verdict: It's quotient is lower than Victory's but higher than the others. Which makes some sense as the density delivered is also much lower. However, with closer examination and when looking strictly at the approximately .26 square miles that the development consists of, this number jumps to 308 intersections per sq.mi. or 137% resilience quotient. It's breakdown comes with the corporate campus sites which have few roads.

You could say this is an isolated development, much like a mall without a roof. I've heard and read of a number of critics, professional and otherwise use this criticism. Similarly, it is a cut and paste criticism of my objective critiques above clumsily and inappropriately applied. Just like when creating "mixed-use" in all the wrong places and without the proper foundation.

This is the case for two distinct reasons:

1) This development has a better housing to retail/jobs ratio than do typical "town center malls in drag" which are nearly entirely retail. And more importantly,

2) The connections to the highway and surroundings are still quite good. And furthermore, these corporate campuses can be eventually infilled as there is already thought of doing so. It makes perfect sense. Many of these corporate office parks have excess land while trying to reposition themselves and their businesses. One of their major assets is land. Legacy, rather than being a disconnected, isolated entity, will actually be the catalyst for expansion and interconnection as its urbanism spreads outward.

Why Are Skylines Roughly Conical?

2012-01-25T12:00:00.002-06:00

I want to take a graphic look at some concepts I've been developing lately, in conjunction of course with the work it builds upon, including the Bartlett School at the University College of London and their work on mathematical models of spatial integration as well as the Andres and Douglas Duany codeveloped concept of the transect.

Spatial integration began as a scientific examination searching for objective realities to urbanism. Why were cities and their patterns so similar? Where and when have we begun to go wrong? And is the aesthetic, subjective driven world of Modernist architecture partially to blame?

Completely independent of this work, the Duany brothers saw similarities in the gradient of intensification of cities as you got closer to the core with various ecologies, particularly coastal regions:

This, became this:

Both relied, perhaps intuitively on the concept of centrality, which has its origins in the study of social networks. Since cities are the physical platform for social and economic exchange, empowering the links between them, network studies had direct relevance. Cities are networks.

But the Transect never really digs into why what was where. Sure there is a dense node at the center, with an decreasing gradient the further you get away from it. But what created centers in the first place? That is where space syntax began examining infrastructural networks. Professor Bill Hillier and his pupils/colleagues found a correlation between social network analysis and infrastructural networks. That is, social hubs have the most connections. The highest degree of integration. Likewise, this parallels with the internet. The highest trafficked sites are hubs that all others link to. Think Google. From there exists a hierarchy from most to least.

Likewise, cities have a similar hierarchy. The most connected places, have the highest degree of integration, which in turn means the highest degree of opportunity. Where there exists the greatest demand, to which the market responds with supply. Building space. Where demand is greater than supply exists the most opportunity for developers. Where integration is highest is the most opportunity for every citizen to meet their needs for social and economic exchange.

This concept exists locally, within one city, as well as globally, amongst all cities. New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, etc., are global cities because they are the most connected, both locally and globally. Within a single city, you also have a hierarchy of centers. All cities are polycentric once they get above the scale of the tiniest of hamlets. This is what sprawl apologist hacks like Joel Kotkin fail to understand. When they talk of polycentric, sprawl-based cities as polycentric cities of the future, they fail to see that New York is also polycentric. Those centers just blur together rather seamlessly, except where geographic barriers (water bodies) or physical barriers (such as highways) divide and isolate them.

Space Syntax map of London:

What they found was that there is a correlation between traffic and value. Just like with any network, particularly the web. The most trafficked sites have the most value. Remember that traffic doesn't mean cars, but people. This is a direct relationship in what I call logical cities. High pedestrian areas have far more people moving past, and capable of interacting with you (economically or socially) in these high traffic areas than does car-based traffic, which has to turn, wait for lights, find parking, etc., all of which accounts for increasing degrees of disconnection, dislocation, and inflexibility.

In the logical city, such as the London-based map above, there is another chicken/egg based component to it as with all complex, interconnected systems. The infrastructure funnels traffic to specific places and specific places also "bend" the infrastructure to them. This is why I call them centers of gravity, what many planner types call "nodes". They literally shape the city around them. Increasing their level of interconnectivity, raising demand, and eventually via opportunity, supply.

Because of the chicken/egg scenario, this also means that infrastructure can create places out of thin air, such as when two railroads meet in the midwest. The traffic intersection becomes an opportunity. And many cities are here today because of such a phenomenon. I'll look at that a little more later.

But first, here are several skylines:

While this is Dallas and the exercise is admittedly abstract, I want to show why downtowns have the biggest buildings. And why severing the interconnectivity to them, is why many of Dallas's buildings in downtown are quite empty, for example. As I have written before, Dallas experienced a building boom (high-rises) at the exact same time that the city, state, and federal level were gorging on highway building. Supply was being added while demand was being undercut, shipped out towards the suburbs.

Those polycenters, instead of being closely interconnected, became Las Colinas and the various highway adjacent corporate office parks around the metroplex. That they were newer or the space is better and they are "grade A" office is irrelevant. The newer development would be in and around more walkable, more highly integrated and interconnected places (more authentic places). They would also prove to be more resilient. I expect, unless they drastically reposition themselves, many of these office parks will fade into dust. With new light rail (another degree of interconnection) and residential, Las Colinas is already doing that.

Compare our growth to say, L'Eixample neighborhoods in Barcelona and Valencia. These were rapidly expanding areas, literally doubling city size, but they did so aggregately. These are both now considered the "old money" areas of those particular cities, and very much still central city as growth then enveloped them.

The dynamic changes a bit for cities like Paris or Washington, D.C. Both cities with extremely high levels of integration, locally and globally. Remember, that local integration is the foundation from which density and resilience lie upon. The most connections can be made locally in dense, walkable environments.

Because the level of integration is so, demand is extremely high to be in the center of Paris (or D.C.). But height restrictions limit the amount of supply of usable building space, making prices skyrocket. The center of Paris is amazing. Who doesn't love it? But it also leads to this condition where opportunity then shifts outward, toward the Banlieus, or suburbs:

The supply is much greater than the demand, which is to be actually in Paris where opportunity is high. But it the market can't meet the demand, so it spills outward. Too much supply, with too low levels of integration. There isn't a natural, organic match. This is made even worse with the design of the "towers in the park" housing for the poor. Whether they were built for the poor or not, eventually they were doomed to devolve because of supply being much greater than the demand. These types of Corbusien buildings are physically isolating, cul-de-sacs in the sky. In effect, the supply is borrowed from the areas with higher integration, higher value. Not coincidentally, these are the areas where Paris experiences the most civil unrest, in homogenous areas of poverty exemplified by socio-economic isolation. Isolation. As in not integrated.

However, this is not to say whether Paris or DC's restriction on building height is wrong. That is a political debate. In my estimation, these cities heights or lackthereof is precisely what makes them so special. 1) The building heights remain humane, lower to the street level, and more interactive. And perhaps more importantly, 2) the demand pressure exerted upon a limited supply ensures that the limited space will always, ALWAYS be maximized. And buildings will be preserved rather than destroyed.

The real issue is improving the connectivity, integration, and walkability within and to the suburbs. Here is where I shift in language from banlieus to suburbs because the need is universal. American suburbs may not have many, if any, high-rises, but supply is currently way above demand, as defined by spatial integration values. Values are plummeting across the country, not only because of the evaporation of liquidity (real or imagined), but also a general market realization and price correction towards this supply/demand imbalance.

There is a movement afoot to "retrofit suburbs." While there is certainly opportunity to do this, and a necessity in many cases. I'm afraid that while some areas will be fine, some will need salvaging, while others are fairly doomed. We simply won't have the capability of retrofitting ALL of them. And by retrofitting, I mean increasing their local connectivity/integration quotient to instill, increase the demand to catalyze the new infill that the retrofitters propose. There will be extreme levels of competition and upheaval, I expect, in American suburbs.

As for city growth:

As I mentioned earlier, it all starts with an intersection. This could be anything:

Two railroads crossing

Two ancient trade routes

Fertile soil and a deep water port

The connection globally has to be strong enough to maintain the raison d'etre. The local connections, like walkability, ensure that the place is efficient and livable. And that people like living there as opposed to the competitors. It is also important to note that no cities current place within the hierarchy is the place it will reside in 10-, 20-, 50-, or 1000-years. Such is the competition amongst cities. And such is the need to maximize local and global connectivity, as well as the raison d'etre for that city, whether it be energy production, idea production, or a socially vibrant place. Whatever it is, it better be timeless. See: Detroit, autos. West Texas, exhausted oil wells. Heterogeny ensures timelessness. Or something approaching it.

Here is the intersection. Imagine it is any of the aforementioned. The red implies the neighborhood development.

If the raison d'etre is strong enough, its opportunity level persists. It attracts more people. The city expands, aggregates:

Eventually, maybe it grows to the point where it needs more global connections. And as technology advances, the infrastructure is needed for those global connections, such as an airport and an interstate. However, all global movement is destructive to fragile local interconnections. Highways and airports can have negative effects upon overall interconnectivity despite increasing global connectivity. Local connectivity drops, therefore demand drops, therefore desirability and opportunity drop and eventually people will leave that city. That is why these global infrastructural networks must be treated very carefully, connecting with cities tangentially.

Vancouver didn't allow freeways into their city. Paris is removing all of them inside the peripherique. They're connected to their airports via subway. Subways are built because at-grade and above grade tracks are disconnective. Below grade is supremely expensive, but as all cities who have them have found, worth the high initial cost to preserve the fabric above.

And within those overall connections, smaller nodes or centers of gravity will emerge at the various convergence points. That is, only in the logical city. In the illogical city, where connections are disruptive and diminish overall connectivity and the ability of its citizens to meet their social and economic needs for exchange, a tension is created. The tension is two countervailing forces. That towards traffic, ie traffic = value. And the opposite force is the repulsive nature of those global connections, ie highways and airports.

You may have to click on the below image to expand it. It's one I've been working on to explain this concept. At the top left we have attractive nature of convergence. People create infrastructure to create opportunities for social and economic exchange, meeting points, trading places, markets. When you disrupt that network, you shift the magnetism so to speak, like putting two like poles of magnets next two each other.

When you look to the right diagram, the glass is supply of building form. The demand is liquid. When you interrupt local connectivity and overall integration (often for the sake of global connectivity), you are essentially creating a hole in the glass. All of the demand spills outward. You get sprawl and an empty glass. Like downtown Dallas highrises.

Pop-Up Hood?

2012-01-24T14:08:00.003-06:00

Not exactly sure what is pop-up besides the intent to streamline the bureaucratic process of opening businesses, and doing so without significant startup capital, in a place that needed it.

POPUPHOOD from Eva Kolenko on Vimeo.

When I write about integration and opportunity, keep this video in mind. Oakland is a city, like many gutted by freeways and cheap gas that shifted the demand model away from proximity as the fundamental driver of social and economic exchange. It still had a strong, intact grid and plenty of building fabric that was cheap precisely because of the drain. Spatial supply high, demand low. This doesn't occur on a cul-de-sac or in a highway fronting strip center where eventually supply will be fairly high and demand will remain low, but in a place with implicit centrality. Undercapitalized upon. And therein lies the opportunity for these entrepreneurs and creatives.

Linkages

2012-01-24T13:01:00.002-06:00

Lots of good linkages today:

First, the DMN picked up the Alliance for Biking and Walking report I mentioned the other day. The headline is rather loathsome and ignorant that behavior responds to context. I'd hate to do anything where I might die too. Really not looking forward to sticking my head in an alligators mouth later. Another fraggle:

An interesting takeaway from the study concerns the importance of city efforts to maximize cycling or walking. Dallas dedicated, according to the survey, $4 million in 2010 to bike or pedestrian projects. That's better than many of the cities on the list, including Washington, D.C., Fort Worth, Houston (which spent $0 city funds). Even Boston, the reigning champ when it comes to its residents walking and biking to work, spent far less -- about $600,000 in 2010.

DC ranks towards the tops of the list but spends no money. Dallas is at the bottom of the list but spends money. Is that really "better?" One could likely more reasonably argue that it is at the very least a form of playing catchup. What more do the cities at the top of the list have to do when they already have a walkable, bikable city? Or maybe the expenditure is a tacit admission of guilt. Perhaps, but I think it is something else altogether even: a bandaid. And a bandaid on urban form and interactivity is always expensive. As are the by-products of the broken form, like pedestrian and bicyclist injuries or worse.

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Why should policies favor pedestrian and bicyclist activity? Forget that they're inherently vulnerable and should be protected (while we're at it, let's put children back to work on lathes, in a lead smelter, and coal mines. Their little fingers will get the hard to reach black stuff.). And forget that their presence is indicative of a dense, desirable, livable place founded on local interconnectivity. But that these forms of movement, of making the social and economic exchanges of our daily lives are so much more energy efficient:

RT @AurashKhawarzad On 350 calories, a bicyclist can go 10 miles, a pedestrian 3.5 miles, and a car 100 feet.

And energy equals cost. Every trip has its own tariff, a cost of completing a transaction, the revenue of which heads outta town.

The other point worth noting is that just because a bicycle goes further on x calories than does a pedestrian doesn't necessarily make the bike better. It has its own inflexibilities. It is more difficult to stop, start, change directions, get off, go into stores, find a place to park and lock it, etc., particularly in packs than a crowd of pedestrians. Furthermore, like heavy traffic of cars, a rush hour of bikes can be repulsive to the pedestrian. Balance and appropriation.

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Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt in Wired: Let the Robot Drive.

After standing at an intersection during morning rush hour today, counting drivers looking down, texting, applying makeup, and generally looking rather distracted, I agree. And since it will be some time, if ever, that this becomes democratically affordable, maybe we should up the qualifying standards for operating a piece of dangerous, nay deadly machinery.

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The economist picks up and weighs in on a debate tangential to fixed alignment mass transit versus buses with an empathetic, aesthetic component. Perhaps one or the other isn't the way to look at it but rather integration --> accommodation --> decoration. The more convenient, as several cited in the article do, that mass transit is, the greater demand will be to amenitize it, make it more comfortable.

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Lastly, a primer on behavior change theory, particularly as it relates to socio-economics and therefore cities: Emotion --> Behavior --> Economics --> City Form. And vice versa. I hope to have more on this as time comes, but for now this piece on systems theory:

Interventions should aim for change at multiple points across a system, targeting a range of factors, and working at various scales (e.g. individual, organisational, community, societal).

For example, this suggests that if we see a problem, which might be a lament that "Greenville Avenue is not the complete neighborhood main street it was several decades ago" where you can no longer meet all of your daily needs. The necessary interventions range at a variety of scales, both cosmetic (it's ugly), systemic (it's unsafe), or genetic (too much parking is required by code). Partial treatment is only a partial cure.

DMag Column: Feb Issue

2012-01-24T12:17:00.003-06:00

...is on West Dallas and the West Dallas Plan. Please go here to read it at the flagship's main page. It is perhaps worth noting that I left all mentions of the Sylvan:Thirty development implicit, as I'm referring to block size and its clownish 800 foot long building and inside-out pseudo-urbanism. Many complex urban grids are composed of blocks somewhere between 200-400 feet in the x or y direction. That is, unless it is an irregular grid akin to a medieval street and block system. Because there is no guarantee nor intent to create a complex, interconnected grid, it will likely never happen. As I closed in the article:

The West Dallas plan seems merely to hope that it will happen. And I suppose hope is all we’re clinging to right now.

As I mention in the article, the bridge connection will increase the degree of integration to some extent. The increment remains a mystery, but I argue it will be minimal. Some initial investment and development will poke its head around, mostly under the assumption that picture books can come true. Then it will fester, like an untreated toothache. Veneers look better but won't help. All places are what they are precisely because of their infrastructural context. Some may be trending upwards, other downwards. How far depends on the complexity and intensity of the network and its connectivity to all things local and global.

Integration = Accommodation. If the proportion isn't precisely equal then it is trending towards the appropriate balance. Urban morphology 501.

West Dallas is what it is today, largely vacant, a number of industrial warehouses, proportional to its degree of connectivity. It is fragmented and isolated, and therefore devalued despite its proximity to downtown. It exists on an island. The new bridge tosses a lifeline, but walkable, livable, timeless places must exist on a foundation of local connectivity. Local connectivity stems from the street and block plan, in this case, measured as intersection density. Lots of intersections means lots of complexity (but not complex), in the way a diverse ecosystem or crop rotation is more durable than single crop farming.

The point remains that the West Dallas Plan is entirely superficial: the book, its pretty pictures, many of which uptown and State-Thomas (at least in its ambition), as well as the intent. State-Thomas had a built-in historic street/block network that were maintained. Initial public investment and partnership tools were necessary to kickstart the chemical reaction past the catalytic barrier wrought by wreckless S&L investment that ripped the neighborhood to pieces in the 80s. In West Dallas, if it ever was there it is gone and must be created or recreated. There is a significant failing to understand the underlying dynamics that allow high quality urbanism to organically and incrementally emerge. Instead, words like incremental are used, but misunderstood. Misrepresented even.

It is the degree of integration, the complexity of the network that instills demand. Demand which expresses itself as maximization of development. Demand wants proximity. It is what pulls buildings up to the street. Or what wants to live above the shop. The plan refers to these things, but forgets the foundation. The structure. But it calls itself a structural plan. Pretense. If the city wants to see development happen, without the expense of a real, interconnected street and block system, they'll pay in another way: subsidy. It may produce the same development but it won't fill up and sustain itself. It won't be loved by the market, ie citizens in perpetuity.

It is how we end up with developments like Victory. Like Park Lane Place. Like Sylvan:Thirty. "Urban" only with quotation marks. Big buildings, half full. At best. A cynical attempt to capitalize on the "fad" of urbanism and get their IRR out before anybody thinks to push over the stage set. The only hope is that enough money is sunk into those places that eventually we'll have to bend the network to them, re-integrating them, just to salvage the initial (or eventual) investment. Often corrections to a property, to achieve highest and best use, must be made off-site. Unless it is just cheaper to start over on-site.

I say "hope," but the reality is there is so much more value and opportunity in doing it right from the beginning. It's really expensive to go cheap. Why sprawl has bankrupted everything. And that starts with the infrastructural framework. Not just for the private market, potential (theoretical) residents, but also the city, which needs to see a return on its investment in the form of tax base.

2012 Report: Rankings for Walking/Biking

2012-01-23T16:11:00.002-06:00

Alliance for Biking & Walking has published their 2012 report ranking American States and Cities. Their words:

This report comes at a critical moment, as Congress takes up the imminent passage of the next federal transportation bill, which dictates how billions of tax dollars will be spent over coming years. The Benchmarking Report reveals that, in nearly every city and state, pedestrians and bicyclists are disproportionately at risk of being killed, and currently receive less than a fair share of transportation dollars. While 12 percent of trips in the U.S. are by bike or foot, 14 percent of traffic fatalities are bicyclists and pedestrians. Pedestrian and bicycle projects receive less than 2 percent of federal transportation dollars.
“The Benchmarking Report shows that biking and walking are smart solutions to many of our country’s most pressing challenges when it comes to transportation, job creation and health,” Jeffrey Miller, Alliance President/CEO, says.
The report compiles persuasive evidence that bicycle and pedestrian projects create more jobs than highway projects, and provide at least three dollars of benefit for every dollar invested. The report also highlights the health benefits of active transportation, showing that states with the highest rates of bicycling and walking are also among those with the lowest rates of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure. “The data points to one conclusion: Investing in biking and walking projects creates jobs, leads to more people biking and walking, and improves safety and public health,” Miller says.
John Pucher, a professor at Rutgers University, emphasizes: “The wide range of environmental, social, and economic benefits of walking and bicycling, so clearly documented in this report, justify greatly increased investment in facilities and programs to encourage more walking and cycling, and to improve the safety of these most sustainable of all transportation modes.”

If you just download the media fact sheet, you'll find where Dallas and Fort Worth stand amongst the 51 cities included in the rankings.

For overall levels of walking/biking:

Dallas 49th of 51

FW 51st of 51

OKC is 50th

That's the bottom three. As for the top three: Boston, DC, San Fran in that order.

For fatality rates of pedestrians/bicyclists:

Dallas 49th of 51

FW 51st of 51

Jacksonville is 50th

As for the top 3: Boston, Minneapolis, Omaha in that order

When I have more time, I'll dig into the methodology.

More on Cedar Springs

2012-01-20T15:16:00.002-06:00

Eric Miller, of newcolonist.com, wrote about the changes to Cedar Springs. He interviewed me about it. That article is here:

Curb cuts, he said, mean that cars are "diving in and out and the pedestrian experience that is frightening at best when there are cuts every 50 feet or so."
That speaks to a long-standing issue about parking requirements in the district in which Whittall said zoning requirements have made it difficult to open or expand a business. The former owner of a popular coffee shop on the strip, Whittall sold it after his plans for expansion were denied because of parking requirement.
Kennedy says those parking requirements contribute to the risk for pedestrians in the district. Not only are patrons being encouraged to drive to places where they can drink, he said the parking requirements insure the curb cuts through pedestrian pathways.
"As long as you make it as convenient as possible for the car, it’s always at the expense of the pedestrian," said Kennedy. "If you make it inconvenient for a car, then proximity becomes a premium and things want to cluster closer together. It’s better use of the land and creates a safer environment."
These are relatively new issues in Dallas, said Whittall, because additional retail and residential development has people opting more often for shoe leather instead of rubber.
"Now that there are more residential areas, people are walking all the time," said Whittall. "All of a sudden Dallas is becoming a walking city."
Agreement seems to be emerging that Dallas also has to become a pedestrian-friendly city.
"We’re at the right point where the business community is starting to see that if it is pedestrian-friendly, they’ll have more customers because more people will be out and about walking," said Kennedy, who estimated most of the customers for Cedar Springs businesses are within a two-mile radius. "Once you get the that rhetorical start, I feel like eventually we can get there."

A truly pedestrian-oriented place is about proximity and done so in a safe, desirable, attractive fashion. And that proximity is considered an amenity. In order to empower the market to fulfill that desire, you can't change the urban phenotype, with superficial, bandaid treatments. Such is basically every single "town center" development. None are authentic, but rather imposed upon a place. You have to get down into the genetic material of a place, altering it, so that walkable urbanism occurs naturally in appropriate places, in an emergent fashion.

The Forces Behind The Market Forces

2012-01-20T10:29:00.002-06:00

While I have a few minutes today, I couldn't let this fester. I find it rather disturbing. The Morning News conducted a Q&A with perhaps the most powerful (and unelected) person in the metroplex, Michael Morris, director of transportation for NCTCOG. It should be noted that many Metropolitan Planning Organizations (or MPOs) have begun calling themselves MTPOs, as in correcting their nomenclature to include Transportation, which is pretty much all MPOs do anyway.

In the interview, Morris cites the work of one Yacov Zahavi regarding commuting preferences. In general people don't like commuting more than an hour per day. He goes on to lament that the road building isn't able to keep up with the outward growth of the city, thereby causing congestion.

The consumer preference makes some sense when put in context of scientist, urbanist, and author Peter Newman's study showing cities throughout history tend to be an hour-wide, the size of which is based entirely on the primary transportation technology of the day. I'm also aware that commuters tend to prefer a commute of about 20-minutes as well. Again, regardless of transportation mode. People like to have enough time to decompress on the way home or mentally prepare their day on the way to work.

What I find concerning is two-fold. First, his mentioning of consumer preference seems to imply that the living arrangement in DFW and the Sun Belt in general is one of consumer preference. It horribly underestimates the role of transportation (planning, design, and ESPECIALLY funding) plays in manipulating the market. If market preference is the invisible hand, government policy provides the invisible arm.

Second, his lament about congestion suggests his mindset is straight out of the flawed and rigged formulaic thinking from the Texas Transportation Institute, that believes velocity of movement is the only goal of any road. Not energy efficiency. Not cost efficiency. Not safety. They can't "keep up" because DOTs and federal highway spending has taken a big hit with the budgetary woes that I don't think I need to explain.

I say this often, but I can walk to a store with less risk of personal injury, at less cost (to me), with less infrastructural burden on the various governmental entities responsible for public infrastructure, and more quickly than can someone in sprawl-burbia drive to the store. But since they're moving faster, COG and TTI's nonsensical formulae say sprawl-burbia is preferred. I'm walking slowly therefore the road must be widened and the sidewalk removed for more lanes. Such is the illogic of the machine.

Because their transportation policies skewed the market towards sprawl, well beyond the hour-wide city, and the funding for their failed policies has slowed from a deluge to a trickle, congestion happens. Supply-side transportation planning can go on no longer. Shame. Though they won't stop trying. They know no other way. It never seems to occur to them to work the demand levers, to lessen the need for regional commuting and focus on building strong, stable, complete, localized, and interconnected neighborhoods.

I've seen little from COG to suggest they understand how cities work. They have shown that they're very good at obtaining money for regional transportation, precisely the kind that prevents the market from delivering walkable communities to citizens that might like a shorter commute. The hardest working man in America is the junkie.

Sure, they've helped secure funding for trails and various planning efforts. Drops in the bucket compared to road building and spending. In fact, those drops in the bucket are quickly evaporated into the thin air of irrelevance when the dendritic road building pattern isolates and fragments the network into dysfunctionality.

China is trying to be "sustainable" while moving people who lived off the land into tenement high-rises at gun point. Putting a car in every garage. Widening every road to 20-lanes. Pushing bikes off the street. Razing highly complex slums for another kind of eventual slum. A monoculture of towers in the park, which surely has energy efficient LED light bulbs or some such inadequacies. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

COG is busy trying to improve regional cooperation at a time when we need more competition amongst the various cities of the metroplex for more walkable communities. Let the most walkable win.

Cedar Springs Tragedy, Safety Plan

2012-01-18T11:56:00.003-06:00

Once again, it is a shame it takes a martyr (or two) to get the city moving in a direction opposite its current inertia. In this case Cedar Springs, site of two pedestrians killed by on-rushing vehicles, will get some...facelifts? Here is a link to the list of proposed changes to the street.

Bad:

Superficial treatments. First, these are cheap and easy, therefore extenuating I suppose. Regulation (speed limits) and enforcement (increased police presence) are tell-tale signs of a poorly designed street. That is, if we answer the first question that must be asked, "what do we want this street to be?" in the affirmative with a pedestrian- and business-friendly neighborhood main street environment, which is precisely what Cedar Springs is suited for (at least in Oak Lawn - on the other side of Turtle Creek it is best served al dente, as in Spaghetti).

Drivers will proceed at the speed that feels comfortable. Similarly, pedestrians will cross where they deem it appropriate. Regulation and enforcement have little effect. The question begs, how "tethered" do we want the street to be? Main Street in downtown Dallas would be a 2. It is similarly a neighborhood service street (despite the name suggesting greater pomp & grandiosity).

Main Street: "tethered" with common pedestrian connections and crossings. The pedestrian activity itself acts as the slowing agent for traffic. The illustrated condition is what I consider a "2". A "1" is where pedestrians cross only at cross-walks and a 0 is where pedestrians don't cross at all and are in fact repelled from the street. See: Lemmon Ave and every suburban arterial.

No mention of parking code amendments. Appeasing the car. It is parking and its consumption of land that spreads people out, reduces pedestrian activity, propinquity. With reduced parking standards, or eliminated maximums, the market can respond based on local cost of land and instead choose to potentially maximize the usage of that land, with more density meaning more potential pedestrians. More repeat customers. And less costly infrastructure necessary.

More study needed. More study by whom? Transportation planners? The people responsible for the road and every other inhumane road in the city? Or the ants in the ant farm playing frogger until another one is run over? Empirical evidence points to the problem already. No, better design needed. The plan suggests a potential "compete street." Unfortunately, the bike plan has no plans for Cedar Springs. And the city has no plan for the bike plan. Coordination. We Haz It.

Good:

That the local business community is the one pushing for changes. This is often one of the hardest things to do (especially when chambers of commerce are involved). Businesses are precisely suited to the status quo, so they inherently fear something potentially disruptive. You have to convince them of how it will improve their overall business. As Kevin Buchanon just sent to me, property values are up 137% on Magnolia Avenue and sales receipts are up over 500% since the installation of bike lanes and overall reclamation of the street by the foot-powered neighborhood citizenry.

Functional change. Closing of the right turn lane and island at Douglass and CS. Please see my post on turning radii and this map overlaying outdoor cafe tables with overly generous turning radii so that cars feel unimpeded regardless of traffic signalization nor signage.

Correlation is causation in this case.

And finally, the neighborhood pushing for the road to be reduced to one-lane each direction. I can hope that this was in some way inspired by my suggestion for Oak Lawn to go on a similar diet. Too often, our streets are planned and designed as a conduit for interconnecting point A to point B. Simple right? A street is linear. It is about linear movement, amirite?

Unfortunately, that isn't the case at all. One street is just part of a much more complex network, a meshwork of interconnectivity. In this case, a neighborhood, where points D, E, F, G, H, etc., are all crossing and criss-crossing the street in countless directions. Once again we return to where we start, do we want our neighborhood "main streets" to be seams or barriers?

Linkages

2012-01-18T10:32:00.002-06:00

If the city is an ecology unto itself, and all evidence and lines of study are pointing in that direction, Le Corbusier is Paul Hermann Muller. If you needed to look up that reference, wiki is down if you haven't noticed. The link is to an article at City Journal by Thomas Dalrymple and it is quite brilliant. I encourage you take the time to read all of it. Some of my favorite bits:

At the exhibition, I fell to talking with two elegantly coiffed ladies of the kind who spend their afternoons in exhibitions. “Marvelous, don’t you think?” one said to me, to which I replied: “Monstrous.” Both opened their eyes wide, as if I had denied Allah’s existence in Mecca.

I rather enjoyed imagining this scene. If only because I've run similar events through my head and/or life dozens of times. It reminds of the global prank turned movie that was Exit Through the Gift Shop, unwitting plutocrats masquerading as intelligentsia.

I'll leave the rest to you, but see if you get the sense that Corbu operated with a child-like understanding of the world. Everything reduced down to the simplest common denominator.

I spent the entire intro to this column in Columns magazine defacing the edifice of Corbusier.

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In a related note, Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros continue to bind together the strands of design, urbanism, math, ecology, evolution, and computer science, which could all broadly be categorized within the phylum of Fractals:

But this imposition of art (real or pretend) on top of life is likely to be highly damaging to both, as the urban scholar Jane Jacobs famously warned. Moreover, an architect is not merely a sculptor at giant scales, but a professional, not unlike a medical professional, with a “duty of care” to provide a living environment with a high grade of quality of life for the rest of us. The architect is not working in a private gallery for the benefit of connoisseurs alone, but deeply affecting the ordinary life and wellbeing of people and regions.

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A commenter added this failed attempt of Corbusier to impose his will upon Algiers.

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Another sent along this article about Golden, CO fighting against the expansion of Denver metro area's beltway through its town:

I didn't particularly care for the article. It provided little context or insight despite the numerous "experts" interviewed. Not that I am for or against beltways per se. While I have a mean streak devoted to superfluous and profligate infrastructure, primarily by way of intra city highways, beltways can be fine, if they are properly integrated with the fractally hierarchical infrastructure where complexity, mobility, density, and desirability function proportionally and in concert.

No beltway in itself caused sprawl to its observable American extent without bank loans, tax policy, and zoning all favoring new "growth." In the sense, that cannibalism can be considered. growth.

We Can Do a Lot of Things, But We Can't Do That

2012-01-16T09:44:00.003-06:00

If you hadn't heard, a bicyclist riding on the Jefferson Street viaduct was struck by a car riding from Oak Cliff to downtown this Saturday. The collision broke his neck. As the news report rightly points out, this is one of the streets suggested for initial restriping of bike lanes. Dallas has no on-street bike lanes at present. Meanwhile, cities around the country are adding them left and right.

It should also be noted that there isn't one safe connection across the Trinity River for pedestrians and/or cyclists at present. Jefferson and Houston Street viaducts, the two primary connections to/fro Oak Cliff are literal nightmares. I've ridden them several times. Yet the irony is that there is so little vehicle traffic to warrant the excess vehicular travel lanes on them. Google Earth Pro tells me that previous traffic studies suggest an average of about 8,000 vehicles per day on each. They're both 4 lanes. 8 lanes in total. The sidewalk for bicyclists and pedestrians abruptly stops. Meanwhile, Main Street in downtown moves 9,000 vehicles per day. It is one lane in each direction.

The Lance Armstrongs as I call them, those that think just some good edjumucation is in order to get ridership and safety up, want riders to co-exist with vehicles on the travel lanes. Cars routinely drive 55 mph on those two bridges. Can you pedal that fast? Can a child? Cars drive as fast as the road design allows them. They haven't a clue as this post points out, which is why they've been saying the same thing with no results for decades. They appeal only to the 1%. Not that 1%, but the 1% identified by Roger Geller that is "strong and fearless."

It is the 60% of the population which is the untapped market that is "interested but concerned." I.e. not batshit crazy enough to try and compete for roadway space with drivers conditioned by a highly competitive traffic environment to drive aggressively. I was in conversation with a woman at one of Chef Nicole's underground dinners a few nights ago. She lamented why does everybody in Dallas have a giant SUV?

The answer, beyond the various tax breaks and artificially deflated gasoline prices for hyper-inflated internal combustion vehicles, is precisely that competition. Every other driver on the road is your enemy? Why? Because the optimum condition of a road is no other drivers. This is the failed logic of the transportation planner/engineer. They're in your way. They cut you off. They slow you down. They tailgate you. It is competitively advantageous to desire a bigger vehicle. In contrast, in European cities, it is competitively advantageous to have a smaller vehicle because space is at a premium, both parking and drive lanes.

Meanwhile, in a safer pedestrian-oriented environment, each other "commuter," whilst on foot, improves the overall experience. And as I tweeted the other day, city form is commonly based on the primary transportation technology of the day. However, foot power is the only transportation technology that transcends time. Therefore, the only truly timeless cities, durable cities, that will surely last long past peak oil (unless we all kill ourselves and each other on the roads first) is the pedestrian-oriented city.

Fortunately, Dallas Torres survived the crash. Or unfortunately? Did I really just say that? In other words, he won't be a martyr for change, since that is apparently what it takes to get the city to do its primary job: ensure public safety. If the city disagrees, thinking that public safety should take a backseat to economic development, there is also the fact that investment and spending along the Magnolia Avenue bike lane in Fort Worth is up over 500%. In one year. The actions of the city make it appear that they don't understand economic development and don't care about public safety. They do however think paying $10 million to Calatrava for a redesign of a physical connection THAT ALREADY EXISTS is a good investment. Maybe he'll just pull a design off the shelf again.

If words like these offend, perhaps they should offend. While the city looks for excuses not to make any changes, will it take a death to begin making changes?

Instead, the city essentially abdicates their role and responsibility forcing the citizenry to throw fund raisers just to build a modicum of safety on their streets.

Perhaps we need to give a call to the Bobs to ask, "what exactly do you do here?"

IntraCity Freeways, Mapped

2012-01-13T13:18:00.006-06:00

Earlier today, I wrote this as an explanation filling in the gaps between highways ----> dead downtowns. Obviously, there is cause and effect, but few take the time to explain why:

You gut the integration, you lose the accommodation. Integration = demand. Accommodation = supply. Cause and effect. As I point out in mySpace Syntax of downtown Dallas post, the real estate market and building technologies built upwards at the exact same time as cities, states, and federal government unwittingly conspired to undermine the demand to fill those towers. But since the towers were new and shiny with whatever modern doo-dads a business may look for at the time, they cannibalized from historic buildings...which could then be torn down for parking all the residents that fled when their homes were taken for highways.

So I did a quick exercise examing inner loop highways in various cities, all at roughly the same scale. When given the time, I'll likely add in the railroads, which also have a divisive effect (see: "other side of the tracks") as well as a rough approximation of the land areas which remain relatively vibrant. It might be nice to test what the ratio of vibrant area vs overall land area within the loop might be and if there is any rough correlation.

Rochester, NY:

Dallas

Houston

Charlotte

Tampa

Detroit

Kansas City

Los Angeles

Paris

Cleveland

Columbus

Cincinnati

Mailbag?

2012-01-13T11:55:00.002-06:00

Not so much a mailbag is a republishing of comments, in the comments section of various posts here, and on twitter, which I'll deem as part of the digital public realm. First, dwind3 alerted me to a few things including this rather amazing post at Atlantic Cities illustrating the before/after effects of modern transportation planning and design:

But we HAD to take those properties. It was for the greater good. And we had to build roads with x,y, and z dimensions and turning radii, because the good book of traffic engineering said so.

You gut the integration, you lose the accommodation. Integration = demand. Accommodation = supply. Cause and effect. As I point out in my Space Syntax of downtown Dallas post, the real estate market and building technologies built upwards at the exact same time as cities, states, and federal government unwittingly conspired to undermine the demand to fill those towers. But since the towers were new and shiny with whatever modern doo-dads a business may look for at the time, they cannibalized from historic buildings...which could then be torn down for parking all the residents that fled when their homes were taken for highways.

Complexity, proximity, efficiency, and synergy. Replaced with... I'm at a loss for words. Homogeneity? Boredom. Dullness. Nice to see the magic bullet of stadiums make an appearance though. THAT'LL SOLVE IT!

-------

Dwind13 also pointed me to a development I'm embarrassed to say I've never heard of, and maybe that gets to his point, Parker Square in Flower Mound:

Dwind13 added:

You should take a look at Parker Square in Flower Mound. I've always felt like it had lots of good potential. human-scaled 3 story buildings, slow road with parking, shopping and green park space with a gazebo. But. They've insisted on no chain stores, and limited the upstairs space to office only. So... no one lives there. And it's surrounded by a suburban sea of houses. There's no reason to venture to the unknown stores because they go out of business so often. I actually think it's a zoning issue or something. i live by it, and its pretty sad.

My response (edited for the awful grammar and punctuation from typing on the iphone):

Until your comment I was unaware of the development. Your initial analysis is right. Any business needs awareness to some extent. Chains get it from recognition, advertising, brand awareness, etc. etc., Local biz needs the recognition that comes from proximate density of a real neighborhood. And return business from locals who develop a personal connection. That plan needs to fill in some of the triangle-shaped "square" to square it up, provide some buffer from the high speed arterial, ideally tame that arterial, infill some of the parking with housing, and improve connections to nearby neighborhoods.

The neighborhoods, of course, would probably fight any multi-family infill as well as any proposed infrastructural connections. Such is life.

-----------

Last night I was interacting with a fellow I've interacted with quite a bit via twitter before, mostly about various downtown issues, since we're both downtown residents. Little did I know, we actually live in the same building. On the issue of dog poop, which I've raised several times: here, here, and here. Frustrated with many of the residents, he referred to them as "suburbanites." Which is not entirely untrue.

But the issue is a bit larger and two-fold. First, the same problem exists in every building of uptown I've lived in as well. It isn't so much a downtown/uptown thing, but it is possibly a "suburban" thing, perhaps more conditioned to allow the doggie droppings to seep into the soil. If anything, I've found that much of uptown still functions rather "suburbanly," with alcohol and dogs necessary social lubricants between head down commutes from residential unit via dim corridor to parking garage.

I've also heard of many complaints pointed towards the type of resident whose parent handles their rent. Perhaps apocryphal, but logically a connection can be made towards a lack of "investment" in the community, even if only renting. The Mondrian had quite the problem upon opening of residents allowing dogs to shit directly in the hallways.

The other, is that leaving dog shit laying around is one of the more loathsome aspects of human nature. London and Rome are notorious for sidewalk land mines. Paris, hardly suburban, eventually gave up, adding a full time doggy janitorial service to sweep the streets of feces. The city found carrots nor sticks to be worth the time, money, and effort, eventually biting the proverbial bullet.

30 Stories in 15 Days

2012-01-09T12:37:00.003-06:00

Yes, a 30-story hotel in China was constructed in but a mere 15-days. Hopefully, with more structural integrity, less corner-cutting than this disaster.

I bring this up due to my high hopes for similar pre-fabricated, modular construction in order to meet the immense housing shortage we face. What?! You say. We have a surplus of 25 million single family homes! You say.

And you'd be right. The deficiency is locational. The majority of the housing glut is in locations deemed to no longer have any real value. Too far from jobs, services, amenities, etc. The city, as a physical entity, grew too big, too fast, aided by sedentary lifestyles and the saturated fat, fast foods of easy lending banking institutions, much like Mr. Creosote:

The shingles and siding material, the copper wiring (if it hasn't already been foraged) is the detritus oozing down the walls. The edges of cities will further erode and contract. Disappear altogether or reorganize into viable clusters. The smear of sprawl but a temporary vestigial residue. We see it today, yet we assume it will last forever. It was there yesterday. It will be there tomorrow. Cities change generation to generation. Urban change needs a time-lapse to visualize it. The cities of today won't meet the needs of the generation tomorrow (in city time). Therefore, the useless will be scrapped and the useful retained, improved.

The city, as a body, is hollowed out, again, much like poor Mr. Creosote post-explosion. Living at the edge is no longer viable for the majority of the population as we return somewhere nearing sanity. With fuel prices surely to rise in perpetuity due to the competing demands of ever increasing population, rising energy usage in the BRICs, and an inability to maintain supply of energy at similarly low cost as was the case for the past century or so, will reinstate the demand for proximity. Being close to things, amenity, jobs, each other.

Lots of supply in areas of low demand. Low supply in areas of high demand (and relatedly, restrictive barriers). Add those two things up and it equals disaster (if we don't act). Or opportunity (if we do).

So back to the city it is. And we'll have to do it fast and furious, ideally with the help of something like Henry Ford's assembly line, except for housing modules. 500 or 600 square feet per module. Functionally adaptable enough to interconnect and expand into 2 or 3 adjacent modules based on your own household's needs. Need 3 bedrooms/3 bathrooms? Purchase (or rent) 3 units, merged together into 1 1500-1800 square foot residence. Need 2? Put two together. Flexibility. Fluidly adaptable to the market. No need for guesswork as to how many studio or 2-bedroom units to build.

I expect this idea to flower someday. There will be an enormous market for it, I suspect. The means of production simply need investment. Oh, and all of the other barriers to infill development have to be ducked, jumped, skirted, or removed altogether as well. And there are many. We have our work cut out for us. Like Mr. Creosote trying to get back in shape.

More Roads = More Traffic

2012-01-09T10:06:00.002-06:00

If only to put this in a place where I can fill a post with keywords to jog my own memory and the search interface for the site...

I'm always looking for this study and never able to find it when I need it:

First, here is the article citing the University of Toronto transportation study that found a one to one relationship between increases in lane miles and increases in Vehicle Miles Travelled, meaning if road miles double over a period of time, we (the citizens of that town) are all also driving double from the beginning of that period of time. The necessary implication is that more roads, everything is further apart. And really, for no good reason, because no matter the infrastructure we always ensure linkages between the things we need and want. Such is the city. May we no longer prioritize the unsustainability of expensive infrastructure and personal automobile transportation at the expense of a more efficient city. Efficient, in how a city functions, and not as a traffic engineer sees efficiency, traffic speed and level of service.

Here is the link to the actual report:

The Fundamental Law of Traffic Congestion: Evidence from US Cities.

They're not playing around. Law. Not hypothesis. Not theory. Law. Fact.

------------------------

And since I'm here, let me dump the correlated University of Brown economics study that showed for every new intracity highway constructed equates to 18% loss in population.

Did Highways Cause Suburbanization?

Simultaneously gutting tax base whilst heaping infrastructural cost/maintenance burdens onto that lessened tax base. This should end well...

Retail Blog-off

2012-01-05T09:33:00.002-06:00

And we're back from a long holiday break and vacation, not particularly rested in the least, but slowly but surely recharging the juices to keep at this thing. The first post of the new year will be part of a retail blog off with fellow urbanists/bloggers, sprung from a twitter dialogue. Shortly thereafter, I hope to recount some of my visits to small towns in New York and, oddly, Arkansas and tell their stories. Or at least, the stories as I interpreted their current condition.

BLOGOFF BACKGROUND

As for the blog-off, this really began with a dialogue on twitter as Hazel Borys of the Placeshakers blog covered/live-tweeted a talk by noted retail consultant Bob Gibbs. Gibbs is on the circuit promoting a new book Principles on Retail Planning and Development. Gibbs specializes in the kind of things that chain stores crave, hard numbers and fast rules with little in the way of gray area. Particularly, things like market catchment area, like how many people it takes to sustain a certain type of store given the size and service of said store, be that a coffee shop, a local neighborhood sundry store, or a walmart.

It is this particular detail that started this entire thing. Borys quoted Gibbs stating that 1,000 households is what it takes to support a neighborhood store. Of course, this is one of those things that gets into the inherent chicken/egg interconnected and intertwined complexities of all things urbanism. For example, even a neighborhood of 500 households will still have demand for goods and services to be provided locally, so should they not be able to at least approach something of a complete neighborhood, where needs and wants can be met locally?

This factoid drew a bit of fire out of Steve Mouzon of the Original Green blog (whose book I recommend), who defended the need for neighborhoods smaller than quoted necessary threshold to have needs provided locally, 1) to improve the value and desirability of the homes within that neighborhood and 2) to reduce the overall vehicle miles traveled therefore at least making a bit of a dent in automobile dependence.

A few things, from my work with local developers in the DFW market, I have a pretty good sense of the number of trips/VMT reductions inherent in different development formats. If unwalkable, car-dependent suburbanism = X, walkable suburbanism, such as what Steve was referring to (in this case, The Waters in Alabama) = X(80%) of total VMTs. And lastly, walkable urbanism, such as in uptown Dallas = X(60%) or a 40% reduction in trips due to the proximity of things. And if you're anything like me, you see the monetary value (and otherwise) of proximity. So Steve has a point.

My question to Steve was, to what level must that store in The Waters be subsidized? In essence, I was digging for what Gibbs' true point was, that it takes roughly 1000 homes to support a local sundry store without subsidy. But as Steve was pointing out, sometimes subsidy is necessary. Chicken/Egg. Just look at the grocery store in downtown Dallas, urban market. The common rule is retail follows rooftops. Except rooftops (residents) often are skeptical of pioneering into new markets without basic services, whether that be in outer, exurban locations or in desolated downtowns. The city of Dallas deemed it necessary to support the market at a cool $3 million/year.

The downtown real estate market tried to hit the uptown market rental rates and missed. Similarly, Urban Market tried to hit a niche Whole Foods specialty market. It also missed and is now providing more basics including a Dollar Store section. It is competing with the plethora of 7-11s instead of Whole Foods.

Ultimately, Mouzon pointed out that the old school developer thought it more wise to build a $1million entry feature to the neighborhood than to subsidize a neighborhood store because the size of the neighborhood didn't meet the threshold. Now one of the ironies here of course, is that without the services/goods provided by such a market, the neighborhood would never approach capacity, nor would it spin off auxiliary developments adjacent that might fill out that magic 1,000 household number, thus allowing the store to sustain itself.

I don't remember the exact dollar amount that the store needed each year just to stay in business, but I calculated that the cost of the entry feature, put towards the store, could have sustained it in business for about 16 years without even factoring in potential interest from an escrow.

Ultimately, that is a decision for the developers/investors to make and consultants like ourselves are only left to provide opinions and suggestions.

OTHER BLOGGERS BLOGGING OFF

As for the actual blogoff, given our backgrounds and aligning opinions, I don't expect this to take on any kind of adversarial stance. Any debate might only be found in the little details. In fact, I quite like what both have written as they track with things that I often talk/write about as well. Emotion and science. What might be deemed the subjective and the objective realities underlying urban places.

If you've read this space for any period of time, you know I care little for the superficialities that many (even professionals) mistake for urbanism. Such as "mixed-use," "build-to lines," structured parking, etc., etc. These are by-products of something deeper, more innate, and more profound.

Adhering to such facile and superficial prerequisites is how we get faux urbanism and Potemkin Villages like Victory, Park Lane Place, or Shops at Allen & Fairview. These are developments brought about by people who whose understanding of urbanism is quite shallow. Getting urbanism right, meaning getting right at its very deepest core, is a must for lasting value. That is, unless you're simply trying to fool people and get your money and profit out before tossing the hot potato to someone else shortly before it fails. The experience of these places is similarly shallow, unmeaningful, and unlovable.

Along these lines, Mouzon writes about the necessity of hope and minces no words getting directly at the issue above:

let's think about the prerequisite of hope. Because without hope, we will not change. Today, some really smart people (whom I respect very highly for other reasons, by the way) have put together guidelines and rules of thumb which poison the transition from sprawl to sustainable places because they make it appear that most places have no hope of succeeding with their transformation.
The classic example of a poison guideline is the "corner store requirement." The best experts say that you can't even support a corner store with less than 1,000 homes… and for pretty much every other type of retail establishment, you need even more "rooftops."

Which tracks right with my stance that human emotion is the core driving force and the creator of cities, as cities are merely the platform for the delivery and exchange of human wants and needs. Without understanding this, and maximizing the ability and potential of the city to meet those needs as efficiently as possible, we can't possibly build successful, sustainable, lovable cities. And as Mouzon has often written, if we don't love a place, we won't care for it, and therefore we won't sustain it.

The city, at its best, facilitates social and economic exchange. Where emotion is the stimulus, the objective and scientific aspect of cities is the connective tissue and the accelerant between these things: the infrastructure, more particularly the interconnectivity

Borys, in her own way, echoes Mouzon's questioning of the rules using quantum physics in her post When to Bends the Rules and Breaks the Law:

When things are very small or very fast, classical mechanics’ laws – as well as their corollaries – do not hold true. Then you’re into the realm of quantum physics where things get very interesting.
Everything boils down to relationships, probabilities, and the fact that when things get small and fast, they act quite differently. Sound a little bit like our economy?
An electron may sometimes act like a particle, and other times act like a wave. And whether or not it tunnels makes a big difference to all the silicon-based artificial intelligence in your life.

In other words, different rules apply for different contexts. And context and the various interrelationships can change, or actively be changed. That is not to say that any place on earth can support density, the changes are never that dramatic. We often try to make too much out of cheap pieces of land. They're cheap for a reason.

Instead, the context and interrelationships are changed in more minor ways. For example, take a typical suburban thoroughfare. Or better yet, a suburban-style thoroughfare in a more urban location, such as West 7th in Fort Worth which I wrote about when introducing the concept of convergence:

In that post, I wrote about infrastructural convergence, ie roads leading towards "high streets," in order to make retail work. However, that is simply not enough. Suburban arterial streets are designed for speed. It is written into their DNA. If traffic speed isn't averaging a certain requirement, they're deemed failing. The irony is that the resultant development will certainly end up failing as it is cannibalized by something further down the road. People simply don't like to be near high speed traffic. It is dangerous, loud, and the air is bad. Fast moving car traffic is by nature repulsive, sociofugal, rather than sociopetal.

What has resulted is the proliferation of semi-walkable bubbles, all-at-once developments like malls or their more recent brethren "town centers," which ironically aren't towns and quite off-center and face a similar future as malls where only one or two will survive and continue to serve the region from which they draw. They are walkable only once you arrive, but you must drive to get there. They are forced to take a defensive towards the hostile roads purveying the majority of consumers to the points of consumption. The intent is clinical, with assembly line efficiency. Convenience is placed at a premium. But that convenience means shuttling people in and out as quickly as possible. Not keeping people there.

Illogical city vs. the Logical

This is the development of the illogical city, rather than the logical. In the logical city, traffic means value. Development wants to get as close as possible to where the people are, hence you end up with buildings interfacing directly up to the street, with demand to live immediately above or adjacent. The place is yet desirable when it isn't hostile, but rather sociopetal. It draws people together. Opportunity is inherent.

The logical city is sustainable as long as its logic isn't undercut via transportation planning intent on moving vehicles rapidly. Once again, is it quick and efficient for me to walk across the street to a store in a dense, desirable place (those two things inextricably linked in the logical city, desirability = density) or is it quicker and more efficient to hop in the car and drive to the nearest store? The car is certainly travelling faster.

But if we look towards physics again, we can understand how these places are formed and maintained. It starts with the science and infrastructure as I alluded to above. Centers of gravity, places that draw people, are created by condensing energy, molecules bouncing about, into a slow vibration.

Now think of that suburban style arterial designed to move its "electrons," or cars, as quickly as possible from points A and B and beyond and occasionally delivering them to adjacent development parcels via curb cuts, large turning radii (to maintain travel speeds), and of course parking lots. Because the street traffic is fast, the buildings don't want to be close, so they use the parking lots as a buffer. Everything slowly but surely becomes increasingly disconnected, fragmented. The bonds of gravity no longer holding strongly together. Each of the little design decisions decreases the safety and amenity of the pedestrian.

It is that pedestrian that holds everything together, that lives nearby (because it is desirable to do so). The pedestrian provides permanence, sustainability. Not just because they're not operating a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, but because they're nearby. They're taking advantage of the amenity of proximity as long as the infrastructure allows, which it must.

Our transportation planning is based on maximizing regional mobility at the expense of local. There are several problems with this. First, planning (one would think) is thinking about the future along with the present. With uncertain gas/oil prices that will likely do nothing but rise with increased population pressures, demand, multiplied by scarcity and increasing refinement costs, it makes little sense (cents?) to build a city dependent upon said fuel behind the entire operation being cheap and plentiful.

Second and relatedly, by doing so, a city is essentially mandating car ownership and operation. Because on the regional scale, the personal automobile is always more suitable than other forms as all destinations are scattered. Effects are two-fold: the poor are unfairly squeezed by having to pony upwards of 30-40% of income just to participate in the local economy. Otherwise, there are similar costs lost in the way of time (and inefficient metro systems covering decentralized places). Also, there is downward pressure on the local middle class, because the vast majority of money towards car O&M costs leaves the local economy by way of car, gas, insurance companies.

Lastly, if city form is defined by the predominant transportation technology, I have argued that the new primary form of transportation is the smart phone and the internet. At least, in how it cuts out a good percentage of the need for physical regional connectivity. Yet we continue to plan and subsequently foist more expensive, inefficient infrastructure upon cities. The internet and smart phones are amplifying the need for local connectivity. As always, Joel Kotkin is wrong about this.

The implications of these factors have multiple effects on local economies (besides infrastructural). First, is the amount of money that remains locally is what drives demand. Or perhaps better said, is what translates human emotion (want and need) into demand. That demand is then manifested in goods, retail opportunities.

The other benefit is the power of synergy. Ideas spring from two creative people bouncing ideas off of one another, working together. Retail businesses do better when clustered with others, through cross-shopping. Mall developers knew this, however that tension between local and regional has cast the institution of the mall to the scrap heap of history. Those that remain are and will continue to slowly but surely relocalize, focusing on the permanence of their context, trending towards complete neighborhoods with housing, jobs, and services all proximate.

Development form follows infrastructural pattern. There is a natural desire (via opportunity) to capitalize by being near traffic. But if that traffic is hostile, an unnecessary and corrosive tension exists, the push-pull of the confused, illogical city where "location, location, location" is overtaken by "if you build it, they will come," a mantra heavily underscored with inherent ephemerality.

Our busy streets must be made amenable to a variety of transportation modes, most importantly with the understanding of how to still move people, but do so in a way that can interface with development. I draw an allegory with a healthy stream vs. an eroded streambank from too much runoff, too fast.

The above diagram shows the relationship of travel speed to development parcels. Much like a healthy streambank, the most biodiversity (activity), happens at the edges, where current is the slowest. If traffic is moving too fast, too close to the edges, development will erode. And as StrongTowns recently pointed out, so will the local tax base. And then cities can no longer support their infrastructure without the tax base. The entire retail dynamic, of providing goods and services to customers, becomes inefficient, stretched too thin.

Chain vs Local

There are then the implications transportation patterns have on the types of businesses that can succeed. In the car-centric pattern, there is a distinct competitive advantage tilted in favor of publicly traded chain businesses, with greater access to capital and investment, with more buying power and leverage, with more ability to secure goods and material at lower costs from suppliers.

It's a business model based on generating profit (what isn't?), at the expense of jobs, (not making value judgment), but is predicated entirely on cheap global transportation (and labor costs overseas). Are either of those things sustainable? I wouldn't bet on it personally. But it sure has paid off handsomely for the Baby Boom Generation born at the right time to take full advantage. The only problem is that very context is set within one of radical upheaval moving forward.

While chains come with the promise of jobs (yes, they do employ people), studies show that for every 2 jobs they create, they replace 3. The net is typically negative. The reason is that local demand remains relatively constant so they're effectively just replacing local businesses. There are likely studies out there refuting this, but the logic is strong. Chains typically pay less than do local businesses. Furthermore, more money stays local from chains. Profits stay local with the owners and small businesses are more likely to utilize the services of other local small businesses (ie accountants, advertising, etc.), which are typically in-house at the chains HQ or subbed out to another national brand.

The wealth gap you see today is this very dynamic in action. It isn't trickle down, but vacuumed upwards. Again, no value judgments, it's just good to be the one operating the vacuum. However, can this system sustain itself? I'm a capitalist, but I prefer a capitalist system that is healthy rather than one that eats its own tail. If people don't have jobs or aren't making enough money, then demand for goods diminishes. They can't even support these businesses. The profit at all costs motive drives quality of goods and most worryingly food down, leading to an assortment of direct and indirect externalities.

Then there is the question, of whether the skill set and training even exists (via education), to even begin thinking about "import replacement," and you start seeing the high degree to which all of these things are interconnected.

When Local Biz Has Competitive Advantage?

The only advantages I've been able to discern for local businesses competing against chains are 1) flexibility, in terms of the type of building/size of space they're able to operate within, and 2) quality of service. The ownership is local and therefore a concerned stakeholder in the neighborhood. If the neighborhood/context suffers, they suffer. All too often with national chains, there is little concern for the area, just profit extraction to shareholders elsewhere, who only care enough to ensure continued profit extraction.

Furthermore, and this is highly anecdotal, but repeated enough that I feel confident in deeming it empirical, the service is better with local businesses. Not all of course, but those that don't dare suffer their fate. They have to rely on good service and a personal connection with their clientele. Whereas chains, with their often miserable and underpaid staff, can rely solely on name recognition (and often, lack of real competition).

Local businesses need a neighborhood. Meaning, they need density nearby that can and wants to walk. they need locals and they need to be a "third place," a Cheers where everyone knows your name, you feel welcome, or the shop owner that is part businessman, part steward of the neighborhood as Jane Jacobs writes in Death and Life. Meanwhile, it's hard for many big chains to get into dense, resilient, complete, walkable neighborhoods primarily because they aren't needed.

As you can tell, it is impossible to talk strictly about retail without discussing the broader context of the economy (and its dynamics) as well as the variations of individual neighborhoods, where they are, where they want to be, and perhaps unwittingly, where they need to be in order to survive.

While the various dynamics of cities, with regards to transportation and commercial opportunities, may all be interconnected, it all starts with physical interconnectivity. And the places with the highest degree of walkability, are the places with the greatest interconnectivity, and therefore, demand, and with it predictable levels of resilience, permanence, and lasting value.

Discussing any subset of urbanism, such as retail, within in the tightly packaged vacuum that the corporate world of today appreciates, I believe to be the deeper issue that troubled Borys, Mouzon, and myself. And that is how Gibbs approaches the subject, within the static frame of today, that rules of retail are constant when they're anything but. Certain rules, might apply today, but not tomorrow. Here, but not there. Not in the everchanging world based within certain constants (like human emotion). Without, the entire exercise of setting rules all just seems so very superficial... kind of like a form-based code without regulating block size, which will be in my February D Magazine column.

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Intersection Density, Disinvestment, and Decay

2011-12-15T10:12:00.006-06:00

On twitter this morning and in recent discussion about the West Dallas Plan and its relation to the contentious Sylvan:Thirty project I've been writing/talking a good bit about block structure. Particularly, block size and the surrounding network, its complexity and interconnectedness as measured by intersection density. I have several contentions regarding the West Dallas Plan, but as it regards to Sylvan:Thirty, I found the biggest glaring weakness is the lack of definitive block size. There are no maximums. Therefore, there is no certainty that a complex, interconnected, safe, desirable, walkable urban neighborhood will ever emerge.

This centers on the work by Prof. Norman Garrick at the University of Connecticut, who has shown direct correlation between intersection density and the safety of an area, modal share, and walkability. I find this to be not just correlated, but causal and predictive as towards the future value of a neighborhood. Limited network density, means decreased mobility, increased risk of severe injury, therefore less desirable, and ultimately less valued by individuals, the market, and eventually investors. They often don't realize it well until the place has cleared out and its lost critical mass and then real estate values plummet.

This fall, the City of Dallas initiated a new planning project focused on five DART station area plans. All are in rather desperate areas and the plan is that after initial planning efforts, each will have a first phase of affordable, workforce housing for the kind of people that need to be near DART station in order to have mobility so as to not have the mandatory expense of car ownership.

However, DART is only one form of mobility, regional mobility. There also must be local mobility. So when going after this project, I put together the following studies showing intersection density and real walkability as opposed to the typical 10-minute walk circles. (The project has been given to Fregonese/Calthorpe)

Also, it should be noted that distance-based walkability is strictly an objective measurement. How far can you get in ten minutes? What is within convenient reach? In the following imagery, I'm only showing that study. I've left out the subjective analysis (as you can see pages are missing), which shows imagery of the character of the environment: boarded up buildings, vacant lots, parking lots, broken or non-existent sidewalks, big bad roads, etc. etc. i.e. the kind of things that make walking feel or seem unsafe, unpleasurable, and undesirable.

Each study area gets three pages. The first shows the demographics in the study area. The second shows the real world ten-minute walking distances in relation to the theoretical ten-minute walk circles. The third page shows intersection density. It was my point that the areas became run-down because of the lack of real, quality public infrastructure in the way of an interconnected, dense network of streets and blocks.

See (and click to embiggen):

Yellow shows theoretical walking distance. Green shows actual 10-minute walks.

Blue dots show intersection density and on each page I show the calculation of intersections per square mile. Garrick's work shows that walkability, safety, and in turn desirability, really jump at around 225 intersections per square mile and up. All of these are much, much lower. Most of which are sub-100.

As a contrast, State-Thomas neighborhood, one of the best examples of neighborhood revitalization in the country after the area was gutted by S&L speculation in the 80s, has 253 intersections per square mile. It's average block size is about 350x325'. The Pearl District in Portland, another example of revitalization, has a typical block size that is even smaller, 225'x225'. In turn there is a very tight network of streets, yielding a highly walkable intersection density of 447(!).

Thus, we can begin putting together some predictions that any revitalization must be tempered and potentially unsustained if we don't significantly raise mobility and safety of areas through increased intersection/network density.

4 Types of Cyclists

2011-12-14T12:02:00.004-06:00

This highly effective little graphic comes from a white paper produced by Roger Geller. The key to bike ridership is not converting the "Interested but Concerned" into "Enthused" or "Fearless." Changing people is far more difficult than changing the infrastructure (unless you are the City of Dallas).

Instead, you have to tap into that population base. But why?

For one, despite the various regional geographies and mindsets we might personally identify with, these percentages are pretty consistent no matter where the question is posed. Portland, Dallas, or Amsterdam. The difference is how amenable the infrastructure is.

Second, this:

and this:

Is far safer, cheaper (for city and individual), more spatially & energy efficient, and healthier than this:

or this:

Or this:

How much longer would you like your income heading towards these things? At some point, the choice will no longer be yours.

Thoroughfare Plans and the Downward Spiral of (un)intended Consequences

2011-12-14T10:25:00.006-06:00

The delay in the bike plan has raised the rabble from the woodwork and apparently really touched a nerve within those active, engaged, occasionally hopeful and sometimes cynical towards Dallas' efforts. Certainly this is partially due to the popularity and interest the bike plan had going into it. There must also be a growing sentiment that all plans, those that the citizenry really want and need, or perhaps only feel deep within their bones of intuition, are the ones that always fizzle. That only sit on shelves as plans for planning's sake.

Meanwhile, the world's ugliest building is finishing out. Soon to eclipse the previous holder of the title. Both local. All of that gets done because it's easy. It sort of strikes me like the South Park episode about Magic Johnson curing AIDS. "Just inject it with $250,000 worth of liquified, concentrated cash." It's not the city's money (for the most part), at least not yet. Until they start getting the maintenance bill or wish they had preserved some land for actual tax generated private property.

The map of downtown Dallas when you black out parking lots or garages, vacant buildings/structures/lots, as well as non-taxable entities (churches and civic facilities) is not pretty. There is a distinct imbalance between tax base, what might be called the vanilla ice cream in the sundae, i.e. the foundation the cherries sit upon and those cherries. All the big wow projects we get and then just sit.

There are a few abstract, generalized formulae I like to point to in order to explain how urban dynamics and morphology work. The first is that any place, area, city, or neighborhood exists within a continuum:

Macro Level:

Viable ---> Livable ---> Memorable or Lovable

and...

Micro Level:

Integration begets Accommodation (usable land uses, entrepreneurial opportunites, ie demand) begets Decoration (detailed design improvements)

Of course, there is a degree below viable which is not viable for concentrated human habitation. There is no opportunity there other than agriculture or nature. The degree which a place sits on that continuum is defined by its level of integration, locally, regionally, and globally. How connected it is to everything else. What we find is that often the infrastructure for global and regional connectivity often disrupts local connectivity, reducing overall integration and thereby dropping the level perhaps from Livable to merely viable. These include airports, shipping ports, rail hubs, highways, large arterials, etc. Likely as some kind of shipping depot, light industrial that wants to be by an airport, or gas stations/strip centers that want to be on regionally connective freeways.

What happened to many of the downtowns in the U.S., particularly in the Sun Belt was the fervor with which they pursued regional connections at the expense of local integration, that which can be safely and enjoyably walked, if one so chooses. There is an extremely high degree of mobility. After spending some time in Barcelona this summer, I'm not sure I can point to a better example. You can get to just about anywhere in the city, to all of your needs, near or far, quickly and expediently. Only on the rarest of occasions do the regional connections disrupt the local:

Notice the development around it has been ripped to pieces. Sure, things will infill, but the character is so poorly defined and integrated that it will never hold up to the rest of Barcelona. The eternal cooperation and competition between and within cities. It should also be noted the other Norman Foster phallic high-rise is right there. It's a common response to failures in the network to overcome them with extravagant buildings. Sometimes you even make it super shiny and glowy to cover up the degraded ground plane. Sound familiar at all?

Often times those destinations are close. You can walk across the street to them. Because I live in one of the few places in all of DFW where it is possible to get to everything I need within a few blocks including transit, my velocity is quite slow. Much slower than suburbanites getting to a their local Appleby's or whatnot. However, I can get there more predictably, more quickly, and while expending much less energy. The average Barcelona resident burns one-twelfth of the gasoline than does the typical Sun Belt resident. Little side note for you.

There are two problems here. One is the way we measure traffic efficiency and rate roadways, which is entirely by speed of movement. This is essentially coded in a way to always, ALWAYS favor car traffic and thereby sprawl as well as dangerous roadways. Why sprawl? Because the formulae used will always say that only more lanes are necessary, widening of all roads in order to improve traffic flow. The reason is because it is a broken system with an impossible end game. The optimal condition is NO cars on the road. Every other car is the enemy and an impediment to your and everybody else's trip. Hence, why you hate them, flick them off, curse them, and get out of your car miserable. Or was that just me?

Because the solution to every question is bigger roads, and the cities happily take the federal money, the cities end up gutting their own tax base. For every percentage increase in lane miles, ie size of roads, there exists a 1 to 1 increase in the VMTs driven by the citizenry. Meaning, the more roads that are built, the further afield everyone lives, the more everyone drives. Bigger roads invariably lead to a further spread out population, with increased infrastructural burden, lower density to pay for that infrastructure, and thus it is all failing. Every part of the system, from the financing and budget to the physical integrity of the actual structures themselves:

Because all cities and metro areas are required by federal law to create thoroughfare plans they must categorize every road. Furthermore, because of the way fed/state money is prioritized towards the bigger roads (highways and arterials) there is an incentive for cities chasing money like crack fiends to upgrade, reclassify, or "improve" roads towards the bigger and badder. These interupt the fine-grained local connective tissue of neighborhoods. It decreases downtowns steadily, with each new road from Memorable down to Livable and eventually down to barely Viable.

Meanwhile, land formerly out in the boonies, in places we now know as McKinney, Plano, Allen, Frisco, etc., went from not viable, to Viable, to Livable in some cases. It remains to be seen how many can remain livable and/or viable on into an increasing unclear energy future. I've written before how cities are always defined by the newly emergent transportation technology and how that technology is now the internet, smart phones, etc. The ability to be connected long distances (regionally and globally) somewhat effectively reduces the demand for regional and global connections. Sure, they're sometimes still necessary, but not to prioritize them while de-emphasizing the local. The local is density. The local is where people collaborate, innovate, interact, and invent. The local is what we must prioritize.

For a brief read on spatial integration, the math and measure of it, and how we decreased the level of downtown Dallas integration and connectivity, thus undermining demand while adding supply of speculative office towers, much of which have emptied out, please see here.

DC, More Like BC

2011-12-13T12:00:00.002-06:00

As in "behind the times," amirite? They so could've built this:

Think about how many of those pesky buildings are in the way, that could've been knocked down to make way for gas stations and parking. Oh, plenty o' parking. Cheap, plentiful, convenient parking lots. #progress #economicdevelopment

Day in the Life of a Pop-up Street Cafe

2011-12-13T10:41:00.002-06:00

Location matters, of course. Integration --> Accommodation --> Decoration. Though this is more of a parklet than it is cafe space for the restaurant that paid for it. Would a few tables help or hurt? Having only the common bench seems to make it rather inviting where tables might discourage the public nature of it.

Unloading

2011-12-13T10:20:00.004-06:00

Rudy Bush, the DMN's city hall beat reporter asked me to weigh in on the latest delays, objections, etc. with implementing the city's new bike plan. You'd think those issues would've been voiced and addressed long ago. Land mines. Makes you wonder about the entire process. I feel for Angela and Scott on Dallas City Council. They're trying. They're really trying. Here is my response, cross-posted from the DMN's blog:

Well, there are a few issues at hand. From the way I understand it the time and delay really stem from the transportation committee, which is hesitant to lose any traffic lanes dedicated to cars. Meaning, it isn't just as simple as re-striping existing roads whenever they're due for re-painting, which would be the cheap, logical, and expedient thing to do in the appropriate locations.
Second, it strikes me as disingenuous to throw numbers around for an entire system buildout that could take who knows how long or how many different projects it would entail. The slow down makes the study and planning effort look a bit like a sham, which is a real waste of money. It should also be noted that I've never seen as many people at a public kickoff as with this bike plan. People were excited.

Contrast the way the city is operating here with how Fort Worth has been enacting bike lanes - incrementally and effectively. I find it amazing that the Better Block Project was invented in Dallas, yet there is no evidence of results from those events. Meanwhile, the city of Fort Worth made those changes permanent.

This has an economic development component to it as well. The Magnolia Avenue corridor's sales receipts have jumped from (and if I remember the numbers correctly) $2 million last year to $11 million in 2011. It was simple re-striping, one street at a time. Meanwhile, as I joked on twitter Monday, we're spending how much on Calatrava to redesign a bridge (which as the existing Calatrava Bridge suggests, he'll probably just copy his own design again (see: Reggio Emilia, Italy)), a silly idea and engineering study for a Ferris Wheel, etc. etc.? If they think that is economic development, then I have another bridge to sell them.

Part of economic development is being cool, which is invaluable. In fact, that is probably the biggest element to long-term economic success, in attracting businesses and talented individuals. They want to go where it is cool, where it matches their lifestyle. The bike and its relationship to what is cool, mostly through Millennial generation nostalgia, can't be overlooked. In the same way that Boomers saw James Dean and cars as a form of freedom, I really think my generation and younger, those dependent upon mom or the school bus to drive us everywhere growing up, saw the bike as our independence.

When people have choice in transportation and can make their own decisions rationally, based on their particular needs for a particular trip, that makes a truly "smart city." It builds intelligence into the operating system by empowering the users if there truly are rational options. Biking, like many other forms of transportation, is virtually impossible here, which is expressed in the numbers of people who actually do it.

Another mistake is to make transportation decisions based on existing land use and density. For example, everything is far apart and rather inconvenient for anything but the car. So the ignorant use this, saying, "Well, everything is too far apart to bike." Of course, it is. Because the transportation system is built only for the car, so the land uses and development patterns respond in kind. If you provide adequate infrastructure for other forms of transportation, the city and the real estate market will adapt.

Now look at the cities that everybody is dying to live in, be in, visit: New York, Copenhagen, Vancouver, Barcelona. These are cities that have been focusing not just on bicycling, but on balancing transportation, with legitimate choices in modes and routes of transportation. We like to throw around the term "world class," but those are really world class cities. They don't need to puff their chest and boast about it as some superficial fabrication.

In other news, here is the map of traffic fatalities in DFW Metroplex 2001-09:

The Integration Increment

2011-12-06T16:08:00.002-06:00

This is in relation to this.

Oh, addendum: here is a little background information:

High integration means high value in the "movement economy," i.e. access and the commercial viability to capitalize on it. This then in turn means high level of service (commercial) and amenity. Which then, in turn, ought to mean high level of demand for residential proximity to said amenities. In theory, it and the process to deliver the above, means a full urban ecology in bloom where each nourishes the other in positive feedback loops.

DFW Squares/Plazas, Chapter 3

2011-12-06T10:07:00.003-06:00

As you may know, I've begun a bit of a recurring examination and perhaps critique of the plazas and squares of DFW. You can find part 1 here and part 2 here. Admittedly, this may be short-lived since there just might be less legitimately integral plazas to the overall movement and land use network in all of DFW than in Siena, Italy alone (and I specifically chose an aerial that ignore the Campo):

I'm going to review two by request today, Southlake Town Square and the Eisemann Center in Richardson, both of which have been built within the last ten or so years. Keep in mind the word integral mentioned above, because that is what gets lost in the majority of our attempts at these single-purpose, off the shelf, attempts at something loosely called "sense of place."

In other words, it has been completely bastardized for marketing purposes as our transportation, real estate, and placemaking, i.e. people places, have all lost sight of one another when they ought to be intertwined. That gets too in the way of the road builders and "efficiency" pursuers, even though the end result of their labor is the antithesis of efficient.

First up, Southlake Town Square: Suburban, OK.

The first thing I notice regarding the primary square at Southlake is its scale that would make emperor's blush. Three football fields side by side can fit within the building envelope. Likely intentionally large to allow for large gatherings, it isn't exactly designed to suit events, lacking a bit of flexibility in its intent. I imagine the large pond and fountain collects some of the runoff hence its relative lack of accessibility. If the water is purely functional, I imagine it could be collected somewhere else.

Sure, it looks nice, but the fact that you can't interact with it, get down to the level and touch it, detracts from its aesthetics. Furthermore, being that it is sunken creates a weird spatial environment in such a large open space, that I get a bit agoraphobic thinking about it. Of course, I'm open to corrections if you can get down to it.

The larger issue is the relationship between building height and the distance between building faces, i.e. the width of the space. Like it or not we're still cave people. We like feeling as though we are within confined spaces. The rough max building height to open space relationship where we still feel as though we're within an "outdoor room" is about 1:5, say two 20' tall buildings separated by a 100' wide space. The relationship at Southlake looks to be about 1:12, hence agoraphobia.

I also question what this does for the commercial environment, since cross shopping is divided by such a large distance. Contrast this with my favorite part of Southlake:

I give this space an A+, given its context. It feels nice, it doesn't try to do too much, it feels integral to its environment.

Perhaps that is another part of the problem with the main square, that it is divided by the large arterial Southlake Boulevard. This is rather natural, you want to get people off of that road, because duh, it's an awful road. So instead of improving the road (unthinkable!), you create a road side attraction and make the experience off-center from the road:

If you buy into the work of Bill Hillier and Space Syntax, you know that any/every deviation from the primary axis or energy source, that being the arterial, is realized by an incremental loss in value.

Except, they are improving the road according to the latest google earth aerial!...

Or not. Actually, it just looks like they are adding what I presume to be a grass median. This is "improvement." The road isn't being narrowed, still three travel lanes on each side. Traffic isn't being slowed. And perhaps even worse, they are blockading connections between the two sides of development. All through movement, no stick around movement. No gravitational pull.

Other than the arbitrary shrubbing and overly wide scale of the square, it's about as best we can do under the iron and ignorant fist of traffic engineers.

Eisemann Center, Richardson. Grade, Incomplete.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this yet. This has been a long time in the works, yet the development has filled out slowly. Very slowly. In fact, the plaza, I suppose, isn't even yet fully enclosed. That is, if the plaza is what seems to be more of a pedestrian promenade between the DART stop and the performing arts center.

It can look great with the proper framing and optics! Stepping back a bit is where the confusion sets in...

As you can see at the bottom left, the last site hasn't yet filled in. I'm confused as to where the center of this place is. Again, it is presumably the axis running left to right on this image. However, the placement of the garages and office buildings is clumsy. I guess the office buildings needed to interact with some abstract landscape rather than a potential people place. Meanwhile the garages occupy two corners of the primary junction point of the place.

However, even if the last parcel were to fill in, I'm skeptical the critical mass is there to bring the place to life. I think the scale and minimalist design of the plaza will be perfectly fine and nice. With the highway acting as a barrier on one side, less than a quarter mile in the other three directions, whatever they're trying to build here runs into awful suburban arterials and disconnected office parks, none of which have much of a relationship between each other. Precisely why the value will be sucked right out of all of them. Hopefully the Eisemann and its context can stay strong, providing the seed of regeneration when all else fails around it.

Not a Pedestrian Mall

2011-12-06T09:28:00.003-06:00

Janette Sadik Khan has hit it big. Main stream media is picking up on the wild and crazy ideas of actually improving cities:

Video link here (sorry, no embed code)

This isn't about de-car-ing the city or pedestrian malling and this particular solution won't work just anywhere. Every single place across this country will have its own special calibrated solution. This is also not to be confused with pedestrian mall-ing of downtowns. What they did in NYC is improve overall mobility, which is precisely why business has improved. Not because it is pedestrian, but because it is more fluid. More pedestrians can fit in Times Square than cars AND the only time they're congested is on New Years Eve.

Mexico City Gets It, Bikes & Pedestrianization that Is

2011-11-28T14:28:00.003-06:00

From conversations with several friends who are from the Distrito Federal, it seems to be leading the way back from the brink in Mexico as cultural capitals tend to do. From their estimation, this is largely due to a generation from 22-35 or so that have been educated elsewhere, traveled the world, seen other places, and have returned home to start programs/businesses like their bike sharing program. When new ideas gain a foothold in a place there is naturally a backlash by conventional wisdom and the preservation of the status quo. Ideas are always battling, competing for critical and decisive mass in order to assert themselves. Witness the memetic competition in action:

This past summer, Mexico City radio station Imagen was forced to place one of its commentators, Angel Verdugo, on indefinite suspension over disparaging remarks he made about the city’s bicyclists. Calling them a “new plague,” Verdugo also accused the bicyclists of putting on “European” airs. The commentator reminded them that Mexico City is not Paris, and that “here is the concrete jungle.” As if that were not enough, Verdugo invited drivers to “throw their vehicles at them, immediately.” Not surprisingly, the statements provoked widespread outrage.

Of course, and inevitably, the best ideas always win (eventually). The new idea always has to bear the burden of proof. And slowly but surely we're all learning it, sharing it, spreading it so that the world can be a safer, more fair, more just, more opportunistic and empowering place to live:

In the 1950s, Mexico City was redesigned along the model of U.S. cities like Los Angeles, with a focus on large suburbs and grand avenues. That, in turn, made the Mexican capital dangerous for pedestrians. The current government is trying to reverse that trend by putting pedestrians and cyclists first. The biggest challenge, however, may be getting the city’s drivers on board. Car owners are used to being kings of the road. Even so, at least in the areas where the new measures have been implemented, change is brewing.
City authorities say that reducing the commuting time will have a direct economic effect. For starters, cars are expensive. “It’s estimated that an average person has to spend three hours worth of work every day to pay for a car,” says Jesús Sánchez, a private consultant. Cycling and walking are far cheaper. They’re also healthier, and therefore less burdensome on the health system.

The costs of a car-based system (city) are exponential, as our burgeoning debts, both public and private, attest. Likewise, the savings AND beneficent profits (socially, environmental, and economic) of a less-car dependent system are similarly exponential. But in a good way.

Spreading Out, Back In

2011-11-28T08:36:00.003-06:00

The above image is from the print edition of the Charlotte Observer. It is pretty self-explanatory, showing the enlargening, broadening of the poor. Of course, the poor are still huddling up as close to the urban core as possible, which might otherwise be known as opportunity areas (for better or worse, mind you).

The other interesting note is the bifurcated pattern of the wealthy, which is pretty observably replicated in every other American city. About half are moving into defensible, monocultural enclaves far out from the core, while others are repopulating the center, otherwise known as high amenity areas.

As for the poor migrating outward, in many ways being pushed out to area where they must "drive til they qualify," which really isn't the poor as much as lower and middle classes getting squeezed toward the poor end of the toothpaste tube, Charlotte in particular has been in the news quite a bit for the rise in criminal and drug activity at the edges. I don't find this to be unique to Charlotte either.

I don't find either to be particularly "right" or "wrong," but rather both quite natural, with examples throughout history. The well-to-do could have country manors, simply because they could afford it (of course, this also necessitates extreme wealth, the kind found in the various gilded ages) or they possess the best, most desirable property, that within the city boundaries.

A good example of this might be Rothenburg, Germany where the most wealthy had peripheral castles with servants, essentially their own private, nearly self-sufficient mini-cities. While the next class of wealthy, often merchants, occupied their particular version of the "high street" or "main street." Their houses were ornate, and highly concentrated along the radials stemming from the marketplatz, with more spartan dwellings toward the periphery.

The highest value area, the area of the highest "convergence" or spatial integration (that is til other cities surpassed Rothenburg's purpose) had the greatest amount of density and ornament, i.e. accommodation. Integration begets accommodation (which might have a subset called "decoration" or "ornamentation" -- both by-products of demand of density).

The lower density and more affordable wants to get as close as possible to the integration or "convergence" points, the areas of opportunity. Rothenburg is interesting because it is so small that there is really only one major identifiable one, with a few others scattered at the edges where the radial or "entry" streets intersect with some of the smaller "orbitals" or the outlying streets.

Point being, there is always some measure of natural order occurring within cities as they shift shape, mold, expand or contract, and they all come down to desirability, opportunity, individual wants and needs. Though, what people can afford and how many can afford it, is a critical component to the "weight" or mass of the movement dynamic.

Traffic Deaths, Mapped

2011-11-23T11:20:00.003-06:00

Here is a link to a pretty incredible site, a map of every single traffic related death in the US between 2001-2009. Nationwide:

Blob of purple. Says little. In fact, this would be more informative I think if it was then overlaid with a graphic emphasizing per capita deaths by city.

Nonetheless, awesome and terrifying. Like any natural disaster. Except this isn't natural, but entirely manmade. And no, I don't find it overkill to remind that Copenhagen has a goal to reduce traffic-related fatalities to zero for an entire year. It's good to have goals. In the last year, they had 5. It's better to have goals that can be met and measured. What are ours?

Let's look closer at downtown Dallas:

A few things jump out. First, the two dominant color-coded deaths: blue for pedestrian and purple for passenger/driver, make up about 90% of the deaths, split pretty evenly. Second, almost all are clustered around the highest speed roads, mostly the highways. Perfectly understandable, if not even predictable.

What I find most interesting is the amount of pedestrian deaths around the freeways. These are barriers, yet there is still motivation to try and cross them. We have to get where we're going and because of the way we've built our city, we have to take our life in not our hands but the hands of others that very likely aren't on the wheel, but texting with one and applying make-up (or shaving with an electric razor - to be non-gender specific) with the other while steering with the knee. I've done it. I also don't like that I have, hence the reason I got rid of my car. Other than the significant change in mood before/after driving.

Backing up a bit, the pattern is still evident as the graphic is organized entirely around the highest speed traffic. Again, predictable, but still there are pedestrians. I'd hypothesize that the number of pedestrian-vehicle conflicts are significantly lower on the roads where the most deaths occur. In other words, where the most pedestrians AREN'T.

The natural assumption is likely, "well, I need to get where I'm going. Dumbasses shouldn't walk on busy roads." Do you think the citizens of Vancouver can't get to where they're going? They have no freeways within the city limits. Did LA shutdown during carmageddon? No to both. Both commuters and the real estate market adapt to the transportation system built. It IS the driver that the rest of the city, its patterns and behaviors, adapts to.

If government's entire role is public safety (and secondarily efficiency/fairness of the market as well as a sustainable city), might we consider building/retrofitting a more humane transportation framework?

That's One Pretty Graphic

2011-11-21T21:32:00.004-06:00

Since I haven't produced much content on the blog lately, I thought I might show a fraction of the goodness I've been working on, on the side. Before, After. The full sized versions are 36x48 inches, but you can likely make out what is going on...

Hiatus

2011-11-10T09:18:00.002-06:00

I'm going to take a break from blogging here for a bit. For how long, I'm not sure. Whether a street is 4 lanes or 2 seems rather irrelevant now.

WalkableDFW patrick kennedy

Of those who let down the ideals we share as Penn State graduates & they themselves are not above nor exempt from...

7 Nov

WalkableDFW patrick kennedy

My time spent here will instead be dedicated to the permanent removal of any/everyone in the Univ administration w/ any prior awareness...

7 Nov Favorite Retweet Reply

WalkableDFW patrick kennedy

Might not be on here much. As some of you know I am a Penn State grad, having some difficulty coming to terms with the news...

Tuesday Linkage

2011-11-08T07:31:00.003-06:00

This is what happens when you allow incessant road building, siphoning public monies, parking standards, tax breaks for oil, gas, car companies, and Euclidean zoning to continue if for no other reason than because that is they it's been since we've known it. Then, your private money begins getting siphoned away, with little choice in the matter. You can't move closer to where you work because zoning prevents enough density to bring prices towards affordable levels to those that might wish to do so. So you have to move further and further out. So far that it can cost upwards of half your monthly take home pay, just to get to work. This is a tax. It is a hidden tax just to participate in the local economy. And by doing so, the majority of that money for car ownership, maintenance, gas, and insurance leaves the local economy. And we wonder why all of our cities are slowly but surely going bankrupt. If not yet financially, surely intellectually.

All told, Americans spend $489 billion annually on gasoline. Every 25-cent increase in the price of gas costs households $90 million per day. That’s hitting a lot of Americans very hard, especially right now as real wages stagnate and unemployment levels remain high.

And no, it is not about building more roads to reduce traffic so traffic flow and therefore the engine becomes more efficient. It is not only about building/buying more efficient cars because the amount of paving, parking, and time lost to traffic and commuting is also at issue. It is about reducing demand. Although demand implies that this is something we want, which it isn't. People want choice. The current road/city building is not about choice nor freedom as American Dream Coalition and other crooked hacks will have you believe. Choice is mode of transportation and possible routing because there are a number of options and destinations within reasonable distances.

It is about reducing our mandated need for spending our entire lives in the car where everyone else on the road diminishes the "ideal" road condition, where everyone else on the road is the enemy. Not only does it harm the economy, but it can't be good socially either. That's one of the big reasons I gave up my car. I was tired of getting out of it angry every day.

Link of the Day

2011-11-07T08:07:00.003-06:00

There might be more, there might not, but this was too good to share. As somebody on the Professional Urbanist listserv suggested, pushing "walkability," bikeability, and transit is pretty futile unless highway spending is cut off at the knees. This is where "walkability" starts and ends, otherwise it is severed completely.

Reprinted in full from Eugene Weekly:

Road Overkill
$1.5 billion in freeways planned
by Alan Pittman
Two months ago an obscure but powerful local committee held a hearing on $1.5 billion in government spending, but no one testified.
The hearing before the Metropolitan Policy Committee (MPC), an intergovernmental group of local elected officials, was on a Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) that would largely ignore local concerns about global warming, livability and urban sprawl by investing $1.5 billion in highways over the next two decades.
In the past couple years, the city of Eugene has held dozens of public hearings and meetings involving thousands of citizens to develop plans to reduce climate pollution from driving, increase bicycling, increase walkable, 20-minute neighborhoods and envision a city with less sprawl. But the RTP ignores all of that, envisioning a metropolis dominated by massive freeway projects.
Here are some of the biggest:
• $60 million to add lanes and interchange capacity to Beltline from River Road to Coburg Road at a cost of $34 million per mile of freeway.
• $110 million to add freeway lanes or interchange capacity at or near the I-5 Beltline interchange.
• $36 million to expand the I-5 interchange near the city of Coburg.
• $50 million for a new interchange at Highway 126 and Main Street in Springfield.
• $40 million for a new interchange at Highway 126 and 52nd Street in Springfield.
• $30 million to expand the Gateway Beltline intersection at I-5.
• $32 million for eight new arterial projects for the Jasper/Natron land speculation area in West Springfield.
• $32 million for a four-lane arterial bridge over the Willamette north of Beltline.
• $45 million to expand I-5 interchanges and widen the freeway at Franklin Boulevard and at Glenwood Boulevard
• $65 million to expand the I-5 interchange at 30th Avenue and widen the freeway.
• $25 million to widen Beltline from Roosevelt Boulevard to West 11th Avenue.
•$22 million to expand the 126 interchange at Pioneer Parkway.
• $29 million to widen the 126 highway from I-5 to Mohawk Boulevard.
• $8.8 million to expand the Delta Beltline interchange.
• $20 million to widen McVay Highway near Goshen and I-5.
The draft Eugene Pedestrian and Bicycle Plan calls for doubling walking and biking in the next two decades to 36 percent of commuters to reduce pollution and obesity and make the city more livable, but money for bike and pedestrian infrastructure makes up only 3.5 percent of the money spent on highways in the RTP.
“What we are looking for is really just a few crumbs,” said Tom Schneider, a volunteer on the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. Schneider marveled at an item for $55 million to save a few seconds of delay for drivers on an I-5 Beltline off-ramp, while he said $3 million could fix almost all of the city’s biggest sidewalk deficits.
The RTP’s massive freeway investment also conflicts with the city’s adopted Climate and Energy Action Plan. The plan calls for cutting greenhouse gas pollution in Eugene to 10 percent less than 1990 levels by 2020 and 75 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and for cutting Eugene fossil fuel use 50 percent by 2030.
The city’s Envision Eugene process is working on a plan focusing on convenient, walkable neighborhoods to “promote compact urban development and efficient transportation options.” But the massive freeway projects the RTP envisions may leave efficient land use planning and Envision Eugene as road kill.
Big freeway projects are a major driver of urban sprawl. Land speculators know this and for decades have snatched up land around new freeway interchanges. The hundreds of millions of dollars of public money invested in the I-5 Beltline interchange spurred the move of thousands of jobs out of central Eugene to farm fields on the edge of the city. The Register-Guard, PeaceHealth and Symantec all relocated from downtown Eugene to build huge parking lots near the interchange.
That’s the opposite of federal and state regulations on how transportation plans are supposed to work. Transportation plans are supposed to follow local land use plans, not make them irrelevant.
So where did the RTP come from? It was prepared by unelected local transportation bureaucrats who serve on an obscure but powerful regional Transportation Planning Committee. The MPC group of elected officials almost never changes decisions made in TPC meetings, which are almost never attended by the public.
It’s even unclear if the obscure subcommittee of the obscure committee is actually making the decisions involving hundreds of millions of dollars in government spending. Many of the decisions appear to be made by unidentified ODOT and federal highway administration bureaucrats who live nowhere near Eugene.
On a state and national level, there’s no political representation for controlling sprawl and greenhouse pollution by controlling freeway projects. Gov. John Kitzhaber and President Barack Obama are driven by union jobs for huge freeway projects. Republicans are driven by huge contractor and trucking company profits on the public spending.
Public comments on the RTP can be emailed through Nov. 7 to mpo@lcog.org. The MPC plans to approve the RTP during a meeting at 11:30 am Thursday, Nov. 10. in the Eugene Public Library Bascom-Tykeson room after little discussion. After that, the RTP could be amended somewhat by the MPC next year to conform to local bike, pedestrian, Envision Eugene, transportation and climate change plans. The next major update isn’t scheduled for another four years.

Wednesday Linkages Derides Incompetence

2011-11-02T11:32:00.003-05:00

Part 3 of the DFW plaza post coming soon, but first, the news of the day, but just after this new draft logo:

Austin is cracking down on jaywalking. Because THAT is the right way to go about it (slidewhistle). It is not in anyway a complete dereliction, dismissal, and abdication of responsibility to create a safe public realm, especially in transportation. Pedestrians are a menace to society and a real pain to clean their innards from the grill of my car.

The best part, THE BEST part, and by the best I mean the most tragic and incompetent is the comparison of the two maps on that link. The first shows where the ticketing is occuring, primarily in central areas, downtown, South Congress, and near the UT campus. Ya know, the kind of places where pedestrianization can and should be encouraged on top of the inevitability of it anyway.

Then look at the second map, where pedestrians have been killed. Scattered, on arterials and low pedestrian areas. Of course, we're talking about the epicenter of TxDOT and road lobbying. So if we can just demonize the pedestrian and force everyone into cars, even those that can't afford it, then we can get back to building roads and lining pockets from the siphoning of taxpayer money. As if there was any threat to this particular march of folly anyway.

Seriously, everyone involved in this policy at the City of Austin should be fired immediately. But who am I to say? Just someone that understands that increased pedestrianization is safer for everyone, better for business, and makes for a more sustainable/affordable city that also maintains more citizen money within the local economy I suppose.

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In related news, a NASA engineer, perhaps bored with reduced responsibilities after the gutting of NASA posts for Greater Greater Washington the costs on both road and rail subsidies and finds the combo of indirect and direct costs of road subsidy is greater than that of rail subsidy. This also takes not into account either long-term maintenance costs of crumbling road infrastructure due to the nature of it as a decentralizing agent, nor the returns on these various subsidies (road case)/investment (rail case) by way of more dense development. One centralizes and aggregates, the other decentralizes and cannibalizes. This is how it works folks.

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Lastly, if you wanted to know where the cutting edge was in urban design, it is here. It also just so happens to be the cutting edge in the study of the life sciences. Mehaffy and Salingaros are disciples/proteges of Chris Alexander and have since picked up his proliferation. The future of thought is happening at this nexus between life sciences, computing, and urbanism. And you wonder why I use so many metaphors of computer science, biology, ecology, etc.?? A quote:

In natural systems, this kind of bottom-up evolution turns out to be essential for the creation of sustainability. There is reason to think this is no less essential in urban systems. In fact, our work persuades us that any urban configuration that has not evolved — has not been computed step-by-step using adaptive adjustments — is probably dysfunctional and unsustainable. It will have to be propped up by enormous and unsustainable energy and resource expenditures. Examples include regularly-spaced high-rise buildings in a Le Corbusier type of pattern (i.e. “towers in the park”) as well as suburban sprawl of cookie-cutter houses. These are both template-based models imposed from above, and they do not manifest an efficiently optimized self-organized pattern of the kind we are describing.

Point being, urbanism is not about the imposition of arbitrary and abstract forms dreamt by Corbusier, et al. In fact, it is ENTIRELY about providing the framework for life to exist on its own. And that comes from proper transportation systems, the interconnectivity and interaction between development and said transportation system, and building positive supply-demand feedback loops through demand-side implementation. Interconnectivity = opportunity = desirability = demand = density. This stuff doesn't need a rocket science to quantify it...errr, maybe it does (see: above).

DFW Plazas, Part Deux

2011-11-01T10:09:00.005-05:00

So yesterday, inspired by the Atlantic cities post on best and worst plazas/squares in the world, I began a catalogue of the public spaces by similar classification within the Metroplex. You can find part 1 here. One of the key defining characteristics of a plaza or square, is that they are more urban than a "park," not just by being more hardscape than softscape because that is not entirely necessary. See: many of the squares in Savannah.

I define them as more urban in that they are more interconnected. Parks are rarely quite as populated. You have more space in a park. Parks don't necessarily have to be as directly interrelated to their surroundings as a plaza/square. You can not dissociate the plaza from its adjacencies, they are all part of the same place. The outdoor room you're within is defined by the buildings facades and the uses of those buildings give vitality to the space.

Onto part 2 (similarly with part 1 - I distinguish "urban" plazas from suburban strictly by location herein, not form as I typically do because as I mention above a "suburban" plaza is a syntactic impossibility. Without form and interrelationship, it isn't a plaza.):

Urban Meh - Ferris Plaza, Downtown Dallas. This could be a good one. It actually isn't missing too much. It has Union Station, Belo's corporate office, and Dallas Morning News HQ fronting three of its sides to populate it (though rarely does this occur). The Hotel Lawrence is on the north side, though it has no relationship to the plaza other than proximity. It's sunken as we lamented yesterday, but not so much as to be problematic. So where are the problems? 1) Not enough seating. What seating there is, is either inadequate or informal part of the fountain structure, which is not in the shade. 2) The ramps/handicap access is clumsily handled and looks like an unattractive tack-on. 3) The planting seems rather arbitrary in its placement and creates little in the way of space or order. And, 4) the surrounding roads are too big. Items 1 and 4 are the most significant in my view.

Urban Bad - Dallas City Hall Plaza. I've long heard stories of the existence of a painting portraying a traveler dying of thirst, crawling across the barren desert of this plaza. I'm yet to witness it with my two eyes. If it doesn't exist, it should. There has been plenty in the news of this plaza "transformed," but that is all overblown. It was filled with gewgaws and marketed to within an inch of the life it doesn't have to get a hand full of people out there for a day. It's problems are deep, systemic, structural and no amount of puppet shows can bring Pinocchio to life without our nose growing *this* big. Those issues are 1) scale and 2) like all/any parks/plazas, its connections and context. Get the 500 S. Ervay building jumpstarted and perhaps there is a chance, but I don't believe IT or any form of private development is particularly viable in that part of downtown for some time, as I wrote here.

Good Urban - Pegasus Plaza, Downtown Dallas

Pegasus Plaza is at what I consider to be the Main & Main intersection of downtown Dallas, at Main & Akard, despite Akard's one-way nature and dead-ending the next street up. It is the primary access street in from the North Dallas Tollway as it transitions from toll road to Harry Hines to Akard, each step incrementally shrinking in size, scale, and speed. When it hits Main Street, both cross streets are scaled for the pedestrian and likewise, are easily traversed even without the crosswalk signal or at intersections. This condition is what I call a fully "tethered" street in that people feel comfortable crossing just about anywhere.

Iron Cactus provides a direct connection and outdoor dining on the plaza (despite not particularly liking their food nor overpriced beverages, preferring Sol Irlandes across the street). The only real issue facing Pegasus Plaza is the dead space in back, where I presume is the Magnolia Hotel's back of house uses within. It is currently a blank wall, dressed up with a bit of oft-dead climbing vines, and essentially a dirt floor for dog shit. The downtown 360 plan rightfully identified this as an immediate intervention opportunity for one of the proposed "glass-box" retail sites to provide an interactive face. Absent that, I propose at the very least some stadium style seating a la Times Square. Effectively, Pegasus Plaza is our Times Square -- in conjunction with the adjoining Main Street blocks.

Meh, Suburban - DeSoto Town Center

Full Disclosure, I worked on the initial planning of this. So my critiques and praises are no different than they were at the time. The eventual project came out of that planning and is a mixed-use development (some ground floor retail with residential above) to infill the large surface parking lot in front of the DeSoto City Hall, which is in a converted strip center. They had a lot of assets including the stream/trail system to the north, the band shell overlooking it, and well, all of the land that was the surface parking. I was not however involved with the execution of the eventual plan and was disappointed to see the town square, to be between the development and the city hall was effectively turned into a cul-de-sac. To the city's credit though, they did follow through with efforts to improve what was essentially just a fire lane circumnavigating the sight to begin 2-siding the development. Remember, the most urban of places (those that maximize development synergy and interconnection) are those without backsides, just interfaces (with that said, sometimes that is impossible).

Good Suburban - North Park Mall Courtyard

No one can say I'm blindly against all malls. I merely point out those that have a future and those that don't. We were over-malled as a product of being over-retailed, nationwide. Most are failing or have already failed. The few regionally drawing ones will survive, but even North Park is showing that in order to continue to compete, survive, it must continue to evolve and become more of a complete place beyond a one-dimensional shopping experience. Every time I'm at North Park, I make it a point to spend some time out here or at the very least use it as a handy short-cut. In that way, it drastically improves the overall interconnectivity of the mall as a place over the typical cattle chute style of forcing people to walk past every single storefront ("And if not, then we'll hang you upside down and shake you 'til all your change falls out!")

There are a few cafes in the space, several of the stores have their own 2-sided entrance and there are mall corridor access points (necessarily) on all four sides. I don't think there is anything particularly special with the design or landscaping, but look at the Atlantic's global list. Scale and feel are more important than doo-dads and gewgaws. I full expect this to be step 1 in North Park's evolution into a more complete place with the surface parking lots filling in with other kinds of mixed-use development allowing the mall to approach the Milan Galleria as something more than a shopping experience but simply an indoor central piece of a complete neighborhood. And if that isn't being thought about...then it should be.

Bad Suburban - Williams Square - Las Colinas

This is less of a public square or plaza than it is a canvas for monumentality. Has anybody used this except to photograph the sculpture? And if you did, what could you possibly use it for? And it really gets at some of Las Colinas' deeper issues, that with the lake being the central feature, creating narrow slivers of land (development) around it, makes it difficult to create central, integral people places with any kind of critical mass within a reasonable distance that make people want to go there and use it. Of course, there has to be something to do there other than photograph some wild horsies that might as well be Flying Seahorses riding Mermaids.

I mean seriously, look at that ground floor facing it. The rest of the surrounding buildings as well. There so oppressively stale and lifeless with deep black windows signifying death for all we know that I'm repulsed even posting this picture and typing around it. And those poor horsies have to exist there in perpuity. Inhumane really.

Starting to think there can be a part 3 tomorrow as I radiate further away from Dallas. Suggestions fully welcome with your own editorializing or without.

Plazas: Best and Worst

2011-10-31T10:08:00.003-05:00

These are difficult lists to make. Who has actually visited every single plaza and public space in the world whether physically or virtually (ie google earth)? And even then, what is the criteria? Is it entirely subjective? How an individual writer enjoyed the place? Or are there some objective metrics at play? And if so, what was the methodology? Is it land value? Number of pedestrians? Revenue of the interfacing ground floor commercial spaces? One measurement I've used in the past is number of geotagged photos are uploaded into google earth of a place. People like to share the places they love, therefore "lovable places" have a density of photos.

None of these questions are answered by the Atlantic Cities and the analysis is limited (unless you dig into the PPS database), but the best part about that is you can make your own lists:

Link to their top 10 and bottom 10. Dallas is spared from either. However, if I were to select the best and worst public plazas in DFW, I'm first dumbstruck by how few actual public squares there are, but that is what happens when the form of cities is exploded from one of corridors and openings, solids and voids, to endless voids punctuated by object buildings. There no longer are outdoor rooms that provide a counterpoint to the more closed in corridors, creating breathing space to some extent.

However, that paints the corridors in less than ideal language and that couldn't be less of the case. The closer in corridors allow for increased cross shopping and density of synergism. Then when these corridors converge, lots of people end up in one space, hence the need for a greater opening, plazas at significant location.

Here are some of my best and worst of DFW:

Bad suburban - One of the interesting parts of the "suburban" category is that they'll actually be quite urban because as I said, suburban form doesn't yield the form of squares and plazas that are integrated with built surroundings. Therefore, in this context I will use "suburban" as a locational tool, meaning Not downtowns Dallas or Not Fort Worth.

Garland Town Square. An interesting and telling note here, all of the photos in Google Earth at this square are of the Art Deco Theater. Nobody pointing their camera towards the plaza. When visiting, you wonder why anybody would even go down into the space when the street is far more comfortable. If you buy William Whyte's work, he warned against sunken plazas, in that people are more comfortable pausing to sit and watch from elevated or periphery positions, not from within the fish bowl effect of a central sunken place.

Bad Urban. JP Morgan Chase - Similar rules apply, except magnified. There are many many many more people in downtown Dallas than in downtown Garland at any given time, perhaps on a 1000x order of magnitude. But then the effect of the sunken plaza is intensified by the 70-story tower looming over it.

I actually think it could be quite successful if it were filled in. I always liked the potential of the little dome outfront on Ross Avenue as a Campanile of sort, providing a bit of form to the plaza. Of course, that plaza has to interface better with it, rather than being 20-feet below. Notice, picture, no people. Though, I expect this might be a popular smoking locale for office workers.

Bad Urban. Wyly Theater.

One of the few images actually facing out from inside, it illustrates the kind of place only architects can appreciate because of the grading gymnastics accomplished. People don't like to be gymnasts unless they're parkour enthusiasts.

So of course the rendering filled it with people. People like places with other people in it. Only problem is these people are photoshopped. They're entirely theoretical. Nobody is ever in this space. Furthermore, the fundamental problem is it interacts/interfaces with but one building. There aren't 'faces' on multiple sides that interact and energize the space. It is one ticket office that is used once every so often during events and two walls on either side.

Good Urban. AT&T Plaza. I believe that to be the official name, not to be confused with the other AT&T Plaza at the American Airlines Center. It helped that AT&T relocated into downtown Dallas and filled up the better part of the surrounding buildings, but what helped even moreso was the removal of the dreadful stone bus shelters. Not that bus shelters are bad, but they interrupted the visual and physical porosity into the space. Humans are repelled from spaces they can't see into. The best trait of this space however is the microclimate created. I have sat in this space in the middle of the Texas Summer heat and have witnessed many others doing the same. It might be 105 degrees elsewhere, but due to the shade, the breeze, and the water, it feels about 20 degrees cooler.

To be continued...feel free to add suggestions.

Book Review: Instant City by Steve Inskeep

2011-10-28T11:50:00.002-05:00

So I received an advanced copy of the book Instant City by Steve Inskeep in exchange for doing a review of the book. This is that review:

Steve Inskeep is co-host of Morning Edition on NPR, a journalist. And like a good journalist, in Instant City Inkseep details the events of a single day in Karachi, Pakistan. A horrible day that should have been a solemn and spiritual one for people of Karachi, instead marred by bombings and arson destroying the center of the city. He unpacks the events of the day by following the threads of Pakistan's history, the central figures involved in the formation and duration of the country until those threads intertwined on December 28th, 2009.

And perhaps the most honest part of the book and Inskeep's reporting is that he doesn't fill in the missing expository gaps that remain inexplicable with editorializing. He'll leave that to the people he interviews trying to explain accounts of the often similarly inexplicable, or at least unjustifiable. Pakistan and its capital city Karachi remain a mystery, a Wild West, where millions just try to live their lives and make a living, while global economic forces, geopolitics, and sectarianism collide in one place, with the vast majority of the citizenry simply an innocent bystander between the colliding forces and impersonal forces. In many ways, the humanism gets lost, by the most fervent dogmatists, religious and economic.

Instant City, the name and the book, is about the cities of the world that have grown and expanded so quickly as to have grown beyond all boundaries, order, or control - organized or otherwise, like a wild fire. He delineates the history of Karachi, its evolution and the division of India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims, and the effects dramatic convulsions has upon people, much like an anthropologist might

He gives the best account I've come across describing the differences between the various Islamic sects - which I shamefully admit didn't know the various distinctions between the Sufis, Shiites, Sunnites, etc. despite our country's military involvement in the region over the past several decades. And when reading Inskeep describe what might seem rather harmless to my secular self, you're left to wonder, "seriously? That is what they're fighting over." The reality, as Inskeep discovers, is that for the most part, they're not. The underlying forces are typically about land, money, power, etc. You know, the usuals. The religion is simply a vessel, a convenient way to martial the anonymous into unspeakable actions.

During the book, I often found myself certainly without sympathy, but perhaps more frightening, occasionally without empathy either. Perhaps it was the structure of the book, which mostly consisted of flashbacks, jumping around in time rather than a linear, chronological narrative. Or maybe even that I, as the reader and a similarly disconnected individual within a globalized world, am no different than the various investors with economic stake in a city so far away from effecting their daily lives. There is no motivation to help those who kill and be killed because they're unknown. I didn't grow attached to the characters (real people) and at times didn't care what happened. Just like the shareholders whose economic interests are tied into maintaining the disorder that plagues most of the 3rd world. If that is even a term anymore.

It tells a story of all "Instant Cities" in this globalized world. Cities so young and volatile, that goes a long way to explaining the various motivations, actions, anywhere else, even our city. What can be explained, and perhaps even more importantly, what can't, is a lesson worth reading.

Sylvan:Thirty Reimagined as Catalyst for Something Bigger

2011-10-27T13:07:00.003-05:00

For friends on the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group, I put together a couple of concepts this week (on my own time/dime) to elaborate on my previously expressed opinion of the Sylvan:Thirty project and the West Dallas plan in general, found here. Where that was polemical, high on rhetoric if only to entertain myself syntactically, these concepts are more serious, dedicated to envisioning a plan that is viable from day 1, but also can lead to implementation of further phases, whether by the hands of the same developer or multiple parties.

As you'll see, I'm only counting square footages of development within the "limits of construction" of the Sylvan Thirty property line. This is considered "Phase 1." From there, I created two options, both of which I believe to be viable, that is if a parking garage works there. Since they're already showing a garage, I chose to include one in each scheme. Furthermore, since a certain portion of the garage would be dedicated to retail, the public segment of the garage can be funded via TIF. In option A, I'm using the garage and connected density of 4-story stick residential over ground floor retail as the buffer from the highway.

In option B, I allow the grocery to face the freeway to be 2-faced, towards the freeway and its surface parking fronting the "going home" side of the highway, then have cafe/bookstore/coffee shop/etc facing the mixed-use street. Also, in option B I chose to pursue a more logically ideal scenario that pushes density towards the "main and main" intersection of Fort Worth & Sylvan. This of course envisions a truly improved Fort Worth Avenue (which coincidentally only moves the same amount of vehicular traffic as Main Street in downtown which is one lane each way). So on Fort Worth Ave, I'm showing 4-lanes of traffic, parallel parking, and copenhagen style cycle tracks.

When you net out the new public street from the traffic signal on Sylvan, both schemes have an FAR of about 1.2.

The other things accomplished by these schemes, besides creating the first piece of a larger puzzle, the essence of urban design and development, where the pieces all complement each other, contributing to a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Placemaking 101.

One of the fundamental failings of Sun Belt real estate markets and their inherent understanding of something notionally known as "property rights" is the distinction between self-interest and enlightened self-interest. Isolated puzzle pieces fall apart. And given the interest that went into the West Dallas Plan, there is a lot at stake with the first phase. Therefore, it is in the interest of the citizens of Dallas to get some return out of the Sylvan:Thirty project. That being, a great place. And no great place exists in a vacuum. It will take at the minimum all of the parcels I'm showing below.

And this is how the city needs to be approaching the project, bringing carrots and sticks to the table in order to achieve something that spreads like fire. If fire was less burn-y and a bit more user-friendly form of investment. Ultimately, the carrot might be first dibs at the development rights of the future phases, or just increased profits by the insurances that neighboring development will raise value and sense of place, rather than diminish it, or worse yet be wholly unknown.

Quick side note, the graphic detail mirrors the thought that went into each phase. The later phases are meant to be abstractions connoting intent rather than specific development product in that at this point it is rather fruitless to take a reading of the market and product types of a future development well down the road. Whereas, phase 1 is here and now.

Click to embiggenate (sic):

Option B

Option A:

Examples of drive lane/parking/bike lane/sidewalk/building interface:

If You Read One Thing Today...

2011-10-27T09:55:00.002-05:00

Let it be this:

Taibbi: Best Little Whore in Texas.

Some select lines that ought to invoke a gag reflex in liberals and conservatives in equal ipecac-inducing measure if you don't have time to read the full 7-page article. It'll leave you wondering, "what's an honest businessman to do around here?"

Though 94 percent of schools in Texas teach a sex-ed curriculum based on abstinence-only – an approach that led one watchdog group to conclude that "shaming and fear-based instruction are the standard means of teaching students about sexuality" in Texas – Perry nonetheless signed an executive order mandating that those same girls subjected to those abstinence-only classes receive an STD vaccine. You can't talk about STDs to sixth-grade girls, but if it's worth $120 a shot to a pharmaceutical company like Merck, you can jam the birds-and-the-bees lesson right into their arms.

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In Perry's Texas, state regulation doesn't work because regulatory seats can be bought, and the free market doesn't work because connections and influence matter more than competition and performance. The landfill run by Perry's pals at Waste Control Specialists represents an extreme example of both dysfunctional ends of the governor's approach to government, a taxpayer-financed hole in the ground that is as extremely unsafe as it is woefully uneconomic. "The WCS plant," says Lon Burnam, a Texas state representative, "is the ultimate example of Perry's crony capitalism."

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The system of uncapped donations means that Perry's superinsiders effectively operate as mobsters who hold a chit on the state's government. "These are obscenely huge amounts," says McDonald. "You can give a politician $100 or $1,000 because you like his ideology. But when you start giving him $250,000 or $500,000, you gotta think you are getting something in return."
So what did Harold Simmons get for his money? A lot.
For starters, a group of Perry appointees on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gave Simmons a license to build his hazardous nuke dump, even after the TCEQ's own team of scientists agreed that the project was too risky, given how dangerously close it lies to the Ogalalla aquifer, which provides drinking water for seven states.
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In a supremely ironic demonstration of how the modern system of payola capitalism works, Simmons is now being paid millions by taxpayers, via the federal Energy Department, to clean up his own mess, moving radioactive waste from his dump in Ohio to the one in Texas.
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What's more, the company even got the government to pay for the landfill, lobbying the town of Andrews to float a $75 million bond issue to finance the construction of two new dump sites on the property. And in a final insult, WCS managed to negotiate a loophole exempting it from having to pay school taxes in Andrews. Instead, it offers a few small scholarships a year.

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Perhaps the single most interesting favor that Perry doled out is one that directly violated his supposedly "conservative" Tea Party principles. One of his first big moves as governor was to back the Trans-Texas Corridor, a $175 billion project to privatize the state's highways. This was to be the mother of all public-works projects, a 4,000-mile highway network, at some points four football fields wide, that would also include commuter rails, freight rails and telecom pipelines. The TTC, in essence, was the ultimate Tea Party nightmare, a massive public boondoggle that would have created a huge network of new tolls and required a nearly unprecedented use of eminent domain to help the state seize nearly 500,000 acres of land from ranchers and farmers.
Though most of the project was shot down by the state legislature, Perry did manage to push through several parts of it, most notably a few stretches of new highway construction around Houston and Dallas. Some of the beneficiaries of those projects were American firms that had donated lots of money to Perry and the governors association, like Williams Brothers Construction ($621,000), Parsons Corporation ($410,000) and JP Morgan Chase ($191,000). But another beneficiary was a Spanish firm called Cintra, part of a consortium that won the development rights for the original TTC project.
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Cintra ultimately received about $5 billion in contracts from the state to develop three major highway projects, one of which, a toll road in central Texas, is one of the few surviving remnants of the hated TTC.

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That's if the road ever gets finished. Cintra received a similar contract to run a toll road in Indiana, but it soon ran into financial problems and had to jack up tolls to pay for the $3.8 billion project. In Texas, Cintra will have some latitude to raise rates on its roads, and if you don't like it, well, fuck you.

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In addition to the highway contract with Cintra, Perry this year signed a bill written in part by a lobbyist for a British firm called Balfour Beatty, paving the way for the state to sell virtually everything that isn't nailed down to anyone – foreigners included. The bill, Hall says, allows "all public buildings, nursing homes, hospitals, schools, ports, mass transit projects, telecommunications, etc. to be sold off to corporations." Even more incredibly, the bill authorizes companies to borrow money from the state, which will also help secure their debt. In other words, Perry passed a bill under which a foreign company could theoretically borrow money from Texas taxpayers to buy the taxpayer's own state property back from him, at a discount!

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But the most treasonous Perry deal of all came when he tried to do a macabre favor for his political hero, former senator Phil Gramm. Gramm gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Perry's campaign, essentially emptying the remnants of his own campaign war chest into Perry's when he left public office and went to work for the Swiss bank UBS. In 2002, Gramm came to Perry's administration with a proposal that would allow the bank to take out life insurance policies on retired Texas teachers. Under the deal, UBS would collect on the policies of the teachers when they died, and reward the state with a small cut for arranging the wagers. Teachers who balked at letting UBS profit from their death were reportedly to be paid $100 to sign on the dotted line. The state insurance commissioner, a Perry appointee, approved a special waiver to allow the deal to go through, but the project collapsed after a media backlash.

To recap: Rick Perry sold the right to tax Texas highway drivers to Spanish billionaires, let a British firm write a law authorizing the sale of virtually all Texas state property to foreign corporations, and tried to literally sell the lives of retired Texas schoolteachers to a Swiss bank.

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Yes, I'm Trying To Tell You Jesus Christ Can't Hit a Curveball

2011-10-26T10:07:00.003-05:00

Up Your Butt, Jobu

Apologies, but Harris - or as Phillies fans like to think of him, Jamie Moyer - is one of the great underrated comical characters of all-time.

With the few minutes I have to spare this morning, I wanted to expand a bit on what I was having some fun with on twitter earlier today where I was making sports to city metaphors. Metaphors are fun, they're easy. They're as good of a way to explain something to the unindoctrinated (?). This might be something you haven't spent the last ten years researching, studying, but intuitively you'll get it. As soon as I can draw a parallel to something more familiar.

I usually like references to biology, ecology, or computing, all systems thinking, which make for excellent corollaries to urban systems and the various dynamics therein. Perhaps, with a twinge of world series fever, my mind went to baseball (read bottom to top):

WalkableDFW patrick kennedy

Or kid w no natural talent (like say geographic features) whose parents buy most expensive equipment. Build from foundation of fundamentals.

1 hour ago

WalkableDFW patrick kennedy

Dallas is like the home run hitter stuck in the minors bc it can't field or hit a curve ball.

1 hour ago

WalkableDFW patrick kennedy

The irony is, to aim higher, we have to set our sights lower and focus on the fundamentals of cities.

1 hour ago

WalkableDFW patrick kennedy

If you want to cite "world class" this is the level of competition. Barcelona not Waco.

1 hour ago

WalkableDFW patrick kennedy

It dawns on me that Barcelona has stuck with me more than any other city, the way an album gets better with each listen.

I guess the motivation stems from a Dallas City Council person hyping the spending another $10 million for yet a second redesign of a bridge that already exists, "This is Dallas. We do things big." Or something similar to that effect. Shocking that "world class" wasn't invoked, that cringe-inducing phrase of ignorance.

Sometimes doing things "big" works, but there is a rhyme or reason. Even great cities get themselves in some trouble swinging for the fences. Vancouver is in debt up to their eye-balls b/c nobody has bought all the olympic village units-turned-condos like they expected/hoped (perhaps if they weren't priced based on a hyper-inflated residential market due to rabid Chinese investment?).

Valencia, Spain - a highly underrated place, overshadowed by Madrid, Barcelona, Pamplona bull-running, Ibizan party scene, and the British preference for Costas Del Sol y Blanca - is under some serious water because of their billion euro investment in City of Arts and Sciences, which terminates the river Turia's old course before rerouting and conversion into a linear park. It's basically the Dallas Arts District if it was public money (debt) instead of private money doing the funding, in that it has very little relationship to the city surrounding.

But Valencia also did many BIG things that go rather unnoticed and will benefit the city for a long-time, it is now the most bike-friendly city in Spain and is tied into the longest high-speed rail network in Europe. I reached 288 kph en route to Madrid, a trip that took barely more than an hour over a distance similar to Austin or Houston to Dallas.

Dallas' obsession with the big, the bravado, and the grandiose is what gets it in trouble. It is why we make claims of "world class" yet our competition is more Waco, OKC, or Tulsa than it is Barcelona, Paris, NYC, Vancouver, London, or even San Fran, DC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, etc. if we're filling out a second tier of American cities.

As I mentioned on twitter, we're the kid dreaming of the big leagues that never bothered to learn the fundamentals. We also can't rely on the natural talent of geographic beauty that imbuing Vancouver, Seattle, San Fran, or Barcelona with stunning scenery. This summer I ziplined 6,000 feet above Vancouver, the skyline seemingly at the reach of my toes. We don't have that and never will - even if Dubai wants to build mountainous indoor ski slopes or artificial clouds. The one thing we can do, and could do better than anyplace is, is to focus on the fundamentals. That is our key to the big leagues. We can't hit for power, we can't steal bases, but we can be the best fielder at our position, with dedicated hard work and a common goal in mind.

That is to say, we have to get the fundamentals of urbanism right. And do them better than any place else. That means digging down into the underlying causality beneath cities, beginning with human emotion. It is what drives all economies and why cities were formed at the dawn of civilization. Cities are the medium, the platform, and the facilitator of us achieving our wants and needs. They provide the most efficient way ever of achieving social and economic exchange (and coincidentally, it turns out, they do so in the most environmentally friendly way ever known outside of living off the land, which is a statistical impossibility given the numbers on the earth these days).

The form of a city is the embodiment of an economy, its physical manifestation. It is a center of gravity, a hub of physical activity and interconnectedness. If the economy is the spirit, the city is its body. And like a body, the cells must be most interconnected, most incommunication with those closest.

Yet we've tried to link our toes to our ears and our knees to our elbows with cripplingly expensive regional infrastructure, mostly highways and arterials. Regional connectivity is fine, however it can't interrupt the fine-grain local connectivity of complete neighborhoods. So too, global connectivity, airports mostly, but these are typically tangential because of the undesirable aspect of jet noise, jet fuel, and safety precautions.

It is amazingly naive and ill-informed when we think we need highways and arterials to the level we have them (despite the fact that they're all in a crumbling state of disrepair) for the sake of connectivity. Anything is further from the truth. All cities are able to deliver goods, services, and opportunity to those that want and needs them. The only difference is the type of spending the city wants to do to interconnect such things.

Think of all the cities in the world where you can accomplish and reach every single one of your needs without a car. All the great ones. The fact is that building highly destructive regional transportation system have isolated and fragmented the fundamental building blocks of great cities, complete, interconnected neighborhoods, that blend from one to another almost seamlessly. Pundits like Joel Kotkin don't know what they're talking about with mononodal vs polynodal cities. Every city in the world is polycentric. And those centers exist at a variety of scales. Because he looks at Manhattan skyline and sees one place is his own misunderstanding when it is really comprised of countless neighborhoods, the seams and connections filled with vitality.

And the similar theory that the market mandated such regional transportation is also hooie. Sure, there was an overwhelming impulse to get away from the poverty, pollution, pestilent-stricken industrial city. But running from the problem only unveiled new problems. And we're seeing that market correction as poverty relocates to the burbs where land and buildings are cheap, but opportunity and amenity scarce.

A lag time exists, yet we think of this as an anomaly because our lifespan is entirely within that anomaly. Value, particularly long-term and lasting, is where the interconnectedness is. Location does still matter. It was only recently in the placeless decentralized landscape of the Sun Belt where "build it they will come" gained any traction in real estate circles. And that was because there was no underlying rational order, no purpose. Except, then everybody leaves. Again, no long-term stability of place, of order.

The intercity highways (not to be confused with interstates) flipped the supply-demand equation of cities, from rational, logical places to irrational, illogical, broken places with no order. They made the traditional cores, hubs of cities, the downtowns, the Davis Streets, the Lakewoods, that complete hieararchy of central places within neighborhoods at a variety of scales undesirable.

Freeways are more disconnective than they are connective. It is easier for me to get from downtown Dallas to Plano than it is to get anywhere within three miles of downtown Dallas. Similarly, that regional connectivity turned land otherwise useless except for food production (that is to say, quite useful) into something viable for other uses, such as housing. Combined with the various subsidies, tax breaks and transportation spending, all the population relocation outward was perfectly rational on an individual basis. But in some, it was cannibalistic. And we're seeing the slow, painful unwinding just beginning to play out.

We have to get back to basics. And that means understanding the fundamentals of cities. The ability to achieve your wants and needs of daily life within your own neighborhood. Everything outside of that is gravy. We have to focus on the neighborhoods, and for the most part, the largest barrier is infrastructural planning, design, and investment. As the legendary football coach Joe Paterno says, "focus on the little things and the big things will take care of themselves." It's like he understands the emergent nature of cities.

NCTCOG 2035 Plan

2011-10-25T10:56:00.003-05:00

Since I just pulled these numbers for something else, might as well post them here as well. From COG's 2035 Transportation Plan, which projects to spend a total of $101 billion on various transportation projects, much of which I suspect won't happen, but here are their projections anyway:

DFW, NCTCOG's 2035 Plan:

TOTAL EXPENDITURES: $101 Billion

Road Maintenance: 10,193M

Freeways/Tollways: 35,078M

HOV/Managed Facilities: 1,647M

Arterial System: 5,057M

Other Arterials: 4,391M

Congestion Mgmt:3,335M

Air Quality/Enviro: 3,231M

Bike/Ped: 1,495M

Sustainable Dvlpmnt/Transpo: 653M

Transit O&M: 17,135M

Rail System Expansion: 17,391M

Bus: 1,486M

Paratransit: 24.4M

Testing 1, 2, 3...

2011-10-25T10:25:00.003-05:00

Was going thru some old files I had, let's see if they post ok if I just drag and drop from my old website's "back-of-house" cache:

This was the plan I did for the Dallas Convention Center Hotel from a previous life. Here is what I've also written about it, aqui y aqui.

It was intended to be part of a larger plan, to stimulate increased investment in an otherwise lifeless part of downtown. As you can find in the links, I suggested using only 5 of the 8 acres of the proposed site that the actual hotel now stands on for the hotel, allowing a total of 3 blocks to be created out of the site. This would then allow for some life between buildings. Ya know, why people actually go to conventions that aren't in the cartoonish hell-holes of Vegas and Orlando. But we're not exactly very good at understanding nor implementing the jumpstarting of place. Far too easy just to throw a bunch of money at dumb objects and hope they come to life. All the cheerleading just makes Pinocchio's nose grow.

Fort Worth's Ciclovia

2011-10-24T14:38:00.004-05:00

From my friend Kevin at Fortworthology, he created a video of PEOPLE ACTING COMPLETELY IRRESPONSIBLY AND UNSAFE! HOW DARE THEY LET KIDS BIKE ON THE STREETS?! CARS NEED TO BE MOVING FASTER, FASTER, FASTER!

Fort Worth Open Streets - Magnolia Avenue, Near Southside from Kevin Buchanan on Vimeo.

Know what? I'm willing to bet the amount of pedestrians and bicyclists moving on this street on that day is greater than the number of vehicles that would typically move on the road. True mobility (based on linking people to people and people to destinations they desire) vs theoretical mobility that is based on speed of movement.

Directions???

2011-10-24T14:15:00.003-05:00

I must get asked for directions more than the average bear. It certainly is because I probably log more walking miles than just about any other person in this city. Maybe not. But likely within the types of areas that intersect my life and those of tourists or the general public at-large that has no idea where they are and where they're going. And to the luck of the asker, the askee, moi, probably knows whatever immediate vicinity within, say, a half-mile radius of wherever the question might be posed. In fact, earlier today, I was asked twice for directions. Once for the DMA and another time for a place, "any place," suitable for lunch.

So while the answer of why I'm always asked for directions is pretty simple (and I've been asked in the native tongue for directions throughout Spain and Italy multiple times as well in various cities), the answer of why so many questions are being asked for directions is a bit more complex. As I paranthetically mentioned, visitors are always asking for directions in any/every city. But at the same time, most of those other cities have a greater proportion of people, both askers and askees, meaning less of a chance that it always seems to be me getting asked.

And, I must add, that I never mind and have always been happy to help because I empathize, if not sympathize, with the asker. I know where I'm going, if only through experience because the city's road network is largely incomprehensible. Dead ends, one-ways, highway on- and off-ramps, mergers, etc. all in the name of regional movement creates its own barrier to comprehension and wayfinding despite the stated goal of movement. There is no order, hierarchy, or clarity to a system that is fundamentally sociofugal rather than sociopetal. It is centerless. This means that it fails as a system. Any network must have a order of hubs. These comprise the central nervous system, so to speak. And this must be given structure by the "bones" of transportation.

It is this hierarchy that provides both visitors and even the real estate market some clarity, some measure of understanding and order that invites them into a more participatory system. A decentralized system has no order, it cannot be comprehended. And this is partially why every single day I also see cars pulling down the wrong way on one-way roads or down the train-only DART line. People assume there is more logic than actually exists within a fundamentally broken system.

There is also the issue of road names and order. In New York and many other cities there is an order to the numbering/nomenclature of the roads that provides an increasing level of clarity. There is also the Japanese tradition of addressing based on blocks and nesting individualized addresses within those blocks, almost like a matryoshka doll. It is quite effective, because it is precisely in line with the orderly "nesting" of increasingly private space that exists within an emergent network, a fractal.

Also, a brief thought on one-way roads because people often cite other cities (NYC, in particular) that has one-way roads. The key point is that in NY, the density is so great and the walkability so, um, possible, that the road is still effectively two-way, as pedestrians can still move in either direction. Also, on many of the streets, there are subways below moving in both directions, so the system is infinitely more complex than what we're dealing with in Dallas. Lastly, their roads are also full, thus requiring the increased street by street capacity of one-ways, although whether that really increases capacity is highly, HIGHLY, debatable. The bigger issue is, once again, we're not NYC, and one-ways are inappropriate here.

Dallas Pedicabs

2011-10-24T14:03:00.003-05:00

So apparently, I've been so disconnected via preoccupation with other endeavors that I missed the announcement of the Dallas Pedicab company. So imagine my surprise when looking for a cab on Saturday night in uptown Dallas and along comes a pedaling pedicab, free of passengers. I quickly hailed it down and proudly proclaimed to the driver, "mush!" On the brilliant spring and fall evenings of Texas, it is great to remain outdoors, connected to the wind whipping you in the face. It helps to have a few drinks in you to block out the on-rushing traffic on roads not suitable for safe bicycling.

I've always loved riding in pedicabs in whenever visiting Austin. In fact, I try to ONLY ride in pedicabs when in Austin, unless the distance is a bridge too far. I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps it is our generation's preoccupation with bicycles/bicycling, as its own form of nostalgic escapism and adopted independence through the mobility the bicycle allowed within a car-dependent childhood. I don't even know how the pricing schedule ranks in comparison to actual cabbies. Certainly, the startup and operating overhead is much lower than driving and maintaining a car.

On our trip this weekend, I didn't even get a price tag for the trip. He simply said, "whatever you feel like paying me." Is it simply because they're trying to grow the business at this point? I don't know. I do know that he said they can't cross the highway from uptown to downtown, another bridge too far, and an impossibly perfect synopsis of the disconnection posed by inter-city freeways. It's amazing how much more mobile cities without freeways are than cities with. But you won't hear that from traffic engineers, the road lobby, or TTI.

So I asked the dude to cross the highway nonetheless. When asked to donate for his troubles, I offered a twenty, for about five minutes of work. Call it a silent protest against the barrier of the highways.

FYI:

Here is the link to Dallas Pedicab's site with their contact information for rides when need be.

Urbanized

2011-10-20T16:30:00.001-05:00

New Website

2011-10-18T18:15:00.002-05:00

Forgive the self-promotion, but after all this is the internet and a blog and what else are they for? My young company has a new website up. You can find it here:

http://www.spacebtw.com

Some kinks still exist to work out, such as migrating the hosting platform because we haven't been able to successfully mask it until we let our existing hosting service expire. So for now, it will redirect to a substitute domain name.

Also, we just got our permits for our new office space, which will be a storefront of a mixed-use building in uptown. So in short order (once all the renovation work is complete) I'll be bicycling to work. At least the days that I don't walk.

On "Congestion" and TTI

2011-10-11T12:28:00.003-05:00

The latest TTI report is out. That is, the Texas Transportation Institute released their gargantuan annual mobility report on what they deem the problems of and solutions to "congestion." If you want it, here is a link to all of Dallas's data.

They do this for every major city. It is the illusion of diligence. Fill it with all sorts of objectively measured numbers then come to the exact same conclusion every single time: Need Moar Lane Miles. Such a smart boy. He's going places. Lotsa $$ in road building (for the very few), so we're going to need an awful lot of gobblety gook nonsense that no one in their right mind will delve into to make it look like it's worth something. There's numbers. It must be right.

Unfortunately, TTI has basically been the be-all and say-all for how transportation is measured, planned, financed, and constructed across the country. How's that working out for you? As transpo expert Tod Litman points out there are flaws. TTI has been without significant critic until CEOs for Cities released there scathing indictment of TTI's methodology last year, Driven Apart.

Here is what you need to know about TTI and subsequently how cities, states, and DOTs think about. In other words, how we get it all wrong:

Mobility only means speed. They base the summation of their conclusions on a simple statistic, how fast are the cars going? Not as fast as others? Going to need more highways. As we know, what do highways do? They're 1) expensive 2)only paid for by taxpayers 3)road builders get a mint 4)make land around them undesirable, while 5) making exurban land viable and 6) are unsafe. The faster we're moving the less safe we are. And isn't any public entity's first and foremost goal public safety? Maslow would say so (perhaps unless clean water/air are no longer givens).

However, we still have a need to get places. That is what cities are anyway. They are a medium for social and economic exchange. They allow us to achieve our wants and needs while being the cauldron of foment for human progress, incubators of innovation, metabolizers of ideas: chewing up the rest while spitting out the best.

Are cars a part of that equation of getting between want and need? Of course they are one part of the equation. But then why are transportation dollars so badly shifted towards car and car-based infrastructure. ~~You mean aside from corruption?~~

The reality is that imbalance of spending on transportation infrastucture towards a goal of free, easy, efficient movement and misses it completely. Once everybody is in a car, there is always the opportunity for a traffic jam. Because the road system is dendritic, funneling everybody towards certain, few routes, there is no choice, whereas a grid is more flexible. Because the entire city is in a car and everything spreads out (so we can move faster)

But if I can walk to all my needs, but do so slower than Plano mom speeding down the freeway, does that mean I'm less mobile? According to TTI, yes. I need a highway between my mixed-use building and the corner store (and it has been delivered, in effect, see: Elm Street).

They say congestion is bad. But what kind of congestion? That is never answered. Because it is an entirely car based report, it doesn't make the distinction between good congestion and bad congestion. Bad congestion is when movement comes to a standstill, ie a traffic jam. Good congestion is where lots of people are in one place but can still move. This can't happen via automobile. It can happen however through mass transit, but even more so pedestrian networks. The most valuable places in the world are highly congested by pedestrians. If TTI had their way, there would be no pedestrians. They're simply speedbumps impeding cars from moving as fast as humanly possible, yet with entirely arbitrarily and only occasionally enforced speed limitations.

Yet the places where you drive the slowest, bad says TTI, are those we love the most (and most valuable): Champs Elysees, Times Square, etc. These places are congested with pedestrians, who freely decide to be there. Unlike any highway TTI recommends building. Very few WANT to be there, but have to because of the transportation network of TTI's dreams.

But the worst part of the matter, is there is no connection between movement and value/investment, particularly the kind that is permanent, that creates a return for cities long into the future. So that each generation isn't paying to build and rebuild every other decade an entirely new city. Instead, that platform already exists. Spain may be in debt to some extent because of their public investments in high speed rail and subways, but they'll pay off long into the future while we have to pay to disassemble some of these freeways in order to build a highly operational city of the future.

Value is created at points of intersection, whether this be two likes forms of transportation (a crossroads), two unlike forms (rail stop meeting pedestrian network), or the convergence of two previously seeming opposing ideas.

A city is best thought of in two planes, the first, is the hierarchical intersection of nodes, what you might call the central nervous system of a city. The crossroads of the network. Value is in relation to the order on the hierarchy of the node/nerve center/convergence point. Value is determined by desirability and manifested by density.

The other plane is the flesh. The residential body that nestles up against the nerve centers as amenities and their interconnections as means to live each and everybody's own lives according to their means, needs, and wants. Except that TTI says you NEED to have a car, your MEANS will have to be spent on gasoline, maintenance, insurance, and the inevitable medical bills when you wreck travelling happily at 120mph, and they don't give a damn what you WANT because those financing TTI do WANT bigger and bigger roads.

TTI is effectively telling us to drive a hatchet (highway) through the patient's nerve center. It seemed like an effective means of curing cancer when cavemen practiced medicine. So why let cavemen play doctor to our cities?

For another metaphor, it is the equivalent of using leaches to cure the patient. Sucking the lifeblood from a city, pedestrians at the nerve centers, and placing them in cars at the edge, in automatonic trudgery down the conveyor belt of life. To work, from work. Stare at bumper. Communicate via monosyllabic honks. Might this be the zombie phase before the ultimate finality? The cannibalistic ponzi scheme ends with the patient dead.

Quotable, the Tangentialism of Regional Networks

2011-10-11T12:12:00.003-05:00

Just got a note sent to me from DFWReimagined:

"Out of the million folks who work in Dallas city limits, 727,000 are suburbanites who come for work then scoot when it gets dark."

My response:

The highways allowed it. We're rational people who make rational decisions. As the Baum-Snow study points out, for every new highway introduced within a city, aka an intracity highway (rather than an intercity highway) a city experiences an 18% population reduction. The reason is the highways made land near city less desirable AND less accessible (interrelated concepts). AND, they repositioned land at the increasingly further edge from worthless (lest it's arable) to viable. Like squeezing all of the air out of an inflated balloon.

It should be more advantageous for business to be at accessible hubs of movement, nodes, nerve centers, at which a downtown always has been and ought to be at the top of the hierarchy (ought because of the amount of infrastructure sunk into it). Cities need permanence. Lovable cities have a connection to the past, present, and future.

It should also be relatively difficult to live far away and get to these cores, lest the regional or larger form of transportation has a light imprint upon local fabric, which it never does: see highways, airports, railroads (i.e. "other side of the tracks) etc.

This is how spatial integration plays out. Real convenience and accessibility versus perceived. Take for example Barcelona. You can fly or train in from afar and then immediately get around the city with ease via a variety of transportation routes, most significantly the subway, which is excellent. By being underground, yes it is expensive, but the tracks can operate quickly and efficiently while not disrupting the local networks above. You can get anywhere in the city quickly and cheaply, only to emerge in a new neighborhood, complex, living, breathing, intact.

Disruption to those local networks decreases accessibility and thereby decreasing investment in the area, resulting in decay. Sometimes this is surface rail that does this, but more often it is highways. Raising highways, burying highways, neither of which help much for the cost to do so. Little bang, high buck because it still makes it convenient to live in and pay taxes somewhere else. You're allowed to take advantage of society but not participate in it. To act rationally, is to act corrosively.

So, are regional networks that intersect the local, ie the city as a complex integration of neighborhood units, tangentially *really* that expensive if we're looking at 1)long-term and 2)cost AND benefit from a broader standpoint?

#OccupyWallStreet I'd Like You To Meet the Tea Party

2011-10-11T11:33:00.003-05:00

(and forgive me from straying from my general topic):

There, now you've been introduced. Perhaps you can even become friends. I really don't think at heart there is much differentiation until you get to the wide disparity of superficial issues that dominate politics these days. And frankly, if we distill the root of the problems down to the basic core, I'm guessing we can find a simple and direct message AND purpose for the OccupyWallStreeters.

The OccupyWallStreeters are largely considered to be a left-wing movement. Whether that perception is true or not, what is true is that it more or less mirrors the leftern (sic) portion (1/2) of the United States, in that it is a big disorganized umbrella. For supposed communitarians, you certainly are a rather disorganized bunch. All of which somehow manages to be ironic yet appropriate.

The Tea Party is mostly considered to be a right-wing populist movement. And for the most part, at the grass roots level, the people who are actually joining the rally, I believe it to be...at least in their hearts. They have real concerns. However, there are definite levers of power and investment behind the Tea Party, which gives it direction, force, and voice at the highest levels of corporately controlled media.

That dichotomy is where the opportunity lies, for the OccupyWallStreeters to expand their umbrella so that it officially is not a left-right issue, but a human one, an American one. It also will allow Occupy Wall Street to find a purpose, a clearly defined goal to push for. This is necessary, because as long as there are a million different directions certainly a few will turn off some other segment of the population.

Here is what they should do:

Distill the issue down into one of people vs corporations. Sure, corporations are businesses and businesses employ people, but it is the shear size and power of the few that is distorting both democracy and capitalism. This is how you'll achieve a critical mass, left and right, black and white, old and young, the 99%.
Reach out to the Tea Party. You're both people, there is common ground. And you're not always going to agree on everything so let those minor details work out democratically after...
Push for the transparency of campaign donations at the very minimum, with stiff penalties for undisclosed donations. At the very least, we'll know who is bought and paid for and by whom.
Push for the breaking up of monopolies. This can be achieved through executive order. Those that exist in a variety of industries stifle innovation, fix prices, alter public policy, and wield too much weight over market rates for both goods and labor. And in fact, more smaller companies employ more people than few larger ones. I don't give a damn about "efficiency." I do care about opportunity, fairness, and true competition, aka a healthy capitalist society. With emphasis on the "society."
Push for the end of corporate personhood under the eyes of the law. If corporations are people, then they should be locked up because they behave like sociopaths. For a detailed history on the rise of corporate personhood, I'd like to point you to Unequal Protection. Also, my personal favorite sign from OccupyDallas: "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one."

Oh and lastly, by reaching out to the Tea Party with this simple, basic premise of human rights versus corporate rights, you are pitting them against themselves. Which side will they take? Theoretically, they should join forces. However, if they don't then you are effectively discrediting their entire movement as one of a corporate pawn. This is a win-win situation for you.

Whether you disagree on healthcare or education or which color tie to wear, it does not matter. Those things will work themselves out once you gut the root of the problem, which is the long, slow (but accelerating) descent from a rambunctious cauldron of democracy, innovation, capitalism, and opportunity, one where our stability and place in the world derived precisely from that messiness, into one of Mussolini-style fascism, that is corporatism = government. He thought it would be more efficient that way. He was right.

A Weekend in Dallas w/o a Car

2011-09-28T13:03:00.002-05:00

Some haven't happily tailored their entire existence around a carless lifestyle, honed over 3+ years now. Long time reader and twitter follower Curtis Rogers details his return trip to the DFW area after having moved to the Bay Area without renting a car. Find it here:

**We planned to walk, but jumped in the car with a friend that was driving from the Crescent to the Ritz, which is located across the street, literally. Valet to valet, it’s how we roll in Uptown Dallas.

Hacks and Faux Libertarian Oppressors

2011-09-26T11:15:00.004-05:00

I've always had a gripe with the anti-urbanists: Randall O'Toole, Joel Kotkin, and the like. The problem isn't that I disagree with them. It is that they're logic is quite illogical. They claim to be libertarians, or something like it, but it is really simple pandering that they partake in. In reality, they try to impose their particular worldview upon others. And this is why I'm so profoundly offended by their drivel. Luckily, I don't have to prove this because O'Toole comes right out and says it:

I would never step into another city again if I didn’t have to as a part of my work. But I don’t think everyone would be better off living my lifestyle; I just think people ought to have a choice. Avent’s book simply stimulates the smart-growth advocates who want to impose all sorts of policies on urbanites and suburbanites to force them to live in denser communities.

Poor, oppressed soul. They conveniently ignore the fact that nearly all spending, policies, and zoning favors disconnected, isolated development patterns that poor Mr. O'Toole just wishes he could live in and spend his entire life within. If only there was some of that out there.

On the other hand, trying to live within vibrant, mixed-use places is damn near impossible if not illegal in many places. Sorry, I accept that people are social beings, we need to be around each other, for better or worse. Cities are the greatest invention in human history for the facilitation, efficiency of social, economic, memetic, and genetic exchange.

This likely means O'Toole hates people (or perhaps himself) and wishes to be a hermit. He has that right.

I completely agree with him on one point. People should have a choice. Except if he were to get his way, which he has, then nobody would have a choice.

Streets vs. Roads

2011-09-26T10:14:00.001-05:00

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns Blog describes the relationship between debt, road building, and the cannibalization of place:

Form-Based Codes and the Dentistry of Urbanism

2011-09-22T08:52:00.004-05:00

Get the drill back out. It's time to go to work:

Today is the CNU-NTX event today on Form-Based and Smart-Codes. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend because of last minute deadlines and what not that fell upon me like an acme piano falls on wil e. coyote.

Earlier today, via email list-serv, Andres Duany posed the question as to what is the reason for these codes and what is the potential argument against them. While I agree in principal with the need for such codes, they are not enough. I respond:

I believe you're correct in that the counter-issue is and will continue to be an economic one, which, if we are to play "urban dentistry" should point us toward the root of the cavity. The "too expensive" line is but the immediate pain of a toothache. In the short-term, too expensive is relative. It isn't too expensive if the returns will be greater. Then it is just right. In many of our cities, particularly the Sun Belt, the land nor the building is too expensive, but rather the demand is too low in infill locations. Sure, many have been highly successful, but they've all relied on significant public participation that has either dried up or must become increasingly creative, which turns both lenders and developers off.

While I believe in form-based and smart codes, without demand they are merely an empty glass. The demand is the liquid that fills the cup.

I believe this comes from transportation. To (perhaps over-)simplify, downtowns have/had the highest density, which is a direct response to desirability, accessibility. The introduction of highways into and through downtowns ripped up the highly interconnected fabric, made them less interconnected, less accessible (except from far away -- for example, it is easier to get to Plano from downtown Dallas than anywhere within 3 miles of it), and overall less desirable because of negative effects on quality and character of spaces near freeways, safety, air quality etc. And by improving accessibility to far flung places, each intracity freeway makes land further out at the edge viable while reducing demand/desirability in town, or other clusters lower on the nodal hierarchy.

And from a longer-term perspective it is "too expensive" because they want to build cheaply. They want to build cheaply because they want their returns within 7-years. But nothing is more expensive (over the long-term) than cheap. The effect of form-based and smart-codes will be dramatically reduced unless there is significant progress in the design and spending for transportation infrastructure as well as the financial industry and their standard practices and expectations on the short-term (at the expense of long-term value).

Addendum:

I should add as a local example that both Park Lane Place and Victory Park were built with some form-based guide, if not an actual form-based code. But at the end of the day, they're really all the same. Build to this line, get up close to the street, stack your uses, etc. But both have failed. If any of you have numbers available about how much they were built for and then sold for, I'd love to see them. (I don't for a second ever buy the leasing numbers provided by companies with a stake in the deal. Ever notice everything is 85% and going fast!?)

The reason both have failed (in the short-term) is because of transportation networks. The design, integration, and overlay of the various networks of movement and interconnection as well as the siting and location of the developments.

This is why projects/developments like these I call "cargo cult urbanism." As Tyler Durden said, "sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken." Neither did putting coconuts to their ears and playing air traffic controller bring cargo planes and supplies to the Pacific Islands after WW2. These developments only get the superficial elements right: build to the street, mixed-use, etc. Those things are outgrowths of something deeper.

Buildings built to the street because they wanted to be as close as possible to the pedestrian movement along it. People wanted to live above the shop because they wanted to be close to the amenities below. Density = desirability. And proximity must equal desirability and the desirable must be proximate. It is a more efficient way to build, it is less costly way to move around, and creates more value long-term.

But we can't get there until we overhaul the transportation and finance industries.

Freeways to Real Estate, the Circle of Life

2011-09-19T18:28:00.004-05:00

Urban Land Institute bumps their head on the road to Damascus, realizing, "hey, there might be opportunity in this," detailing the top 10 (and really, only 10) Highway Removal projects on-going in these here United States. The article even has a Dallas mention as "thinking about it," which I presume is regarding 175 and Dead Man's Curve. The list:

Because of this article and arming myself with plenty of defense for the obvious questions to arrive whenever an idea threatens to disrupt everybody's daily lives, I took a look back through comments of larger media outlets when they bring up the very idea of highway removal. The response is typically along the lines of "PREPOSTEROUS!" I won't go so far as to call these people idiots, so ignorant will suffice. And when they point to their reliable gotcha question of "where would the traffic go?" LA Carmageddon was kind enough to provide the answer in a contemporary context. It finds other ways to get around. Or it doesn't at all. And that is for temporary closings.

The highway along with cheap gas prices (which first socialist President Michelle Bachmann promises to set arbitrarily at $2/gallon) allowed for destinations to spread apart, often severing irrevocably the bonds of community. And that was when the cost of road construction was paid back in return thru cannibalistic development. Since building the freeways that made in-town living undesirable and out-of-town living (and commuting) viable, tax base fled to the point where we can't maintain the roads and infrastructure we built. Insult to injury, the elevated freeways of concrete reinforced by steel is literally corroding each other to the point that driving on them much longer is closer to a game of Russian Roulette than it is to a casual Sunday drive.

For long-term closures, like the aforementioned list, what happens is that people will relocate. The city, the state, and particularly the federal government are short on cash and looking to divest assets, particularly land, their largest one. Under highways we have right-of-way, given potential value in its proximity to assets and amenities like downtown. Along highways, but in private hands we have land where demand is low for anything but parking lots. You can thank the freeways. The cars to fill those parking lots pay taxes outside of the City of Dallas. The City is left with infrastructure and no residential base to maintain it. And it gets over-run and overburdened by the mandate of car use upon it. At some point in a downward cycle you can go downward no more until you hit bottom.

There is one consistency in all cities throughout time and therein lies a lesson. The golden rule if cities have one. And that is that they are defined by and created specifically to serve the wants and needs of the humans that build them and are served by them. Where we locate upon them might be defined as a fractal pattern of individualized and interdependent desirability of place organized across the geographic landscape. We need things to survive. We want things to make life better. To get those things require others, who in turn, require their own space. To facilitate these social and economic exchanges cities make various interconnected conduits: roads, sidewalks, interstates, trails, train tracks, bike lanes, etc. etc. Each of these can't compromise the others, but rather would want to enhance them, interconnect with them. They also can't compromise the nested spaces within the lattice-work networks for us to live, warehouse, interconnect, trade: ideas, goods, currencies, genes, etc.

Each city works the exact same. Except the means by which we move between these exchanges varies from city to city, mostly due to the degree of choice that exists for various modes and varying purposes. We've let a certain type of road building corrupt our cities. A Keynesian idea of spending to spur economic growth turned into a Frankenstein monster of a ponzi scheme. Build roads, get spending, get growth. But what if all that growth is specifically because of the spending of that money, a bloated financial and construction sector feeding into itself and then, in turn, upon itself?

Like most large-scale public projects the chance of graft and corruption is a large and opportunistic one. Railroads corrupted federal government. Highway projects replaced railroad ones thanks to the impressive and influential public works of the nazis. And we spread out. Sun Belt cities grew, in numbers and in size. The car and the roads allowed it as transportation technology of the day always dictates size and shape of a city. Except the car is no longer new. It is no longer popular. And we keep the industry afloat simply because. Because that is all we knew and the future seems frightful. No one seems to know what is beyond that curtain.

Count me as one not afraid. That is, because I see a future. One that must be dictated by the choice of travel and transportation. Where we can still achieve all of our wants and needs as a social species without having to spend a day in the soul-crushing conveyor belt of a polluted freeway that offs 40,000 Americans each year and mangles a million of us.

A business that is inefficient and stupid is likely to soon be a failed one. The cities we have built are incredibly cost inefficient in terms of the cost of infrastructure per capita AND the costs imposed on families just to accommodate their lifestyles or participate in the local economy. ie get to a job everyday. Having to own, operate, and maintain a car is like a de facto second income tax, simply because some politicians and road construction companies got fat off of state and federal tax dollars. Walkability is a tax cut.

The city as a machine is also a stupid one in that we have little choice to appropriate our day and direction. There are few routes and modes so we all hop in cars, get on the same freeways and arterials based on a dendritic-model, and get stuck in traffic every time there is a hiccup. And because of human error, inevitably there is an accident or the accordion effect that costs the economy billions every day, year after year, simply because we can't act rationally in our daily lives.

Taking out specific highway segments, and not willy nilly as people who don't understand basic fundamentals of urban structure might suggest to strengthen their own specious arguments, creates opportunity for the private market to get back to work, constructing highly complex, interconnected places. Building cities that will last, not as Richard Sennett writes in The Corrosion of Character:

The classic American suburb was a bedroom community; in the last generation a different kind of suburb has arisen, more economically independent of the urban core, but not really town or village either; a place springs into life with the wave of a developer's wand (ed. note: and the political entities willful desire for its own ponzi-fueled growth via infrastructure), flourishes, and begins to decay all within a generation.

The larger point Sennett is making in his book is that short-term, impatient people, as we have become, armed with short-term, impatient capital, and short-term, impatient investment armatures, can not possibly build a permanent structure, whether that be a physical town, a business, a family, or a community. Sennett laments what it is doing to us in that long-term relationships and structure are no longer seen as amenities but even as hindrances. They tie us down and prevent us from something called freedom, I suppose.

But with regard to cities, building costly infrastructure based on short-term ephemeral technologies is a doomed strategy. Along with Sennett's point, I would argue that the economics that drive our decisions based solely on short-term calculations also give us certain freedom. That is freedom and independence from long-term benefits or that which might be described as invaluable: community, trust, obligation, togetherness.

But there is no such thing as this imagined, unadulterated freedom. We are all tied together as neighbors whether we like it or not. My rent goes to property taxes, which pay for roads so you can live outside the city. Getting along is hard work, but it pays. Democracy is messy and difficult, but in the absence of it, there is no choice. You'll get the roads and you'll like it, because the road builders pay campaign kitties. Then you'll have no choice in how you live and work and commute. Then people stop going to live there, choosing other places around the country and world where there is more opportunity, more actual freedom. Where people want to be. And where people want to be is density (the by-product of desirability). And amongst others, we have to learn to get along, or not, but we find others that we can and want to get along with. Because we have to. It is in our DNA.

Unfortunately, it isn't in the DNA of Sun Belt Cities. There is no built-in adaptability. No choice. It is a dumb, monoculture. Not the people, but the system. The ecosystem if you will. The bees aren't pollenating the flowers. The trees are no longer providing shade and shelter. But merely getting logged because the short-term economics say so. And that is why they'll die much like any single purpose Silver Mining town once it is strip-mined did, without radical repurposing.