The dangers of faster and larger vehicles to pedestrians

The chart at the right sums up the issue of speed. (A screen grab from this video.)

More on speed here: 20's Plenty for Us
This is UK group dedicated to lowering town and city speed limits to 20mph. Good video on their homepage.

Study: SUV's 3.6 times as likely to kill a pedestrian as a passenger vehicle.

A Selective Summary of The Death and Life

Later this year marks the 50th anniversary of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, published in 1961. And this May 4 marks what would be Jacobs's 95th birthday, which numerous cities will commemorate with Jane's Walks, including one in my own town. This has prompted me to look over the book again, and offer up a brief, selective summary.

Part I: The Peculiar Nature of Cities
A very anecdotal look at neighborhoods, parks, sidewalks with observations on the "ballet" of lively city life. Lays a lot of the groundwork for the rest of the book, but may not be so insightful to someone who's lived in a healthy urban environment before.

Part II: The Conditions for City Diversity
Four conditions are necessary for healthy, vibrant cities. These don't guarantee vigor and diversity of uses for an area, but vigor and diversity can't happen without them.

1 Mixed primary uses
A district must serve more than 1 primary uses (preferably more than 2), whose people use the same streets and facilities and different times of the day. There's economic efficiency in this re-use, which doesn't occur in a pure office district where people only go out during lunch hour, or a pure residential area where facilities are only used after 6pm.

2 Small blocks
Small blocks ensure that people traveling from point A to B have more paths to get there, encouraging more exploration. Businesses and neighbors on adjacent blocks are much more accessible than they would be on very long blocks. Drawings of Manhattan blocks on the west side illustrate how traffic is pushed off side streets and onto the avenues. In Rockefeller Center, the blocks have been shortened, allowing for more circulation.

3 Aged buildings
Buildings should vary in age and condition, including "plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings." The high cost of new buildings precludes a lot of businesses necessary to a healthy mix. (Studios, neighborhood bars, unusual restaurants, etc.) New ideas need old buildings. A large swatch developed at once is poor at creating diverse business, culture, and population. It decays as one over time, until it's deemed obsolete and the cycle is started again. A mixture of buildings is something a city can only inherit and sustain over the years.

4 Concentration
Despite density having a bad name among urban planners at the time, Jacobs gives examples in many cities of the most vital areas being far denser than the slums. High density often confused with overcrowding. How dense is appropriate? Under 6 dwellings per acre can make out well in suburbs. ~10-20 per acre makes a semi-suburb, which can work on the periphery (until it gets swallowed by a growing city.) 20+ per acre you can start getting city problems, but not the benefits. Around 100+ (depending on other factors) you start to get liveliness, safety, convenience, and interest. (Numbers rough-- numerical answer means less than a functional answer.)

Jacobs closes part two by countering some common myths about diversity: that it is ugly, invites ruinous uses, etc.

Part III: Forces of decline and regeneration


Self-destruction. How a successful district can naturally get killed by its own success, as the most lucrative primary use can crowd everything else out.

Border vacuums
She goes into great detail on how borders can hurt a district or city, especially the adjoining areas. The borders can be the canonical railroad tracks, the Cross-Bronx expressway being constructed, industrial sites, academic institutions, long empty blocks, or even large parks. Anything that disrupts the flow of people and makes them less inclined to keep walking. Some borders are necessary, but other city elements should be used to create lively, mixed territories, not unnecessary additional borders.

"Slum" clearance. Yep, a huge mistake. Caused more problems than it solved.

Gradual money vs cataclysmic money. Helping a district improve and evolve vs upending everything and creating more long-term problems.

Part IV: Different Tactics


Subsidizing dwellings. Instead of the government acting as builder and landlord.

Attrition of automobiles
Jacobs describes how we've gutted our cities to accommodate the automobile, but she goes to great pains to not vilify it. (Many pages devoted to how it's superior to the horse-and-buggy.) Should have replaced 6 horses with 1 car, instead of 1 horse with 6 cars. Discusses Ped/Auto separation schemes and their issues. Better just to reduce the dominance of cars and gradually reverse the cumulative effects of widened streets, increased parking, new expressways, etc., each step of which made sense on its own, but created a positive feedback loop with more cars and more gutting of the city.

When Washington Sq was closed to auto traffic in 1958, dire projections on increased congestion nearby proved false. Counts actually decreased slightly. There is no absolute, immutable number of drivers; they vary in response to other factors. Attrition of automobiles can occur by a gradual process of making conditions less convenient for cars. Widen sidewalks, increase ped crossings, reduce parking, make shorter blocks and thus have more crossings. (Today we might add curb extensions and gratuitous turns, lower speed limits, increase gas taxes.)

Visual order
"A city cannot be a work of art." The Radiant City, City Beautiful, etc. movements were "architectural design cults, rather than cults of social reform." A visual order can be established without complete control of the field of vision. To mitigate the inhuman-scale endless avenue effect of grids, introduce some irregular intersecting streets, but don't create dead-ends to foot traffic. Large buildings like Grand Central can be placed in some intersections; landmarks give orientation clues.

Salvaging housing projects
Remove the borders and reunite the project lands with the city. Place new streets and street-level buildings running through the empty spaces in projects. Introduce other uses besides residential to add diversity. Over the long term, look to disassemble them.

Governing and planning districts. Add a little more horizontal district administration, to give people a more local, accessible leverage point.

Non-review of Green Metropolis by David Owen

In honor of Earth Day I guess.

For a book whose premises I agree with, this was one tough read. I could only bear to skim it. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the main premise is old and obvious now--any environmentally conscious urbanist has known for decades that urban living is more green than suburban or rural living. So I offer just a quick chapter-by-chapter summary with a couple random comments.

More like Manhattan
Yeah, Manhattan is a much more energy efficient place to live than anywhere in the US. People who think it's an ecological disaster are failing to look at its per capita impact. Duh. Most Manhattanites I knew 20 years ago realized this.

Liquid Civilization
Yep, oil is bad. But come on, the concept of peak oil production may have some truth to it, but taking "Peak Oil" seriously as some sort of impending doom is ridiculous. More oddly, the author states that the 2008 price run-up on gas was purely due to speculation, clearly not true. We'll have the same prices this summer--global demand is the root. (Isn't that part of the peak oil gloom and doom?)

There and Back
Now we're getting somewhere. Some good points about the absurdity of auto-dependent lives. Improving MPG efficiency matters less than the accelerating sprawl. Zoning laws still largely encourage sprawl and undermine the communities they try to preserve. We should treat Manhattan as a model, not the exception.

Interesting note on Theodore Kheel, who first noted in 1955 that the auto was lowering NYC transit numbers, creating congestion and frustrating both drivers and transit riders. Under Mayor Lindsay, in 1969, he proposed tolls on the bridges to reduce congestion and pay for transit. Thwarted by Moses, and most of the US still reluctant to have "rubber pay for rails".

Traffic jams are beneficial environmentally, if they reduce the willingness of drivers to drive. Good discussion of congestion pricing, plus the need for properly priced parking. Though, Owen writes against charging trucks more in congestion pricing, which I disagree with. It doesn't matter that pedestrians need trucks to bring them goods, being against a higher toll is akin to arguing for subsidizing gas for trucks. The trucks use more of the public resource (roads) than cars so should be priced accordingly, and such charges won't pose a threat to delivering essential goods. The price is still very low relative to the value of the goods and services they bring--the charge may just help nudge them toward being a little more efficient.

Side note: At the end of the day, I think most drivers in small cities enjoy bitching about traffic. It makes them feel like they're in the big leagues.

The Great Outdoors
Lots of good Jacobsian observations. Good criticisms of Central Park, as hugely disruptive to the flow of the city, creating massive borders to the neighborhoods around it. I used to promote (rather tongue in cheek) building in the park to get a rise out of people and to encourage them to think about some of the problems it creates. Washington Square park much more valuable use of land.

Perceived distance and borders more important than actual distance. Like the author, I now use the car in cases I would find ridiculous in my more urban past (driving half a mile to the post office because it's raining.) This isn't just because driving is easier now, it's because walking is a lot less pleasant.

Suburbanites don't actually spend more time outdoors. Notes how people complain about having to park half a block away from their destination. (Another side note: people in small cities love to bitch about parking too.)

"Environmentalists have tended to think of themselves mainly as defenders of what's left, rather than as shapers of what lies ahead." Amen.

Embodied Efficiency
Get this: skyscrapers are actually very efficient. Again, Duh. And, LEED is kinda stupid. (See the chart here, which sums things up nicely:
http://www.microurban.org/2011/03/epa-study-urban-more-green-than-green.html.) Maybe some good background info in this chapter, but getting bored.


On this topic, I believe the elevator is the greatest and most overlooked mass transit tool ever. Maybe after the staircase.


The Shape of Things to Come
China, China. Dubai, Dubai. Snooze, snooze. Ok, back on track:

When affluent Americans think about "going green," they tend to focus on enhancements to their own consumption rather than subtractions from it: buying a new, more fuel-efficient car (rather than driving less or taking the bus), building a new kitchen full of eco-friendly gadgets and exotic building materials (rather than deciding not to add yet another underused room to their house), replacing their old windows with high-tech new ones (rather than caulking air leaks, drawing the curtains during the day, and turning the air-conditioning down or off), and eating better-tasting chickens, tomatoes, and eggs.

Good point, these aren't just "enhancements", they're increases to consumption. Damn yuppie bastards.

Still, I can't understand why this guy still lives in exurbia, and yeah, I can't recommend the book. I do hope it finds an audience who will find all this novel and enlightening--I'm sure there's a huge potential market still. And I hope that smaller cities, despite their many differences with Manhattan, accept a lot of the positives of Manhattan, especially its density and its transit-/walking-/biking-orientation.

Neighborhood Elementary Schools

(Re-post from the Scrantonite.)

Handsome late 1800s stone and brick school on Oram, in the heart of a neighborhood it serves. Sadly, one of two neighborhood schools being killed to create the inaccessible monstrosity pictured below.

The new school is inaccessible enough by car, at the far end of a disconnected, small residential street, and its design is extremely unapproachable by foot. Wouldn't want neighbors interacting, or parents having the odd chance to discuss the quality of their kids education. That'd be kinda threatening.

The kicker is that some wanted to name the new school after Jane Jacobs. Oy.

More reading on preserving old schools:

http://www.saveourlandsaveourtowns.org/renovate.html

http://www.preservationnation.org/issues/historic-schools/

Maps of neighborhood census data

The New York Times has some great maps of the 2010 census data, allowing you to see tract by tract how the population has changed in any city. http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map

Related, I've used the data to make a spreadsheet of the growth and decline of neighborhoods and sections of Scranton, PA, which has finally leveled off after seven or 8 decades of decline. Interesting to see where the growth is that has offset the declines elsewhere. Basically boils down to intra-city sprawl, the UofS, and Latinos..

Scranton Neighborhood Populations

EPA Study: Urban more green than "Green"

In short, living in a transit-oriented, multi-family home--even w/o green construction & green autos (A)-- is much more energy efficient than a conventional single-family house with all the green trappings (B).

via treehugger:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/02/location-efficiency-as-important-as-energy-efficiency.php

Picking redevelopment wisely: Lack of leverage at the Scranton Lace site

The Scranton Times reported on a $4.5M grant to begin plans to redevelop the Scranton Lace site into artists lofts and studios. The Lace Works is an immense collection of contiguous 3- and 4-story buildings near the river, with a tall clock tower. You can see an aerial view of the site here.

There's a lot to like about this news, and you can appreciate the vision:

• restoring a historic site with some beautiful industrial buildings
• creating a artists colony -- what's not to like about artists
• re-inhabiting a desolate stretch of the city
• the site abuts the river, where the new hiking+biking trail is coming in

But there are a few big problems. First, is the scale of this site. There just aren't enough artists in the world who'd want to move to Scranton to fill this in. Even if it were opened up beyond artists, there just aren't enough people who'd want to live in this spot to fill a tenth of it in. The project calls for live/work spaces for 30 artists to start, which makes sense, but the whole site will still feel like a dead factory with 30 artists. It'll likely feel empty and dilapidated for hundreds of years unless huge amounts of cash are poured in, or something dramatic changes to quadruple the population of the city.

Most importantly, though, the site sits in a serious no-man's land. There's nothing in the surrounding blocks; it's an empty neighborhood beyond walking distance from downtown. There's one restaurant right across the river, and a dreary, uninviting suburban-style shopping center 5 blocks away, plus a few active industrial buildings amid a lot of rubble and ruin. There are few services and very little existing urban fabric here, so there's little leverage to be gained. 

Proponents claim that each dollar would generate $8 of economic impact. We're dubious, but if that were true, it'd be easy to see how a better a location would mean $80 of economic impact per dollar spent. If it were closer to downtown, and/or in a neighborhood with an active commercial stretch, this would benefit the residents of the redeveloped site and the local businesses. There just isn't enough business going around to create a whole new set of services around the Lace Works, and even if there were, it would have some cannibalizing effect on other existing businesses elsewhere. That's the reality of a region with stagnant population numbers.

Location is key to using redevelopment funds wisely. Perhaps the spotty nature of state and federal grants makes it difficult to always consolidate such efforts and to leverage other redevelopment and existing infrastructure. But we do our cause a disservice in the long run by inefficient investment. A smaller project, downtown or nearby (say Pine Brook, South Side, West Side, or the The Hill) would be a cheaper proof of concept, would be a better location for artists, and could leverage each dollar spent into much more economic activity.

If the money's there specifically for this project, I probably wouldn't turn it down. And from a preservationist standpoint, I'd love to see the Lace Works preserved. But, an artist colony in that location is a poor investment.