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Walkable city notes dump
I took a lot of notes. Later I may try to summarize the book better, but here's a raw dump. Paragraphs that start with a " are quotes (usually unclosed), paragraphs without " are probably me.
Book is about how walkable cities are awesoe, and walkability pretty much sums up a healthy city. Cases for walkability are detailed in wealth (property values), health (natural exericse), and sustainability (lower emissions and pollution). The second part of the book is about various aspects that make up a walkable city. Don't expect anything like a structured table of contents in this post.
"It turns out that since the late nineties, the share of automobile miles driven by Americans in their twenties has dropped from 20.8 percent to just 13.7 percent. And if one looks at teens, future shifts seem likely to be greater. The number of nineteen-year-olds who have opted out of earning driver’s licenses has almost tripled since the late seventies, from 8 percent to 23 percent.
Many aging Boomers relocating to walkable areas, smaller homes and less driving.
"In the Detroit region, he (Leinberger) finds that housing in walkable urbanism fetches a 40 percent price premium over similar housing in drivable sub-urbanism; in the Seattle region, that premium is 51 percent; in Denver, it’s 150 percent. New York City, unsurprisingly, tops the list at 200 percent
Walkscore surprisingly accurate despite being crude, because short distance to stores correlates with traditional cities. Breaks down in big shopping areas:
"Mixed uses and pedestrian-friendly streets are both part of one common model (the traditional urban neighborhood), while isolated uses and unwalkable streets constitute the other (sprawl). Where the algorithm begins to fail is in high-intensity, commercial edge cities. Here, a preponderance of retail outlets cranks up the score, despite the fact that the only walking occurs in gigantic parking lots.
"Referring to Walk Score’s five categories, they state that “each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents, and nearly $82 per square foot to home values”
"The market-research firm Belden Russonello & Stewart polled several thousand American adults for the National Association of Realtors, and found the following: “When selecting a community, nearly half of the public (47 percent) would prefer to live in a city or a suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses.… Only one in ten say they would prefer a suburban neighborhood with houses only.”18
"Portland has more restaurants per capita than all other large cities except Seattle and San Francisco.
"While transportation used to absorb only one-tenth of a typical family’s budget (1960), it now consumes more than one in five dollars spent.
"All told, the average American family now spends about $14,000 per year driving multiple cars
.
"the typical “working” family, with an income of $20,000 to $50,000, pays more for transportation than for housing.
I'm skeptical.
"While fully 50 percent walked to school in 1969, fewer than 15 percent do now. ... the number of elementary school–aged children driven to school in private vehicles has risen from 12 percent in 1969 to 44 percent in 2009
"As recently as 1991, no states had adult obesity rates over 20 percent. By 2007, only one state, Colorado, was under 20 percent.
Various studies find obesity correlates with driving time and low density.
Combining traffic deaths and crime, you're safer in the inner city than the suburbs, and that was true 30 years ago with the higher murder rates then.
"The study concluded that an hour spent driving triples your risk of heart attack in the hours that follow.
Walkability is biggest contributor to lower emissions.
"in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.
"sprawl, which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.
"the vast majority of the driving reduction occurred in the switch from large-lot sprawl to densities of ten to twenty units per acre.
"increasing density from two units per acre to twenty units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from twenty to two hundred.22 To students of urban form, these outcomes are not that surprising, because ten to twenty units per acre is the density at which drivable sub-urbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.
Is that overall or within residential zones?
"The researchers expected to find a broad range of historical and cultural causes behind the differing fates of Canadian and U.S. cities. Instead, they found that these cities appeared almost identical in 1940 and then tracked in different directions based upon relative highway investment. It didn’t matter whether a city was American or Canadian: the highway-investment history was all you needed to know to accurately predict the real estate–value history.
Traffic studies are bullshit. Sensitive to assumptions, biased in who does them, and ignore induced demand.
"In Great Britain, where planners are no longer allowed to justify new highways on the basis of reduced congestion, road construction has dropped so drastically that Alarm UK, the main freeway protest organization, disbanded itself “on the grounds that it was no longer needed.”15
Congestion saves fuel per capita! Fuel costs are typically too small to deter driving, congestion is the only deterrent.
Main streets often run by the state DoT, focused on traffic flow rather than what's good for a community. City traffic engineers are also a threat.
Quotes Jacobs and Marohn about how traffic engineering is a fraud.
"The Embarcadero was replaced by a lovely boulevard, whose cute little streetcars actually transport more riders per day than the freeway once did.
Cheonggyecheon
"A sixteen-lane highway was replaced by an urban boulevard and a spectacular 3.6-mile river park.
A few years later, the river’s ecosystem had been significantly restored, an urban heat island had its temperature reduced by more than five degrees, and traffic congestion had dropped sharply—thanks in part to simultaneous investments in transit. As of this writing, property values surrounding the former highway have risen 300 percent.
Some car free zones work, like Copenhagen, NYC, or college towns, but most USA attempts failed
.
"But the main lesson here is to not do it the way they did last time, with the construction of expensive and expensive-to-remove streetscapes that make driving impossible. Instead, put up some temporary bollards and bring in a few potted trees and movable chairs, like they did in Times Square. Try it on a weekend and, if it works, expand the days. Don’t spend a penny on gorgeous car barricades,
"In the early 2000s, London was choking on traffic, and people were desperate for a solution. Having exhausted the alternatives, Mayor Ken Livingstone proposed the only known cure, economics.
Congestion dropped 30 percent in the toll zone, and typical journey times went down by 14 percent. Cycling among Londoners jumped 20 percent and air pollution fell about 12 percent. Bus reliability has jumped by 30 percent and bus delays have dropped by 60 percent.
"Ivan Illich, the multinational intellectual who in 1973 wrote the smartest thing that I have yet to read about transportation: “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.”
"Illich discovered a hidden physical law: the faster a society moves, the more it spreads out and the more time it must spend moving.
"The cheapest urban parking space in America, an 8½-by-18-foot piece of asphalt on relatively worthless land, costs about four thousand dollars to create—and not much urban land is worthless.
"In 2010, the first nationwide count determined that there are half a billion empty parking spaces in America at any given time. More to our purposes, a 2002 survey of Seattle’s Central Business District found that, during times of peak demand, almost four out of ten parking spaces were empty.
Some cars parked, some on roads. 255 million cars? 3 spaces per car.
D.C. USA mall with 2 spaces per 1000 ft2 has largely empty parking, never tops 47% use.
"Developers in San Francisco estimate that the city’s one-space-per-unit requirement adds 20 p
ercent to the cost of affordable housing. Shoup calculates that eliminating this requirement w
ould allow 24 percent more San Franciscans to buy homes.
"a study in Oakland found that requiring one parking space per home “increased housing costs by 18 percent and reduced density by 30 percent.”
Ocean avenue in Carmel makes off street parking illegal. Businesses pay fees for city garages.
California requires some businesses to provide cash out option for free employee parking.
"each parking meter in Pasadena generate an average of $1,712 in annual revenue for the city, but sales tax receipts are way up. Indeed, the city’s sales-tax revenue tripled in the first six years after the meters were installed.
"With rare exceptions, every transit trip begins and ends with a walk. As a result, while walkability benefits from good transit, good transit relies absolutely on walkability.
Transit factors: local density and neighborhood structure. Compact, diverse, and walkable neighborhoods.
"A traditional city is composed principally of these neighborhoods, interspersed periodically with districts like universities and airports, and corridors like rivers and railways.
"sprawl, which is defined as being vast, homogeneous, and unwalkable.
Dallas light rail has expanded with declining ridership.
"lacking sufficient residential densities; encouraging ample parking downtown; placing the rail alignments in the least costly rights-of-way rather than in the busiest areas; locating stations next to highways and with huge parking garages; reducing frequencies to afford farther-flung service; and, finally, forgetting about neighborhoods.
Park and ride only works when you don't need a car on the other end, like dense expensive downtowns.
Induced demand: transit by itself doesn't reduce congestion.
Bus needs: urbanity (pass through good locations, not a block away or across a parking lot), clarity (simple lines or loops), frequency (10 minutes or not at all), pleasure (eh).
BRT 15 million per mile, light rail 35. Proper BRT infrastructure ugly. (yeah, Brisbane wasn't pretty).
Boulder has a good bus system.
"Despite gaining ten thousand new residents and twelve thousand new jobs since 1994, the city has seen zero increase in its total vehicle miles driven.
120/year for household pass.
After a year of service, Zipcar Baltimore polled its members and found that they were walking 21 percent more, biking 14 percent more, and taking transit 11 percent more than before joining. Only 12 percent of members had taken more than five driving trips in the previous month, compared to 38 percent before joining Zipcar. About a fifth of members had sold their cars, and almost half claimed that Zipcar had saved them from having to buy a car.
"Generally speaking, the cities with the smallest blocks are the ones best known for walkability, while those with the largest blocks are known as places without street life—if they are known at all. The preindustrial neighborhoods of downtown Boston and lower Manhattan, like their European counterparts, have blocks that average less than two hundred feet long (and the cranky medieval street patterns to match). The most walkable grids, like Philadelphia’s and San Francisco’s, have blocks that average less than four hundred feet in length. And then there are the pedestrian-free zones, like Irvine, California, where many blocks are one thousand feet long or longer.
There are, as always, exceptions. Much of Berlin has surprisingly large blocks. But its street maps are effectively a lie, since so many Berlin blocks are rife with interior passages and courtyards that create a hidden network of pedestrian life. The blocks of Los Angeles aren’t much bigger than Barcelona’s, but the latter’s streets aren’t engineered for high speeds. Los Angeles demonstrates that it is possible to make a small-block city unwalkable, but the larger pool of evidence confirms that it is much harder to make a big-block city walkable.
Block length should be under 400 ft, or 133 meters.
"the more blocks per square mile, the more choices a pedestrian can make and the more opportunities there are to alter your path to visit a useful address such as a coffee shop or dry cleaner. These choices also make walking more interesting, while shortening the distances between destinations.
Longer blocks mean wider and faster streets.
"Presuming a similar traffic volume, a city with twice the block size requires each street to hold twice as many driving lanes. The typical street in downtown Portland, with its two-hundred-foot-per-side blocks, holds two lanes of traffic. The typical street in downtown Salt Lake City, with blocks over six hundred feet per side, holds six lanes of traffic. And six-lane streets are much more dangerous than two-lane streets.
"“safer” cities and twelve “less safe” cities. Among these two groups, they found no single variable to be more predictive of injury and death than block size. Blocks in the dozen safer cities averaged eighteen acres in size, while blocks in the dozen less safe cities averaged thirty-four acres in size. All told, a doubling of block size corresponded with a tripling of fatalities.
"the most significant threshold is between one lane and two lanes in any given direction, since that second lane offers the opportunity to pass and thus allows drivers to slip into a “road racer” frame of mind.
"The good news is that four-lane streets can be as inefficient as they are deadly, because the fast lane is also the left-hand turn lane, and maintaining speed often means jockeying from lane to lane.
So can convert to one lane each way plus turn lane without losing efficiency. Crashes reduced and crash speed reduced.
But left turn lanes often unneeded or too long yet come at expense of nearby parking.
Cars are 6 feet wide, Ford Excursion is 6'6", historical lanes were 10 feet wide, but now engineers are putting in 12-14 feet to allow safety at speed, which induces more speeding.
"widening a city’s streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter crime.
Risk homeostasis. Safest roads are the ones that feel the least safe.
"In most cities, intersections are required to meet at ninety degrees or close to it. Staggered intersections, great for slowing speeds, are strictly forbidden. Five-ways, common in older places, are also off the table.
Sight triangle requirements that prevent corner trees and buildings.
Talks about naked streets and shared space, but I think the latter have been discredited since, at least the way the Dutch were doing it.
One way streets in cities remove the friction of oncoming traffic, speeding cars up. Can kill businesses if the mandated flow is opposite the commuter market, like a breakfast store on a street away from jobs, or evening shopping in the morning direction.
A Savannah thoroughfare lost 2/3 of its businesses after a one way conversion; businesses returned after it went back. Other success stories, including Main St in Vancouver WA.
Curb parking makes people feel protected from cars and slows down traffic wary of pull outs.
Curb parking being eliminated with idea that car bombers will fear a parking ticket.
Back-in diagonal parking safer than nose-in.
"Most pedestrian routes are not due north-south or east-west, but diagonal, and every intersection provides the opportunity to cross in one direction at all times. Walkers like to keep walking and dedicated signals kill the momentum.
"The ideal signal cycle timing is almost always sixty seconds or less. Longer signal cycles have long been favored by traffic engineers, who calculate that these contribute to system throughput. However, their calculations ignore the associated negative impacts of the speeding and road rage that result from drivers having to wait inordinately long times at stoplights, not to mention the jaywalking accidents.
Right on red is banned in the Netherlands. Favors cars over people. Pedestrian head start good.
Four way stops safer than signals.
"Today’s seventeen-year-old is a third less likely to have a driver’s license than a baby boomer was at that age.
"Using the same amount of energy as walking, a bicycle will take you three times farther.
"typical bike lane handles five to ten times the traffic volume of a car lane twice its width.
"In Copenhagen, most of the city’s major four-lane streets have been converted to two lanes plus two bike paths. As a sign of the city’s priorities, these bike lanes are always cleared of snow before the driving lanes are. The minimum recommended bike path width is over eight feet,19 which makes America’s five-footers look pretty dinky.
Brooklyn "converted one lane of Prospect Park West from driving to biking. As a result, the number of weekday cyclists tripled, and the percentage of speeders dropped from about 75 percent of all cars to less than 17 percent. Injury crashes went down by 63 percent from prior years. Interestingly, car volume and travel times stayed almost exactly the same—the typical southbound trip became five seconds faster—and there were no negative impacts on streets nearby.
Desire for prospect and refuge, humans from forest edge, maybe why we like colannades, arcades, and porches. Roof, pillar, and view.
American cities are more open space than edge. People happier with edges on both sides, parking lot across the street can sabotage the built side.
Successful public spaces usually 60 yards across or less.
"we can see a person’s movement at one hundred yards and recognize and hear them at about fifty.
"a width-to-height ratio above 6:1 is generally agreed to exceed the limits of spatial definition, with a 1:1 ratio historically considered the ideal.
Walking around, this feels right. Decent trees add a lot. 6-8 meter houses separated by 36 meters of yard, sidewalk, and street feel too open; 6 vs 16, hugging sidewalk, felt better.
North End in the 1960s had 275 units per acre.
Supports height limits in most cases to prevent land speculation and a skyscraper sucking up development activity.
D.C. limit is 20 feet higher than the street width.
Where using scrapers use the Vancouver model, skinny tower on a broad sidewalk hugging base. Give more of a skyline and cause less wind problem.
Street design matters more to walking than climate.
"The Georgia DOT outlaws placing trees within eight feet of a state-owned street because, in the words of one reporter, “sidewalks are auto recovery zones where drivers have space to correct course if they’ve veered off.”4 And only recently did the Virginia regulations stop referring to street trees as “Fixed and Hazardous Objects.”
Trees make streets safer and cooler as well as more pleasant. Also boost real estate values.
"Extrapolating to Portland as a whole, the study’s authors found that the presence of healthy street trees likely adds $15.3 million to annual property tax revenues. Meanwhile, the city pays $1.28 million each year for tree planting and maintenance, resulting in a payoff of almost exactly twelve to one.
"in their quest to become more sustainable, cities need to remember that, for the typical pedestrian, the most mundane storefront is still more interesting than the most luxuriant landscape.
Utility of hiding parking behind storefronts, even shallow ones, having upper levels pretend to be building, and using more convertible ramps against future non parking use.
"It is fairly easy to gauge the intelligence of a city’s planning department by asking a simple question: in downtowns and other areas of potential pedestrian life, do your rules require that all parking lots be hidden behind a habitable building edge?
Friendliness of sittable surfaces, bench or low wall.
"“It is interesting to note that shops and booths in active, thriving commercial streets all over the world often have a façade length of 16–20 feet, which ... means that there are new activities and sights to see about every five seconds.”
5-6 meters.
Codes could require inviting facades instead of blank walls. Melbourne has one.
Star architects don't think about fostering pedestrian life.
"Most of the design codes that I write for governments include a paragraph that goes something like this: “While even smaller units of design are encouraged, no more than 200 feet of continuous street frontage may appear to have been designed by a single architect.”
Columbus built a 200 foot wide bridge over a recessed freeway, big enough for retail lining, thus connecting two walkable neighborhoods.
Urban triage, focus on improving walkable and nearly walkable streets, or connectors, not spending money on clear car country.
Downtown belongs to everyone, investing there benefits everyone.
Book is about how walkable cities are awesoe, and walkability pretty much sums up a healthy city. Cases for walkability are detailed in wealth (property values), health (natural exericse), and sustainability (lower emissions and pollution). The second part of the book is about various aspects that make up a walkable city. Don't expect anything like a structured table of contents in this post.
"It turns out that since the late nineties, the share of automobile miles driven by Americans in their twenties has dropped from 20.8 percent to just 13.7 percent. And if one looks at teens, future shifts seem likely to be greater. The number of nineteen-year-olds who have opted out of earning driver’s licenses has almost tripled since the late seventies, from 8 percent to 23 percent.
Many aging Boomers relocating to walkable areas, smaller homes and less driving.
"In the Detroit region, he (Leinberger) finds that housing in walkable urbanism fetches a 40 percent price premium over similar housing in drivable sub-urbanism; in the Seattle region, that premium is 51 percent; in Denver, it’s 150 percent. New York City, unsurprisingly, tops the list at 200 percent
Walkscore surprisingly accurate despite being crude, because short distance to stores correlates with traditional cities. Breaks down in big shopping areas:
"Mixed uses and pedestrian-friendly streets are both part of one common model (the traditional urban neighborhood), while isolated uses and unwalkable streets constitute the other (sprawl). Where the algorithm begins to fail is in high-intensity, commercial edge cities. Here, a preponderance of retail outlets cranks up the score, despite the fact that the only walking occurs in gigantic parking lots.
"Referring to Walk Score’s five categories, they state that “each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents, and nearly $82 per square foot to home values”
"The market-research firm Belden Russonello & Stewart polled several thousand American adults for the National Association of Realtors, and found the following: “When selecting a community, nearly half of the public (47 percent) would prefer to live in a city or a suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses.… Only one in ten say they would prefer a suburban neighborhood with houses only.”18
"Portland has more restaurants per capita than all other large cities except Seattle and San Francisco.
"While transportation used to absorb only one-tenth of a typical family’s budget (1960), it now consumes more than one in five dollars spent.
"All told, the average American family now spends about $14,000 per year driving multiple cars
.
"the typical “working” family, with an income of $20,000 to $50,000, pays more for transportation than for housing.
I'm skeptical.
"While fully 50 percent walked to school in 1969, fewer than 15 percent do now. ... the number of elementary school–aged children driven to school in private vehicles has risen from 12 percent in 1969 to 44 percent in 2009
"As recently as 1991, no states had adult obesity rates over 20 percent. By 2007, only one state, Colorado, was under 20 percent.
Various studies find obesity correlates with driving time and low density.
Combining traffic deaths and crime, you're safer in the inner city than the suburbs, and that was true 30 years ago with the higher murder rates then.
"The study concluded that an hour spent driving triples your risk of heart attack in the hours that follow.
Walkability is biggest contributor to lower emissions.
"in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.
"sprawl, which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.
"the vast majority of the driving reduction occurred in the switch from large-lot sprawl to densities of ten to twenty units per acre.
"increasing density from two units per acre to twenty units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from twenty to two hundred.22 To students of urban form, these outcomes are not that surprising, because ten to twenty units per acre is the density at which drivable sub-urbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.
Is that overall or within residential zones?
"The researchers expected to find a broad range of historical and cultural causes behind the differing fates of Canadian and U.S. cities. Instead, they found that these cities appeared almost identical in 1940 and then tracked in different directions based upon relative highway investment. It didn’t matter whether a city was American or Canadian: the highway-investment history was all you needed to know to accurately predict the real estate–value history.
Traffic studies are bullshit. Sensitive to assumptions, biased in who does them, and ignore induced demand.
"In Great Britain, where planners are no longer allowed to justify new highways on the basis of reduced congestion, road construction has dropped so drastically that Alarm UK, the main freeway protest organization, disbanded itself “on the grounds that it was no longer needed.”15
Congestion saves fuel per capita! Fuel costs are typically too small to deter driving, congestion is the only deterrent.
Main streets often run by the state DoT, focused on traffic flow rather than what's good for a community. City traffic engineers are also a threat.
Quotes Jacobs and Marohn about how traffic engineering is a fraud.
"The Embarcadero was replaced by a lovely boulevard, whose cute little streetcars actually transport more riders per day than the freeway once did.
Cheonggyecheon
"A sixteen-lane highway was replaced by an urban boulevard and a spectacular 3.6-mile river park.
A few years later, the river’s ecosystem had been significantly restored, an urban heat island had its temperature reduced by more than five degrees, and traffic congestion had dropped sharply—thanks in part to simultaneous investments in transit. As of this writing, property values surrounding the former highway have risen 300 percent.
Some car free zones work, like Copenhagen, NYC, or college towns, but most USA attempts failed
.
"But the main lesson here is to not do it the way they did last time, with the construction of expensive and expensive-to-remove streetscapes that make driving impossible. Instead, put up some temporary bollards and bring in a few potted trees and movable chairs, like they did in Times Square. Try it on a weekend and, if it works, expand the days. Don’t spend a penny on gorgeous car barricades,
"In the early 2000s, London was choking on traffic, and people were desperate for a solution. Having exhausted the alternatives, Mayor Ken Livingstone proposed the only known cure, economics.
Congestion dropped 30 percent in the toll zone, and typical journey times went down by 14 percent. Cycling among Londoners jumped 20 percent and air pollution fell about 12 percent. Bus reliability has jumped by 30 percent and bus delays have dropped by 60 percent.
"Ivan Illich, the multinational intellectual who in 1973 wrote the smartest thing that I have yet to read about transportation: “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.”
"Illich discovered a hidden physical law: the faster a society moves, the more it spreads out and the more time it must spend moving.
"The cheapest urban parking space in America, an 8½-by-18-foot piece of asphalt on relatively worthless land, costs about four thousand dollars to create—and not much urban land is worthless.
"In 2010, the first nationwide count determined that there are half a billion empty parking spaces in America at any given time. More to our purposes, a 2002 survey of Seattle’s Central Business District found that, during times of peak demand, almost four out of ten parking spaces were empty.
Some cars parked, some on roads. 255 million cars? 3 spaces per car.
D.C. USA mall with 2 spaces per 1000 ft2 has largely empty parking, never tops 47% use.
"Developers in San Francisco estimate that the city’s one-space-per-unit requirement adds 20 p
ercent to the cost of affordable housing. Shoup calculates that eliminating this requirement w
ould allow 24 percent more San Franciscans to buy homes.
"a study in Oakland found that requiring one parking space per home “increased housing costs by 18 percent and reduced density by 30 percent.”
Ocean avenue in Carmel makes off street parking illegal. Businesses pay fees for city garages.
California requires some businesses to provide cash out option for free employee parking.
"each parking meter in Pasadena generate an average of $1,712 in annual revenue for the city, but sales tax receipts are way up. Indeed, the city’s sales-tax revenue tripled in the first six years after the meters were installed.
"With rare exceptions, every transit trip begins and ends with a walk. As a result, while walkability benefits from good transit, good transit relies absolutely on walkability.
Transit factors: local density and neighborhood structure. Compact, diverse, and walkable neighborhoods.
"A traditional city is composed principally of these neighborhoods, interspersed periodically with districts like universities and airports, and corridors like rivers and railways.
"sprawl, which is defined as being vast, homogeneous, and unwalkable.
Dallas light rail has expanded with declining ridership.
"lacking sufficient residential densities; encouraging ample parking downtown; placing the rail alignments in the least costly rights-of-way rather than in the busiest areas; locating stations next to highways and with huge parking garages; reducing frequencies to afford farther-flung service; and, finally, forgetting about neighborhoods.
Park and ride only works when you don't need a car on the other end, like dense expensive downtowns.
Induced demand: transit by itself doesn't reduce congestion.
Bus needs: urbanity (pass through good locations, not a block away or across a parking lot), clarity (simple lines or loops), frequency (10 minutes or not at all), pleasure (eh).
BRT 15 million per mile, light rail 35. Proper BRT infrastructure ugly. (yeah, Brisbane wasn't pretty).
Boulder has a good bus system.
"Despite gaining ten thousand new residents and twelve thousand new jobs since 1994, the city has seen zero increase in its total vehicle miles driven.
120/year for household pass.
After a year of service, Zipcar Baltimore polled its members and found that they were walking 21 percent more, biking 14 percent more, and taking transit 11 percent more than before joining. Only 12 percent of members had taken more than five driving trips in the previous month, compared to 38 percent before joining Zipcar. About a fifth of members had sold their cars, and almost half claimed that Zipcar had saved them from having to buy a car.
"Generally speaking, the cities with the smallest blocks are the ones best known for walkability, while those with the largest blocks are known as places without street life—if they are known at all. The preindustrial neighborhoods of downtown Boston and lower Manhattan, like their European counterparts, have blocks that average less than two hundred feet long (and the cranky medieval street patterns to match). The most walkable grids, like Philadelphia’s and San Francisco’s, have blocks that average less than four hundred feet in length. And then there are the pedestrian-free zones, like Irvine, California, where many blocks are one thousand feet long or longer.
There are, as always, exceptions. Much of Berlin has surprisingly large blocks. But its street maps are effectively a lie, since so many Berlin blocks are rife with interior passages and courtyards that create a hidden network of pedestrian life. The blocks of Los Angeles aren’t much bigger than Barcelona’s, but the latter’s streets aren’t engineered for high speeds. Los Angeles demonstrates that it is possible to make a small-block city unwalkable, but the larger pool of evidence confirms that it is much harder to make a big-block city walkable.
Block length should be under 400 ft, or 133 meters.
"the more blocks per square mile, the more choices a pedestrian can make and the more opportunities there are to alter your path to visit a useful address such as a coffee shop or dry cleaner. These choices also make walking more interesting, while shortening the distances between destinations.
Longer blocks mean wider and faster streets.
"Presuming a similar traffic volume, a city with twice the block size requires each street to hold twice as many driving lanes. The typical street in downtown Portland, with its two-hundred-foot-per-side blocks, holds two lanes of traffic. The typical street in downtown Salt Lake City, with blocks over six hundred feet per side, holds six lanes of traffic. And six-lane streets are much more dangerous than two-lane streets.
"“safer” cities and twelve “less safe” cities. Among these two groups, they found no single variable to be more predictive of injury and death than block size. Blocks in the dozen safer cities averaged eighteen acres in size, while blocks in the dozen less safe cities averaged thirty-four acres in size. All told, a doubling of block size corresponded with a tripling of fatalities.
"the most significant threshold is between one lane and two lanes in any given direction, since that second lane offers the opportunity to pass and thus allows drivers to slip into a “road racer” frame of mind.
"The good news is that four-lane streets can be as inefficient as they are deadly, because the fast lane is also the left-hand turn lane, and maintaining speed often means jockeying from lane to lane.
So can convert to one lane each way plus turn lane without losing efficiency. Crashes reduced and crash speed reduced.
But left turn lanes often unneeded or too long yet come at expense of nearby parking.
Cars are 6 feet wide, Ford Excursion is 6'6", historical lanes were 10 feet wide, but now engineers are putting in 12-14 feet to allow safety at speed, which induces more speeding.
"widening a city’s streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter crime.
Risk homeostasis. Safest roads are the ones that feel the least safe.
"In most cities, intersections are required to meet at ninety degrees or close to it. Staggered intersections, great for slowing speeds, are strictly forbidden. Five-ways, common in older places, are also off the table.
Sight triangle requirements that prevent corner trees and buildings.
Talks about naked streets and shared space, but I think the latter have been discredited since, at least the way the Dutch were doing it.
One way streets in cities remove the friction of oncoming traffic, speeding cars up. Can kill businesses if the mandated flow is opposite the commuter market, like a breakfast store on a street away from jobs, or evening shopping in the morning direction.
A Savannah thoroughfare lost 2/3 of its businesses after a one way conversion; businesses returned after it went back. Other success stories, including Main St in Vancouver WA.
Curb parking makes people feel protected from cars and slows down traffic wary of pull outs.
Curb parking being eliminated with idea that car bombers will fear a parking ticket.
Back-in diagonal parking safer than nose-in.
"Most pedestrian routes are not due north-south or east-west, but diagonal, and every intersection provides the opportunity to cross in one direction at all times. Walkers like to keep walking and dedicated signals kill the momentum.
"The ideal signal cycle timing is almost always sixty seconds or less. Longer signal cycles have long been favored by traffic engineers, who calculate that these contribute to system throughput. However, their calculations ignore the associated negative impacts of the speeding and road rage that result from drivers having to wait inordinately long times at stoplights, not to mention the jaywalking accidents.
Right on red is banned in the Netherlands. Favors cars over people. Pedestrian head start good.
Four way stops safer than signals.
"Today’s seventeen-year-old is a third less likely to have a driver’s license than a baby boomer was at that age.
"Using the same amount of energy as walking, a bicycle will take you three times farther.
"typical bike lane handles five to ten times the traffic volume of a car lane twice its width.
"In Copenhagen, most of the city’s major four-lane streets have been converted to two lanes plus two bike paths. As a sign of the city’s priorities, these bike lanes are always cleared of snow before the driving lanes are. The minimum recommended bike path width is over eight feet,19 which makes America’s five-footers look pretty dinky.
Brooklyn "converted one lane of Prospect Park West from driving to biking. As a result, the number of weekday cyclists tripled, and the percentage of speeders dropped from about 75 percent of all cars to less than 17 percent. Injury crashes went down by 63 percent from prior years. Interestingly, car volume and travel times stayed almost exactly the same—the typical southbound trip became five seconds faster—and there were no negative impacts on streets nearby.
Desire for prospect and refuge, humans from forest edge, maybe why we like colannades, arcades, and porches. Roof, pillar, and view.
American cities are more open space than edge. People happier with edges on both sides, parking lot across the street can sabotage the built side.
Successful public spaces usually 60 yards across or less.
"we can see a person’s movement at one hundred yards and recognize and hear them at about fifty.
"a width-to-height ratio above 6:1 is generally agreed to exceed the limits of spatial definition, with a 1:1 ratio historically considered the ideal.
Walking around, this feels right. Decent trees add a lot. 6-8 meter houses separated by 36 meters of yard, sidewalk, and street feel too open; 6 vs 16, hugging sidewalk, felt better.
North End in the 1960s had 275 units per acre.
Supports height limits in most cases to prevent land speculation and a skyscraper sucking up development activity.
D.C. limit is 20 feet higher than the street width.
Where using scrapers use the Vancouver model, skinny tower on a broad sidewalk hugging base. Give more of a skyline and cause less wind problem.
Street design matters more to walking than climate.
"The Georgia DOT outlaws placing trees within eight feet of a state-owned street because, in the words of one reporter, “sidewalks are auto recovery zones where drivers have space to correct course if they’ve veered off.”4 And only recently did the Virginia regulations stop referring to street trees as “Fixed and Hazardous Objects.”
Trees make streets safer and cooler as well as more pleasant. Also boost real estate values.
"Extrapolating to Portland as a whole, the study’s authors found that the presence of healthy street trees likely adds $15.3 million to annual property tax revenues. Meanwhile, the city pays $1.28 million each year for tree planting and maintenance, resulting in a payoff of almost exactly twelve to one.
"in their quest to become more sustainable, cities need to remember that, for the typical pedestrian, the most mundane storefront is still more interesting than the most luxuriant landscape.
Utility of hiding parking behind storefronts, even shallow ones, having upper levels pretend to be building, and using more convertible ramps against future non parking use.
"It is fairly easy to gauge the intelligence of a city’s planning department by asking a simple question: in downtowns and other areas of potential pedestrian life, do your rules require that all parking lots be hidden behind a habitable building edge?
Friendliness of sittable surfaces, bench or low wall.
"“It is interesting to note that shops and booths in active, thriving commercial streets all over the world often have a façade length of 16–20 feet, which ... means that there are new activities and sights to see about every five seconds.”
5-6 meters.
Codes could require inviting facades instead of blank walls. Melbourne has one.
Star architects don't think about fostering pedestrian life.
"Most of the design codes that I write for governments include a paragraph that goes something like this: “While even smaller units of design are encouraged, no more than 200 feet of continuous street frontage may appear to have been designed by a single architect.”
Columbus built a 200 foot wide bridge over a recessed freeway, big enough for retail lining, thus connecting two walkable neighborhoods.
Urban triage, focus on improving walkable and nearly walkable streets, or connectors, not spending money on clear car country.
Downtown belongs to everyone, investing there benefits everyone.