Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Have a heart: Valentine's Day benefit for Franklin Elementary 1st Grader's medical emergency

My son came home from school yesterday with a note that I hope will serve as a call to action for the entire Franklin community.

The Neitman family is facing catastrophic medical bills as a result of the health issues faced by their 7 year-old son, Logan (sign his guest book and read his story here).

Logan has had to deal with various medical issues his entire life. His newest challenge will require brain surgery to address three different types of brain abnormalities, as well as a bone fusion.

Logan's mom, Melissa, cares for all of his ongoing medical needs as well as his siblings (Devyn, I2, Tanner, 10,  and Mason, 1). Logan's dad, Scott, is employed at BSI Scales.

This is not, unfortunately, a new or unique story: Insured or not, serious long-term medical issues can and will drain a family's finances to the point where certain life-enhancing and life-saving procedures, therapies and specialized care become out of reach.

I think we'd all agree that Logan deserves the best care possible.

There will be a benefit for Logan and his family on February 14th, 2010 at the Root River Bowling Center, which is located at 7220 West Rawson Ave. [(414) 425-7225]. Bowling begins at 1pm, and a mini buffet in the banquet hall starts at 3pm.

Donation tickets for this event are:

• $25.00 each for Buffet/Bowling and
  

• $15.00 each for Buffet Only.

Please confirm by February 7th via Robert Fredrickson at 414-732-1691 so food can be finalized, and to insure you have a lane.

There will also be a silent auction and raffle table. Individuals and businesses in Franklin and surrounding communities: If you have anything to donate, please contact Mr. Frederickson at the number above. Monetary gifts can be donated at any Well's Fargo bank.

Let's see what we're made of here in Franklin -- it's time to come together, open our hearts and open our wallets to help out a family in need.

Slide show: street network design pre-1950 vs. post-1950

Though unaccompanied by narration, clicking through these 50 slides from the Congress of the New Urbanism will give you a good general overview of street connectivity issues and how we arrived at our current sad state of affairs.

Norman Garrick compares street network design from pre-1950 and post-1950, factors that help determine the overall safety of safe pedestrian travel, and explains why it is so obvious that the pandemic of sprawl development is to blame for unsafe, poorly designed, disconnected neighborhoods.

Street Networks: Traffic Safety, Travel Mode Choice and Emergency Services

View more presentations from Congress for the New Urbanism.

Factoring ‘Walkability’ Into Home Values

The New York Times highlights increased home values in cities where people can walk from place to place:

Real estate agents often chant the mantra “location, location, location,” which essentially means “find a home in a well-kept neighborhood with good schools and a low crime rate.”

Some may cite a fourth factor, “walkability,” a concept supported by self-styled “new urbanists” who advocate denser cities designed for the pedestrian and mass transit as much as for the car. In their ideal neighborhood, you could walk to a bookstore and then to an ice cream shop, and your children could walk to school, probably unescorted. (It sounds like so many movie depictions of America in the 1950s.)

They argue that walkability lowers crime — that good people on the streets drive away the bad guys — and that it generally improves life and sharply raises home values. Whether it helps homes retain their value when the market slumps, however, seems a harder question to answer.

A study published in August by C.E.O.’s for Cities, a group of urban redevelopment advocates, found that in many ways, the street corner beats the cul de sac. It looked at the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 markets to estimate how much value was associated with something called the Walk Score. Using a 100-point scale, this score rates the number of destinations, including libraries, parks and coffee shops, within walking distance of a home.

The scores for America’s 40 largest cities can be found at Walkscore.com by typing in an address. For instance, the White House scores a near-perfect 97: a “walker’s paradise,” the Web site says. Another famous home, the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles, rates a 25. (You can get lost in Walkscore.com for hours; the “Brady Bunch” house, the exemplar of 1970s suburban life, scores an above-average 75.)

The study found that houses with above-average Walk Scores commanded a premium. It was as much as $30,000 in cities like Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Sacramento and San Francisco, wrote Joe Cortright, the study’s author and an economist at Impresa, a consulting firm in Portland, Ore.

Read the rest at: Everybody’s Business - Factoring ‘Walkability’ Into Home Values - NYTimes.com

"Engineers have an obsession with making neighborhood streets wider, flatter and straighter."

If you've attended any Franklin city meetings regarding road and street construction, you know the title of this blog entry to be very, very true.

Here's a typical street/speedway in a Franklin residential subdivision. 

It's not for nothing that Franklin is nicknamed "the drive-thru city."

We don't mess around with contrivances like right-angle corners that might slow your vehicle down, either. Here's a typical high speed turn in another Franklin residential area:

It gets worse: Look closely at the photo above and you'll see a small paved walkway emptying onto the road. Yes - a walking/biking path that leads to a park, ball field and volleyball court terminates right at the business end of a high-speed curve.

Furthermore, there is an incline on the walk/bike path just before it meets this high-speed curve, which prompts kids on bikes to pedal harder and accelerate just as they meet the street. Note as well that the city has planted trees that will eventually further obscure the view of this path.

This is a road - among many, many in Franklin and other suburbs - designed and built without any sense of context. (This summer I'll be posting video clips of traffic from streets like this and you'll see just how fast drivers zip through our subdivisions. And, no, I won't be blurring license plate numbers.)

From the Strong Towns Blog comes an excellent related entry made all the more persuasive by the fact that it's author, Charles Marohn, is himself a licensed civil engineer and describes himself as a right-leaning Republican. (Frankly, I don't think party affiliation should make a difference, but, for reasons I still cannot fathom, certain right wing columnists insist that the issue of standards in suburban design is a partisan issue.)

Mr. Marohn writes:

Engineers have an obsession with making neighborhood streets wider, flatter and straighter. It is not that they love such streets - they are human too (you'll have to trust me on that) and will often have the same reaction (yuck) that the rest of us have to these misapplied streets. Actually, it is funny how many engineers I have seen protest engineering projects that widen, flatten and straighten the street in front of their own home.

When engineers recommend wider, flatter and straighter streets, what they are doing is misapplying ROAD standards to STREETS. Roads are designed to move autos at high speeds from location to location. There are few intersections (aka: crash inducement sites) and and so wider lanes, excess shoulder recovery area and turn lanes all make sense.

Streets are more complex. With many intersections, we need traffic to drive slower. Slower traffic means narrower lanes and no need for wide, sweeping highway geometries.

We started this week talking about financial imbalances with a local street project. One of the recommendations we made had to do with the way in which we design streets. From our Monday posting:

Evaluate the City’s road standards to see if they can be transformed into sections that are more affordable to construct and maintain. Most small towns have road standards that are derivations of state-aid highway standards. Not only are these standards a poor fit for the context of the neighborhood, they place extra financial burden than what is warranted by the traffic volumes.

The following are two different road sections that run through single-family residential neighborhoods. The first is in the City of Walker, MN, but could be in just about any town that has given their neighborhood design over to their engineer (aka: nearly every town in the country). The second photo we took on our recent trip to Celebration, Florida.

I love this street (above) in Celebration, which is actually typical of most of the streets there. Most other engineers would go crazy with this street. Not only do you have on-street parking, but the parking creates a situation where two cars actually could not meet traveling in opposite directions. The remaining street width is not wide enough.

Ostensibly, if the engineer is to be believed, cars will drive down the street and, due to this unsafe design, crash head first into each other. Of course, when we see this street we know this will not happen. When two cars meet (a rare occurrence), they simply slow down, pull over a little and let each other pass. There might even be (brace yourself) eye contact between the two drivers.

Let me add to the obvious here. The Celebration street is beautiful. Give any of us the choice between living on one of these two streets, we all choose the narrow street. We'll sacrifice the three seconds we save driving to the store to live someplace that is beautiful.

One final obvious point: the Celebration street costs less.

Demand that your engineer build a safe street that will not only look beautiful and enhance the neighborhood but actually cost you less money. Demand a Strong Town.

(Via Strong Towns Blog.)

[See also my entries on roads that make you drive faster in places you should drive slow, roads as sewers, and the possibility of encouraging Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) in Franklin.]

Pouring interchange asphalt - for a once-every-5-years golf event?

Freeway-building lunacy reaches new heights. Question is: Are they reconsidering now that Tiger Woods is damaged goods?

Road work for golfing events spurs suit - JSOnline.

As long as it pays a fair price, the government can seize your property to build projects such as a new road, school or police station. 

But should that power, known as eminent domain, extend to buying land for a freeway interchange that's used for only one week, every five years or so, to serve traffic going to a major golf tournament?

That question is central to a battle pitting two Sheboygan County families against the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, and Kohler Co., owner of Whistling Straits golf course - which next August hosts the PGA Championship, one of golf's biggest events.

"For whose benefit is this being built?" asks Alan Marcuvitz, a Milwaukee attorney for one of the families suing the department to stop their land from being taken. Marcuvitz says Kohler Co. should negotiate to buy the land for the interchange, instead of having the state use eminent domain to force a sale.

The I-43 interchange, which is getting half of its $1.5 million cost paid by Kohler Co., will benefit the public despite its very limited use, DOT officials say.

"The purpose of the project, from an engineering standpoint, is the safety of I-43," said Mike Berg, the department's northeast Wisconsin regional director. "We have to deal with traffic generated by events at Whistling Straits."

Columnist warns of forced porch-sitting, with possible mandatory neighbor interaction

[Sorry for the odd typography and text color - I'm trying to use the Google Chrome browser, and it isn't playing nice with Typepad]

Let's take a few moments and discuss the many and varied reasons that Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel conserva-columnist Patrick McIlheran cannot be taken seriously when he attempts to address suburban sprawl issues.

Reason one: Mr. McIlheran, from what I gather, lives in a traditional urban-type neighborhood and spends the balance of his day in a city-based office (at least for now; newspapering is a tough business lately) at the Journal-Sentinel building. He also has written frequently about how he's availed himself to the city of Milwaukee's (increasingly meager) bus transit system.

One wonders how this daily experience gives him any insight whatsoever into the habits and lifestyles created and enforced by suburban subdivisions.

How about this: Plant Mr. McIlheran and family in a Franklin or Oak Creek subdivision - one of the curvy-road, avoid-the-neighbors, park-in-my-backyard, strictly-zoned types that he loves - for a period of one year. And make him work at the Franklin Northwestern Mutual Insurance campus.

Reason two: Despite his obvious dependence on the many well-funded arms of Sprawl Inc. (Reason Foundation, American Dream Coalition [be sure to download their inspiring and not-at-all-funded-by-oil-and-auto-companies "white papers" in their website's "Automobility" section], Randal O'Toole on speed-dial, etc.), he cannot (as per usual, I'm afraid) muster a "fact" that doesn't make you laugh. 

For example: McIlheran has chosen for special mention designer Rick Harrison, who has come up with something that he calls "Prefurbia" (this zany appellation, interestingly, is not mentioned in McIlheran's column, perhaps to accommodate the clumsy headline: "Suburbia that keeps its prefix"). On the plus side, Harrison's "coving" design sets out to eliminate cul-de-sacs, increase connectivity, and decrease paved area. On the minus side, Harrison is oddly drawn to the "speedway" curved road plan that makes so many suburbs deathtraps for bikes and pedestrians. The illustration below is from Harrison's site and depicts a development called "Edgewood" in southeastern Wisconsin:

I've seen worse, but there not much to get excited about here. Unless you're Patrick McIlheran:

And between the angles, setbacks and serpentine streets, the subdivisions use much less pavement - usually 25% less for a given acreage, says Harrison.

"Much less pavement." "Usually 25% less for a given acreage." Less than.... what? Did they stop using editors over at the Milwaukee JS?

Perhaps McIlheran derived his nugget from an old 1998 New York Times profile of Harrison:

In a typical subdivision, streets account for 20 to 30 percent of the land, say builders. At [Harrison-designed] Eagle Pass, however, that figure is 17 percent.

So Harrison's "coving" uses less asphalt than a "typical subdivision"? Not entirely inspiring; the curving roads in Harrison's designs are built for speed, and getting rid of "typical subdivision" cul-de-sacs accounts for a huge amount of asphalt without having to do much else, design-wise.

Heroic? No.

Reason three: McIlheran loves him some drive-thru design.

Built-for-speed roads are worth touting:

His roads are snaky, with few intersections (and, so, few stops).

Excellent - because we gotta get through that residential area at top speed! Hooray - "FEW STOPS"!

Reason four: Like others who lobby for Sprawl, Inc., McIlheran conveys the ludicrous notion that - in a region overrun with non-planned, non-sustainable suburbs that have grown at the whims of developers and their desire for increased and quicker profit (a condition that has created the need for cuts in services while property taxes continue to climb) - creating provisions for New Urbanist or Traditional Neighborhood Development subdivisions somehow limits our choices rather than increasing them by adding another flavor to the mix.

You see, in McIlheran's worldview, the appearance of a non-standard choice in some way magically eliminates countless existing subdivisions - and their ready-to-buy vacancies. So, he uses ludicrous language like the following:

Porches are nice to relax on. Not that you should have to.

People are busy, after all, [quoting Harrison] "and maybe they don't want to know their neighbors that well."

Harrison does not like the dominant planning idea of recent years, New Urbanism, which mandates porches and narrow houses on narrow lots...

So, when they built the wildly successful Middleton Hills subdivision in Middleton, Wisconsin, did residents of the surrounding subdivisions receive orders to get out on their porches? Were they told they'd better learn the names of their neighbor's pets? Did the Middleton Hills "mandate" of "narrow houses on narrow lots" result in letters being sent to nearby Manor of the Lake McMansion subdivision that they'd better start building infill immediately?

Ludicrous.

But, for those with the patience to read to the end of McIlheran's column, all becomes clear, and we have reason five that Patrick McIlheran should not write about planning issues:

And this guy's made money for himself and for developers with such an accommodating attitude. Hallelujah. Ain't America cool?

At least he's fairly transparent in his quest for additional partisan speaking gigs - perhaps at next year's National Association of Home Builder's convention.

Because, goodness knows that "developers making money" is what creates successful communities, and any attempt to enforce standards would be "bossy" ....

[See related: The Conservative Case for Walking and Biking]