Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Changing Travel Demands: Implications for Planning | Planetizen

The graph above shows the most recent USDOT vehicle-travel data covering the last 25 years. Although vehicle-miles of travel (VMT) grew steadily during most of the twentieth century, in recent years the growth rate stopped and even declined a little. It is now about 10% below where it would have been had past trends continued.

Yet another argument against business-as-usual (read: ASPHALT as usual):

The Twentieth Century was the period of automobile ascendency, during which personal motor vehicles grew from virtually nothing to becoming the dominant travel mode in most developed countries. During this period it made sense to invest in automobile-oriented infrastructure: paved roads, highways and parking facilities. However, demographic and economic trends are changing travel demands. Aging population, rising fuel prices, increasing urbanization, increasing traffic congestion, improvements in alternative modes, changing consumer preferences, and increased health and environmental concerns are all reducing demand for automobile travel and increasing demands for travel by other modes. Although automobile travel will not disappear, it will not grow as it did in the past, and in many developed countries motor vehicle travel will be flat or negative in the future.

Read the rest at: Changing Travel Demands: Implications for Planning | Planetizen

Aerial Footage: Portrait of a Housing Bust | The Big Picture

Fantastic set of aerial photos from Google Images (by way of Boston.com’s Big Picture), showing Florida’s developmental disaster.

The images of half finished (and barely started) developments are strangely beautiful, with a geometric symmetry that belies the state of human misery these developments represent: Lost deposits, bankruptcy, misallocated capital.

Read the rest at: Aerial Footage: Portrait of a Housing Bust | The Big Picture

Kaid Benfield's Blog: "Why doesn't the public health community get it about walkability?"

 

To say the chart above is startling is an understatement. The date in the "before" map is not 1935, or even 1975 -- you're looking at the spread of obesity in the time since THE SIMPSONS have been on TV.

That, my friends, is an epidemic.

Research proves that sprawl is significantly associated with inactivity and obesity, now perhaps the nation's foremost public health menace.  The results of overweight and obesity include increased coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon), hypertension, dyslipidemia, stroke, liver and Gallbladder disease, sleep apnea and respiratory problems, osteoarthritis, and gynecological problems (abnormal menses, infertility).  Research also shows that walkable neighborhoods and transit improve fitness and the health of communities.  Sure sounds important to me.

Read the rest at: Why doesn't the public health community get it about walkability? | Kaid Benfield's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC

Guerrilla Pedestrians Paint Crosswalks on Perilous Streets - GOOD Blog

And why not?

Read the rest at: Guerrilla Pedestrians Paint Crosswalks on Perilous Streets - GOOD Blog - GOOD - StumbleUpon

Responding to Incentives - Strong Towns Blog - Strong Towns

Interesting perspective on incentives, something under discussion ad nauseam locally (to no effect):

A monkey sits on a chair in front of a panel with two buttons. If the monkey presses button number one, they get one treat. Pressing button number two yields two treats. After participating in this experiment for some time and seeing consistent results, which button is the monkey likely to press?

I appear before dozens of city councils and town boards each year, often to talk about economic development, growth and land use planning. There is a belief system that is near universal that is revealed in these conversations. It goes something like this:

• Our budget is tight, cutting services is difficult and so we need more revenue.
• The best way to get more revenue is by adding commercial development.
• We need more commercial development.
• Mr. Planner, zone more property for commercial development.

Today we're not going to challenge that dead idea - although there are some fundamental flaws in the logic - but instead focus on the incentives that bring about this delusion.

Read the rest at: Responding to Incentives - Strong Towns Blog - Strong Towns

Frank Gruber: What To Do With the Suburbs?

From the Huffington Post:

The issues facing 21st century planners will be how to deal with population growth while avoiding more sprawl at the edges, and how to prevent more decades marked by (i) disinvestment in cities and older suburbs and (ii) isolation of the disadvantaged (who may well include a huge mass of elderly Baby Boomers). The consensus among planners is that to solve these problems there need to be strategies for allowing and encouraging existing suburbs to evolve into denser versions of themselves, with more of the good qualities of cities and towns.

One problem with this is that the zoning in suburbs is rigid and politically difficult to change. The culture celebrating the single-family house is so strong that people don't like to convert their single-family neighborhoods into something else, even as demographics change. For instance, in November 2009 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a guidebook called "Essential Smart Growth Fixes for Urban and Suburban Zoning Codes", with suggestions based on a panel the E.P.A. had convened in 2008. But nearly all of the suggested fixes would only affect the zoning on un-built land or in commercial zones -- the book has no concrete suggestions about what to do with existing single-family home districts.

This political reality puts the densification focus on existing commercial zones, such as malls or office parks or, where they exist, in the vestigial centers of small towns that existed prior to being engulfed by sprawl.

Two current strategies to do this are "de-malling", i.e., turning existing (often enclosed) malls into "town centers" by opening them up and adding housing and/or offices, and creating the equivalent of high-density urban downtown job centers in the suburbs, ideally connected to the regional center (the historic downtown) by rapid transit.

 

Read the rest at: Frank Gruber: What To Do With the Suburbs?

The Political Environment: WisDOT Becomes Kohler's Caddy

The golf course was built by and belongs to the privately-owned Kohler Company, which has always had, shall we say, an out-sized presence in Sheboygan County affairs. (There have been long and bloody strikes at the company; when I covered the 1983 walkout for the Milwaukee Journal, I remember seeing bullet holes in company property that dated to the historic 1930's strike.)

Read the rest at: The Political Environment: WisDOT Becomes Kohler's Caddy

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story

The parking mess at the local Little League Complex is as eloquent a visual aid as you'll ever need for the tragic comedy that is suburban "planning"

When you can't walk or bike to a community's Little League Complex because the roads leading to it and bordering the complex are typical suburban speedways with no provision for walkers or bikers, what do you get?

Repeated pandemonium and rising frustration. 125 players on six diamonds means 125 cars, minimum. Now add the incoming cars for subsequent games, and you get pandemonium squared.

Parking lot culture replaces what used to be a valuable community gathering point.

Fighting a culture of inaction: Voting against... CONSIDERATION of a development?

If you wonder why certain things don't move forward in Franklin, perhaps the following will give you a taste of the sort of attitude that creates municipal inertia.

An interesting sequence of events at last night's Economic Development Commission meeting. With just enough members present to create a quorum, we addressed the following agenda item:

Presentation by Hitters Baseball Academy concerning plans for a new baseball facility located on South 27th Street near County Line Road

The pitch was straightforward enough: Hitters Baseball Academy, currently operating in Racine, sees an opportunity to create a year-round, indoor/outdoor baseball facility on what is now a soybean field on the edge of town. An 80,000 square foot building would be built on the land along with four full-sized turf baseball fields (turf ballfields remain green year-round). The owners of the land are ready to fully finance the project; they could break ground tomorrow. They are asking for no financial support or incentives from the city.

When presented to the Common Council, there was evidently a hang-up with "27th Street Corridor design standards" -- not very relevant, as the complex would be set far back from 27th Street (one might conjecture that restaurants and even hotels might locate on 27th street to support the baseball facility, and they would have to conform to the design standard).

Hitter's has a business plan that includes past performance. They've grown steadily in their Racine location, and have consistently brought in traveling teams and visitor traffic that rent rooms and use restaurants. Franklin would be home to an attraction that would fuel surrounding commercial development.

No-brainer: Whether or not you think Hitter's is right for the area, let's take a close look at this possibility, right?

Wrong.

One particular EDC Commissioner said the following:

"Just to remind the commissioners, about a year and a half ago we set forth direction for the southeastern quadrant of the city to be high-value business development, and this is one of the parcels that is recommended as part of the Comprehensive Master Plan that is going on. The dollars-per-acre that we would yield in high-value business development would be different from this; totally different concept."

Then:

"If we're looking to build tax base in the city of Franklin, this will not build the type of tax base that this portion of the city was talking about doing a year and half ago."

Valid points.

However, further questioning of the Hitters rep revealed a very, very significant factor: The landowners would lease the land and buildings to Hitters Baseball Academy. If another Northwestern Mutual or Wheaton Medical Center were to express interest in the land -- of course, creating a greater payoff for the owners of the land and higher dollars-per-acre value for the city  --the baseball faculty would vacate. They could roll up the fields in a weekend, evidently.

Furthermore (the substance of my comments at the meeting): Any economic development assumptions made a year and a half ago (or, indeed, six months ago!) are, frankly, worthless today. I've said it before: The road that got you here won't get you there. We either remain flexible and creative, constantly re-assessing conditions and outdated notions, or stand like a jilted groom at the altar, waiting in vain for the sort of early-90s style development that is now past history.

EDC Chairman Skowronski said it best: "A bird in the hand...".

The EDC is an advisory body; we can only recommend action to the Common Council. So the motion was made that the EDC recommend to the Common Council that they investigate the potential of the project. 

Read that again: The EDC voted on nothing more than whether to recommend further study of the project in light of changing economic conditions and the unique parameters of the project.

The motion does not say, "Yep  - BUILD IT!" It says, "Let's look into this - we're not necessarily for or against it, but it may have potential."

Let the record show that every commissioner voted "aye," except for the commissioner I quoted at length above, who voted "no".

He left before I could ask him, with all due respect, exactly what he was voting against.

Public Hearing Scheduled on S. 76th Reconstruction Project

The price you pay.

Having just pledged a half million dollars to help build a highway interchange in a neighboring community, odds are the city of Franklin will plead poverty and elect to create another speedway with little or no provision for pedestrians and bikes; that sort of thing is expensive, you know.

The Franklin Little League complex is on 76th Street. Not that it matters, of course, in a city that builds for cars, not for people.

There is a hearing on the project from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Franklin Law Center on Loomis Road. There are four options that are being considered. The options include: a four-lane highway with no median and no sidewalks, a four-lane highway with no median and a sidewalk, a four-lane highway with an 18-foot-wide median and no sidewalks and a four-lane highway with an 18-foot-wide median with a sidewalk.

If the City of Franklin cannot reach a decision by June 15, Milwaukee County will move forward with plans to construct a four-lane highway without a median or sidewalks in 2012.

Public Hearing Scheduled On S. 76th Reconstruction Project - Milwaukee News Story - WISN Milwaukee.