Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Study: Walkable neighborhoods have happier people - Green House - USATODAY.com

Sidewalks and trails make you happier?

I can tell you that I was certainly a happier person when I went for a run the other day and was able to use a sidewalk on 51st street rather than the slush-clogged shoulder of the road I'd braved before the new sidewalk was installed. We're making slow but steady progress.

And, of more import to the bottom line:

If the residents of these walkable neighborhoods are homeowners, they benefit in yet another way, notes the Sierra Club's Green Life blog. It cites a 2009 study by CEOs for Cities that founds homes with an above-average Walk Score sold for up to $34,000 more than their sidewalk-less counterparts.

Read the rest at: Study: Walkable neighborhoods have happier people - Green House - USATODAY.com

City engineering by "gut": "Let's live on the edge and BUILD THE FOUR-LANER!"

This post is a comment in response to an item at a Franklin blog, Fred Keller's BATTLE JOINED -- please excuse a bit of localese as well as cut-and-paste linkage, as this was done quickly:

 

Fred: Your "Let's widen College Avenue" argument doesn't make a lot of sense, frankly, unless you are merely looking for a cudgel with which to hammer the mayor. And, any cudgel will do, right?

You ask: Why would the mayor and city officials argue for Contest Sensitive Design when a road is being built through our community?

Really?

The idea that road congestion will increase at a steady rate is just FALSE, reinforced by a road-building industry anxious to lay more asphalt. (A mile of freeway costs three to four times the annual operating expense to the state of a rail line connecting us to Madison and Chicago -- has that not occurred to you?)

"But we need to build capacity," you might say. (Actually, what you said was: "Let's live on the edge and BUILD THE FOUR-LANER!")

But - what's that? Traffic can DECREASE? Guess what - the engineers don't account for that in their forecasts. They are all about BUILDING IT UP. If traffic rates go up +.05 in a year, they tend to keep adding the same increase every year.

Let's apply engineer-style traffic analysis: My daughter grew 1.5 inches in the past year. At this rate, she'll be over 9 feet tall by the time she's my age.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/08dectvt/index.cfm (2008)

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/09dectvt/ (2009)

Your stance sees to be "gut instinct" against years of traffic studies NOT DONE BY ROAD BUILDERS that show widening roads actually INCREASES traffic and congestion (it's called "induced traffic"); and that creating alternative travel options (bike and ped) DECREASES traffic and congestion.

The Federal Highway Administration found in a study in Milwaukee that induced traffic accounted for 11-22 percent of the area's increased traffic from 1963 to 1991. ("Widening roads to ease traffic congestion is ineffective and expensive at the same time," said Roy Kienitz, Executive Director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project. "It's like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt.")

I have no time to get fancy (a pillar of your argument: "waste time digging up stats for me!"), so I'm quoting here directly from another web site: A road diet on San Francisco’s Valencia Street reduced automobile through lanes from four to two, adding a center turn lane and two bike lanes. Following this change, collisions involving pedestrians declined 36%, accompanied by an increase in pedestrian traffic and a whopping 140% increase in bicycle riders – all without significantly altering automobile traffic capacity. (http://www.completestreets.org/complete-streets-fundamentals/factsheets/ease-congestion/)

Also: "When travel demand requires three moving lanes in each direction and/or double left turn and right turn lanes, the roadway impact on the adjacent community can become severe. From on urban planning standpoint, volumes of these magnitudes usually indicate too few arterial streets serving that particular corridor or a lack of freeway capacity for the longer trips that should not be on the arterial street system to begin with. Although it is recognized that geographic and urban development constraints may require these six-lane arterials in some situations, these conditions should be dealt with early in the planning process for new or developing suburbs, and some compromises and special design measures may be needed in existing corridors where other alternatives exist." (http://www.urbanstreet.info/3rd_symp_proceedings/Retrofitting%20Urban%20Arterials%20into%20Complete%20Streets.pdf)

"The phenomenon of induced traffic works in reverse as well. When New York's West Side Highway collapsed in 1973, an NYDOT study showed that 93 percent of the car trips lost did not reappear elsewhere; people simply stopped driving. A similar result accompanied the destruction of San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway in the 1989 earthquake. Citizens voted to remove the freeway entirely despite the apocalyptic warnings of traffic engineers. Surprisingly, a recent British study found that downtown road removals tend to boost local economies, while new roads lead to higher urban unemployment. So much for road-building as a way to spur the economy." (From the book SUBURBAN NATION)

You also proceed from a FORTUNATE standpoint: You and your kids perhaps can (or will) drive. How about a bit of empathy for those of us who want to create an environment of moderate independent travel for the elderly of differently-abled? I can tell you for CERTAIN that I will not live in a community where my son cannot walk a few blocks to get on a bus or visit a friend. 

Interesting statistic: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for 15- to 20- year-olds. Franklin's 16-to-20 year-olds have NO OPTION but to drive.

Do you know that a pedestrian or bikers chance of death jumps from 45% to 85% when the speed limit jumps from a sane, residential 30 MPH to the Franklin-standard (and enforced by engineering) 40 MPH?

A 27th street public transit hub (i.e. better than the spotty bus service currently available) is a logical next step. The average American who lives in an area that's walkable and has transit spends only 9% of their income on transportation, while a person living in an area that requires driving spends more than 25%. College Ave. can feed bikes and pedestrians to a public transit hub IF ACCOMMODATIONS ARE MADE FOR THEM NOW. 

Of pedestrians killed in 2007 and 2008, more than 50% died on arterial roadways, typically designed to be wide and fast (ala College Ave).  Roads like these are built to move cars and too often do not have meet the needs of pedestrian or bicyclist safety. 

You can dismiss safety, induced congestion, and mobility for the differently-abled and elderly. But how about ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?

http://www.ceosforcities.org/files/WalkingTheWalk_CEOsforCities1.pdf (WALKING THE WALK: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities, by CEOs for Cities)

http://www.walk21.com/papers/Litman(1).pdf (
Economic Value of Walkability)

Want to rely on something more reality-based than your "gut instinct"? Dig into these studies:

http://www.hsisinfo.org//pdf/10-053.pdf (Evaluation of Lane Reduction “Road Diet” Measures on Crashes)

http://www.completestreets.org/webdocs/resources/lanewidth-safety.pdf (Relationship of Lane Width to Safety for Urban and Suburban Arterials)

http://www.vtpi.org/cong_relief.pdf (Smart Congestion Reductions: Reevaluating The Role Of Highway Expansion For Improving Urban Transportation)

http://www.urbanstreet.info/3rd_symp_proceedings/Retrofitting%20Urban%20Arterials%20into%20Complete%20Streets.pdf (RETROFITTING URBAN ARTERIALS INTO COMPLETE STREETS)

 

The diaper on the curb: This is the new community?

ABOVE: Somebody else's business.

So, I was out on my run yesterday -- beautiful weather -- and once again saw my old friend the discarded diaper.

Way back on October 27th we were buffeted by windstorms. It just so happened that these days-long winds occurred during trash collection day on a certain street in Franklin, and a garbage can disgorged a tightly wrapped disposable diaper. I saw it on the curb as I ran my route a day or two after the storms.

And then I saw it again a few days after that.

Three days later -- still there. 

A week later; hadn't budged. (Evidently a hefty, er, load.)

I took the pictures above and below today, November 8th; that's 12 days after the windstorm. At least two trash collection days have come and gone, meaning the homeowners on either side of this discarded diaper looked right at it as they placed their garbage cans by the curb -- and did nothing.

They backed out of their driveways and looked at it -- and did nothing.

What if a neighborhood kid grabs it and gets curious? Didn't seem to occur to anyone living there.

 
ABOVE: Becoming a local landmark.

Every time I passed it I considered how I might discard it myself. However, carrying a weeks-old soiled diaper a mile-and-a-quarter back to my house never seemed like a good plan.

But surely, I thought, someone on this street full of carefully manicured lawns will take the time to come out with a plastic bag and take this refuse off the street. 

Never happened.

I'd see people out for a walk with their dog and doggie-doo bags; people who pick up raw excrement as a matter of routine. They'd walk right past it.

Today on my way to Moondance for lunch I stopped with an old Target bag and picked up the discarded diaper after I took these pictures. I could feel eyes on me from the surrounding houses. Probably a bit suspicious -- though, on the other hand, their long diaper nightmare had been successfully dealt with. Call me a socialist, if you must.

The "curbside diaper" is an unfortunate visual metaphor for how insular we've become. Though there are surely subdivisions in Franklin and other suburbs that are cared for beyond each homeowner's property edge, there are far too many like this street, which you would be hard-pressed to characterize as a neighborhood. It's just a fast road with houses on either side. I see "perma-refuse" in these kinds of non-places on a regular basis. 

Perhaps they are waiting for the city to deal with these sorts of things. The same city which is cutting back municipal services because the cry has gone up that property taxes are too darn high.

But they still want a discarded diaper to magically disappear.

I feel old, because it used to be different. My dad and I used to go for long walks, and he'd pick up whatever refuse he saw -- and tell me to do the same -- and we'd deposit it with the next neighbor we saw out on the porch or out washing their car. There would be "howdys" and the unquestioning acceptance of whatever my dad and I had picked up; into the garage garbage can it would go. You didn't even have to ask -- this was our neighborhood, after all.

But, in my city, this diaper could not be budged from its position.

So, the question is this: When did we start believing that our "community" -- our responsibility --  ends at our individual driveways?

 

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

Suburban Renewal: Key to economic recovery

[Map Sources: Map by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute. Data from Christopher Leinberger.]

Renewing our suburbs is part and parcel of broader economic recovery. The very act of restoring them—of retrofitting them for the new ways of living and working that our emerging new economic order requires–will help bring back prosperity overall.

- Richard Florida

Some selected excerpts from the article that I would surely bring up at an Economic Development Commission Meeting --- if we bothered to have economic Development Commission meetings: 

• MCMANSIONS ARE OUT: According to an eye-opening 2009 survey commissioned by Buildermagazine, home buyers are no longer willing to drive to the furthest edges of developments to buy the biggest house they can afford. In fact those are precisely the kinds of homes that are not selling.  Real estate development expert Arthur C. Nelson predicts that we will have a surplus of as many as 22 million large-lot homes by the year 2025.
  
  
• COMMUNITY IS IN: Today’s buyers—surprising numbers of them single women— are looking for smaller houses closer-in, with access to parks and cultural amenities. There is a rapidly growing market for super-energy efficient homes under 1,300 square feet – quite a departure from the 5,000-6,000 square foot McMansions of just a few years past. “We are entering a new era of home building, where buyers look for spiritual satisfaction rather than material gain,” the Builder study concludes. Not the kind of language we’re used to hearing from the construction industry.
  
  
• WALKABILITY = HIGHER HOME VALUES: Walkable suburbs are some of America’s best places to live; they provide a model for renewal for their sprawling, spread-out siblings. Relatively dense commercial districts, with shops, restaurants, and movie theaters, as well as a wide variety of housing types, have always been a feature of the older suburbs that grew up along the streetcar lines of big metro areas.... These are the places where Americans are clamoring to live, where housing prices have held up even in the face of one of the greatest real estate collapses in modern memory, as Leinberger documents in his book, The Option of Urbanism. The desire for walkability can be measured in dollars and cents. Houses in walkable neighborhoods command higher prices than houses in more distant, less dense locations. A recent study by urbanist Joe Cortright for CEOs for Cities analyzed the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 major metros. In 12 out of 15 of them, walkability commanded a premium—sometimes of hundreds of thousands of dollars in places like the D.C. suburbs.

• WALKABILITY = ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT SUCCESS: We found that metros with walkable suburbs had greater economic output, higher incomes, and higher housing prices; higher levels of human capital, higher membership in the creative class; higher levels of patented innovations and of high-tech industries and employees; not to mention higher levels of happiness.
  
  
• MALLS ARE ZOMBIES: A 2001 PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that one in five malls were dead or dying – 7 percent were effectively dead and another 12 percent were vulnerable and likely to fail in the near future. But these troubled malls have become the sites of a wave of renewal. Outside of St. Paul, the parking lot that surrounded a dead shopping center built on land fill was turned back into wetlands—which in turn attracted new “lakefront” townhome development. In Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, a dead mall on a single 103-acre superblock is being transformed into Belmar—22 urban blocks with parks, bus lines, restaurants, stores, and 1,300 new households—the downtown that Lakewood never had. Eight of the 13 regional malls in the Denver area are now planning or have completed makeovers. 

Longer, unedited version of Mr. Florida's column in the 10/9/10 Wall Street Journal:

Remaking our sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily put up infrastructure, and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times—far larger in scale, scope and cost than the revitalization of our inner cities.

What a dramatic shift. Just a couple of decades ago, the suburbs were the locus of the American Dream. More than their sprawling, large-lot homes and big wide lawns, their shopping malls, industrial parks, and office campuses accounted for a growing percentage of the nation’s economic output.  A good many of them formed into Edge Cities—satellite centers where people could live, work, and shop without ever having to set foot in the center city.

With millions of homes underwater or in foreclosure, our suburbs and exurbs have taken some of the most visible hits from the great recession. In a stunning reversal, big cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle have become talent magnets at the same time, drawing ambitious people, empty-nesters, young-families, and even a growing number of offices back to their downtown cores. As inner city neighborhoods are being gentrified, blight and intransigent poverty are moving out to the suburbs, where one third of the nation’s poor now reside—1.5 million more than in cities, according to a Brookings study. And suburban poverty populations are growing at five times the rate of those in cities.

......

Perhaps the biggest retrofit of all is happening in Tysons Corner, Va., the virtual archetype of an auto-dependent, sprawling edge city. Located near the junctions of three major highways, it boasts 25 million square feet of office space and four million square feet of retail space. Decades ago developers hailed it as the wave of the future—one of hundreds of new satellite centers that would render our old downtown commercial centers obsolete. But Tysons Corner has lately been losing out. Its perpetual traffic gridlock and its lack of human energy have caused home-buyers to choose other places. Some companies that were headquartered there have even moved back into the District of Columbia.

Now developers and landowners are seeking to make it more walkable, with a more integrated mix of uses. In June, the county's Board of Supervisors adopted a comprehensive plan that would transform Tysons Corner into a "24-hour urban center where people live, work and play." Its hallmarks will be green construction, access to public transportation and abundant public amenities, like parks and bicycle trails—something that sounds very much like a real city.

There are countless other opportunities for reclamation, all across America, as Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson document in their 2008 book, "Retrofitting Suburbia." Under-used golf courses can be transformed into parks and nature sanctuaries; abandoned car dealerships can be landscaped and developed as new, mixed-use neighborhoods. Developers can cut streets through formerly walled-off corporate campuses and add restaurants, stores and public spaces.

Historically, America's economic growth has hinged on its ability to create new development patterns—economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. The rebound after the panic and long depression of 1873 was based on the transition to an urban-industrial economy organized around great cities and their early streetcar suburbs. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs. Today the challenge is to remake our suburbs, to turn them into more vibrant, livable, people-friendly communities and, in doing so, to make them engines of innovation and productivity. 

Read the rest at: Creative Class » Blog Archive » Suburban Renewal - Creative Class

Safe Routes to School gets some local press

From the FranklinNOW website:

Franklin — As a parent of a former Pleasant View Elementary School student, John Michlig knows as well as anyone how the conditions can be for students trying to get to school.

Subdivisions on either side do not have a sidewalk or path connection to the school. The road that brings vehicles to the school does not have a shoulder on which a child could ride a bike. Buses must squeeze onto narrow city streets.

It's bad enough that Michlig has seen children get picked up by a school bus a mere two blocks away because they do not have a safe route to walk to the school.

"You got this condition people refer to as, 'Nearby is far away,' " Michlig said.

Michlig has been a volunteer on the Franklin Trails Committee since it formed last year to address problems on 51st Street near Pleasant View, 4601 W. Marquette Ave.

Funding help In the last week, Franklin was awarded a $19,700 grant for a federal program called Safe Routes to School. The program encourages children from kindergarten through eighth grade to walk and bike to school by creaking safer biking and walking routes.

Franklin was one of 34 communities in Wisconsin to receive funding.

With that money, officials will plan possible improvements in the Pleasant View area, which may include anything from sidewalks to a foot bridge over a nearby creek.

After the planning stages are complete, the trails committee hopes to receive a much larger, possible six-figure second grant to pay for those improvements.

Planning the path

But first things first: coming up with the plan.

Part of the process includes soliciting feedback from businesses and residents in the area so everyone is on the same page about what the neighborhood needs, Michlig said. Their input will help assess the needs of the area.

Committee members want to find out how to make it easier for neighborhood kids to walk to school. Many city officials and those in the neighborhood participated in a "walking workshop" last spring and were struck by how difficult that can be, Michlig said.

"We heard it again and again - we as parents are stuck having to drive our child to school when actually it's so close," Michlig said.

Plus, by encouraging the idea of walking to school, kids would also be more physically fit without having to go out of their way to find exercise opportunities, Michlig said.

Mark Cloutier, the school district's manager of buildings and grounds, said that while the district does not have control over what goes on outside its boundaries, school officials support sidewalks and anything that makes pedestrian access better in the community.

He noted there is a sidewalk in front of the school itself and he did not expect the Safe Routes to School program to change the district's requirement to bus every student.

Pedestrian accommodations were recently improved near another school building just to the south, when 51st Street in front of Franklin High School was reconstructed and sidewalks were added with the help of federal stimulus money.

Read the rest at: Group eyes safer ways to get to school - FranklinNOW

More bike riders create "safety in numbers"

Another non-intuitive fact about non-vehicular travel and safety:

As ridership goes up, crash rates stay flat. It's happening in Portland (see page 11 of this report[PDF]). It's happening in New York City.

The phenomenon, dubbed "safety in numbers," was first identified in 2003, in an academic paper by public health researcher Peter Jacobsen [PDF]. After being asked by officials in Pasadena, Calif., if their city "was a dangerous place to bicycle," Jacobsen began looking at crash data from various communities where bicycle ridership had fluctuated over time.

What he found surprised him: The number of crashes involving bikes correlated with the number of riders in a community. As ridership fluctuated, so did the crash rate. More riders, fewer crashes; fewer riders, more crashes.

Read the rest at: TheWashCycle: Still more evidence of the network effect in bicycle safety

Excellent news: Franklin has won a Safe Routes to School Grant

I just found out today that a grant I wrote with my alderman, Kristen Wilhelm, resulted in Franklin being selected as one of 34 Wisconsin communities receiving Safe Routes to School funds!

Now the real work begins. Stay tuned ...

51st Street sidewalk - at long last

P1090471, originally uploaded by John Michlig.

Cement was poured and smoothed today to complete the portion of the 51st Street sidewalk located in front of the high school. Click on the photo to see a set of shots on Flickr.

Study links sprawl to obesity; light rail to the rescue - NYTimes.com

On the plus side: you'll never wear out a pair of shoes in a post-WWII suburb:

Car-loving Charlotte, N.C., home to strip malls and suburban sprawl, did everything right when putting in place its new light-rail transit system called the Lynx in 2007. The result: a ridership that doubled predictions, and an unexpected public health study that may be the first in proving that the built environment causes obesity.

Riding the rails can leave users an average of 6.5 pounds lighter than others, and 81 percent less likely to become obese over time, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Before this study, it was difficult to say for certain whether the features of the built environment, such as sprawl and miles of roadway, are directly responsible for obesity and related illness such as cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.

....

In its first year, at the peak of the gasoline price rise, Charlotte's Lynx saw about 18,100 riders, which was double the number expected, said Robert Stokes, researcher at University of Pennsylvania's department of culture and communication, and co-author of the study. The numbers have maintained. The city did all the right things when putting in place the light-rail system, Stokes said. It chose to put the line close to places where people lived, which increases ridership, according to studies. The corridor stretches 9.6 miles and has 15 stops.

Charlotte also changed its zoning laws to allow development closer to rail stations, and a greater concentration of units. It was a policy change, said Stokes. Since World War II, zoning laws in the nation promoted a separation between commercial, residential and recreational land use in the built environment, leading to more sedentary lifestyles. About half of all Americans do not get enough physical activity to promote health, and about 25 percent do not get any exercise at all, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2007 statistics.

Read the rest at: Study Links Sprawl, Obesity - NYTimes.com