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 Asks: Who Put Up All Those Stop Signs?

From NPR:

Authorities in Cranston, R.I., as WPRI-TV reports, say they've only partially solved the mystery of who put up nearly 700 stop signs that hadn't gotten proper approval.

State Department of Transportation officials have said their workers were responsible for about one-third of the signs. The other two-thirds? A spokeswoman for the mayor says many may have been installed by city residents.

"Anecdotally, people will tell you that in years past they would call city hall and a sign would go up," says that spokeswoman, Robin Schutt:

Our favorite part of WPRI reporter Kathryn Sotnik's report: The caution from the mayor's office that "drivers ... should not take this as a free pass. A stop sign is a stop sign."

Cranston is no small place, by the way. Population: Nearly 80,000.

 

Watch a local news report at: City Asks: Who Put Up All Those Stop Signs? : The Two-Way : NPR

The costly cul-de-sac in Milwaukee Magazine

Almost a year ago I wrote a well-received blog entry about expensive cul-de-sacs. That has evolved into an article I did for the November issue of Milwaukee Magazine, which you can download below.  

PDF:  Download Insider Milwaukee Magazine Cul-de-sac

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 Political Environment: High-Speed Rail Is A National Economic Development Plan

As Wisconsin's new Governor-elect works to pull the coffin-lid shut on Wisconsin's middle class and fully enable corporate socialism, here's another excellent reality-based post by James Rowen on the importance of Wisconsin's participation in regional and national economic development:

Lost in the rhetoric and misstatements about the Madison-Milwaukee train is that it is a segment of a network of trains connecting Chicago and the Twin Cities, and eventually a portion of a truly national rail system.

It makes no sense to excise Wisconsin from the line. Check out this map of the Midwest plan, and remember that it will connect to routes service other regions, too.

It will make the state an inaccessible economic backwater.

Short-to-medium length trips are not always available by air; often airports are distant from central business districts or other job centers, and last-minute air travel can be pricey.

And many people - - the elderly, the young - - do not drive, do not own a car or have access to one. Rail opponents, often suburbanites, need to realize that not everyone has a minivan.

The rail system is intended to fill in these gaps, providing connections among businesses, universities and tourist destinations not easily served by aviation.

Trains also offer a working environment not replicable inside a car.

Modern trains are fast, wi-fi-equipped, comfortable and imminently practical.

A new national rail network makes an infrastructure investment that fills a need, puts people to work and was to be made available in Wisconsin at no construction cost, and an annual operating charge statewide of about $60,000 a month.  A bargain, as I said a few days ago.

As the scribe Wisconsin State Journal philosopher scribe used to say, "What could be more fairer?"

Read the rest at: The Political Environment: High-Speed Rail Is A National Economic Development Plan

Apple invests in public transit - with impressive, stylish results

From Kaid Benfield's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC:

It cost around four million dollars to refurbish the station.  If you’re thinking that there’s no way the cash-strapped Chicago Transit Authority could afford that, you are right:  it was funded with private money, by the Apple corporation, in conjunction with the company’s construction of a new retail store on adjacent property.

Mike Cassidy wrote in The San Jose Mercury News:

“This is not a company that leaves much to chance and there was no way the sales gurus in Cupertino were going to let a dungeon-like transit stop present the first impression of their sleek and glassy store.

“Remember, Apple sells an experience as much as it sells products.

"’The public might not think of it this way, but the retail experience doesn't start exactly in your store. It starts when they approach your store,’ says Kirthi Kalyanam, a professor with the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.”

Apple also built the plaza in between the North/Clybourn transit station and its new store, which opened in late October.

 

Read the rest at: Apple invests in public transit - with impressive, stylish results | Kaid Benfield's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC

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

Reduce sprawl to attack three threats

Cogent thoughts by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, city planners and co-authors of "The Smart Growth Manual" (2010) as well as "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream" (2000), just re-released on its 10th anniversary.

The issue is not new for urban planners. We have been talking about it for 30 years, first as an aesthetic problem and then as a social concern: children and the elderly lacking independence, overburdened soccer moms and dads, massive income-based segregation and all that time wasted in traffic.

But the debate has changed now that sprawl has been identified as a contributor to some major challenges to our well-being: oil dependency, climate change and skyrocketing health-care costs. These crises have causes beyond sprawl, but sprawl may be the only one they all share.

Read the rest at: Andres Duany and Jeff Speck - Plan to reduce sprawl will boost health, environment

 

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