Archive | 2017

If you recently joined us thanks to Elon Musk, you may not know all about what I’m up to here.  There’s an “about” page for that, and over at the right you’ll find links to my book and consulting firm  But there’s also a lot of good material here that doesn’t go out of date.  Start with the Basics collection!

Last year at this time, I reviewed the 10 posts that got the most views in 2016 and was happy to find that only four of the ten were written in that year.  The pattern continues: only three of 2017’s most-read articles were written in 2017.

1. The Dangers of Elite Projection (July 2017).  This is one of my most useful posts ever, about a basic mistake that’s everywhere in city planning.  It’s an example of my attempt to talk very patiently and inclusively about a difficult topic that makes people very emotional.
2. Does Elon Musk Understand Urban Geometry? (2016)  My first effort at laying out what’s wrong with Elon Musk’s attempts to make cars go faster through cities, and to provide “service to your door.”  Written several months before I got Musk’s attention.
3. Elon Musk Responds!  (December 2017) Some drama around my December 14 exchange with Musk. No enduring content.
4. Basics: Walking Distance to Transit (2010).  An explainer.
5. Basics: The Spacing of Stops and Stations.  (2010).  This turned into Chapter 4 of my book.
6. The Receding Fantasy of Affordable Urban Transit “To Your Door” (May 2017).  A first attempt to lay out why demand-responsive services do not scale as any sort of substitute for fixed transit in dense cities.  However, the post will probably be superseded by this expanded one written just this week.
7. That Photo That Explains Almost Everything (2011).  You’ve seen the photo.  I notice a few things in it beyond its first impression.
8. Keys to Great Airport Transit (2016, but new on the list in ’17)  A pretty useful explainer about the common challenges and mistakes in airport rail lines.
9. Streetcars: An Inconvenient Truth. (2009) My first controversial post, still starting arguments seven years later.
10. Learning from “Mini Metro”.  (2014) Geeking out on the best public transit planning game I’ve seen.

But the Musk drama nudged some other keepers just out of the top 10.

1. Explainer: The Transit Ridership Recipe (2015).  Perhaps my single most essential explainer.
2. Core vs Edge Debates in Public Transit. (2016) An eternal issue.

Happy reading!  And if you’d like to see some of this material in more organized form, there’s a book, whose introduction you can read online.

Happy New Year.

… I would like to recommend the computer game The Witness.

Yes, this is off topic in a narrow sense. But I know many readers of this blog love the process of scientific discovery, and that’s what The Witness is about.

You arrive in a beautiful garden that presents you with puzzles.  You figure them out. Soon you are allowed out of the garden into a large island full of more puzzles, which gradually open up richer mysteries.  You learn more and more about the world.  Just like science, see?

As I faced these puzzles of increasing difficulty, I found myself having the full range of sensations that accompany the scientific process:

• The thrill of recognizing a pattern, solving something, and thus being free to move forward.
• The need to document what you’ve learned. (Take lots of screenshots.)
• The uncertainty about what might turn out to be important later.  This gradually recedes  a bit as you grow to learn the world’s “rules” but never quite goes away.
• The frustration of being stuck.
• The moment when the beautiful solution that you’ve found turns out to be wrong, but it’s so beautiful that you’re angry it isn’t right.
• The way this anger can guide you to come up with mathematical proofs that there is no solution to the puzzle.
• That feeling when this ironclad argument for despair is ruined by a sudden insight or successful guess.
• The resulting realization that while the pattern isn’t always the beautiful thing you imagined, there is a different beautiful pattern.
• The way that, late in the game as the problems get very hard, the notion that every pattern must be discoverable becomes stretched, and you start trying to theorize unknowability in ways reminiscent of chaos theory or the Heisenberg principle.
• The way the sheer beauty of the world keeps you coming back to it, even when you feel mad at its designers.

I write this at a moment of being very stuck, but I’m still eager to recommend it, if only for the delight I’ve had getting to this point.

But this is important: If you decide to trust me, do not read anything else about the game!  Don’t read other reviews, because it’s hard to say more than I’ve said without giving spoilers.

Well, I will give one clue.  It’s a comment to a review (yet another review you really shouldn’t read):

Was walking my dog. Saw something on sidewalk that looked like part of a circle. Wondered how I can get on neighbors roof for better perspective.

It’s best on a tablet.

Commenters:  No spoilers.  Please don’t give away anything more than what I’ve described.  Because the pleasure of this game starts with knowing nothing at all.

Thanks to my recent dust-up with Elon Musk, my book is 50% off at the Island Press website.  Not sure you want it?  Read the introduction online first.

You can get the e-book for half off here until January 22).

As for the physical book, well:  Just an hour or two after Elon Musk called me an idiot, Island Press announced a discount on my book, and they quickly sold out of all their copies on hand.  You can still get the discount from the Island Press, until January 22, by going here and checking out with the code ELON, but I’m afraid it may take a month for you to get the book, though they tell me they’re trying to do an expedited print run.

Of course, you may still be able to get it from other online retailers.

Photo: BJ (Brian Jim) Imagery via Wikipedia.

Vera Katz, mayor of Portland from 1993 to 2005, has passed away at 84.  She began life fleeing from the Nazis, and became one of the most distinctive and effective characters in Oregon politics.  I disagreed with her sometimes but can’t forget the way she could bring out the best in people.  Her 12 years as mayor meant that a whole generation came of age knowing no other leader.

The Oregonian has a fine obituary. Jonathan Maus has a nice review of her urbanist achievements.

Our oldest free weekly, Willamette Week, called her “Portland’s last successful mayor,” which seems a little nasty to me.  The three men who followed her all served just one term, opting not to run for re-election, so I suppose you can say that if you mean sheer longevity in office.

But of course, the job has also gotten harder.  Portland is an angrier place than it was in her time.  News media is more diverse, which is great, but can also be less constructive.  More of the population feels cornered and desperate, due to a greater economic cruelty in the culture that is beyond city government’s power to heal.  The kind of patience and shared effort that Katz could inspire may not be possible now.

Portland’s mayor is legally a weak position, largely a role of chairing the City Council and assigning fellow councilors to supervise different parts of city government.  In my experience, the average citizen has wildly exaggerated expectations for what a Portland mayor can actually do.

In this context, great mayors have succeeded by managing the council, creating space for everyone to excel while steering people toward a common purpose.  But this only happens if there’s an electorate that really wants to reward that kind of co-operation.

I wonder if we’ll notice the moment when the job of Mayor of Portland — and similar weak-mayor positions in other cities — has gone from difficult to impossible.  When a job is impossible, you won’t find competent people who want to do it, and that’s not good for any of the causes you care about.

Microsoft has unveiled plans for a complete rebuild of its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, in the eastern suburbs of Seattle.    Corporations have long wanted to make their headquarters feel like universities — hence their love of the word campus — but this one is much closer to delivering on that image. complete with retail, generous plazas and open space, and — very important — the removal of through car traffic.

It’s most important feature is its relationship to the new light rail station that will open on the edge of the campus in 2023.  A central axis of the campus points right to the station, minimizing walk distances to all campus destinations.  The station is just off the image to the upper right.  It’s not the town of circa 1900 town where density crowded around the station, but then rail stations in 1900 weren’t in ravines next to freeways.  This campus represents the best of what you can do given the suburban nature of the urban fabric, land ownership, and transportation infrastructure. It’s no substitute for locating in the old fabric of a dense city — as Amazon and Twitter did and Google is planning to do — but it’s a great start toward building a more human urban environment in a difficult context.

None of the materials I’ve seen mentions the parking ratios, however.  How many spaces per employee?  Too much parking would destroy the whole point.