Over at New Geography, Joel Kotkin has a new broadside against high-density inner city life. It’s called “Forced March to the Cities,” presumably to feed the right-wing talking-point that urbanism and planning are totalitarian. Here’s the part that’s supposed to scare you: Continue Reading →
Urban Structure
Sydney: Grid Networks for Gridless Cities
Whenever I talk about the value of grid networks, as I did here, someone always says: But my city isn’t a grid. For example, Sydney, where I live now, is about as ungridlike a city as you’ll encounter. In fact, there’s no large system of order in Sydney’s road network at all. Some roads follow what were once Aboriginal tracks, but mostly it just grew, one bit at a time, an accretion of millions of short-term decisions.
vancouver: the great broadway debate
The big rail transit debate in Vancouver at the moment concerns Broadway. You might call it Vancouver’s Wilshire Boulevard: not always a beautiful street but a very important one. It’s the direct line east from the University of British Columbia at the west end of the city, and goes through a major office core, including Vancouver City Hall, just south of downtown proper. It’s the busiest east-west arterial in the entire city and the site of one of the busiest bus lines in North America, the 99. It has everything you need for successful rail transit, except consensus. Here again is the City of Vancouver’s transit network, with the Broadway corridor in dark orange.
vancouver: the almost perfect grid
In the last post, which explains why grids are such an efficient structure for transit, I mentioned that Vancouver has one of the best transit geographies I’ve ever encountered. Here’s what I mean.
A grid pattern of arterial streets covers almost all of Vancouver. Most of the time, parallel major streets are spaced about every 800-1000m apart, and since a comfortable walking distance is about half that, this spacing is perfect for efficient transit. Continue Reading →
The Power and Pleasure of Grids
Why do transit planners love grids? Now and then you’ll even hear one muttering about “grid integrity” or “completing the grid.” What are they talking about?
Suppose you’re designing an ideal transit system for a fairly dense city where there are many activity centers, not just one big downtown. In fact, you don’t want to give preferential treatment to any point in the city. Instead, you want people to be able to travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else by a reasonably direct path, at a high frequency. Everybody would really like a frequent service from their home to everywhere they ever go, which is pretty much what a private car is. But money isn’t infinite, so the system has to deliver its outcome efficiently, with the minimum possible cost per rider. What would such a system look like? Continue Reading →
Sydney: An “Independent Inquiry” on Public Transport
For the last four months, I’ve been part of a team looking at the big-picture problems of public transport in Sydney, sponsored but not controlled by the city’s main newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. We released the draft report today, so I can finally talk about it. Continue Reading →
Vancouver: An Olympic Urbanist Preview
Over the next two weeks, we’ll see a lot of Vancouver, one of the most remarkable achievements in 20th Century urbanism. If you’re going to promote transit anywhere, especially in North America or Australasia, it’s an important city to know about.
As the Olympic Winter Games run, I’ll do a series of posts on Vancouver transit issues (interspersed with some Sydney news that will break over the weekend). I’ll rely on my own experience living and working there in 2005-6, my annual visits since then, and the insights of my former colleagues. But my single best source is probably my friend Gordon Price, a former city councilman and frequent speaker on urbanist issues around the world. His friendly blog Price Tags is my first bookmark for Vancouver’s news on sustainable transport and urban design. (Just today, for example, he posted a link to a spectacular aerial montage, a bit like Google Street View from an altitude of 500m or so. It’s a great way to explore the city.)
What’s special about Vancouver? It’s a new dense city, in North America. Continue Reading →
On Incompleteness (of Networks, of Life …)
Reader Russell Bozian thinks he spies a theme coursing through recent posts.
Will partially built houses ever be energy efficient? Ones where the walls are up, but the roof has not been put on yet? If you don’t qualify for a full home loan, will banks even lend you half the money you need to build a house? Will the banks figure that you can at least have half a good life, living in a house with walls but no roof? …
Jarrett, your original post wonders out loud why Portland can spend tens of millions on transit and not, in 2010, see a much higher percentage of people commuting to work on public transport. But at the present build rate, won’t it take at least until 2050 before Portland has a comprehensive and ubiquitous public transport network, such as we see in Manhattan? Why do we starve public transport of the money it needs to finish a decent network of routes, and then pause to criticize its incomplete performance statistics? Would we ponder why the waterworks is not delivering much water to our faucets, if we only gave them enough money and right of way for each water line to stop 100 feet short of our houses?
Continue Reading →
Three Paths to a Low-Car City
If you want to live in a city with fewer cars, how do you get there? What do low-car cities have in common? Anything? Or are there in fact different ways to reach low car-dependence, demonstrated by very different cities achieving the same high scores?
All these questions came to mind as I perused Wikipedia’s helpful list of the US cities over 100,000 population with the most zero-car households (thanks to commenter Alon Levy). I find the list so interesting that I’m just going to copy all of it here, then add some thoughts at the end. The figure given for each city is the percentage of households that do not own a car. Continue Reading →
A Visit From the Loyal Opposition
Very interesting and civil comment threads have grown on the last several posts. Comment threads, of course, have a tendency to start with the post’s topic but then turn into conversations among the commenters, often leading far from the source. As long as everyone’s civil, I don’t worry about that much. I’ve learned not to treat the comment count as a measure of my relevance.
But I do want to note the efforts of commenter Watson, who lucidly argued for parking subsidies, sprawl land use patterns, etc. on the this recent post. The resulting comment thread is worth a read. On the subject of whether downtown Portland all-day parking rates should be higher, he began:
Be careful what you wish for. In the short-term, a sharp increase in central city parking prices might induce a significant shift from autos to transit. But over the long-term, the primary effect may be to drive businesses and people out of the city and into the suburbs where land is cheaper and parking can be provided at lower cost.