San Antonio Water Conservation

From the NYTimes: San Antonio is buying conservation easements from area land owners in order to preserve the long term viability of the Edwards Aquifer, the city's primary water source.

I'm not a legal expert, but my understanding is that land easements are legal obligations written into the land's deed. They have the virtue of being much cheaper than buying the land outright, which San Antonio learned the hard way, when an earlier initiative to purchase tracts of farmland fizzled out. And they are permanent restrictions on what said land can be used for--in this case, on subdivisions and other developments that intensify water use, or pollute ground water.

The conservation program has won support from San Antonio’s business community, which sees water security as vital to development.

“It sounds very touchy-feely, but at the end of the day, if we don’t have water, then it’s like a plant — our community withers and goes away,” said Richard Perez, the president and chief executive of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.

"It sounds very touchy feely"--indeed. The wisdom there is that conservation is not about altruism, which is how conservation has traditionally been painted. It's about the viability of our communities and the places where we live.

Transit Tensions: Development Enhancer, or Mobility Tool?

I hope my professors will let me submit light rail prospectus analysis in multimedia:



An excellent series of accompanying blog posts at Transport Michigan gets to the heart of the issue:

Over the past decade, developers and city officials across the U.S. have taken an interest in downtown streetcar systems as a development tool. The model was the Portland Streetcar, opened in 2001 as a 2.4-mile loop connecting downtown Portland to a former industrial area just to the north. Rechristened the "Pearl District," that area boomed with new luxury lofts drawing Portland's growing professional population. Ironically, just as housing developers extended streetcar lines out to posh new residential districts a century ago (Woodbridge in Detroit is one such "streetcar suburb"), streetcars now offer cities and developers a potentially lucrative tool for facilitating the return of well-heeled residents back into the inner city. Transit advocates have long sought transit-oriented development to increase ridership, but streetcar advocates flip the phrase, proudly calling streetcars "development-oriented transit," although some Portlanders complain the district has grown too "hoity-toity" for their taste.

...

On a more fundamental level, though, when we lack regional rapid transit, and tens of thousands of transit-dependent Detroiters have to rely on unreliable, infrequent buses to get around, is it really appropriate for us to put real estate development that primarily serves newly arrived professionals before meeting the transit needs of the entire region, and especially those of the less privileged? This author's status as a twenty-something white guy from an affluent, educated background makes him a strong candidate for being one of those professionals, and I'm all for more housing in Cass/Midtown (though I think it's vital for it to be mixed-income), but I still think regional transit has got to be first.  [bold mine]

Mobility is part of equity. Planning for streetcars with local stops designed to spur development and boost property values without a pre-existing regional transit network smacks of boutique transit. Transit can have positive externalities, but only when it helps people get from point A to point B.

The issues of privilege, gentrification, and which needs transit serves are certainly at issue here, but equity concerns are not the only ones. A streetcar with an overly local focus, in the absence of good regional services, runs counter to the forces that generate lively and diverse city blocks: letting people move freely about the city. Cities are great because they have a wealth of different activities housed cheek and jowl: opera, sports franchises, boutiques, professional services, offices, residences. Attempts to cluster these into zones usually leads to a breakdown of the very diversity that generated the foot traffic that generated the diversity, you dig?

Human Transit recently weighed in on the importance of mobility vs. local place-making. The two elements should balance each other in any self-respecting city: the former about passing through, the latter encouraging staying around.

The trick is the dialog: keeping that pendulum balanced between transit that encourages people to, say, take the streetcar for all their local errands, and transit encouraging mobility. These are not mutually exclusive functions, but recognizing the different motives behind transit projects helps avoid imbalances. Too far to the local, and isolation/stagnation can ensue. Too far to the mobile, and you have a land of no-places (see auto-dependent freeway suburbs with replicated chain stores surrounding parking lots off 6 lane median-less arterials for what maximum mobility looks like).

The late 20th Century car-centered model led to the massive conversion of land area from placehood functions to mobility functions.  Transit's great virtue is that it provides a lot of mobility using relatively little space, so that more area can be devoted to places, both public and private.  ...

There is a strong current in New Urbanism, not without detractors, that does seem interested in abolishing mobility.  Patrick Condon's idea for Vancouver, for example, would cancel a single proposed subway line and instead replace all of the city's electric trolleybuses with streetcars that go the same speed as the buses do.  He would cancel a mobility-improving project and instead spend money in way that that may do great urban things but doesn't increase mobility at all.  Once his network was complete, nobody could get anywhere any faster than they can now. 

This makes sense only in a context where going places (even under renewable elecric power) is an objective evil.  Streetcars, in this vision, supposedly cause greater urban density to be built at livable neighborhood scales, so that people meet more of their needs close to home.  People spend most of their time in their own "villages" and others nearby.  They simply do not travel far across the city, and had better not be in a hurry when they do.

It's understandable that "urban village" is a winning concept right now.  We do need to increase the self-reliance of each part of a city, so that travel demand for many of life's needs can met closer to home.  The pendulum swung far the other way in the late 20th century, toward surrendering placehood to movement.  I support and eagerly participate in efforts to help it swing back.

But I think we can see what it might look like to swing too far in the new direction.  We stay close to home, and thus evolve transport systems that are useful for going short distances and useless for going long ones.  And the obvious retort to this is:  In that case, why live in a city?  Why not just live in a country village, or in a small city?

Remedial Street Grids

Street grids can be, in theory, an effective way to alleviate congestion on major suburban arterials. Frequently, lack of alternate routes, shared parking lots, and destination sprawl will concentrate traffic by virtue of the multiple car trips necessary to complete a set of errands.

Streetsblog DC has a great post about a rejected alternative to highway expansion in Charleston regarding a congested stretch of 4 lane suburban arterial. Read on:

The proposed secondary street grid would have been perpendicular and parallel to the existing arterial road.

To ease congestion on Savannah Highway, officials in Charleston have proposed an eight-mile, $489 million expansion of Interstate 526 through the towns of West Ashley, Johns Island and James Island.

One plan SC DOT rejected was developed by the Coastal Conservation League. The League opposes the I-526 extension, saying the project will destroy wetlands and perpetuate sprawl while having no effect on congestion on Savannah Highway. Their alternative proposal, “A New Way to Work,” could serve as a model for how to improve safety and make communities more livable while avoiding the expense and sprawl caused highway expansion.

“A New Way to Work” asserts that the congestion problems on Savannah Highway can be solved through street-level interventions in key locations. The biggest shortcoming of Savannah Highway, say League staff, is poor design. Their report notes that the road has a driveway every 80 feet, on average, creating a chaotic scramble between drivers who use the road to travel far distances and those who dash in and out of retail establishments. The lack of connectivity in the street network also limits drivers’ options, forcing traffic onto the arterial road.

What is needed, the report states, is a hierarchy of streets for different types of trips.

In its proposed redesign of Savannah Highway, the League would:

• Eliminate many curb cuts
• Install medians to control turning
• Repair connections between cul-de-sac-style, disconnected streets

These three principles are recommended by the Transportation Research Board to reduce congestion, preserve scenic landscapes and improve safety of motorists and pedestrians.

“It centers around the power of the network streets to relieve the knots in the system,” said the League’s Josh Martin. “We’re trying to create a really great, livable, walkable multi-modal street.”

Sigh.

Biking No Man's Land II: Overpasses and Frontage Roads

In the first post about biking in downtown Danville, I chronicled the way land-use patterns tilt different parts of the same commercial corridor precipitously toward complete streets, or precipitously toward automobile only zones.

Southern downtown is frustrating, but the No Man's Land deal-sealer is the difficulty of negotiating its southern boundary. Biking in and out from the north is not the greatest, but after getting to the Iron Horse Trail, it is rather pleasant. To the south, though, there are two choices for leaving Dodge, both dangerous.  

As an ardent suburban biker, I know the roads that are good, and the roads that are dangerous. #1 most death-defying, damn-I'm-in-a-tight-spot place: freeway overpasses with onramps. #2: high speed (40+) frontage roads with gravelly <4 ft shoulders. Let's mix some Homer with our Gunsmoke and call them Scylla and Charybdis. A closer look:

Scylla Sycamore: Anatomy of a Beast

The only way to get to the Iron Horse Trail from the south end of town is to use Sycamore Valley Rd as it passes over highway 680. The screen captures and photographs below illustrate the difficulty of this endeavor.

1) Southern edge of Danville Blvd/Danville shopping district/Dodge.

2) Street view:

No bike lane, and the sidewalk ends. A subtle signal about who is welcome. Beyond that ped dead-end, cars merge to the right at will and at speed onto a gently banked ramp to 680 south, regardless of what color the light is. No pedestrian crossing there.

3) Street view a little tighter in:

No pedestrian crossing, but hey: a bike lane! It's hard to see, but by the island (just left of the 680 sign), a bike lane emerges. It disappears across the intersection, and then reappears by the next island, then disappears, then reappears across the overpass, then disappears, etc. It's comical that someone thought that a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't four foot margin between freeway-aroused automobiles and a bicyclist would even be worth the paint.

O = bike lane, X = No bike lane

A patchwork bike path described as such is misleading insofar as it implies that the object described is, in fact, a patchwork bike path. It fails to summon the agoraphobic terror one gets when biking across the gray expanse of what is not technically an intersection, but rather a space for cars to ascend to, or decelerate from, highway velocities triple and quadruple a bicyclist's. One feels as though there may as well be a bike path across a runway at SFO.

Of particular danger and high dexterity-need is the switch from the 2nd "O" to the 3rd "O" (L to R). One must cross a lane of cars, cars having just experienced the g-forces better known as the cloverleaf exit, cars with drivers having just tasted the anticipation of flooring it on the straightaway to even out a leftward-tugging centrifugal force, cars that are supremely totally not expecting a bike to appear in front of them, nor prepared to brake for said bike.

One must reverse this maneuver as one moves from "O" the 3rd to "O" the 4th. Cars leave the overpass, and right-turning traffic moves into the dedicated, banked right hand lane. One must somehow move from the right of these cars (while on the overpass) to their left (@ "X" the 4th and "O" the 4th). While doing this, one must contend with new cars being added to the travel way from the off ramp near "X" the 4th.

The reward at the end is safe passage on the Iron Horse Trail/Ithaka. I only take this route, somewhat counterintuitively, at night, when traffic is lighter. Doing so requires waiting to verify an absence of headlights on the cloverleaf, and then pedaling like hell. Scylla. I avoid it.


Charybdis: The Choke Point

After the complications of Scylla, it's anticlimactically simple. Heading south, with Sycamore to the left, a biker follows a bike path for a hundred yards, and then a generously wide shoulder picks up the slack. So far so good, until the choke point.

  

The picture does not show that the 3 foot shoulder is rather gravelly, mostly inclined (heading south), or that the woosh of 45 mph cars is muy frightening. Whereas Scylla involves timing and a mad dash to the other side, Charybdis requires a sustained, disciplined sprint. Since I am not terribly fast (12-15 mph being my guesstimated cruising speed with a slight incline), this stretch takes about 4-5 minutes, but feels like 20. The uphill, devilishly, increases as you get to the end.

The risk comes from the speed differential between the hypothetical car and bicyclist. A professor of mine once showed the following chart (I do not know the source, but in addition to being a transportation planning lecturer, he is also a transportation planning consultant, so I trust it) to indicate the effect that vehicle speed has on crash mortality.

The numbers on the axes are difficult to read, but a vehicle-pedestrian crash at any speed over 30mph stands an excellent chance of causing a near fatal injury or death.

Check for Pt 3 of the Biking No Man's Land series, coming soon, in which I'll review a few potential fixes pipe dreams.

A Biking No Man's Land in Danville, Pt I

Problem: south of the where the Iron Horse Trail meets San Ramon Valley Boulevard/Hartz Avenue, downtown Danville is a biking no man's land.

Old-timey Downtown Danville, the proper downtown north of the IHT access point, is well integrated with the regional bike/ped path. The historic downtown's "antiquated" land-use pattern of small blocks, on-street parking (with additional lots behind the shops), and retail make it an ideal place for pedestrians, and its convenient IHT access points only intensifies incentives for leaving the car at home.

The IHT, somewhat ironically, marks the southern boundary of the bike/ped friendly zone. On the Google Earth screenshot below, the IHT is in blue, the historic downtown is the "A" pushpin, and the No Man's Land is outlined in yellow.

Downtown Danville. 680 runs North to South, from top of image to bottom, respectively.

The zone bordered in yellow could have been an asset, an extension of the historic downtown. Unfortunately, the difference between it and the downtown could not be more stark. Just north of the blue circle, blocks shrink, streets narrow, and stores front the sidewalk. South of the blue circle, the road widens to 4 lanes, (in some cases 5), and parking lots push storefronts back as much as several hundred meters from the (now perfunctory) sidewalk.

From El Nido restaurant to the street is +/- 300 meters

The Livery Mercantile is a lost place entirely: cabin-like shops in various shades of colorless brown held at a distance by a big parking lot forest. I avoid it. It's like, unpleasantly arboreal. Arboreal in the sense that there are no sightlines; it is hard to orient oneself; it is dark; the buildings actually do look like dark huts. Instead of following the predictable geometry of the courtyard/plaza blueprint (see above image; geometric assets aside, it's still just a car-choked variation on a classic pedestrian urban space [imagine filling this with parking, or the Plaza Mayor]), the Livery lot is an amoebic lagoon.

Endor?

So let's be clear: this part of town is not friendly to pedestrians or bikers. If the historic downtown is where people go for a pleasant meal or a shopping stroll, or a midsummer festival, the No Man's Land is where you do the daily errands: Lucky, Walgreens, CVS, McCaulous, multiple banks, etc. The Bowling Alley. So it's a fairly vital part of any Danvillian's weekly life. Except for McCaulous.

If land use patterns made biking safe and desirable, more people would be free to make the choice to deposit checks, pick up groceries, etc, on their bikes. But in a place built for cars, there is only one option: cars. Unless you really enjoy going against the grain, like me.

As much as the land use planning decisions make this a tale of two Danvilles, one for cars and one for bikes/peds(/and cars, too; there really is plenty of parking, proof that you can have it both ways), what really makes the southern downtown a No Man's Land is access. Lack of it: getting to this area from the south, and getting back out of this area to the south present bicyclists with a dangerous set of options that only further discourage anything beside driving.

More on this in the next post.

Automobile Dependence and the Limits of the Electric Car

Sometimes an argument is taut enough to (momentarily) suffocate any counters. A defense of gay marriage recently accomplished this feat. Below please find its transportation-savvy counterpart.

[He] may well be right that electric cars are the future of the automobile, the ultimate problem isn’t cars themselves—it’s the consequences of a car-centric culture.

Those consequences include, but aren’t limited to: Sprawling development patterns (which are massively energy-inefficient, destroy farmland and rural lifestyles, contribute to the concentration of the food system, and require massive amounts of infrastructure—electrical, sewer, and roadway—to exist), impervious surfaces that increase roadway runoff into streams and soil, car crashes (which kill 40,000 people a year and create a huge cost to public health institutions) the consequences of sedentary, car-based lifestyles (obesity, shorter life spans), and the weakening of ties to friends, family, and community, to name a few.

Publicola author Erica Burnett is responding to the argument that bike and pedestrian street improvements are wasteful and unnecessary because in the future, the climate problem will be solved by electric cars. The electric car meme is tempting, but it only scratches the surface of the lifestyle enabled by the automobile. And while e. cars are certainly a net improvement, climate-wise and oil-dependency-wise, reducing automobile dependence is just as important as reducing fossil fuel dependence.

Should Redevelopment Agencies Get the Axe?

Gabriel Metcalf, of SPUR fame, has a good op-ed defending Redevelopment Agencies.

... it's worth pointing out that we are talking about eliminating the tool central cities use to attract growth that would otherwise go to the suburban periphery.

For me, best outcome of this attn to Redevelopment Agencies will be better oversight. A clipping of wings, not elimination.

Two commenters on this op-ed nicely articulated the pro and con argument for RAs:

Pro:

Dive in deeper to some of San Francisco's large redevelopment projects and you will see that the trade-off Brown is creating between redevelopment and public services is a false one. As part of the Mission Bay deal, private land is being donated to the San Francisco Unified School District for a new public school; funding and construction of a playground accompanying the new school is a required deal point; land and funding is being provided to the City to build a new local fire and police station; space was built to house the first new public library in San Francisco in 30 years. The Treasure Island deal has many of the same public services being supported in its redevelopment program. These are examples of how redevelopment can and should work, resulting in economic development AND needed public services.

Con:

"Used wisely..."

That's the problem Gabriel - they aren't used wisely. The LA Times documented the waste by redevelopment agencies. We've seen redevelopment here in Alameda fund boondogle parking garage projects.

 

The LAT did run an excellent two-part series about redevelopment abuses, and it had an awesome title: Arrested Redevelopment (Links: one and two). LAT also published financial records from city redevelopment agencies to toss some daylight on whether they were meeting their minimum requirements for affordable housing. Great stuff.

But as the first commenter showed, when done right, a redevelopment project will do more than hoard affordable housing monies or build skyscrapers on razed neighborhoods that formerly belonged to low-income people of color.

Ascertainable Fact: Sprawl Neither Demanded nor Profitable

Not demanded:

(From the WSJ. Italics mine. Bolding mine. Underline mine.)

Much of this week’s National Association of Home Builders conference has dwelled on the housing needs of an aging baby boomer population. But their children actually represent an even larger demographic. An estimated 80 million people comprise the category known as “Gen Y,” youth born roughly between 1980 and the early 2000s. The boomers, meanwhile, boast 76 million. (And, uh, we're gonna outlive them.)

Gen Y housing preferences are the subject of at least two panels at this week’s convention. A key finding: They want to walk everywhere. Surveys show that 13% carpool to work, while 7% walk, said Melina Duggal, a principal with Orlando-based real estate adviser RCLCO. A whopping 88% want to be in an urban setting, but since cities themselves can be so expensive, places with shopping, dining and transit such as Bethesda and Arlington in the Washington suburbs will do just fine.

Count me in that 88%, obvi. I'm wracking my brain for a peer to (anonymously) trot out as a counterexample, but I can't.

Not Profitable:

Transportation for America breaks down a report indicating that these Gen-Y preferences (density, infill, transit-links, walkability) have big economic bonuses:

In Dallas, Texas, for instance, downtown retail sales rose 33 percent the year after the new light rail system began operation. Portland, Oregon attracted $3.5 billion in private investment after just $100 million in streetcar funding. In Sarasota, Florida, downtown development costs clocked in at just half the cost of new development in the suburbs and generated four times the revenue in tax receipts.

Denver, Colorado perhaps best exemplifies the market for new approaches to growth and transit. Home values for Denver residents within a half-mile radius of the Southeast light rail line increased by 18 percent just as home values in the remainder of Denver declined by 18 percent, between 2006 and 2008. Nationwide, one study found that every one-point increase in a home’s “walk score” — a measure of how accessible the area is by foot — corresponded with a $700 to $3,000 increase in property value.

Toward More Reliable Financing for Mixed-Use Development?

Not out of the woods yet, but it appears momentum is growing to create a more reliable source of funding for mixed-use developments. An alphabet soup coalition of National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), and the National Town Builders Association (NTBA) is pushing for Fannie, Freddie, and HUD to guarantee mortgages for a more diverse, incl. mixed-use, portfolio of real estate. 

A Big Urban Victory – Mixed-Use and Fannie, Freddie and the FHA

The board of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has approved a resolution that could have a dramatic impact on urban mixed-use, Main Streets and good development overall. In a partnership with the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and the National Town Builders Association (NTBA), the resolution by NAHB supports reform of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration’s guidelines for mixed-use development.


Currently, Fannie, Freddie and the FHA will not guarantee a mortgage on a development or building that is more than 25% commercial space. The resolution would raise that limit to 45%. This is significant because historic Main Street districts and new infill development would be suddenly eligible for significant new investment opportunities.

Streetsblog Capitol Hill has more:

Urbanists have won an important victory in their campaign to reverse Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s bias against mixed-use development, enlisting the National Association of Home Builders to help push for a critical reform to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lending standards. The mortgage giants currently require that projects they finance be no more than 25 percent commercial (20 percent for Fannie and for multifamily HUD projects.)

The Congress for the New Urbanism has waged a battle against these mandates. “Every Main Street in America violates Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s rigid standards,” CNU President John Norquist has said.

According to CNU, Fannie and Freddie’s commercial-space maximums have had “a distorting effect on building types and development patterns,” especially disadvantaging low- to mid-rise buildings with retail on the first floor and apartments or condominiums above. “Before these regulations, low-mid rise mixed use buildings were common.”

Planners vs. Pre-Fab in the Olde Sod

Interesting story coming out of England: Residents of Britain's last prefab estate battle to save homes that were built to last only ten years.

In the waning months of World War II, England built hundreds of pre-fab homes that were intended as only as temporary housing. Many of these neighborhoods were replaced within 20 years by Le Corbu inspired concrete towers, which, of course, were about as pleasant to look at and live in as a bag of hammers.

One neighborhood, the Excalibur Estate, has persisted, but a local council has redevelopment in mind for the 20 acre site: something on the order of 400 homes. (I found this amount perplexing, given that there are 187 prefab home/garden units there currently.)

The article has a definite NIMBY bias, given the historical role the prefab homes played for WWII vets, and given the natural human indignation summoned when a bureaucracy declares it can and will buy your home, demolish it, and rebuild under the aegis of a "Sustainable Community Strategy."

Related: Human Transit had a great post about the semantic importance of reporting both sides of story. This article fails that test, and as a result makes vilifying the cruel bean-counting central planners a very tempting activity. Am trying to resist without knowing more.

Geoffrey West, Physicist, Solves the City!

The New York Times Magazine ran an article in the most recent issue titled, "A Physicist Solves the City." Apart from the pretension of, you know, solving a city, I have one other thing to say:

SCOOP there it is!

The article draws its topic from the report published in Nature magazine, brought to my attention by dear reader and resident Scientific Correspondent, KH. I covered it about two months ago with the slightly less ambitious title of "A Unified Theory of Urban Living."

In any case, the findings are excellent, and though the air of conscious superiority that suffuses Mr. West is a bit noxious, I doff my hat to him. Just like I do to the other self-consciously superior Mr. West.

The quick summary is that Mr. West and his collegue, Luis Bettencourt lay good claim to have discovered the urban planning equivalent of Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion. The notion is that without knowledge of what rules govern a system, efforts to understand, assess, and make improvement to that system are inevitably hindered by the lack of a proper yardstick.

“What we found are the constants that describe every city,” [West] says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.”

"The what" has two key pieces: 1) as cities double in size, their infrastructure footprint only increases by 85%, on average. 2) As cities increase in size, per capita socioeconomic quantities such as wages, GDP, number of patents produced and number of educational and research institutions all increase by approximately 15% more than the expected linear growth. Congestion and crime do, too.

West treats point 2 as a statistical proof of Jane Jacobs' theory that cities should be built to generate diversity by building densely and facilitating easy pedestrian movement and interaction:

“One of my favorite compliments is when people come up to me and say, ‘You have done what Jane Jacobs would have done, if only she could do mathematics,’ ” West says. “What the data clearly shows, and what she was clever enough to anticipate, is that when people come together, they become much more productive.”

Geoffrey and Kanye should get in touch--two Mr. Wests re-writing the possibilities of their respective fields. And don't they know it.