This is basically just a real estate development with no parking. It’s on a light rail line, and the main idea seems to be to embrace micromobility (bikes, scooters, autonomous taxis) for people to get around. It doesn’t seem hugely pathbreaking to me, but I think what might make it seem pathbreaking to suburban Americans is that the bikes, scooters, human beings, and cars are not in conflict with each other. This is so simple, and yet so pathbreaking. It’s also pathbreaking because it’s in greater Phoenix. We assume this can’t be done in American cities because when we choose to devote most of our space to car maneuvering and car storage, there is not also room for the bikes, scooters, and human beings.
Tag Archives: urban design
the problem with sprawl
This article from Strong Towns has a good explanation of why low-density development is not the answer to the housing supply issue.
this style of development works extremely well for a specific type of private developer… developers like Ross Perot Jr. are masters of the assembly-line approach: secure cheap land on the fringe, install infrastructure, and build tract housing as quickly as possible. At this scale, the profits are enormous, and the risks are low. The federal government provides generous support through mortgage guarantees, tax preferences, and highway spending, and buyers keep lining up for new homes.
But while the private sector gets the cash, local governments get the bill. Sprawling developments create long-term infrastructure liabilities—roads, water lines, sewer systems, schools, fire protection—that far exceed the revenue they generate. Local governments, which are really just collections of us acting together, are left trying to maintain and operate systems that are fundamentally unaffordable.
As Mayor Eugene Escobar of Princeton, Texas, put it, his town boomed with affordable homes, but now it’s struggling with traffic, overburdened infrastructure, and a lack of basic amenities. The city’s leadership is trying to build a real downtown, attract jobs, and create public spaces—but they’re doing it after the fact. That’s not planning. That’s triage.
Some suburbs seem to persist for long periods of time. But they are ones located within commuting distance of urban centers with high-paying professional jobs, and the zoning serves to keep the median income in those successful suburbs very high, and therefore able to support the very high infrastructure costs per resident or per square mile. There aren’t enough of these highly affluent people for all suburbs to work like this, so for every successful one there are many turning into slums.
What seems to be suggested instead is a gradual process of intensification from the middle out, so that populations, incomes, and tax revenues can keep rising over time as value is continuously created. This makes sense to me. I think there may be a more linear model though that could work for U.S. suburbs, where the intensification happens along a transportation corridor with progressively less dense development as you move back from highway. This way, you get a long linear downtown with access to transportation and other infrastructure at a low unit cost. People could live in relatively low-density neighborhoods if they want to and still not be too far from work, school, and inter-city public transportation. And these commercial corridors already exist in the form of arterial highways, water and power lines, big box stores and car dealerships separated by oceans of parking.
why parking is the enemy of affordable housing
This article has a clear explanation of why parking mandates push up housing costs in cities.
Off-street parking mandates add hundreds of dollars a month to people’s rent, even for tenants who don’t drive, who then have to subsidize their neighbors’ parking in the building’s garage. One reason for this is that off-street parking is incredibly expensive to build, especially now that building material costs keep rising, and are expected to rise even more with President Trump’s tariffs.
But the other reason is that parking just takes up a lot of space in a building. All the space devoted to a garage and all the related internal building infrastructure takes up room that can’t be devoted to more homes and living space. Not surprisingly, when cities remove parking mandates, builders add more housing and less parking to projects.
In some cases, the cost of building an underground garage for the required parking spaces ends up being the real limit on how tall a building can be. On paper a builder might be legally allowed to add more units than proposed, but if providing the parking for them is too unaffordable, they’ll opt for a smaller building.
I still think self-driving (and self-parking) vehicles will solve this particular problem in the long term, because vehicles will be able to park themselves in very tight spaces. The technology has arrived in the world’s most advanced countries (not the U.S. sorry, we are behind and falling more behind.). But it might take a generation for laws to catch up, and we are going to be stuck with a lot of wasted space for a long time to come.
3-30-300
The idea is you can see 3 trees from your window, your neighborhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and you are within 300 m of a half-hectare park.
Interest in the 3–30–300 green space rule has recently emerged in urban forest scholarship, but its applicability in developing country contexts, especially in intermediate cities, remains largely unexplored. This study assesses the feasibility of the rule’s three components—visibility of three trees from every building, achieving 30 % neighborhood canopy cover, and ensuring 300-meter walking access to 0.5-hectare parks—using geospatial analysis. We employ a combination of remote sensing data, local administrative records, and open-source global datasets to evaluate tree canopy cover, greenspace distribution, and accessibility under different scenarios. Our case study focuses on Surakarta, an intermediate city recognized as Indonesia’s most livable city. Results show that only 29 % of buildings meet the visibility requirement, 2 % are in neighborhoods with 30 % canopy cover, and 25 % are within 300 m of a greenspace. However, accessibility could increase to 79 % if all greenspaces were fenceless and high quality. Our findings highlight disparities in urban greening, as smaller residential buildings tend to have lower scores than larger office buildings. These results underscore the role of park governance in shaping access to green spaces and the persistent challenges of achieving the 3–30–300 targets. We propose place-based recommendations tailored for each urban commune and advocate for the adoption of the 3–30–300 rule as a target for national and local development planning to enhance urban green space accessibility and equity. This framework has the potential to be used in participatory planning processes for consensus-based siting of green infrastructure and nature-based solutions in cities in developing countries.
My city (Philadelphia, USA) has set the 30% canopy goal in the past and failed to implement it. Not only failed, but failed to maintain the inadequate tree canopy we already have. Part of the reason is dysfunctional and uncoordinated government agencies, and part of the problem is the “sidewalks are private property” farce.
R.I.P Donald Shoup
Donald Shoup explained why parking is so scarce in walkable, livable cities. Basically, you can have walkable, livable cities, or you can have free parking. You can’t have both. This is a matter of geometry. Pricing parking is one answer. Progress on this issue is a dog fight every inch of the way. Most people are not interested in waking up from the auto-oil-highway propaganda matrix and seeing the world for what it is. The fight is worth it. Thank you Donald Shoup for opening my eyes to reality.
sidewalks
Sidewalks are important. Besides being (obviously?) part of the transportation system (because the purpose of a transportation system is to move people and goods from point A to point B, NOT to move your private motor vehicle from point A to point B), we can put trees in them, manage water and pollution in them, move water/electricity/gas/communications under them and over them, conduct business and engage in social interactions in them. In engineering lingo, they are part of the “public right of way” along with the street. This is why most U.S. cities recognize that they are a critical part of the urban public infrastructure…wait, what? They don’t? They pretend they are private property and put the onus on private property owners to keep them in a state that provides all these public amenities. The article I link to here compares sidewalk policy in U.S. cities and concludes that some are better than others.
closing streets to cars raised business sales by 68%
This was during four Sundays of “open streets” (which means open to humans and closed to big, heavy motor vehicles) in a portion of Center City Philadelphia. But this works because people live nearby. People don’t really have to “walk to” the event because they live there. When cars are the only practical way to get around, most of the space has to be reserved for cars to maneuver and park (relatively) safely so you can’t have space for people too. It’s obvious, sure, but 100 years of oil-highway-car industry propaganda has brainwashed us to be blind to the realities of geometry. Take your red pills, people!
electric vehicle charging in Philadelphia
Here’s an article on the woes of electric vehicle charging in my home city of Philadelphia. On the plus side, electric vehicles are becoming more common.
As of January, there were 6,615 all-electric vehicles and 3,149 plug-in hybrids registered in Philadelphia, according to data from the state Department of Transportation (PennDOT). Combined, those represent 1.3% of the city’s nearly 767,000 registered vehicles. That doesn’t include cars used by the many commuters and visitors who drive into Philly every day.
To fully charge a typical EV on a standard Level 2 charger, the owner may have to leave their car parked there eight hours, which means there need to be more chargers per EV than gas pumps per gas car.
Yet Philly has only 145 publicly accessible charging stations with 378 charging ports, according to U.S. Department of Energy data. Most of the stations have Level 2 chargers, but 13 of them have Level 3 or DC Fast chargers, which typically charge a car in an hour or less, depending on the vehicle’s battery capacity and other factors. Pennsylvania as a whole has 1,785 public stations with 4,598 ports.
Philadelphia is a large city with many neighborhoods, some quite car-dependent. That is where chargers belong, not in the walkable urban core. What we need there are safe, separated, protected lanes for bicycles and light electric vehicles, like e-bikes and scooters and even light-weight golf carts. These need their own signals and they need to never, ever, ever be in conflict with highway vehicles, whether those are electric or not. So I wouldn’t prioritize chargers there, but on the other hand we should be thinking about air pollution. Replacing fossil-fueled vehicles with electric ones is certainly a win for all the lungs of all the people walking and using those light-weight electric vehicles, so that is one argument in their favor, even in urban cores.
I still autonomous vehicles will eventually solve the charging problem, even in urban cores. Because your vehicle will be able to drop you off at your home or another walkable location, then go park itself somewhere it will not be in the way, then come pick you up again when you need it. So ideally we will be able to have walkable urban cores not ruined by private vehicles, and the ability to take trips to car-dependent locations when we need to. I want to believe this is a decade or less in the future, but it seems to be coming along very slowly.
Bike lanes don’t slow down fire trucks or ambulances
Safe street designs don’t affect emergency response times. People can have other opinions without evidence if they want (and they will), but assertions made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
SEPTA tries micro-transit
The Philadelphia-area Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) is experimenting with micro-transit. I have heard that the idea of micro-transit, including semi-fixed but flexible bus routes people can schedule with apps, has not worked all that well in trials elsewhere. And SEPTA has a history and tendency of underwhelming. Nonetheless, I think that if the U.S. remains committed to its low-density sprawl land use preferences, traditional fixed bus and rail routes are just not going to work. Something more flexible is needed, and if public agencies can find ways to do it more efficiently or cost-effectively than the private sector then it’s worth a try. If we are tempted to say it is unfair for a subsidized government agency to compete with the private sector in this area, we should remember the enormous public funding that has gone into building and maintaining our enormous public road network over the past 70 or so years at the expense of nearly all other types of public infrastructure.
I’m still skeptical of you though SEPTA. You have never exceeded my low and steadily declining expectations. Prove me wrong.