Tag Archives: urban planning

bicycles, airships, and things that go

I have read Cars, Trucks, and Things that Go to my 3 year old son at least 100 times. It is his favorite book in the world. I didn’t have a lot to do with this – I actually tried to steer him more toward animals and nature, but his fascination with wheels began shortly after birth and shows no signs of abating. It’s clearly baked in to his genetic makeup, which is interesting considering that almost all evolution of our genetic makeups happened before cars, trucks or other things that go (other than legs and muscles) ever existed. Perhaps humans, and the male of the species in general, just have an instinctive attraction to power, whether it comes from harnessing animals or burning things and then transferring that power through mechanical or electrical means. That would clearly give us an advantage and it makes total sense, but it is amazing that it emerges within months of birth.

I’m not going to censor Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. But there is a lot of pollution and unsafe road conditions in those books, plus head-scratching things like children driving cars, and enormous pileups where nobody gets hurt. So I think it’s great that some people are trying to update that classic winning formula with updated and more sustainable technology choices. Of course, kids don’t need to be brainwashed in the latest urban planning buzzwords, they need to be educated in how to think about systems so they can reach the right conclusions and make the right choices when they grow up. They also need to be entertained. We’ll see if this succeeds.

May 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • There are scary and seemingly reckless confrontations going on between U.S. and Russian planes and ships in the Indian Ocean. And yet, it is bizarrely humorous when real life imitates Top Gun.
  • The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • Obama went to Hiroshima, where he said we can “chart a course that leads to the destruction” of nuclear weapons, only not in his lifetime. Obama out.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • I try not to let this blog get too political, really I do. But in an election season I just can’t help myself. This is a blog about the future of civilization, and the behavior of U.S. political, bureaucratic, and military elites obviously has some bearing on that. In May I mused on whether the U.S. could possibly be suffering from “too much democracy“, Dick Cheney, equality and equal opportunity, and what’s wrong with Pennsylvania. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, TRUMP IS A FASCIST!
  • The world has about a billion dogs.
  • It turns out coffee grounds may not make good compost.

“new vision” for suburbia

This article from The Smithsonian presents some ideas on the future of suburbia.

With truly autonomous vehicles still years away, no one can say with much certainty if they will result in people spending less time in cars. But Berger does foresee one big potential benefit—much less pavement. Based on the notion that there likely will be more car-sharing and less need for multiple lanes since vehicles could continuously loop on a single track, Berger believes the amount of pavement in a suburb of the future could be cut in half. You would no longer need huge shopping center parking lots, or even driveways and garages.

Not only would fewer paved surfaces increase the amount of space that could be used for carbon-storing trees and plants, but it also would allow more water to be absorbed and reduce the risk of flooding in cities downstream.

That kind of interdependence between suburbs and downtowns is at the heart of how Berger and others at the CAU see the future. Instead of bedroom communities of cul-de-sacs and shopping malls, the suburbs they’ve imagined would focus on using more of their space to sustain themselves and nearby urban centers—whether it’s by providing energy through solar panel micro-grids or using more of the land to grow food and store water.

I almost liked the article until I got to the Joel Kotkin quote:

“The reality is that the large majority of people want to live in suburbs,” says Joel Kotkin, a fellow of urban studies at Chapman University in California and the author of The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. “People make these choices for all kinds of reasons that urban theorists don’t pay attention to. They’d rather live in a detached house than in an apartment building. Or they can’t afford to live in the middle of a city. Or they’re worried about where their kids will go to school.”

It’s a scare tactic. Yes, dictators of the past may have forced people into high rise housing blocks at gunpoint in a few cases. That is not happening in the United States right now. In fact, most of us are not able to make a choice between car-dependent and walkable communities because walkable communities are in short supply. Things that are in short supply and high demand tend to be expensive. They are expensive because they are desirable and limited, not because they are undesirable and people are being forced to live there against their will. The nascent trend toward city living would have to continue for a long, long time before there is any lack of suburbs to choose from.

I can’t deny that the state of many urban school districts is problematic. Schools in the United States tend to be locally funded, so that areas with higher concentrations of poverty have worse schools. And areas with higher concentrations of minorities have worse schools because racist and ideologically anti-city politicians from rural areas are able to starve them of funding in many states. All this leads to a downward spiral of poor outcomes and low expectations that is hard to break out of.

Pennsylvania governor on anti-city policies

Here is the Pennsylvania governor talking about how state policy disadvantages cities and what could be done about it.

  • Regional land use planning
  • Zoning ordinances and planning codes that allow mixed use, high density communities
  • Urban growth boundaries like Portland, Oregon
  • Inclusive zoning like Montgomery County, Maryland
  • Change public infrastructure investment strategy to promote redevelopment of old settlements
  • Strike a better balance between highway and mass transit funding
  • Consolidate and restore old industrial sites for redevelopment
  • Reform local tax policies starting with the state taking a bigger share of funding for public education

In the end, the struggle for our cities will depend on the outcome of the competition between suburbs and cities. The outcome will largely be determined by the extent to which that competition is a fair one.

I like most of this, but I’m not so sure about the city vs. suburb talk. Part of regional coordination and planning would be to think of the success of a metro area as a whole, from its most intensely urbanized core out to the less dense areas. But I like the urban growth boundary concept, because it puts a lower limit on how far out that development can go and how much infrastructure it can gobble up to get services to people who are spread out, at every else’s expense. Education funding could be done well at this metro area scale, rather than pitting many tiny municipalities and school districts against each other as it does now (a problem across the U.S., but Pennsylvania is particularly bad). I am skeptical of the state, which draws much of its political power from the empty spaces between metro areas, being the solution. Its existence depends on sucking resources out of the population centers where economic activity happens and taxes get paid, and redistributing them to the empty spaces. Even more insidious, in our state at least racism plays a role in the urban vs. rural divide, as well as the city center vs. suburban divide.

Jane Jacobs

This article about Jane Jacobs is most useful because it mentions all of her major works. It talks quite a bit about Dark Age Ahead. I read Dark Age Ahead, and yet it doesn’t stick in my mind. I am ashamed to admit that I have only read the first chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and yet that first chapter sticks in my mind. I am lucky enough to live in one of the great American cities, and in fact a neighborhood that she visited and commented on. I had to spend a few years away from it to really come to understand how great a walkable street grid with a mix of homes, businesses, workplaces and green spaces really is, and how rare it unfortunately is. One day I’ll sit down on a bench in one of those green spaces and finish Death and Life.

autonomous vehicles displacing traditional vehicles

If self-driving cars come into their own, will they reduce the total amount of vehicles on the road, or will everybody who owns a car now just buy a self-driving one? This study set in Austin says that each self-driving car will displace 9 normal cars. So even if the same or more cars are in motion at any given time, there will be a lot less land required for parking. That land can be used for something else – housing, commerce, habitat, recreation, gardening/farming, or some combination. Bring it on!

Remaking Economic Development

This is a new Brookings study on a vision for economic development at the metro scale. Here’s an excerpt, but the rest is worth reading.

As Michael Porter, the Harvard authority on competitiveness, describes it, the anchor firms, supply chains, supporting entities and organizations, research centers and specialized knowledge assets that make up industry clusters arise from a “highly localized process” that creates differentiated competitive advantages tailored for particular industry clusters.

Those assets are sometimes called “market drivers,” “factors of production,” or the “industrial commons”— because they benefit a wide array of firms. They include applied research and technical expertise, supports for entrepreneurial activity, robust pipelines of skilled labor, deep benches of suppliers and related firms, globally connected infrastructure, and responsive, predictable governance to maintain them all. It is the productive mix and synergy among these distinctive drivers—innovation, traded sectors, human capital, infrastructure, and governance—that create the conditions in which industries thrive, create value, and generate growth and income.

Globalization and technology have not dispersed these market assets but instead have further concentrated them in cities and metropolitan regions, with leading centers of knowledge and production capturing an increasingly greater share of specific market opportunities.

That is in part because innovation today reinforces the power of place. The rapid pace of competition requires solutions often developed through collaborations among firms, research institutions, national labs, competitors, customers, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs—collaborations that are most readily forged through the networks formed within metropolitan regions.

 

This sounds right to me. Policies like minimum wage and affordable housing have their place, but ultimately I feel like they are treating the symptom and not the disease. The pie has to be growing.

City Observer’s Weekly Roundup

City Observer has a nice weekly roundup with way more stuff than I could actually hope to read in a week. This example covers everything from car “demonization” to affordable housing to real estate capital gains.

I’ve been in the process of trying to form opinions on these issues for many years. On cars, I think they are demons. At least, private cars and all the waste and environmental and social hell they have unleased on the entire world. We should design cities and connections between them so we almost never need them. Then we can keep a few share cars and taxis around. On affordable housing, I don’t have the answers that have alluded everyone else forever, but in general I like focusing on the idea of supporting well-functioning markets that are able to set appropriate prices. When you distort prices with large subsidization schemes in a world of finite resources, you end up with distorted systems and unintended consequences. Better to find ways to remove hidden distortions, subsidies, and discrimination, constrain supply less, help people get around efficiently, and generally help them make an income and build assets so they can afford what housing costs. In the U.S., all the tax deductions and exceptions for homeowners and subsidization of inefficient low-density infrastructure are forms of distortion that maybe should be phased out. But please don’t take away my personal subsidies all at once, because I was counting on them when I made my last round of housing and financial decisions.

dots moving around on a map

This is just dots moving around on a map, but I find these dots very engaging in helping me understand urban planning concepts and results of a simulation.

I found this on R bloggers, which talks about how the simulation and map were created.

Data Scientist Todd Schneider has followed-up on his tour-de-force analysis of Taxi Rides in NYC with a similar analysis of the Citi Bike data. Check out the wonderful animation of bike rides on September 16 below. While the Citi Bike data doesn’t include actual trajectories (just the pick-up and drop-off locations), Todd has “interpolated” these points using Google Maps biking directions. Though these may not match actual routes (and gives extra weight to roads with bike lanes), it’s nonetheless an elegant visualization of bike commuter patterns in the city.

January 2016 in Review

I’m going to try picking the three most frightening posts, three most hopeful posts, and three most interesting posts (that are not particularly frightening or hopeful) from January.

3 most frightening posts

  • Paul Ehrlich is still worried about population. 82% of scientists agree.
  • Thomas Picketty (paraphrased by J. Bradford Delong) says inequality and slow growth are the norm for a capitalist society. Joseph Stiglitz has some politically difficult solutions: “Far-reaching redistribution of income would help, as would deep reform of our financial system – not just to prevent it from imposing harm on the rest of us, but also to get banks and other financial institutions to do what they are supposed to do: match long-term savings to long-term investment needs.”
  • Meanwhile, government for and by big business means the “Deep State” is really in control of the U.S. In our big cities, the enormous and enormously dysfunctional police-court-prison system holds sway over the poor.

3 most hopeful posts

3 most interesting posts

  • There are some arguments in favor of genetically modified food – they have increased yields of some grains, and there is promise they could increase fish yields. 88% of scientists responding to a Pew survey said they think genetically modified food is safe, but only 37% of the U.S. public thinks so. In other biotech news, Obama’s State of the Union announced a new initiative to try to cure cancer. In other food news, red meat is out.
  • Not only is cash becoming obsolete, any physical form of payment at all may become obsolete.
  • The World Economic Forum focused on technology: “The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.”