We Should Design Cities For Shorter Distances, Not Faster Speeds

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

if you think a lot of suburbanites riding the bus are ever going to fix this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7442...7i16384!8i8192

then you have far more faith than i do.



it's great that a lot of choice riders use transit in brampton.

but i highly doubt it will ever evolve into a place that i would want to live in my lifetime.

On the other hand, if there was for some reason a place or a friend I wanted to visit there, it would certainly be easier than here (although PACE isn't completely awful, depending on where).

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

On the other hand, if there was for some reason a place or a friend I wanted to visit there, it would certainly be easier than here (although PACE isn't completely awful, depending on where).

on transit? for sure!

but if i lived in urban toronto, i'd probably have little reason to venture out into the sprawl often.

living here in chicago, the only reason i go out into the sprawl is to see relatives (which has been basically zeroed out over the past 10 months for obvious reasons). and when i do, i simply drive, because that's what sprawl is built for.

the problem with running transit like light rail out to the suburbs is that the amount of subsidy needed to keep it operating is inversely proportional to population density. the suburbs are already subsidized all to hell. another issue, in the US at least, is racism/classism. Chesterfield and St. Charles County (St. Louis suburbs) would have had Metrolink light rail years ago if their populations hadn't voted against expansion for fear that black people would ride out their ugly homes and then ride back to the city with stolen big screen TVs hidden under their shirts.

[isaidso]

Shorter distances instead of faster speeds is a cornerstone of TOD and that's been around for a good half century already. Our cities have been building like this for decades now.

^ huh? it's been around a whole lot longer than that. then in the '50-'60s the auto industry, subsidized by the government, came along and tore up all our slower/frequently-stopping transit for highways and roads.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

if you think a lot of suburbanites riding the bus are ever going to fix this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7442...7i16384!8i8192

then you have far more faith than i do.



it's great that a lot of choice riders use transit in brampton.

but i highly doubt it will ever evolve into a place that i would want to live in my lifetime.

I didn't say transit would fix anything. I said transit is the first step, the foundation. If you want to build cities for pedestrians you have to first build cities for transit riders and then cyclists. If people are travelling 10km by car, the distance is not going to be suddenly reduced to 1km to make walking viable. Public transit, not walking, is the direct competitor to cars.

And again it's not just about fixing one suburb or one neighbourhood. It is also about Mississauga, Vaughan, Toronto.... People in Brampton can work in Toronto, they can drive to Toronto, they can park their car in Toronto, which could mean more parking lots and roads needed in Toronto. Likewise, people in Toronto cannot live a true car-free lifestyle if they need a car whenever they cross the border. Isolating Toronto from the rest of the GTA can only promote suburbanization.

Of course Toronto itself is not exactly an urban paradise to begin with. What would happen to downtown Toronto if all those suburbanites in Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough stopped using the TTC? Calgary is 90% suburban as well. What would happen to downtown Calgary if all those suburbanites stopped taking transit? Urbanity is about connectivity, so dividing cities and suburbs, thinking of them as separate, can only get in the way of building urban communities, and I think such divisions are the root of the problem in the US.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Doady

I didn't say transit would fix anything. I said transit is the first step, the foundation. If you want to build cities for pedestrians you have to first build cities for transit riders

I think we just have some radically divergent perspectives on this issue.

To me, the key is not bus ridership, rather, it's a pre-war built environment. As I've said many times in this thread, our society could have continued building more suburbs like oak park, but we ended up with a bunch of schaumburgs instead.

Whoops.

Even if every single last man, women, and child in schaumburg rode the bus everywhere, it still wouldn't stop schaumburg's craptacular "geography of nowhere" built environment from sucking a giant pair of donkey balls.

[Nouvellecosse]

How do you get support for the changes that make a city less like a Schaumburg and more like an Oak Park? If everyone in the community is a motorist there will be insurmountable opposition to anything that reduces overall road widths/speeds, devotes road lanes to transit or bikes, reduces surface parking, etc. But if a portion of people in that community understand how crappy the current set up is because they regularly try to get around using other modes then you have a beachhead of sorts from which further change can spring forth.

[nito]

Introducing transit can produce modal shifts, but the reality is that neighbourhoods need to be pedestrian friendly to begin with. If there are dual carriageways between you and a station, or you have to wait at a bus stop inhaling noxious emissions, or the traffic speed and volume make cycling feel unsafe, most people won’t make the shift.

[memph]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

I think we just have some radically divergent perspectives on this issue.

To me, the key is not bus ridership, rather, it's a pre-war built environment. As I've said many times in this thread, our society could have continued building more suburbs like oak park, but we ended up with a bunch of schaumburgs instead.

Whoops.

Even if every single last man, women, and child in schaumburg rode the bus everywhere, it still wouldn't stop schaumburg's craptacular "geography of nowhere" built environment from sucking a giant pair of donkey balls.

Brampton's built environment isn't that different from Oak Park's though. Large swaths of predominantly residential areas with some retail mixed in, and similar densities, lot sizes, building sizes/types. The average distance to walk to a grocery store is probably a lot more similar than some here would think.

They aren't *identical*. Oak Park has back alleys while Brampton has mostly front-loaded garages. Brampton's arterials are more limited access and have little buildings fronting onto them. Brampton's retail is more in the form of strip malls at arterial/collector road intersections while Oak Park's retail is mostly lining arterials. Brampton is 25 miles from downtown Toronto while Oak Park is 9 miles from downtown Chicago. Oak Park's side streets follow a rigid grid while Brampton's follow a pseudo grid.

Many of these differences are not a fixed reality and can be changed. The arterials can be redesigned to be more boulevard like (Oak Park has some wide arterials that aren't entirely inviting to cross too). The land along the arterials can be rezoned to have mixed uses and/or midrises. The strip malls can also be rezoned to have higher density mixed use development. The pseudo grid honestly works fine, the pedestrian walkways and parks connecting the crescents provide the necessary levels of connectivity.

Some more things I would add about suburbs like Brampton, as someone that's familiar with living in Toronto's suburbs.

-A high percentage of kids walk/bike to school. A high percentage of those that don't could
-the majority of the population lives within a 15 minute walk of a proper grocery store
-Parks/playgrounds are very well utilized, in fact I would say that new Toronto suburbs have higher utilized playgrounds within walking distance of the average resident than most pre-war neighbourhoods. If you want to find other kids to play with on a nice day after school, you can find a playground/park with around 50 kids playing in it within a short walking distance, and additional, also there will be smaller less busy playgrounds also within walking distance if you want something more quiet. Also, in Brampton specifically, there's always some Sikh grandpas hanging out in the park gazebos chatting, playing cards, etc. so they're utilized while kids are in school as well.
-Although arterials can be an obstacle for cyclists, the side streets and collector roads are good for biking, and most suburbs have a pretty good network of multi-use trails along ravines, power line corridors and arterials. Some areas can generate high volumes of cycling activity. For example I've been to Milliken which has a similar post-WWII built environment to Brampton and you see quite a lot of people biking around, especially to Pacific Mall/Market Village. I'd estimate that at peak times, there can be up to 100 bicycles parked at the various bike racks along Market Village's mall perimeter (and leaned against walls and trees...).
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.8254...7i13312!8i6656
-transit use to destinations within Toronto's suburbs is still not that high, but about 80% of those destined to workplaces in downtown Toronto commute by train, even though those are mostly post-WWII suburbs

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

This actually just proves my point. Proof that people can still drive cars while also living in environments that aren't soul crushingly depressing and designed solely for single use vehicles like North American suburbs are.

I'm not anti-car, just anti-awful urban design.

Agreed. Car ownership and driving aren't necessarily problems; complete auto-dependency and total lack of other viable options are. Nowhere is this more evident than (surprise) NYC where an estimated 45% of all households own at least one car, yet only 27% commute "via car, truck, or van."


https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Quixote

Agreed. Car ownership and driving aren't necessarily problems; complete auto-dependency and total lack of other viable options are. Nowhere is this more evident than (surprise) NYC where an estimated 45% of all households own at least one car, yet only 27% commute "via car, truck, or van."


https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars

Car ownership in NYC is very highly correlated to living in regions of the city with limited subway access. NYC is actually quite a good case study for how transit accessibility affects car ownership. From that map, you can pretty much guess what areas of the city are hard to live in without a car, and which are not.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

I think we just have some radically divergent perspectives on this issue.

To me, the key is not bus ridership, rather, it's a pre-war built environment. As I've said many times in this thread, our society could have continued building more suburbs like oak park, but we ended up with a bunch of schaumburgs instead.

Whoops.

Even if every single last man, women, and child in schaumburg rode the bus everywhere, it still wouldn't stop schaumburg's craptacular "geography of nowhere" built environment from sucking a giant pair of donkey balls.

I just don't see urbanity as a static or binary quality like pre-war vs. post-war, or places like Schaumburg and Oak Park as isolated and separate from each other. What goes on in one neighbourhood can affect what goes on in another. Even if Oak Park was built in the pre-war era, arterials like Madison St. are now lined with parking lots. You can see the same in other neighbourhoods like Roseland, Montclare, McKinley Park, Avondale. Of course, you can look outside Chicago and see historic downtowns and inner cities like Des Moines, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Columbus that have been ravaged by parking lots and parking garages. It just seems unrealistic to expect so much more urbanity in the suburbs if we can't reverse or even stop the suburbanization of the central city.

Suburbanization is a gradual increase in distances, a shift from walking to cycling to transit to cars, and it is affecting pre-war neighbourhoods as much as post-war neighbourhoods, so I don't see how urbanization is going to happen suddenly overnight. Reducing the demand for parking, redeveloping the parking lots, increasing the density, changing the culture, changing people's expectations for neighbourhoods, that must be a step-by-step process also. And if we can't even take the simple easy first step of getting people out of the car and onto the bus, to start getting rid of all those parking lots, then I don't see what else we can do.

[Steely Dan]

^ the difference is that I don't expect overnight urbanism to form in places like schaumburg.

Hell, I don't expect it to happen even gradually, ever.

They are lost causes unless they are obliterated off the map and rebuilt from scratch from the street layout up.

As monkeyronin said in like the 3rd post of this thread, it's not that I'm against suburbia existing, I just don't get why they had to make it so goddamn ugly in the postwar era.

Coulda had millions more people living in oak parks.

Whoops.




Higher bus ridership will never fix the community on the right pictured below.

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K

[memph]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ the difference is that I don't expect overnight urbanism to form in places like schaumburg.

Hell, I don't expect it to happen even gradually, ever.

They are lost causes unless they are obliterated off the map and rebuilt from scratch from the street layout up.

As monkeyronin said in like the 3rd post of this thread, it's not that I'm against suburbia existing, I just don't get why they had to make it so goddamn ugly in the postwar era.

Coulda had millions more people living in oak parks.

Whoops.




Higher bus ridership will never fix the community on the right pictured below.

Even a community with Schaumburg's layout could be transformed into something less auto-oriented.

However, for a truly significant transformation, you'd need a fair bit of redevelopment and Chicagoland doesn't have the kind of population growth needed to have redevelop across all of its suburbs. It's better to focus the redevelopment/infill into the areas that have better bones (city proper + some older suburbs). And try avoid incentivizing further auto-oriented development in the suburbs.

In higher growth cities though, it makes more sense to think about these things. If they're fast growing, that means they have much more post-WWII fabric, and consequently much less pre-WWII fabric to work with, and also have the population growth needed to redevelop/infill/transform larger swaths of the metropolitan area.

As for Schaumburg. I mean it doesn't hurt to try to make it a bit less bad. Realistically it will still remain quite auto-oriented, but it has a workable transit system that will encourage teenagers to put off buying a car and then when they're ready to move out of their parents house maybe they'll pick a place in the city instead of some lowrise apartment complex in the outer suburbs. And people working low income service sector jobs in the suburbs can maybe avoid having to buy 1 car per adult.

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Car ownership in NYC is very highly correlated to living in regions of the city with limited subway access. NYC is actually quite a good case study for how transit accessibility affects car ownership. From that map, you can pretty much guess what areas of the city are hard to live in without a car, and which are not.

The car ownership rate in NYC is much higher than I would've guesstimated; I was thinking around 35-37%. Brooklyn is quite an eye-opener, as the northern (north of Atlantic), central, and southwestern (west of Ocean Parkway) portions of the borough have good Subway access -- "good" meaning you can drop a pin anywhere on Google Maps and find yourself within a 0.6-mile walk of a Subway station. Gowanus (40-60% car ownership) in particular caught me by surprise because that includes prime brownstone neighborhoods like Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill with fantastic urban design, great amenities, and proximity to Manhattan.

[Quixote]

What that NYC map shows is that, in today's day and age, the war against cars is a losing battle and that private automobiles, public transit, pedestrians, and bicyclists can co-exist. For "choice people," near across-the-board car-freedom seems almost exclusively applicable to CBD/urban core environments -- Manhattan, skyscraper Chicago, and the most tony parts of Boston, Philly, DC, and SF.

In the context of my own city of Los Angeles, that's a really reassuring thought (Toronto's another good, more relevant case study) as we continue to try to search for multi-nodal equilibrium and how that manifests in urban design.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Quixote

The car ownership rate in NYC is much higher than I would've guesstimated; I was thinking around 35-37%.

I don't know what people are expecting. Vehicle ownership in NYC is lower than in (apples-apples) Paris and London.

35% car ownership, over a large geography, probably doesn't exist in the (western) developed world. That's miniscule car ownership for wealthy nation standards. Even Madrid doesn't come close, and Madrid is significantly poorer than NYC, London or Paris, almost entirely large apartment blocks, and has fantastic transit.

Originally Posted by Quixote

Brooklyn is quite an eye-opener, as the northern (north of Atlantic), central, and southwestern (west of Ocean Parkway) portions of the borough have good Subway access -- "good" meaning you can drop a pin anywhere on Google Maps and find yourself within a 0.6-mile walk of a Subway station. Gowanus (40-60% car ownership) in particular caught me by surprise because that includes prime brownstone neighborhoods like Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill with fantastic urban design, great amenities, and proximity to Manhattan.

Brownstone Brooklyn is wealthy, with lots of rich families in brownstones. Rich families with kids, overwhelmingly, will own a vehicle, even if it isn't parked near their primary home. 40-60% car ownership is quite low for such a neighborhood typology. Way lower than equivalent neighborhoods in SF, Chicago, DC and the like, and even generally lower than rich Paris neighborhoods.

The Southern Brooklyn neighborhoods with high(er) car ownership rates are generally Orthodox, or heavily SFH. An non-poor Orthodox household in Outer Brooklyn, esp. with a bunch of kids, is likely to have a vehicle. Someone living in a SFH in Mill Basin, on the outer fringe, is likely to have a vehicle.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Quixote

What that NYC map shows is that, in today's day and age, the war against cars is a losing battle and that private automobiles, public transit, pedestrians, and bicyclists can co-exist.

Definitely not true. Auto ownership share has been dropping in NYC and other major U.S. cities. Urban auto ownership rates in transit-oriented cities were higher 40-50 years ago. You see this in Boston, DC, Chicago, Seattle and others. Car ownership would obviously be much lower if it weren't so heavily subsidized and our priorities weren't so seriously skewed.

Originally Posted by Quixote

For "choice people," near across-the-board car-freedom seems almost exclusively applicable to CBD/urban core environments -- Manhattan, skyscraper Chicago, and the most tony parts of Boston, Philly, DC, and SF.

Also not true. There are more car-free households in NYC's outer boroughs and adjacent parts of Jersey than in all those core environments combined. There are relatively few people, anywhere, living in skyscraper/core environments.

Originally Posted by Quixote

What that NYC map shows is that, in today's day and age, the war against cars is a losing battle and that private automobiles, public transit, pedestrians, and bicyclists can co-exist.

The Earth's population will be nearly 10 Billion by 2050. There is simply no way that space can be made for an additional 3 billion personal vehicles on the road (especially given the trend of ever-increasing vehicle size) without completely eviscerating the planet and making conditions much much worse for pedestrians and cyclists (who are already suffering record casualties in the US due to said increased vehicle size) and everyone else—just wait until there's absolutely nowhere to go to escape the adverse health effects of air pollution and traffic noise, the latter of which has only recently started to get attention from the WHO and other European health agencies—but not the US, of course).

This Atlantic article isn't specifically about traffic noise but it's discussed: Why is Everything Getting Louder?

An excerpt:

Though data are scarce, the world appears to be growing louder. The National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division, which sends researchers to measure the acoustics of the American outdoors, estimates that noise pollution doubles or triples every 30 years. The EPA last measured our nation’s volume in 1981; assuming (generously) that our collective cacophony has remained constant, calculations from 2013 estimate that more than 145 million Americans are exposed to noise exceeding the recommended limits. In the absence of more recent surveys, the volume at which emergency vehicles shriek is telling, given that sirens must be loud enough to pierce the ambient noise level. According to measurements by R. Murray Schafer, a fire-engine siren from 1912 reached 88 to 96 decibels measured from 11 feet away, whereas by 1974, sirens’ screeches hit 114 decibels at the same distance—an increase in volume, he noted, of about half a decibel a year. The latest fire-engine sirens howl louder still: 123 decibels at 10 feet.

Not everyone bears the brunt of the din equally. Belying its dismissal as a country-club complaint, noise pollution in the U.S. tends to be most severe in poor communities, as well as in neighborhoods with more people of color. A 2017 paper found that urban noise levels were higher in areas with greater proportions of black, Asian, and Hispanic residents than in predominantly white neighborhoods. Urban areas where a majority of residents live below the poverty line were also subjected to significantly higher levels of nighttime noise, and the study’s authors warned that their findings likely underestimated the differences, given that many wealthy homeowners invest in soundproofing.