Monthly Archives: February 2010

A day in the life of Metro

Metro’s definitely seen better days. The Washington Post had a lengthy piece in Sunday’s edition documenting the massive problems facing the system: aging infrastructure, missing leadership, a broken safety culture, amongst others. Metro’s been trimming the fat to balance budgets for a while, and it now looks like they’ve been cutting into the bone and impeding the system’s ability to function. WTOP notes that several internal and external candidates for the soon-to-be vacant General Manager position have turned it down.

At the same time, the Post managed to document the role the system plays in the daily lives of those living and working in DC.

At the same time, one of WMATA’s new Federally-appointed board members, Marcel Acosta, is asking for input from riders over at Greater Greater Washington. In looking at some of the responses in the comments, you can’t help but notice people speaking out about how Metro enables car-free lifestyles; how crucial good transit service is to urban life.

Olympic transformations

The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off today in Vancouver, British Columbia. Design Observer has an excellent interview with Vancouver’s planning director Brent Toderian. These kinds of major sporting events can be a huge opportunity to re-shape areas and integrate larger planning projects into the public support for the games. Salt Lake City’s first light rail line was built in advance of their hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and that starter line has since proved popular enough to warrant massive expansion, even in a fiscally and socially conservative state.

Vancouver’s Olympic Village. Images from City of Vancouver.

Vancouver has seized the opportunity to shape the city through their host duties. Those include the Olympic Village, the Olympic Streetcar pilot program (mentioned previously here), and the rapid transit expansion of the Canada Line. Toderian discusses the physical transformations possible with the focus from events such as the Olympics:

NB: From an urban planning perspective, what impact do you think the games will have on the city?

BT: We’re going to have significant physical legacies of the Olympics, not the least of which is Athletes Village. And on top of that we have our new Canada Line subway that connects the airport to downtown, and a number of athletic facilities, either new or upgraded, that will be sport legacies for the city. But there’s also physical infrastructure and what we call “look-of-the-city” legacies that will make Vancouver more livable. In fact, we’ve spent over 6 million dollars on public art pieces scattered across the city, integrated into the urban realm, that will make the city more attractive long after the Olympics are over. So from a physical city-builder’s perspective, the legacies will be powerful. From a policymaker’s perspective, we have a legacy of new attitudes and standards and policies that have fundamentally changed business as usual for Vancouver. Almost everything we learned in the development of Athletes Village has been translated into new approaches in our citywide zoning, citywide policies and guidelines, or just new attitudes.

When you’re doing a place like Athletes Village, and you very much want it to be a model, our perspective is: What good is a model of it doesn’t change business as usual, if it doesn’t make everything that comes after it better? So in our case, even before the Athletes Village was completed, it was substantially influencing the regional discussion on city building. Many of the exemptions we built into the development approvals have now been built into our citywide zoning bylaw — even before the Olympic buildings were open. Our learnings on passive design have been translated into a passive design toolkit. Our urban agriculture learnings have been translated into urban agriculture guidelines. Our learnings about district energy — we did our first neighborhood energy utility using sewer heat recovery to heat and cool the Athletes Village — has already raised our bar with other major projects. We’ve emphasized that these new projects have to be even better than Athletes Village, and that’s being translated into a new district energy policy for the city. So you see the point of the power of a model. Unfortunately, too many cities do model developments, but years after nothing’s really changed. That’s something we very much wanted to prevent here.

NB: A lot of people think of these big events — Olympics, World Cups — as being a spur for development and physical infrastructure creation, but it seems like you’re taking it further and using it almost as a lab for urban policy.

BT: You have to remember that the second most important moment in Vancouver’s city building history was Expo ‘86. That event changed the way we do things as city builders and really sparked what is now called the Vancouver model. I say the second most important moment because the first most important moment was the refusal to put freeways in Vancouver, particularly through our downtown. But Expo ‘86 was a turning point. It gave the city a huge amount of confidence and started an era of city building that has really defined the Vancouver model. So we’re well aware that this is our second great event, that the Olympics, like Expo ’86, will be transformative not only in our attitudes, but in the way we do business.

We set out from day one to make sure that we were positioned for that transformation. The fun of this challenge is that Vancouver is the most populous urban destination ever to host the Winter Olympics. Our population is about 600,000, in a region of about 2.1 million. And even for most Summer Olympics, the event areas for the Olympics are often on the urban outskirts. Much of the activity of the Vancouver Winter Olympics is in the middle of our most urban environment. So it’s a huge operational challenge to accommodate an Olympics and the huge influx of people.

All too often, the legacies of these games quickly fade into memory rather than physical transformation. Both Athens and Beijing have been saddled with seldom-used venues. Even more frugal Olympic implementations, such as the 1996 Atlanta Games, lack the kind of physical legacy. Perhaps most disappointing was the lack of emphasis on transportation and infrastructure in Chicago’s failed bid for the 2016 Olympics.

However, as Salt Lake City has shown (and Vancouver is positioned to show), these kinds of events can galvanize the kinds of civic investments that will pay dividends for the city long after the last event concludes.

Jarrett Walker at HumanTransit.org is also planning a series of urbanist posts on Vancouver and the Olympics:

What’s special about Vancouver? It’s a new dense city, in North America.

Vancouver is the closest North America has come to building a substantial high-density city — not just employment but residential — pretty much from scratch, entirely since World War II. I noted in an earlier post that low-car North American cities are usually old cities, because they rely on a development pattern that just didn’t happen after the advent of the car. In 1945 Vancouver was nothing much: a hard-working port for natural resource exports, with just a few buildings even ten stories high. But look at it now.

Now, if they can only get some snow. We’ve got lots of extra here in DC.

Links – burrowing, tunneling

WaPo infographic on NATM for Dulles Metro

Curious about the tunnel progress for the Dulles Metro line? I ran across a WaPo infographic on the Dulles Metro line’s tunnel under the intersection of Routes 123 and 7 in Tysons Corner. This tunnel is being completed via the New Austrian Tunneling Method – the graphic explains the process and shows the tunnel’s path under the highest point in Fairfax County.

Similarly, there’s tunneling in Russia. The English Russia blog has some great shots of new station construction for the St. Petersburg Metro. Thanks to the geology of the city (built on fill, swamps, etc) the nearest reasonable strata to tunnel in is quite deep, making the Metro the deepest in the world.

Unhappier Hipsters? Matt Yglesias’s twitter feed is apparently feeding the beast.

Not in the erogenous zone? Ah, there’s nothing quite like the unintended consequences of land use law.

Paul Pickthorne, of Merrimack Park, has been hosting kink parties in his house for some time, and has been charging admission to defray the costs of hosting. His non-kinky (that we know of, anyway) neighbors complained to their county council representative, Roger Berliner, who responded that the county “has moved aggressively to put an end to this blight on your community.” This swift action took the form of a warning from the zoning inspector.

Charging admission might be a commercial use, eh? Either way, it’s worth taking note of this particular case study of how zoning laws are used for all sorts of nitpicky regulations and impositions.

Streetcar wires and trees – not a problem. Streetcars 4 DC collects some case studies of how DC’s potential streetcars can get along just fine with neighboring trees.

The new Times Square will be around for a while. The folks at StreetFilms put together a nice piece showing off the transformation of Times Square in advance of Mayor Bloomberg’s decision on making the changes permanent.

Today, they did just that. Streetsblog has the story:

After weighing a dramatic decline in traffic injuries and data from millions of taxi trips showing an average seven percent increase in west Midtown traffic speeds, Bloomberg characterized the results of the trial as very encouraging. Safety improvements alone, he noted, were “reason enough to make this permanent.”

In a rather extraordinary Q&A session that followed the announcement, Bloomberg fended off several questions from reporters who expressed skepticism that overall traffic speeds had improved. The mayor did not shy from the chance to frame pedestrian, bicycle and transit improvements in a way that New Yorkers rarely hear from their elected officials.

“Are the roads for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists,” he asked, “or are they just for motorists?” When it comes to streets that safely serve all users and create vibrant public spaces, he suggested, New York has fallen behind its competitor cities around the globe.

Great news. The final report and data that was evaluated is available here (PDF).

Snowpocalypse III – Linkage

Image from Wayan Vota on Flickr

Some more pleas for realistic expectations: Ryan Avent chimes in on the economics of it all, and Jon Chait notes the basic, physical problem with dealing with so much snow in such a short period of time:

In my neighborhood, like much of Washington, people park along the street. When it snows, plows go down and shove the snow away from the middle of the street and toward the sides. When it snows large amounts, the plows create massive snow barriers between the cars and the street. Digging out one’s car becomes a huge task. You have to scoop all the snow off the car itself, around the perimeter of the car, and this is just a tiny warm-up to the major task, when you have to breach the snow wall so that your car can get out to the street. This is even harder than it sounds. Every shovelful has to be carried back form the middle of the street and deposited on the front lawn.

Before the latest snowfall, the barriers in my street stood at around three or four feet. When the plow comes, they’re just going to get bigger. The nearly-intractable problem here is that there’s simply no place to put the snow. All the spare space along the side of the street is taken up by parked cars. The snow has nowhere to go.

One part of the solution is to truck the snow away to a remote location. Washington is already beginning to do this. With enough money to hire enough trucks and equipment, the government could probably remove all the snow. But this is a massive project that would take an unthinkable commitment to finish. I’m wondering if I’ll see my office again until spring, or spring-like weather.

This is the crux of the issue. Where is it going to go? Who’s going to move it? Any solution requires participation from the city’s residents.

Gabe Klein agrees – where is it going to go? Dr. Gridlock’s blog has some good notes on the challenges:

“This is no longer just a plow operation,” said Gabe Klein, director of the District Department of Transportation. “There is too much snow accumulation on some streets for the plows to adequately move the snow, the snow has to be physically removed and hauled away. This will add some time to our cleanup efforts but we have crews working around-the-clock to minimize how long and to assist us in being as efficient as possible.”

In addition to 250 to 270 pieces of equipment for plowing and treating roadways, the city has deployed specialized equipment such as backhoes, frontloaders, dump trucks, and dumpsters.

Dumpsters, eh? Sounds unorthodox. Speaking of unorthodox…

Snow removal tools, realistic and not: The City Paper has some great suggestions for makeshift snow removal tools – but missed one of the obvious ones I’ve seen out there – the dustpan. In previous snow storms, I’ve seen cutting boards and spatulas making their way from the kitchen to the front yard. Still, that’s not as sweet as the flamethrower option (appropriately tagged under ‘cool shit‘).

Don’t bring the grill inside: Just don’t do it. Seriously.

And then there’s this:

Snow perspective, in graph form.

Since we’ve now eclipsed the seasonal record, it’s worth noting how unusual it is for DC to get lots of snow in a season, to say nothing about snow storms coming back to back. Let’s look at the history:

We’re now well above that blue star for the 1898-99 season record. As Gabe Klein noted on Kojo yesterday, you can’t budget for those intervening years and then expect to deal with the extraordinary snowfalls.

Likewise, there are physical limits to how fast you can remove snow, and when the snow is accumulating faster than that rate, you’ve got a problem.

City Paper has a survey of ANC commissioners, asking about their street conditions. Gary Thompson has some good perspective on snow removal:

Gary Thompson, of ANC 3G, who lives in the 2800 block of Northampton Street NW: “My own street’s been plowed very well,” he says. “They’ve done an excellent job plowing, especially under the circumstances. There have been a few forgotten streets here or there, like a dead end culdesac,” but the city is catching up. “People are very quick to complain,” he says. “But Mother Nature is what it is. It’s a pretty powerful storm.”

Ben Thomas, not so much:

Ben Thomas, of ANC 7E, who lives in the 1100 block of Chaplin Street SE: A plow came by sometime last night, he reports (the second of two times a plow has made an appearance during D.C.’s three snowstorms this season). “They don’t really do anything but pile the snow against peoples’ cars,” he says. But the street is at least passable. “I saw a car go by a little while ago,” he says.

That’s what plowing does – it moves snow around. And that works pretty well when you get a little snow here and a little snow there. When you get 40 inches in a matter of a few days, there’s only so much you can do within the realm of what’s physically possible.

Perspective, please.

Snowpocalypse III – the removal

Photo from InspirationDC on Flickr.

Well, it’s official. The winter of 2009-10 is now the snowiest winter on record in DC, eclipsing the snow season of 1898-99 That’s saying something, since DC’s current official weather station is at National Airport, which has abnormal weather conditions compared to the rest of the District, thanks to being surrounded by water on all sides and at low elevation. That 1898-99 record wasn’t taken at DCA of course, since the airport then was nothing but Potomac River mud flats. Hell, heavier than air human aviation wasn’t even around yet.

So, we’ve got a lot of snow. Now we have to deal with it.

While grades for this current snowfall are obviously yet to be determined, DC did an excellent job for the first round back in December. The response to round two this past weekend was also, all things considered, quite effective.

I bring this up because I hear a lot of complaints about snow removal, and almost all of them strike me as a product of unrealistic expectations and a lack of experience dealing with snow.

Snow doesn’t magically disappear. Having grown up and lived in several cities in the Midwest frostbelt, I’ve dealt with plenty of snow. It seems to me that many DC residents equate snow plowing with making the snow disappear – this simply isn’t the case. Plowing moves snow around. In the Midwest, you get used to this – snow sticks around, and you learn to deal with it. Snow Emergency routes will get plowed down to the pavement, but most residential streets will have snow on them until winter ends – this is considered ‘plowed’ because those streets are more than passable.

Still, snow takes up a lot of space – even Minneapolis has run out of places to put it this winter, forcing them to implement permanent one-side parking restrictions as the ever-growing snowbanks are encroaching on street space.

Shoveling is your responsibility. Plenty of DC bloggers have noted this (as is the case in just about every snow city in the US), but the responsibility for sidewalk snow removal falls on residents/tenants/occupants/owners.

“It shall be the duty of every person, partnership, corporation, joint-stock company, or syndicate in charge or control of any building or lot of land within the fire limits of the District of Columbia, fronting or abutting on a paved sidewalk, whether as owner, tenant, occupant, lessee, or otherwise, within the first 8 hours of daylight after the ceasing to fall of any snow or sleet, to remove and clear away, or cause to be removed and cleared away, such snow or sleet from so much of said sidewalk as is in front of or abuts on said building or lot of land.” (D.C. Code § 9-601)

There are good reasons for this – the city is struggling to deal with the current snowfall – adding miles and miles of sidewalks to their duty list would make the task impossible. There’s absolutely no way such removal could be handled in a timely fashion. It’s your civic duty, it’s good public policy, and (when people are engaged with the snow culture), it works far better than any other option.

Perspective matters. Other cities might be better at dealing with snow, and they might have a stronger snow culture to deal with shoveling and whatnot – but let’s not forget that this particular snowfall is exceptional. These kinds of storms, dumping several feet of snow on an area, will cripple even the best-prepared cities. As noted above, this is the most snow DC’s ever had on record. Sure, it’s a ballpark total similar to the average snowfall in Minneapolis, but the snow in Minnesota comes in small increments that are much easier to deal with than the huge storms we’ve seen.

All of that record snowfall has basically come in three storms. Even the best prepared snow cities will be slowed down significantly by storms of that magnitude, especially when they hit back-to-back.

Things we can take from Detroit

Spirit of Detroit, from Maia C

…and I’m not just talking about salt, even though the Eastern Seaboard could use a lot of extra road salt right about now.

There are a couple of very interesting bits up on the net recently about Detroit and the lessons it has for the rest of America, for our infrastructure, and for our industry and our economy.

The New York Times has a review of the PBS ‘Blueprint America’ series.

There’s much more to the 90-minute program than simply cataloging Detroit’s woes. It offers a history of national transportation planning in the United States — yes, it ends with the Interstate System — and presents the counterexample of the Spanish AVE system, which in less than 20 years has linked the country from north to south and fostered economic development in the cities it serves (at a cost of increased national debt and higher taxes).

The Times criticizes the PBS piece for veering too far afield from Detroit itself to the larger issues of infrastructure and development, but I think this deviation is both necessary and well-timed. These are systemic issues across all of the United States – Detroit’s economic malaise only exacerbates the same symptoms that have affected just about every American city.

“Beginning in the 1980s, in the United States it was perceptible that things were beginning to deteriorate, that the maintenance of those infrastructures was getting worse and that the network didn’t evolve in any way to keep pace with the country,” a former Spanish economy secretary says by way of a coda. “And in the 1990s, in terms of infrastructure, it was a country that had fallen behind the standards of any European country.” O.K., maybe not Albania. But we get the point.

The Blueprint America video itself is well worth watching. Unfortunately, their website does not have html embedding code, but please take a look (particularly if you’ve got 90 minutes to kill during today’s snowpocalypse III). On a personal note, it’s always a pleasure to see Robert Fishman talk about urban history, and that of Detroit in particular. Fishman was a professor of mine in grad school.

As the Times review notes, the piece tackles just about every conceivable issue for urban transportation and infrastructure – industry, highways, high-speed rail, urban farming, planning, sprawl, density, transit, divestment, reinvestment, policy (local and national) and anything else you might be able to think of.

The Transport Politic looks specifically at the proposed light rail project along Woodward Ave in Detroit, filling the gap of local focus the Times points out. Yonah notes that the ability for light rail and transit investments to focus grow, of course, requires economic growth to begin with – and the macro factors for Detroit’s economy might just be too far gone for any one light rail line to really have an impact.

Additionally, there’s a very real concern that Detroit’s serious mobility issues won’t be solved by such an intervention at all, given the depopulation of the city and the huge pockets of emptiness, even if aggregate residential densities in parts of the city remain fairly high.

The real issue, then, is both obvious and daunting – for such a proposal to work, you need some big, audacious ideas – and you need to implement them:

On the other hand, Detroit could pursue a radical change of direction in which it closes off sections of the city to housing and compels to move into newly built housing along transit corridors and in the downtown core — basically, artificially altering the city limits to the exclusion of most of the city’s residents. This approach, which would require making it illegal to build or even live in many areas of the metropolis, would increase land prices substantially near transit stations. It would only be possible, however, with enormous subsidies from the state and federal governments to pay for the construction of tens of thousands of affordable housing units. People would have to be implored to stay in the city despite being kicked from their homes.

Because of the cost of such a strategy and the political infeasibility of shuttering whole neighborhoods, such focused growth seems unlikely to occur. But without a well-planned reconfiguration of the city’s built form, Detroit may have difficulty surviving.

Detroit represents the extreme case, but these concepts can translate to any city in the US. It might be dealing with suburban redevelopment and transit-orientation, but the idea remains the same – big change is necessary. It’s going to happen one way or another, and the question is now about form and function.

Fun with maps

Something you can do to waste time during the snow day – UCLA has a great website with a series of historical maps scaled and overlaid on a contemporary aerial image for select cities around the world. The closest to DC is New York, but this is still a lot of fun to play around with.

Hat tip to Dale for the link.

Some screenshots to give you an example of the interface and how it works:

The Hypercities interface. Note the base aerial photo, various maps to toggle in the right sidebar, other available cities in the upper right map, and the usual Google map interface navigation.

New York, base aerial photo.

New York, with 1766 map overlay

1766 map, with opacity adjusted.

Same as above, with a 1775 map of Lower Manhattan overlay.

There are tons of historical maps and an incredible amount of detail to explore here. I’ve been playing around with it and feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. Very cool stuff.

Again, the URL is hypercities.ats.ucla.edu. Check it out.

Snowpocalypse III – time to assess blame

Blame this guy:

Snowpocalypse II – the aftermath

Some more pics from walking around Capitol Hill today:

Different shoveling philosophies

Those who’ve lived in snowy places know this as a matter of fact – it’s a lot easier to shovel 5 inches of snow 5 different times throughout a storm than it is to try to shovel 25 inches all at once. End result? A narrow little path. Better than not shoveling at all, however.

Eastern Market Metro canopy

The snowplow brings mixed blessings for those trying to dig out

Lincoln Park

Makeshift sledding in the alley next to Mott's Market

City Block

a work in progress…