Monthly Archives: June 2010

Where the water comes from

Back in March, the New York Times featured DC WASA’s (now DC Water) new director, George Hawkins, talking about the challenges of dealing with aging water and sewer infrastructure in American cities.  The piece lays out the challenges facing most American cities, currently resting on our laurels of the investments from previous generations:

For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.

Mr. Hawkins’s answer to such problems will not please a lot of citizens. Like many of his counterparts in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta and elsewhere, his job is partly to persuade the public to accept higher water rates, so that the utility can replace more antiquated pipes.

The problem is serious, and Hawkins is here to spread the word:

“We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them,” said Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor at Tufts University and a member of the E.P.A.’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council.

“There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick,” he added. “But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”

To bring those lapses into the light, Mr. Hawkins has become a cheerleader for rate increases. He has begun a media assault highlighting the city’s water woes. He has created a blog and a Facebook page that explain why pipes break. He regularly appears on newscasts and radio shows, and has filled a personal Web site with video clips of his appearances.

Part of Hawkins’ ‘cheerleader’ duties included a recent blogger roundtable, with several local blogs (DCist, Greater Greater Washington, District Curmudgeon, We Love DC, Hill is Home, etc) offering detailed insight into the the most seemingly basic aspects of city life.  For me, the most interesting visual to come out of these meetings is this map from the Curmudgeons of DC’s water mains in 1985.

DC WASA map 1985

The system is based on gravity and pressure, each color represents a band of elevation served by certain reservoirs in the city.  There are two separate systems (for the most part) east and west of the Anacostia river.  The width of the lines represents the diameter of the water mains under the street.   When seen from afar, the color bands give a rough approximation of DC’s topography – the red and blue colors clearly show the extent of the L’Enfant plan, for example – which L’Enfant specifically limited to the flat parts of DC.

A closer inspection (click the image for a larger version) shows the fantastic level of detail in the various water main routes, the large mains that connect reservoirs to areas of similar elevation, as well as the local distribution to the end users.

DC WASA map 1985 cap hill

The Need for Speed

A streetcar speeds by in Toronto. CC image from Matthew Burpee.

A streetcar speeds by in Toronto. CC image from Matthew Burpee.

Jarrett Walker has a wrap-up post on his debate with Patrick Condon on the need for speed in urban transit.   Condon is a professor of sustainability, not a transportation planner or engineer, and his view is that we need to improve the experience of sustainable transit and not enable the sprawling lifestyles of yesterday, no matter what mode we use to get to and fro.  Jarrett sums up Condon’s thesis in an earlier post:

Condon heads the Design Centre for Sustainability inside UBC’s Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and is the author of the very useful book Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities. In his 2008 paper “The Case for the Tram: Learning from Portland,” he explicitly states a radical idea that many urban planners are thinking about, but that not many of them say in public.  He suggests that the whole idea of moving large volumes of people relatively quickly across an urban region, as “rapid transit” systems do, is problematic or obsolete:

The question of operational speed conjures up a larger issue: who exactly are the intended beneficiaries of enhanced mobility? A high speed system is best if the main intention is to move riders quickly from one side of the region to the other.  Lower operational speeds are better if your intention is to best serve city districts with easy access within them and to support a long term objective to create more complete communities, less dependent on twice-daily cross-region trips.

It’s an interesting question, and it’s having a significant if not always visible impact on transport planning.  Darrin Nordahl’s 2009 book My Kind of Transit, reviewed here, also praises slow transit; he makes that case in the same way you’d advocate for “slow food,” by pointing to the richness of experience that comes only from slowing down.

The implication is clear, as Jarrett states in the title of his posts – “is speed obsolete?”  Jarrett’s counter-point, however, is that speed matters, and it matters a great deal:

So here’s my main point:

Rapid transit is a far more viable “augmenter” of pedestrian trips because its travel speeds, and thus the trip-lengths for which it’s suited, lie entirely outside the pedestrian’s range, whereas the streetcar overlaps the pedestrian range substantially.

The rapid transit and pedestrian modes play entirely complementary roles, while streetcar and pedestrian modes have partly overlapping roles — a less efficient arrangement.  You’ll walk further to a rapid transit station, but once you’re there you can move at a high speed that makes that extra walk worthwhile […]

Rapid transit’s speed also exceeds typical cycling speed, by a large enough factor that it makes sense to cycle to the station.  So rapid transit works with cycling to a degree that local stop transit, such as the Portland Streetcar, just doesn’t.

Obviously, the usefulness of rapid transit requires a longer trip length, so rapid transit should be considered only for relatively long corridors.  As several commenters have mentioned, the problem with Condon’s view may be in the corridors to which he’s applied it, including Vancouver’s Broadway corridor, where he’s presented it as an alternative to a SkyTrain extension.

Streetcars and rapid transit are different tools, each suited for different jobs.  I’d argue that some of the value in streetcars is precisely because they can fill in the gaps of a hub-and-spoke system like Metro, while the aforementioned Broadway corridor in Vancouver probably should be one of the spokes. The question is then one of how you use that tool.  One thing to remember about Portland’s streetcar is that the station spacing is very close, especially when you consider Portland’s short blocks. Small adjustments, such as wider station spacing and some signal priority treatments could greatly improve performance and reliability.

DC’s proposed streetcar system can take better advantages of the streetcar’s strengths as a mode.  Yonah Freemark’s excellent graphics on DC’s network show how streetcars can fill in some of the crosstown gaps that exist in the current Metro network. However, streetcars certainly are not and cannot be a substitute for Metro’s utility to the city and the region.  Yonah also chimes in on the subject over at The Next American City:

By advocating streetcars, Condon is implicitly arguing that people should stay in their neighborhoods for most of their trips; that they should find work, go shopping, and be entertained in their near surroundings. If people have to rely on slow transit, they simply won’t have the time to be making trips across the region. (Or, of course, they might switch to driving their private automobiles, which would defeat the point of the transit investment entirely.)Though this approach would likely produce better ecological outcomes (less energy consumption per person as a result of reduced transport mileage), it would exacerbate spatial inequalities. Because jobs (especially well-paid ones) tend to be concentrated in the favored quarter, poorer inhabitants living far away from that zone would be isolated from employment opportunities and thus be deprived of chances for income growth. Or they would face devastatingly long commutes.

Stepping outside of the fiscally constrained world, the obvious answer is that both rapid and circulator systems serve different and complimentary needs.  The economic implications (for a city’s economy, rather than just real estate development) are the really interesting – Walker’s commenter ‘micasa’ highlights Jane Jacobs and the very nature of cities:

What does the venerable Jane Jacobs have to say about the notion of a “city of neighbourhoods”?

“Whatever city neighborhoods may be, or may not be, and whatever usefulness they may have, or may be coaxed into having, their qualities cannot work at cross-purposes to thoroughgoing city mobility and fluidity of use, without economically weakening the city of which they are a part. The lack of either economic or social self-containment is natural and necessary to city neighborhoods – simply because they are parts of cities.”

Jacobs is describing what does, and always has, made cities “tick”.  To be against intra-urban mobility is to be against the very proposition of the city.  I don’t think we can afford to let the threat of climate change, peak oil, or whatever, destroy that. We may need radically different, more sustainable cities in the future if we are going to survive, but rest assured, we will still need cities. Not agglomerations of inward focused neighbourhoods, but cities.

I’m not suggesting that the debate over transit technologies in this particular case ought to be closed. But I am suggesting that Condon’s particular argument for surface rail – that it encourages local living in a neighbourhood setting – is fundamentally anti-urban.  A better argument, and one that actually addresses the urban mobility issue, is that perhaps surface rail is a cheaper solution that can be designed “fast enough” to allow those neighbourhoods on the West Side (including UBC) to cohere with the rest of the region without the necessity of cars (and vice-versa). But that’s not the argument as presented.

Is speed obsolete?  I’d say no.  To micasa’s last point, surface rail can indeed be designed to be ‘fast enough’ to address urban mobility, particularly when paired with an existing rapid transit system (such as DC’s Metro).

The true cost of gasoline

nyt-oil-6

The New York Times’ oil map now includes a close-up of the landfall area around the Gulf Coast.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein provides some much-needed context as to the true cost of oil, and in turn the gasoline we buy to power our cars.  The key part is framing the overall cost in terms of externalities:

Most of us would call the BP spill a tragedy. Ask an economist what it is, however, and you’ll hear a different word: “externality.” An externality is a cost that’s not paid by the person, or people, using the good that creates the cost. The BP spill is going to cost fishermen, it’s going to cost the gulf’s ecosystem, and it’s going to cost the region’s tourism industry. But that cost won’t be paid by the people who wanted that oil for their cars. It’ll fall on taxpayers, on Gulf Coast residents who need new jobs, on the poisoned wildlife on the seafloor.

That means the gasoline you’re buying at the pump is — stick with me here — too cheap. The price you pay is less than the product’s true cost. A lot less, actually. And it’s not just catastrophic spills and dramatic disruptions in the Middle East that add to the price. Gasoline has so many hidden costs that there’s a cottage industry devoted to tallying them up. At least the ones that can be tallied up.

Klein lists pollution, congestion, the need for our military to secure oil reserves, and citing some other research from Ian Parry at RFF, he concludes the premium is $1.65 per gallon of gas – which put on top of the current average cost per gallon of $2.72, would mean we’d need $4.37 gas to cover the true costs – a number Klein notes is almost certainly an underestimate.  However, Klein notes that while higher gas prices would certainly curb some driving (and data suggests this to be true), the larger move over the past decades has been the entrenchment of our auto-dependence, and thus our gasoline dependence.

The key to reducing use is to provide alternatives:

That gets to the bigger issue, which is that energy sources are cheap or expensive only in relation to one another. And the heaviest anchor beneath our reliance on oil is that, at this point, there’s nothing to replace it with.

“We’re pretty much stuck with our dependency on oil,” Parry says. “We don’t have any substitutes. Even if we hugely increase the price on oil, we’d only have limited impact on it. People need to drive and get to work.”

In urban situations, reducing oil use means reducing driving.  A key part of that equation would be to provide more alternative transportation modes. If we were to raise the price of oil via an increase in the gas tax, that revenue could be used directly to build those new transportation infrastructures – internalizing the externality.

In other urban, externality pricing schemes, linking the revenue generated from the tax to a tangible benefit for users is the key to gaining political support.  Donald Shoup talks extensively about funneling parking revenue to parking benefit districts; polls in New York suggested that dedication of congestion pricing revenue to transit improvements was the key to securing popular support (if not legislative support). Linking revenues to the tax is a key part of helping people understand the value of the virtuous cycle – no matter how counter-intuitive it might be.

Weekend Reading – The Group Stage

Soccer in the Circle, from M.V. Jantzen

Soccer in the Circle, from M.V. Jantzen

The World Cup is underway.

England in Roo-ins: The cup means large gatherings of fans and sweet commercials (even the older ones).

Infrastructure: Jarrett Walker takes a look at some of the transit improvements for South Africa, building off the notion that large scale events like the World Cup can provide a kind of focus for infrastructure investments and other benefits that will last well after the conclusion of the games.  Infrastructurist looks at the stadiums.

Last week’s screening on the Mall of PBS’ documentary of Daniel Burnham focused a great deal on his role in the creation of the White City at the 1893 Columbian Exposition – another special event that focused a great deal of infrastructure investment – highlights two issues: the temporary and often fleeting nature of these kinds of events, as well as the ability to focus investments in one area.  Chicago focused on a park, Vancouver’s investments in one region – South Africa’s investments are spread across an entire country.

Ryan Avent’s post on infrastructure investments in mature cities versus growing ones also gets at the comparison between Chicago in 1893 and Vancouver in 2010.

Representative Space: Mammoth takes a look at soccer as a representation of urban space – a diagram of the strategies for using space.  Very interesting.

Framing the Issue: Cap’n Transit disagrees with the idea of framing bus operating improvements in New York as a ‘surface subway.’  This is an important tension – selling a project to various stakeholders is vitally important if you ever want to actually get something done, but overselling the benefits of some projects can dangerous.

Home Ownership and NIMBYism: Ryan Avent dissects a recent paper from the Federal Reserve on home ownership and ‘investment’ in the community, both literally and figuratively.

It’s clearly right that homeowners take an active interest in local policy in an effort to protect and enhance local services and the value of their homes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that homeowners are generating societal benefits…

It’s also not clear that homeowners are necessarily maximizing the value of their properties. Homeownership, as I’ve mentioned before, is an undiversified, highly-leveraged, immobile, illiquid financial bet. Having made such a bet, homeowners become very risk averse. We can imagine situations in which new developments are likely to benefit local homeowners and increase the value of their properties, but have benefits uncertain enough that there is a small but real probability of a negative effect on local property values. Highly risk-averse homeowners may opt to oppose the project, despite the good chance that they’d benefit from it.

Balancing individual and collective interests is one of the key tensions in any urban environment.  That tension also illuminates the problems of pushing home ownership as the be-all and end-all for one’s living situation.

Politically Correct: Bike lanes?

Couch Criticism: Architecture critics take on forts made of couch cushions.

DC Photo Map

A couple of blogs today (GGW, DCist) featured this fantastic map of DC and environs from Flickr user Eric Fischer.

DC Photo Map_1

Fischer has a set of similar maps from various cities around the world.  Fischer’s methodology takes data from the images and the user accounts to determine the location of the photo (via geotagging), as well as the time and date and the type of user (tourist, local, or unknown).  Tourist photos are in red, locals in blue, and unknown data in yellow.  Each dot represents a photo.  Photos taken in succession by the same user within 10 minutes of each other are connected by a line.

DC Photo Map_2

Fischer also has maps of cities that do not discern between tourists and locals.

Intersection density & centrality

What is the best method to quantify what makes a place walkable?  The Journal of the American Planning Association recently published some powerful documentation from Robert Cervero and Reid Ewing on the value of pedestrian-oriented design (following up on yesterday’s links).  Grist has the article (hat tip to Planetizen), citing Laurence Aurbach’s PedShed blog – again, the “Three D’s” or urbanism emerge front and center – density, diversity, and design:

Their findings? Of all the built environment measurements, intersection density has the largest effect on walking — more than population density, distance to a store, distance to a transit stop, or jobs within one mile. Intersection density also has large effects on transit use and the amount of driving. The authors comment,

This is surprising, given the emphasis in the qualitative literature on density and diversity, and the relatively limited attention paid to design.

In other words, intersection density is the most important factor for walking and one of the most important factors for increasing transit use and reducing miles driven, but gets relatively little attention in research and in public policy.

In other words, the other two D’s (density and diversity) get more play than design.  Perhaps that’s because density and diversity (of land use, of people, of incomes, etc) were easier to quantify than something as seemingly subjective as design.

Intersection_Density

Kaid Benfield ties these principles to those angry about the ever expanding oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, hitting on another theme of the research – location:

The study’s key conclusion is that destination accessibility is by far the most important land use factor in determining a household or person’s amount of driving.  To explain, ‘destination accessibility’ is a technical term that describes a given location’s distance from common trip destinations (and origins).  It almost always favors central locations within a region; the closer a house, neighborhood or office is to downtown, the better its accessibility and the lower its rate of driving.  The authors found that such locations can be almost as significant in reducing driving rates as other significant factors (e.g., neighborhood density, mixed land use, street design) combined.

The clear implication is that, to enable lifestyles with reduced driving, oil consumption and associated emissions, environmentalists should continue to stress opportunities for revitalization and redevelopment in centrally located neighborhoods.  As Ewing and Cervero put it:  ‘Almost any development in a central location is likely to generate less automobile travel than the best-designed, compact, mixed-use development in a remote location.’

Aurbach is quick to note the limitations of the study, but even with those this is an exciting quantification and potential metric for walkable and sustainable design.  It builds off the Jacobs legacy of ‘short blocks’ and adds some science behind recent GGW posts from Erik Bootsma and Daniel Narin on the variety and histories of street grids.  This kind of research lends weight to the anecdotal accounts of Portland’s small blocks resulting from the belief that corner lots were more valuable, as well as ideas of better utilization of alley space – such as this recent post from Richard Layman.

Weekend reading

DC-Streetcars-Planned-Streetcar-Radius-Map

Excuse my timing on this, as this doesn’t leave much weekend to play with – but here are some items worth noting from the previous week or so:

Streetcars bridge the gaps: Yonah Freemark has an excellent post on DC’s evolving streetcar network and its ability to fill the gaps in Metro’s network.  Yonah’s excellent visuals (as usual) help frame the discussion.

New maps: New York gets a new map – Second Ave Sagas has the breakdown.  The map decreases clutter, though nothing compared to the more schematic designs for other systems.

Metro too cluttered: Speaking of clutter, Massimo Vignelli thinks Metro’s gotten too cluttered since he and Harry Weese came up with the signage scheme for the system decades ago.

Congestion pricing:

Grid vs. Sac: David Alpert notes a (perhaps the only) redeeming quality of the cul de sac; Jarret Walker notes the many advantages of gridded street networks.

Hacking the city

Times Square

Mammoth’s excellent series of posts covering any and all topics on The Infrastructural City recently touched on chapter 5 – Blocking All Lanes, the first of the book’s section on the fabric of this city of networked infrastructure.  Mammoth notes a couple of big themes from the chapter, each with profound implications for how cities are built and how they evolve.

The interesting fact that arises from the complexity of these co-evolved systems (and, as noted in Varnelis’s introduction to The Infrastructural City, from the primacy of individual property rights in L.A.’s political culture) is that, “as the possibilities for adding new highways — or even lanes — dwindle in many cities, most new progress is made at the level of code”.  This shift which the authors identify is a part of a systemic shift in the methodology of urbanism, from plan to hack, that we’ve been fascinated with for some time now.  In a mature infrastructural ecology, like Los Angeles, the city has developed such a persistent and ossified physical form that, barring a radical shift in the city’s political culture, designing infrastructure becomes more a task of re-configuration and re-use than a task of construction.

The idea is simple – big moves, such as new highways, new subways, and other massive infrastructure investments are much harder in a developed city than in a greenfield site.  I’d also argue that such challenges are not solely physical or political, but also financial (see previous discussions of the limitations of nostalgia for private-sector transit funding).

Mammoth continues:

Initially, this may seem an extraordinarily frustrating condition for urbanists, who have of late been so interested in the possibility that the design of infrastructures might offer an alternative instrument for shaping cities, combining the intentionality and vision of the plan with the vibrancy and resilience characteristic of emergent growth.  Infrastructures, we’ve noticed, can be a stable element which mold and manipulate the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, property values, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies.  Historically, governments and private developers have sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along a new infrastructure or by supplementing existing infrastructure to reinforce growth and density in a locale (the initial growth of Los Angeles along privately-owned streetcar lines being one of the classic examples of the former sort of infrastructural generation).  But if, as the authors of “Blocking All Lanes” suggest (and, I think it is fair to say, The Infrastructural City suggests as a whole), opportunities to plan and design new infrastructural frameworks are likely to be extremely rare in mature infrastructural ecologies, should urbanists abandon their interest in infrastructure as an instrument for shaping the city?

There’s no doubt about urbanists and their interests in large scale infrastructural investments (see the various transit fantasy maps at Greater Greater Washington –  spilling out to reader submissions, for example – and even my own contribution here).  Many of these ideas are financial non-starters, but the overall ideal is not something to be completely dropped.  Instead, the focus should be on encouraging those infrastructures to evolve within this urban context, while also continuing to use the useful parts of the old infrastructure plans and ideas of capturing increased land value, etc.  Mammoth seems to agree:

I don’t think so […]

First, the rarity and scarcity of those opportunities does not mean that they should not be seized when they are realistically presented.  And when opportunities for the construction of new infrastructures within a mature city do occur, they are likely to appear in hack-like guises: concretely, like Atlanta’s Beltline, which utilizes a defunct rail right-of-way as the foundation for a new commuter rail line1, or Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which redirects the flow of cleaned wastewater in Orange County from ocean to aquifer; speculatively, like Velo-City’s Toronto bicycle metro (which, as it happens, has a less-speculative southern Californian counterpart, the Backbone Bikeway Network).  Go over, go under, re-deploy, tag along, piggyback.

…

[T]he key realization is that successful shifts in urban form will only happen when they are paired with successful alterations of the infrastructures, systems, and flows that generate those forms.  Attempts to construct a new vision for the city that fail to grapple with the underlying systems that, like traffic, constitute and produce the city will ultimately either be ineffective or collapse catastrophically.

Instead of using the hack to replace the era of infrastructure, hacking instead is the method to implement these infrastructural changes.  In the comments, faslanyc likens the hack (as opposed to the plan) to the tactic (as opposed to the strategy) – tactical urbanism:

by the way, i like your reading of this chapter and think that it is basically what the nyc dot is doing with a lot of their bike lane/pedestrian plaza initiatives. A while ago I likened it to tactics and strategies, certainly they are not mutually exclusive, though in practice they aren’t usually working in concert.

Reconfiguring extant street space for new and re-prioritized uses is a good example, with bike lanes and NYC’s ‘temporary’ pedestrian plazas representing the lower end of the spectrum in terms of investment.  I’d argue that streetcars in DC (when compared against the costs for new Metro lines) represent another level of investment.  Even large scale investments, such as the Federal stimulus money for High Speed Rail involves a hack approach – key investments in grade separation, signaling, and other small moves to offer incremental improvements rather than wholesale development of TGV-style trains from the onset.  Federal grant programs such as TIGER tend to focus on these kinds of investments, as well.

Large scale investments are still crucial to our urban systems, but as Mammoth notes, opportunities to capitalize on them will be both rare and scarce.