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From the Department of Worst Practices: Two-Lane Stroads

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One phrase that has become common in transportation planning circles is “stroad”– a street that is oriented towards cars (like a major road) but is full of intersections (like a traditional, more pedestrian-oriented street) and thus doesn’t function well as either a street or a road. When I think of a stroad, I think of six-to-eight lane streets like San Jose Boulevard in Jacksonville, or Queens Boulevard in Queens.

But under the wrong conditions, even a two-lane street can function almost as badly as a stroad. My parents in Atlanta live near Mt. Paran Road, a two-lane street that attracts 40-45 mph traffic for three reasons.  First, the absence of sidewalks scares off pedestrians- especially since many residences are surrounded by woods or bushes rather than by more walkable lawns, which means pedestrians have no alternative to walking in the street.  Second, despite its curves, the street is just straight enough and wide enough to accommodate fast traffic. Third, this part of the city lacks a grid of east-west streets, so Mt. Paran and two or three similar streets have become the easiest way to get from the western edge of the city’s affluent northside to north-south streets further east. As a result, Mt. Paran combines speed and congestion, much like a true stroad.  And when it is congested, a driver feels tremendous peer pressure to drive as fast as possible, because he or she is part of a long line of cars that cannot switch into another lane.

What can be done about two-lane stroads?  I’m not sure.  Sidewalks would be a major improvement; given the difficulty of getting anywhere nearby without driving on Mount Paran, I’m not sure traffic calming would be politically feasible.  But planners of future neighborhoods can certainly learn something from the difficulties of streets like Mount Paran: the best way to avoid turning residential streets into de facto regional arterials is to build a grid of streets that accommodate both drivers and pedestrians more effectively.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org, with minor modifications)

Joel Kotkin on “What People Really Want”

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(cross-posted at cnu.org)

Joel Kotkin recently wrote in the Washington Post that unspecified urban planners want “to create an ideal locate for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers” rather than focusing on the needs of “most middle-class residents of the metropolis.” He claims that these people want “home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools, and ‘human scale’ neighborhoods” as well as “decent-pay [job] opportunities.” He doesn’t really explain how these goals can be achieved, other than noting that Sun Belt cities continue to grow more rapidly than high-cost northern cities, and thus must have somehow achieved these goals. Kotkin’s claims miss three realities.

First, smart growth-oriented planners seek to achieve some of these goals. By improving public transit and substituting street grids (which allow traffic to flow through a broad range of streets rather than being confined to a few major streets) for cul-de-sacs, they seek to expand “rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area.” Smart growth-oriented planners also seek to make cities more “human scale” by making them more friendly to pedestrians as well as automobiles. By contrast, much of America is “car scale” rather than “human scale.” And by expanding the urban housing supply, smart-growth oriented planners seek to make more homes available to more people. (Having said that, I agree with Kotkin that planners in “luxury” cities have failed to meet the latter goal- partially because density-phobia has limited development and thus artificially constricted housing supply).

Second, some of Kotkin’s worthy goals are beyond the reach of urban planning. Nearly all Americans are for “good schools” but urban planners don’t have any special expertise in how to create them. Other central-city policymakers have struggled with this problem for decades, usually without much success. Similarly, urban planners have no special expertise in how to create jobs, especially in the teeth of the post-2008 worldwide economic downturn. Even before the 2008 recession, Rust Belt metros like Buffalo struggled with job creation.

Third, to the extent a city can’t solve the “school problem”, it might as well try to attract the people who don’t need schools: singles and empty-nesters. Although Kotkin may sneer at these groups as “hipsters”, the fact of the matters is that the number of nonfamily households has exploded over time. In 1940, 47 percent of households were either married couples with children or single parents with children; today, only 30 percent do. Kotkin may bemoan the growth of nonfamily and empty-nester households, but they exist and need places to live too.

Highway to Serfdom

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(cross-posted from planetizen.com, with minor modifications)

In “The Road to Serfdom,” F.A. Hayek wrote, “Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated.” Hayek was of course thinking about economic planning designed to govern society as a whole. However, his thoughts could just as easily be applied to transportation and land use policy; at all levels of government, 20th-century American land use and transportation planners sought to support “one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated”—making cars go as fast as possible. For example, American planners bulldozed city neighborhoods to build highways so that cars could go from downtown to suburbs as rapidly as possible, widened existing roads so that cars could move as rapidly as possible, and limited density everywhere because of concerns about traffic congestion.

Much has been written about whether these policies have achieved their goals; however, it seems to me that even if car-oriented policies have reduced congestion, they may have also led to restrictions on the freedom of nondrivers.

Here’s why: after a few decades of car-oriented policies, driving inevitably became the norm in most of the United States. This alone need not, in theory, restrict the freedom of nondrivers.* However, once driving became the norm, politicians, police officers and prosecutors inevitably began to see walking as abnormal or even dangerous, and as a result have begun to limit pedestrians’ liberty in the name of security.

A very early manifestation of this mentality was anti-jaywalking statutes; in the 1920s, the automobile lobby and its allies persuaded state and local politicians to enact statutes outlawing something called “jaywalking”—that is, walking anywhere except at certain portions of the street (that is, intersections). Even at intersections, pedestrians can only cross streets for a few seconds at a time. Americans supported these statutes because they thought without these limits, pedestrians would not be safe from speeding cars.**

By contrast, drivers have the entire street at their disposal. In the most car-dominated places, police have gone beyond fining pedestrians for this offense; in some places, pedestrians have been arrested for jaywalking, and in others, they have been treated even more harshly. For example, if you are walking with a child at the wrong place or time and the child is hit by a car, you may be prosecuted for manslaughter, on the theory that your jaywalking caused the crash. If your jury is comprised of people who drive everywhere and view walking as abnormal and dangerous, your chances of acquittal are probably not very good.

On the other hand, police (many of whom spend lots of time in cars) and prosecutors tend to treat errant drivers leniently; as long as the state cannot prove a driver did not kill a pedestrian intentionally or after drinking copious amounts of alcohol, a driver who kills a pedestrian is unlikely to receive significant punishment in some jurisdictions. Less serious violations of traffic law are treated even less seriously by government and by the public; for example, I suspect that nearly every American who drives a car violates speed limits on a fairly regular basis.

Jaywalking statutes do at least allow walkers to cross some streets at some points. However, some government officials have gone even further in keeping minor pedestrians off the streets. If government officials view walking as dangerous, a logical step is to limit minors’ access to this activity. And most states have created perfect tools for such limitations, by enacting vague laws prohibiting “neglect” or “endangerment” or children. In some places, if you let your child walk (or even play) outside and anyone sees the child present without you, you can be arrested (and possibly even lose your child) for this offense, if the nearest police officer believes that a child alone is in more danger than a child in her parents’ vehicle. Continue reading →

Mission Accomplished? Not Yet.

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(cross-posted from planetizen.com)

Over the past few years, I’ve read a lot of articles and blog posts proclaiming that cities are back: that millenials want to drive less and live in cities, and that suburbs as we know them may even be dying.

I agree that many consumers demand more walkable development, both in cities and in suburbs. But even in relatively prosperous, safe cities, the political obstacles to meeting this demand are enormous. To name a few:

*Zoning. The increased desirability of urban life means that in many central cities and walkable inner suburbs, there is simply not enough housing to go around. But zoning law is generally designed to limit density (i.e. neighborhood population), which means that if a landowner wants to build new housing, it will usually have to apply to the city for a rezoning. However, rezonings tend to be politically difficult, because people who live in a neighborhood tend to like it the way it is- otherwise they would be living somewhere else. So as long as zoning is designed to limit density and accommodate present residents at the expense of future residents, urban cores will never be able to accommodate consumer demand. (I note that this is equally true for already built-out suburbs- so in many regions, the only easy place to build new housing is at the fringe of suburbia).

*Transit. Many Americans may wish they could drive less- but if their residences and jobs aren’t in places with good public transit, they may never get the chance. The highway lobby of road-builders and suburban developers has plenty of money to give to politicians, while there isn’t really much of a transit lobby (beyond bureaucrats who can’t give campaign contributions, and environmentalists who are more interested in other issues). So whenever economic growth flattens, public transit is one of the first things to be cut back; after the 2008-10 financial crisis, nearly every American city areduced transit service. (To see a few examples, just google ‘transit cutbacks.’) And even in relatively good times, transit is politically vulnerable because, unlike highways, transit often lacks a reliable source of funding.  For example,Seattle plans to eliminate 28 bus routes this fall to make up for weak sales tax revenues, and to eliminate even more routes in 2015.

*Street design. Many commercial streets are designed for high-speed traffic– for example, the eight-lane street near my former apartment in Jacksonville, Florida. Because a pedestrian is more likely to be killed by a car going 40 mph than by one going 20 mph, such streets are not particularly safe for pedestrians. In theory, these streets could be retrofitted. For example, a city could effectively slow traffic by widening sidewalks and medians, thus reducing the number of traffic lanes. However, these changes would cost money and be politically controversial.

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Don’t Blame The Rich For High Rents

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(cross-posted from cnu.org) One common explanation for the high housing costs of New York and San Francisco is that the wealthy are pricing everyone else out of the market.  According to this narrative, there are so many obscenely wealthy people in such cities that developers are only building housing for the rich, thus making it impossible for the law of supply and demand to function. But a recent article on CNBC’s web page suggests that although New York does indeed have the highest percentage of millionaires in the United States, the second-place finisher is relatively low-cost Houston.  It therefore appears that a city can have lots of wealth and still have relatively low housing costs, if government makes it reasonably easy for people to build housing. This does not mean Houston is a perfect role model: although Houston’s regulations don’t disfavor all new construction, they still favor sprawl by limiting density and mandating parking.  As a result, Houston’s low housing costs are balanced out by high transportation costs. Ideally (from a smart growth perspective) a city would make new housing construction easy without mandating sprawl.

Transit, Density and Congestion

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(cross-posted from planetizen.com)

A few weeks ago, Wendell Cox wrote a blog post asserting that the most dense metros tend to have the highest levels of congestion. Assuming for the sake of argument that his methodology for measuring congestion makes sense, it does not necessarily follow that sprawl equals low congestion, or that transit-oriented development equals high congestion.

Cox focuses on metrowide density. But there are different kinds of density; some regions, such as Los Angeles, have high regionwide density but so-so transit systems, car-oriented street design, and a not-too-dense central city. Others, such as Boston, combine a very dense, transit-oriented core with not-so-dense suburbs. Regions in the first group tend to have low transit ridership, thus effectively combining density and sprawl. In addition, large regions are likely to have higher congestion than small regions, even leaving aside density.

So I thought I would take a look at Cox’s data and ask a slightly different question: do transit-oriented places have more congestion than one might expect for their size, or less?

Exhibit A is New York City: the region with the highest transit ridership in the United States. Since New York is the largest region in the nation, one might expect it to have high levels of congestion. But according to Cox, New York is only fourth in congestion. Thus, it appears that a highly dense core, when combined with less-dense suburbs, will have levels of congestion lower than one might expect based on population.

Five other large regions (Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington) have highly transit-oriented central cities: that is, cities where over 25 percent of residents use transit to get to work. All of these cities have fairly high central-core density; all but one (Washington) that is, over 10,000 people per square mile within the city limits, and Washington is pretty close to the 10,000/square mile mark.* In fact, five of these cities (all but Washington) are the five most dense principal cities (that is, largest city in their metropolitan area) in the United States.

Philadelphia has the fifth highest regional population, but only the thirteenth highest level of congestion. Thus, Philadelphia clearly outperforms its population in addressing traffic congestion—that is, it has less congestion than one might expect from its size.

Chicago has the third highest regional population, but only the 12th highest level of congestion. Thus, Chicago again outperforms expectations.

On the other hand, two other transit-oriented regions do not outperform. Boston has the tenth highest population but the eighth highest level of congestion, and San Francisco has the eleventh highest population but the third highest level of congestion. (Washington ranks no. 7 in both).

On balance, transit-oriented regions do not seem to have more traffic congestion, controlling for size, than the nation as a whole.

*Washington has 61 square miles and 602,000 people, according to the 2010 Census.

Parks for Pedestrians: No Easy Matter

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(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

Last weekend, I visited Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. Rock Creek Park is quite different from the parks I am used to in New York City, both in good ways and in bad ways.

On the positive side, Rock Creek Park is more wooded and natural-looking than most parks. While a typical park is mostly grassland, Rock Creek Park is mostly forest. I saw three deer in the park over the course of an hour or two, which is three more than I would normally see in a park.

On the other hand, Rock Creek Park seems to me to be made for cars rather than for pedestrians. Although there are certainly some pedestrian entrances to the park, one of the main entrances, Military Road, is a high-speed road with no sidewalks in the blocks closest to the park.

As I walked along the park’s eastern border on 16th Street N.W., I only saw one or two pedestrian trails per mile leading westward through the park. Because the park is so densely forested, the only feasible way to walk through the park is through those trails. And as I walked, I didn’t really have a good idea where I was going; in the course of my two-mile walk from 16th Street to Military Road, I saw only one map—and even that one was more focused on the park’s interior than on how to get out of the park.

Unfortunately, Rock Creek Park has the virtues of its defects. A typical grassland park is pretty easy for a pedestrian to navigate; to get from the east end of New York’s Central Park to the west end, all a pedestrian need do is walk across the grass and keep walking. A more heavily forested park such as Rock Creek Park can be quite impressive, but may need a bit more planning to be pedestrian-friendly.  In particular, such a park may need more visible trails than other parks, and may need more maps to guide pedestrians.