Congestion is GOOD?

Provocative piece on Saturday in the Wall Street Journal by New Yorker writer David Owen, author of the new "Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability."


Here's his point, in a nutshell: Measures to ease traffic congestion are not good for the environment, because congestion is what makes people decide to opt for mass transit, which is decidedly better than driving.


He's right, of course, although his seeming prescription – just let them sit in traffic if they won't take the subway – seems a bit New York-o-centric. After all, in only a tiny handful of U.S. cities is taking mass transit much of an option. But there's much merit in the idea of figuring out how to funnel more money into transit revenue, through such ideas as bridge access fees (well, not in Charlotte) or congestion pricing scenarios.

NYC banning traffic on Broadway

(Photos show Herald Square before and after, courtesy of www.nyc.gov)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week he'll bar auto traffic from several blocks of Broadway. It's a way to try to reduce congestion in the Times Square and Herald Square areas. While it may sound like a crackpot idea, there's some counterintuitive evidence that, in other cities where streets were barred to traffic, the overall traffic did, in fact, diminish. Newsweek has a rather in-depth article on the proposal and the underlying thinking.

The New York Times web site has a kind of pro-con debate among urban observers such as architect/planner Alex Garvin and the Cato Institute's Randal O'Toole.

Conventional wisdom in the U.S. has been that pedestrian malls didn't work – cities that tried them gave them up. Even our own Rock Hill, which turned its downtown into a covered-roof shopping mall, eventually had to pop the top and revert to a more traditional downtown, complete with sky, clouds, rain and sun.

But, as the Newsweek article points out, New York is unique among U.S. cities, due to its population density, rigid street grid, high proportion of residents without cars and excellent public transit services. It's certainly an idea worth watching. That said, Charlotte doesn't have density, a grid or extensive transit, so anything learned from the NYC experiment isn't likely to be applicable here, regardless.

Sprawl's dipping into your pocketbook

People just don't realize how much extra tax money must be spent because of the sprawling development patterns, not just in Charlotte and North Carolina, but around the country. Consider connected streets, and their role in easing expenditures for roads and for emergency services.

It's clear that connecting streets – whether with a rigid grid or more curving street patterns such as Charlotte's John Nolen-designed Myers Park neighborhood – relieves thoroughfares of some portion of their traffic. Yes, each neighborhood street gets a bit more traffic. But if they're well-designed, narrow enough to discourage speeding, have adequate sidewalks, bike lanes and/or on-street parking (or all of the above) traffic moves slowly and poses little burden for residents.

Meanwhile, thoroughfares need not carry as much traffic (or be widened or resurfaced as often). When there's an accident or other problem on a thoroughfare, motorists have plenty of options for alternate routes.

Yes, it costs developers a bit more to build a street grid than a cul-de-sac subdivision, and the extra streets reduce the number of lots and buildings a developer can squeeze onto the land. But for taxpayers, it ought to be a no-brainer.

But connecting streets can have some other, unexpected benefits for municipal coffers. Here's an intriguing study from Charlotte’s transportation and fire department staff that finds fire station costs sharply lower in parts of town where streets connect.

The study analyzed eight stations and found those in connected neighborhoods can serve more square miles because they can reach more homes within acceptable response times. The Dilworth station can serve 14 square miles. The station in the cul-de-sac-laden Highland Creek area can cover only 8 square miles.

The study found the annualized per-household life cycle cost of the Dilworth station to be $159. The equivalent cost for the station in the Highland Creek area was $740 – almost five times more.

Charlotte Department of Transportation staff who worked on the study included Matt Magnasco, Steven Castongia and Katie Templeton. Fire Department staff included Benny Warwick and Rachel Pillar. Magnasco tells me it hasn't yet been published or peer-reviewed, but they're working to get it into shape for that. The PowerPoint presentation linked to above was for a Congress for the New Urbanism transportation conference in Charlotte last last year.

Traffic congestion: 'The condition of the city'

One of the most influential human beings in the world of architecture, planning, development, city growth and urban design is in town this week for a transportation conference. Andres Duany (ranked No. 5 on Builder magazine's list of the most powerful people in the planning industry) is giving a public talk this Wednesday 5:30-7 p.m. at the Levine Museum uptown.

Then he'll attend a three-day transportation summit conference by the Congress for the New Urbanism. Yep, Charlotte will be fairly crawling with New Urbanists. Here's a link for more about Duany, if you're not familiar with him and his work. Here's a link to information on the conference. (Correction: It's Congress, not conference, for the New Urbanism. Too much typing fast. My apologies.)

In a nutshell, Andres and his wife and business partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, helped found the whole New Urbanist movement.

You'll hear a lot of different definitions of New Urbanism, especially from developers and/or rival architects, many of whom paint it as a movement seeking only nostalgic houses with front porches. That's a simplistic look at a complex set of ideas.

In a nutshell, New Urbanism seeks to model new development on the successful, human-friendly designs of decades past.

I've heard Duany lecture over the years, and among the ideas that has stuck with me is this: When re grappling with the problem of traffic congestion, he said, remember: "Congestion is the condition of the city." Whether it's flocks of goats, ox-drawn carts, people on foot, people on horseback, carriages, cars, SUVs, buses, Jetson-style flying saucers, whatever. Cities are crowded places, and they are going to be congested.

What matters is whether people can get around in a multitude of ways: by car, on foot, bicycle, train, streetcar, bus -- the whole panoply of transportation options.

Love his ideas or hate them, Duany is always provocative, always an incisive observer of American (and world) societies.

What ails cities and suburbs -- and more

News from around:

Bull City Blues: Architect, engineer and planner Tony Sease raps Durham for how it's NOT making streets more comfortable for pedestrians in some new streetscaping projects.

Obama the City Dude: Alec McGillis writes in the WashPost that Barack Obama is the first candidate in decades who has spent almost all his life living in large cities, and speculates on what that might mean if he wins election. To make his point McGillis dismisses Dukakis as being from Brookline, not Boston, and Kerry as being more of Nantucket than Boston. That's a bit of a stretch.

Curing Urban-itis: Americans have a love-hate relationship with cities, writes author William Finley in a column on planetizen.com. The problems of cities and of suburbs are inextricably linked, he says, but usually they're dealt with as if totally separate Problems he lists include traffic congestion, lack of affordable housing, blighted inner city neighborhoods and sprawl. He fingers the federal government -- among others -- for lack of leadership.

Here's his take on traffic congestion: "Traffic Congestion is caused by one-person cars, auto and oil lobbies, subsidized parking, low gas taxes, political opposition to rapid transit, Federal and State failures to assist metro areas and the lack of regional leadership. It is always the other fellow’s fault."

Beauty Out of Season: Maybe Momma Nature decided the campaign muck was just too dreary and wanted to cheer us all up. Whatever the reason, some of the Rocky Shoals spider lilies are blooming out of season in the Catawba River near Great Falls, S.C. Lindsay Pettus sent along some photos from Bill Stokes. (one above, another below. )

The spider lilies are an endangered species that grow in the middle of the river. The colony in the Catawba is one of the largest known -- and when they bloom in the spring they're spectacular.