• PBS's Blueprint America series will be airing "Road to the Future" tonight at 8pm in New York City. Check your local PBS station for times. Part of a PBS series on the country’s aging and changing infrastructure, the documentary examines the choices we can make as the country invests in its infrastructure, and how they can affect the way we live. Focusing in on three cities, New York, Denver and Portland, it features interviews with a whole host of interesting subjects including NYC DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Portland Mayor Sam Adams, BikePortland blog maestro Jonathan Maus and Columbia University's Owen Gutfreund, author of "20th Century Sprawl." It should be a good one. Check their web site for a preview.
  
• I've also been told that the 11 pm10 pm local news on Fox channel 5 is going to run a report tonight on a Brooklyn resident named Miguel Padro who was arrested the other day for bicycling on the sidewalk on his way to work at the Prospect Park Tennis Center. I haven't spoken with Padro yet to get the story for myself, but word has it the NYPD held him in jail for 24 hours without a phone call despite the fact that he had no oustanding summonses or any problems with his record. Padro's wife and employer were really shaken up by the arrest and worried that he'd been kidnapped or killed. It sounds like a completely insane story but given the NYPD's increasingly random, senseless crackdowns on bicyclists it is entirely believable. I'm looking forward to seeing the Fox News piece and talking to Padro for myself before getting too worked up about this.
  

The first time you visit Portland, Oregon, the gaggles of cyclists streaming over the Hawthorne Bridge during rush hour is a sight you will never forget. It's something other cities need to see and be inspired by.

On a recent vacation there, I couldn't resist cranking out a Streetfilms shortie, so I hooked up with Crank My Chain's Dan Kaufman to capture the essence of the p.m. rush and find out what it feels like to be a part of the mass of cyclist humanity in Southeast Portland's Hawthorne corridor.

As Greg Raisman from Portland's Bureau of Transportation pointed out: 20 percent of all traffic on the Hawthorne Bridge is bikes, while the number of cyclists in Portland has risen 600 percent in the last 15 years and shows no sign of letting up.

Denver's FasTracks transit expansion will add more than 100 miles of rail and BRT service.

The core of his argument that Americans don’t like cities rested on this survey by Pew Research Center. The survey found that Americans, when asked where they would most like to move to, named Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio as their top ten, in that order of preference. Because these cities are mostly in the west and the south, Brooks concluded that Americans are interested in living in, well, the west and the south. But then he went further, citing it as general evidence of America’s anti-urban tastes.

What Brooks didn't address -- and which I have a hard time believing he didn’t know, given his usual informedness -- was that most of the 10 cities in the poll are pursuing pro-urban agendas with a vengeance. They are building lots of light rail lines. They are re-configuring streets to make them more walkable and bikeable. They are steering clear of policies and projects that would encourage more driving.

Nowhere is that more true than Denver, the number one city in the poll, which supplied the headline to Brooks' column, "I Dream of Denver." Well, a few years ago, this object of American aspirations voted to approve what is probably the largest new mass transit system in the United States. The city of Denver and a bunch of neighboring political jurisdictions managed to come together and agree to build a half dozen light rail and commuter rail lines at once. The metro area will end up with a complete rail-based transit system in one fell swoop, without having to proceed line-by-line over decades, like most cities.

Portland, of course, has been the most aggressively pro-urban city in the country for three decades, with its mix of pro-transit, pro-biking policies all set in a state that employs some of the most cohesive growth-management practices in the country. In Portland, as readers of Streetsblog know, you can now ride a bike and have priority over cars when you come to a red light, just like in Amsterdam, the place Brooks posits as the epitome of un-American living. If Americans don't want to be urban, why are they putting Portland in their top ten list?

Essentially all the other cities on this list are pursuing pro-urban policies, even if they aren’t all urban yet. Hell, even Tampa, in the belly of a state that defined suburban sprawl, opened a downtown streetcar line a few years ago.

Before posting this piece, I went back and re-read Brooks' column, just to see if I had gotten everything right or missed anything. Upon review, it's actually astonishing how misleading it is. It's such a textbook example of selectively using facts and figures to advance faulty logic that it's worth doing a blow-by-blow here.

First Brooks starts with an arguably true statement, that many urban planners would like Americans to live in denser, more urban places. Then he condenses that into the hyperbole that urban planners want Americans to live in Amsterdam. This is not quite the case, but it’s okay to over-simplify to make a point and to make a column easier to understand.

But then, having set up this over-simple argument, Brooks goes about arguing that the places where Americans want to live are not Amsterdam. As I think I’ve demonstrated, even going by that absurd criteria, Brooks can’t prove his point. Because Denver, Portland, and other cities on America’s top ten list are moving in the direction of "Amsterdam." Plenty of Americans do “want the Dutch option,” or an American version of it.

Every columnist must at times simply pull one out of the air, using whatever is lying around on the desk. I wonder if this was one of those times with Brooks.

Advocates cheered the news. "More bike lanes and safer designs like Ninth Avenue are really starting to pay off," says TA's Wiley Norvell. "These numbers really show the huge latent potential for biking in NYC. We can't wait for 2009."

DOT paired its announcement with a safety message for cyclists and, yes, drivers:

"This unprecedented increase shows we are well on the way toward our goal of doubling the number of bike commuters," said Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. "As these numbers rise, cyclists should take all safety precautions, while drivers must be vigilant when sharing our streets with this growing population."

Meanwhile, fueling what could become a heated intercity rivalry, bike counts just came out of Portland touting a 28 percent increase in cycling this year, bringing bike commute mode share up to eight percent.

More background from DOT on its screenline count, after the jump.

DOT first conducted screenline counts of cyclists in 1980 and has been doing so annually since 1984.  Counts were historically taken once a year, during the middle of the week for a 12-hour period from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. In 2007, DOT expanded the time window to 18 hours and added two additional counting dates. The 18-hour count showed that over a quarter of cyclists counted use City streets earlier in the morning and later in the day than previously believed. While commuter cycling has doubled over the past six years, DOT has found that some facilities have gotten much more popular.  The cyclist volume on the Williamsburg Bridge has quadrupled from 2000-2008 to 4,000 cyclists on a typical day.

DOT's NYC Commuter Cycling Indicator makes use of the most robust data available to estimate the trends in commuter cycling.  While not every commuter cyclist in New York is counted in the screenline, the count locations are high usage areas where trends are easily spotted. The screenline count looks at cyclists crossing the four East River bridges, those entering and exiting the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall terminal, as well as cyclists crossing 50th Street on each avenue and the Hudson River Greenway.

This growth in cycling follows two years of DOT efforts to rapidly expand and improve New York's bicycle network. DOT added 140 miles of new bicycle routes to the on-street bicycle network in 2007 and 2008.

Graphic: NYCDOT [PDF]

Bike infrastructure can help overcome safety concerns, says Portland-area researcher Jennifer Dill.

How effective are bike lanes at enticing people to ride? Portland State University professor Jennifer Dill has been looking into that question for more than a year, and her research is starting to get some attention. Using GPS trackers to map more than 1,700 bike trips, Dill found that about half of all bike travel occurs on dedicated infrastructure like bike lanes or bike boulevards, even though such routes comprise only eight percent of Portland's street network.

Dill also conducted surveys about who rides most often and why people choose to bike or drive. She concludes that bike riding won't expand far beyond a core demographic of young men unless perceptions of safety change, reports the Portland Tribune:

According to Dill, most regular bicyclists are young men. This means that if the city wants to substantially increase the number of people riding bikes on a regular basis, it needs to reach out to young women and older people. And, Dill said, that is what public spending on bike infrastructure can accomplish.

All this may come across as confirmation of common sense (Portland DOT has based its bike network strategy on similar surveys), but the notion that dedicated bike routes make cyclists safer is not universally accepted. Proponents of "vehicular cycling" reject bike infrastructure forcefully, claiming that biking amid traffic reduces collisions. They wield considerable influence over design standards at the federal level, and in Portland they have consistently opposed steps intended by the city to improve safety and boost bicycle mode share.

Dill's preliminary research [PDF] adds to the evidence that dedicated bike infrastructure matters. Without a bike network that makes everyone feel safer -- men and women, children and seniors, veteran and inexperienced riders -- it's hard to imagine that American cyclists will ever enjoy the safety in numbers that cities like Copenhagen have managed to produce.

Graphic: Jennifer Dill

Check out this video, via BikePortland.org, on bicycle safety, part of a Portland Water Bureau campaign to reduce truck-cyclist collisions there. Last month, the Water Bureau held a bike safety seminar, which involved cyclists climbing into the cab of a city truck to see (or not see) driver blind spots for themselves.

The accompanying vid definitely puts the onus on cyclists (since "drivers are trained for safety"). Still, there's valuable info here on how the road looks from a truck driver's perspective, and it's impressive to see a city not only acknowledging the dangers trucks pose to cyclists, but taking action to mitigate them. Writes BikePortland.org editor Jonathan Maus:

I’m usually skeptical of educational videos as they are often cheesy and pedantic. But this one worked. Much of the footage was taken from inside the truck’s cab on crowded bikeways I’m very familiar with, but they looked completely different from a trucker’s perspective. It was eye-opening and nerve-racking just to watch the truck’s rear and side mirrors as bikes darted in and out of view — I couldn’t imagine the stress of actually operating that vehicle.

Here's one more from this summer's Carfree Cities conference week in Portland. In this Streetfilm, Greg Raisman of the Portland Office of Transportation treats Elizabeth Press to a bike parking tour, featuring two designs that make the most of available space while keeping pedestrian impediments to a minimum. The "bike oasis" incorporates a sidewalk bulb-out for bike storage, while the "bike corral" secures scores of bikes in parking spots once occupied by two or three cars.

Not only are the set ups convenient for cyclists, they're good for business too. Says Richard Satnick, founder of Laughing Planet Café:

"They're very heavily used all the time. And the usual business argument that you're taking away parking just doesn't work here."

Two recent road rage incidents are all over the news in Portland. Earlier this month, a drunken man on a bike became aggravated when a driver, himself a self-described bike advocate, reprimanded the cyclist for blowing a stoplight. The cyclist threatened the driver, picking up his bike and hitting the car with it. Then this week, a driver struck a cyclist and continued to drive as the victim, who escaped without serious injury, clung to the windshield.

The aggression on display is hard to fathom, but does it merit front page coverage? The breathless headlines pitting cyclists against drivers have led BikePortland's Jonathan Maus to critique the local press for exacerbating the us-versus-them mentality.

There's no excusing dangerous behavior on the road, no matter how you choose to get around, but the level of violence people are capable of when they're driving is, by the nature of the vehicle, quite considerable. As one commenter on the Oregonian's web site put it, "A drunk cyclist is clearly a menace, but a drunk driver can be downright deadly."

And then there's this story (via Tom Vanderbilt) out of Seattle last Wednesday, when a man was killed for setting up orange cones while he gardened in a traffic circle near his house, showing that people don't always have to be behind a wheel for their entitlement to the road to turn fatal.

Here's a question for Vanderbilt, whose new book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), will be released later this month. What is it about automobiles or the road or human psychology that makes people behave like sociopaths at times?

According to the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), Portland, Oregon's Pioneer Courthouse Square is one of the Top 10 greatest public spaces in the U.S. & Canada. I couldn't agree more. Affectionately referred to as the city's "living room" the charming and versatile block was once slated to be a parking garage in the 1960s. Thankfully the residents didn't let that happen.

Recently while grabbing lunch in Portland, I wandered into the "Festival of Flowers" - a beautiful urban meadow installation that was so pleasant and comforting, I just had to shoot some video. Ethan Kent from PPS has often said to me that the key to the success of Pioneer Courthouse Square (and many public spaces) is its amazingly diverse programming. He's right, I've been to Portland a dozen times and there always seems to be something wonderful going on there.

We can't set this one up any better than Mr. Eckerson himself, so without further ado:

At just about any public gathering I go these days, there's usually at least one person who will come up and give me an enthusiastic "Bike Box!", based upon our earlier, popular Streetfilm. In my heart I hoped there would one day be a sequel to Bike Box, and it all came together last week while in Portland at the World Car-free Conference. Earlier this year, Portland's Office of Transportation installed many high visibility bike boxes that are filled in lime green to help cyclists avoid right hook collisions. (Note: NYC now has a few green ones as well.)

What we were unprepared for was being stopped by random cyclists who wanted to lend their collective "Bike Box!" exclamations. So watch and see all the fun improv as it flows.

Clarence and the Streetfilms crew are also looking for homegrown bike box videos to feature in the Streetfilms sidebar. To participate, post a vid of bike boxes in your city on YouTube and tag it "streetfilms."

Bike Box!

In New York, "Summer Streets" is set to debut this August. In Portland, they just held "Sunday Parkways" for the first time. Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson, in town for the Carfree Cities conference, captured the action and picked up a few pointers for other cities planning to launch car-free events:

It was like a giant community block party with walkers, bikers, joggers, bladers, families, and pets filling the 6 mile course.

There were plenty of fun activities in four northeast parks that were linked by the circuit, which was opened to bikes and pedestrian traffic only from 8 AM to 2 PM. For cities planning their own Ciclovias, here are some things I liked about Portland's event: knowledgeable volunteers, lots of fun chalk messages on the ground, easy to follow directions, lots of music & entertainment, and a huge number of bike stations for bike repair.

Our coverage of the Toward Carfree Cities conference continues with this Streetfilm from Elizabeth Press, who brings us a unique public service project.

Hundreds of conference participants helped break and remove asphalt from a 3,000 square foot parking lot. Depave.org is the mastermind behind the Fargo Garden Project. They promote the removal of unnecessary concrete and asphalt from urban areas. Depave.org will continue to work with Goldsmith Properties to transform this now asphalt-free site into a community greenspace. Once completed, the site will be used to educate the public about pavement removal and storm water drainage management.

The World Carfree Network's Towards Carfree Cities conference is underway in Portland, Oregon this week. Now in its eight year, it's the first time the event has come to North America. Streetsblog EIC Aaron Naparstek made the trip, along with others from The Open Planning Project Livable Streets crew.

TOPP's Nick Grossman is live-blogging the conference, and if we can get Aaron off his rental bike we'll have coverage on Streetsblog as well.

Photo: Nick Grossman 

 
On Tuesday, voters in Portland, Oregon elected Sam Adams as their next mayor. A former Congressional staffer and current Portland city commissioner, Adams -- who is a cyclist -- ran on a platform that emphasized environmental and progressive growth initiatives, including, in the words of the Oregonian, "use [of] the Portland Streetcar and better planning to spur urban renewal." Adams received strong support from the livable streets community, which helped earn him a 52-34 percent margin of victory.

There is speculation that the Adams camp got a last-minute boost from Barack Obama, who came to town ahead of Tuesday's primary and drew a crowd of some 75,000 -- with an estimated 8,000+ arriving on bicycles. As quoted on BikePortland.org, Obama responded with some fairly breathtaking comments on transportation policy.

“If we are going to solve our energy problems we’ve got to think long term. It’s time for us to be serious about investing in alternative energy. It’s time for us to get serious about raising fuel efficiency standards on cars.  It’s time that the entire country learn from what’s happening right here in Portland with mass transit and bicycle lanes and funding alternative means of transportation.

That’s the kind of solution that we need for America. That’s the kind of truth-telling that we are going to do in this campaign and when I am President of the United States of America.”

How remarkable is it that a presidential candidate -- or virtually any politician in higher office -- would talk about transit and bike lanes without making fun of them? Still, as BikePortland Editor Jonathan Maus notes:

These are all good signs; but what happens on the campaign trail is not the same as real change. It will take the work of voters, local leaders, and advocates to seize this moment in history and work together to push the pendulum toward more sustainable, human powered cities.

At the very least, it looks like Obama may be willing to get this conversation started on a national level.

Not only are Portland, Oregon's new bike boxes to be accompanied by a motorist safety campaign, they're also making them hard for drivers to miss at street level. Note the "Get Behind It" sign to the right.

Compare the Portland version to a New York bike box:

Could this call for a green paint line item in the livable streets fund? 

Photos: BikePortland.org/Flickr [Portland], Ian Dutton [New York]

"DC SmartBike" will launch as a pilot program in the coming weeks with 120 bikes at 10 stations, available for an annual subscription of about $40. It's not exactly Vélib, but it's a start. During an address at the Bike Summit earlier this week, Emeka Moneme, head of DC’s DOT, said that his department is also looking at developing a region-wide bike-share network in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia. For more coverage of the city's bike-share plans, check out the excellent DC bike blog WashCycle. 

If there was a star at yesterday’s National Bike Summit, it was Portland, Oregon. After Earl Blumenauer, one of the city's congressional reps and a former county commissioner, delivered the morning address, Portland's bike planners and advocates shared their strategies at some of the more urban-focused panels. Portland’s transportation commissioner, Sam Adams -- who is now running for mayor -- was scheduled to deliver a post-lunch plenary, but he canceled with the flu. Instead, a contingent of five other Portland bike luminaries shared the podium.

Two things stood out about the city that has achieved a cycling mode share of six percent and is aiming much higher:

They’re big believers in bike boulevards.

Streetsblog and StreetFilms have covered Portland's bike boulevards before, but I wanted to share some of the reasoning behind them. Portland has essentially set the goal of becoming the Amsterdam of the U.S. (as far as bikes are concerned), and they don’t think that’s possible if they rely mainly on bike lanes on heavily trafficked roads. According to their surveys, only one percent of people making trips (all modes) on Portland streets fall under the category of “fearless” cyclists. The bigger chunk of bike mode share comes from people who have safety concerns, and another huge portion of travelers -- 55 percent -- say they would cycle if conditions were even safer than today.

Their surveys also tell them that what makes people feel safe is biking on low-traffic streets, leading them to convert more streets into bike boulevards. By building facilities where bikes outnumber cars and riders seldom have to stop, Portland’s bike planners believe they can make cycling a desirable mode for trips like, say, taking your kids to the library.

They do intensive education and outreach.

The Portland Office of Transportation runs an outreach program called SmartTrips, which Streetsblog first covered last September. Here's a little more about how SmartTrips operates.

Every year the program selects an area of the city to target for outreach. Beginning in April, they send out information about walking, biking, and transit to everyone in the area, contacting each household at least five times. The first thing they send is an order form, which people fill out to request things like bike maps, a schedule of rides, and leg bands. When the SmartTrips office receives an order, interns deliver the goods by bike within three days.

"People are shocked that interns get there by bike, and that the city is actually doing it," said SmartTrips' Dan Bower. "Every year we get a 8-10 percent reduction in drive alone trips in the target region." Noting that ridership is skyrocketing in Portland despite the fact that the city hasn't built many new bikeway miles in the past five years, he summed up his program's raison d'etre: "If you build something, it's worth your while to tell people about it."

Also worth noting -- this list of “five things you don’t know about Portland,” presented by the crew who spoke at the lunchtime plenary:

1. The growing social acceptance of biking
   Even residents who don’t bike say they like living in a city that is so bike-friendly.
   Store owners are calling the city and asking to have on-street parking removed and replaced by bike parking.
   
2. Financing – they haven’t spent big bucks, yet
   Only one percent of Portland’s transportation budget is spent on bike facilities. Ridership is way up nonetheless. Now that cycling is at six percent mode share, there is talk of allocating funds based on mode split.
   
3. Biking boosts tourism
   According to Travel Portland, being named the nation’s top cycling city has been very valuable for tourism. Portland is now attracting conventions based on its bike infrastructure. The North American Handmade Bicycle Show, a convention that draws 15,000 participants, is a case in point.
   
4. Low-cost publicity and lobbying
   Every year, Cycle Oregon stages a policy-makers’ ride, inviting influential people to get away from their desks and see what’s working for bikes in the city and what’s not.
   
5. The economic development crowd is getting behind biking
   There are now 10-15 bike manufacturers in Portland and new bike shops popping up all the time. It’s a stretch to call this a “thing you don’t know.” Portland’s bike industry has actually gotten national press.

Bike-share programs are a very hot topic at the Bike Summit. Everyone is aware of how Velib has led to a huge spike in bike ridership in Paris, and they're wondering which U.S. city will be the first to replicate that success. Based on the Q&A session at one panel, "Bicycling in Great American Cities," it seems like Portland is the best bet to get something up and running first.

An audience member asked representatives of DOTs in Boston, Portland, and New York if they're looking into bike-share programs. Boston's Nicole Freedman, who has basically been building a bike program from scratch, answered first: "Absolutely. Everything I've researched says that bike-share is transformative." The two stumbling blocks are liability, which Freedman said can be overcome, and funding. No system has been profitable yet, she noted, so Boston is looking at models that could be profitable.

Roger Geller, Portland's bicycle coordinator, said his city is looking to launch a vendor-operated bike-share system and has put out a request for proposals.

Dani Simons of NYCDOT said bike-share might be on the table once the infrastructure for a safer bike system is in place. Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives, who moderated the panel, said he'd like to see a pilot program in the East Village, but that Governors Island was the most likely place to get something set up first. "Nothing has grown cycling as fast as bike-share," he said. "We need to get one off the ground here."

Photo: quosquos/Flickr 

First the trends: oil costs are surpassing $100 a barrel, global warming alarm calls are mounting, polluting autos and trucks increasingly clog city streets, and health concerns about a sedentary and fattening society are mounting.

And now the developments: Handy bike-for-hire stations are proving instant hits in Paris and other European cities and seem poised to invade urban America. Moves to add painted bike lanes along city roadways are being eclipsed by proposals for entire networks of "bike boulevards" -- roadways altered radically to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. And a companion "Complete Streets" movement -- making roadway space for cyclists and pedestrians, not just cars and trucks -- is gaining traction nationwide.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), founder of the Congressional Bike caucus (now 160-bipartisan members strong), claims a new pro-bike politics is forming, that it can mobilize a 1-million-plus national constituency and force clear recognition of the role of bicycles in the next (2009) federal transportation bill. He and the Bike Summit will be pushing a sense of Congress resolution recognizing the potential of bikes to undergird a greener, healthier and more efficient national future.

Cycling, nationwide, still counts for tiny portions of commuting and shopping trips. But Portland's experience shows the potential, Blumenauer insists: since that city's bike program began in the 1990s, the "modal split" for bikes has quadrupled and a $100 million bike industry of bike shops, bike sales, a start of manufacturing and bike tourism, accounting for 1,000 jobs, has emerged.

Paris' "velib" bike rental program -- the name combines "velo" (bicycle) and "liberte (freedom) -- opened last July and registered an astounding 2 million trips in its first 40 days. Almost identical systems are sprouting up across Europe -- in Lyons, Rennes, Barcelona, Oslo, Stockholm, Seville, Brussels, Vienna. Many others are soon to come including London and Rome. There's also reported interest in Moscow and Beijing.

This April the first serious U.S. fast bike-rental system is due to open in Washington, D.C., followed shortly by San Francisco. Considering the idea or in active negotiations are Houston, Tucson, San Antonio, Portland, Cambridge and Boulder. Among possible U.S. cities is Chicago -- Mayor Richard Daley tested a Velib bike in Paris last summer and came back a fan. 

Portland, Oregon, which has ascended the ranks of cities judged most walkable, bikable, and urbane, benefits mightily from its small 200-foot square blocks, which provide businesses more street frontage and people more streets on which to bike, cycle and walk. These short blocks did not create Oregon's and Portland's growth management and pro-transit policies, but they gave them terrain on which these policies could take root.

Contrast that to Salt Lake City. Its founder Brigham Young for some reason opted for one of the widest urban grids anywhere. (I've read he wanted teams of cattle to be able to turn around?) Its streets are laid out in a grid where each blocks is 660 feet square - which means that nine Portland blocks to fill up one Salt Lake superblock. This makes getting around Salt Lake City on foot very difficult, as I can personally attest.

New York City is somewhere in the middle, at least in Manhattan. Its numbered streets are set at a pedestrian friendly 200 feet apart while its avenues are set at a pedestrian unfriendly 800 feet apart, except where broken in two by Lexington, Madison or other mid-grid streets. This deficiency has long been noted, so if anything the city should have a set policy creating new streets when possible, and so to create shorter, more pedestrian friendly blocks.

But that is not the case. Instead the city and state often encourage one of the deadest institutions, the Superblock. Not content with blocks that are too large already, the city and state often team up to create even bigger blocks, and not even pedestrian friendly versions of those.

What exactly is a superblock? This term came into vogue in planning circles more than a half century ago to describe the then fashionable idea of demapping older street grid and creating one large blocks where before many blocks had been. It was thought that the old small blocks were outmoded, and did not fit a car-friendly culture. Jane Jacobs, among others, fired a stake into the heart of this idea, and now, theoretically at least, the superblock is dead. There are few defenders of it -- theoretically.

But practice is different than theory. Let's look at a few examples.

There's the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. While there are a lot of reasons to criticize this project, starting with the process that seemed to reverse the normal way development of a public parcel should proceed. But when you get down to urban design of the plan itself, it has entirely too few streets. Not only does it de-map some existing ones, it doesn't pick up the possibility of creating new ones so that this big area could be divided into smaller, pedestrian friendly blocks.

The Hudson Yards Development on the Far West Side of Manhattan is still evolving and it's far from clear what exactly will emerge there. But most of the proposed plans submitted by developers for the new area atop the West Side Rail Yards show towers set in parks or plazas. They seem more appropriate to an Edge City outside Dallas than in a dense urban city. Only the Brookfield plan, in its words, "honors the Manhattan street grid" by drawing several new streets across the site, and puts an emphasis on urban style buildings that front on streets.

Brookfield's Hudson Yards project plan essentially maintains Midtown Manhattan's street grid.

Why do developers haul out the superblock so quickly when designing current projects, and why do public officials let them, despite its near death in academic circles?

One common answer these days is terrorism concerns. Setbacks for more prominent buildings are often larger now, to allow for the placement of bollards and other protective measures. But there is a certain lack of logic here. After all, most New York City buildings do not have enormous setbacks from the street, so pushing that for newer buildings hardly deprives a terrorist of potential targets.

A stronger explanation to me lies in finance and issues of political power. Large concentrations of money affect development in New York City disproportionately, and such large concentrations of money often favor having large concentrations of land to work with. While it may be a disservice to the city to have a large, island-like superblock - traffic flow is disrupted, walking and bicycling trips are made more difficult -- to the developer, a superblock allows for wide floor plates, campus-like settings and a level of land use control that would not otherwise be possible. And since the government sector is weak, large developers often end up doing what suits them first, not the public.

I'm not expecting to get rid of all superblocks. But it is a fair question whether the city should make creating a pedestrian friendly city of short blocks with buildings close to the street a priority. We have the most pedestrian oriented city in the country, but too often we chip away at its essential attributes in this regard, rather than seeking to add to them.

Photosim by Eric McNatt and Jason Lee for New York Magazine.