Would you use a rototiller to get rid of weeds in a flowerbed? Of course not. You might solve your immediate goal of uprooting the weeds — but oh, my, the collateral damage that you would do.

Yet when we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed. And it’s time to acknowledge that the collateral damage has been too great.

Image: Andy Singer

Image: Andy Singer

First, an explanation of what I call the “deadly duo”: travel projection models and Levels of Service (LOS) performance metrics.Travel projection models are computer programs that use assumptions about future growth in population, employment, and recreation to estimate how many new cars will be on roads 20 or 30 years into the future.

Models range from quite simplistic to incredibly complex and expensive. Simple models deal primarily with coarse movements of vehicles between cities, while complex models deal with the intricacies of what happens on the fine grid of urban areas. To be truly accurate, growth projection modeling can be expensive. Therefore, absent compelling reason to do otherwise, most growth projections tend to be done using less expensive techniques, which usually lead to overestimates.

Levels of Service (LOS) is a performance metric which flourished during the interstate- and freeway-building era that went from the 1950s to the 1990s. Using a scale of A to F, LOS attempts to create an objective formula to answer a subjective question: How much congestion are we willing to tolerate? As in grade school, “F” is a failing grade and “A” is perfect.

Engineers decided that LOS “C” was a good balance between overinvestment in perfection and underinvestment leading to congestion. In urban areas, a concession was made to accept LOS D, representing slightly more restricted but still free-flowing traffic. LOS is commonly (actually, almost always) calculated using travel projections for 20 to 30 years into the future.

Using basic traffic models and LOS C/D to plan and design the interstate system was a no-brainer in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. When deciding how many lanes to build on a freeway connecting major cities, a sensitivity of plus or minus 10,000 trips a day could be tolerated, and the incremental difference in cost to plow through undeveloped land was relatively insignificant.

Good approach, wrong setting

I’m not going to look back and quibble with the general philosophy of how the interstates and the associated high-speed freeways were planned and designed. On many levels, the approach made sense.

But it became increasingly less persuasive when applied to the rest of our road network. Unlike interstates and freeways, most roads exist not just to move traffic through the area, but also to serve the homes, businesses, and people along them. Yet in search of high LOS rankings, transportation professionals have widened streets, added lanes, removed on-street parking, limited crosswalks, and deployed other inappropriate strategies. In ridding our communities of the weeds of congestion, we have also pulled out the very plants that made our “gardens” worthwhile in the first place.

It’s worth remembering, too, that not all congestion is bad. John Norquist, former Mayor of Milwaukee and current CEO and President of the Congress for New Urbanism, suggests that congestion is like cholesterol: there is a good kind and a bad kind.

What makes the prevailing situation even more troubling is that there are no comprehensive requirements dictating the use of either LOS or travel modeling in transportation planning and project design. The “Green Book” from the Association of American State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) (more formally known as “A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets”) clearly states that these are guidelines to be applied with judgment — not mandates. So does the Federal Highway Administration’s “Highway Capacity Manual.”

The idea that we must rid our roads of any and all traffic congestion is, in fact, a self-imposed requirement. As Eric Jaffe wrote in an article for Atlantic Cities in December, 2011:

Although cities aren’t required to abide LOS measures by law, over the years the measure hardened into convention. By the time cities recognized the need for balanced transportation systems, LOS was entrenched in the street engineering canon.

Worse yet, many designers size a road or intersection to be free-flowing for the worst hour of the day. Sized to accommodate cars during the highest peak hour, such streets will be “overdesigned” for the other 23 hours of the day and will always function poorly for the surrounding community.

If that isn’t troubling enough, LOS is often calculated using traffic predicted 20 years into the future, even in urban settings. Until the forecasted growth materializes, the roadway will be overdesigned, even during the peak hour. Overdesigned roadways encourage motorists to drive at higher speeds, making them difficult to cross and unpleasant to walk along. This degrades public spaces between the edges of the road and the adjacent buildings, encourages people to drive short distances, and generally unravels a community’s social fabric.

Let me repeat: Contrary to what you may hear, there is no national requirement or mandate to apply LOS standards and targets 20 years into the future for urban streets. This thinking is a remnant from 1960s era policy for the interstate system, and has erroneously been passed down from generation to generation.

Image: Andy Singer

So what are the right approaches?

Asking the simple question, “Do you want congestion reduced at a particular location?” is a question out of context. It’s like asking you whether you want to never be stung by a bee again. Of course, the answer will be yes. But what if I told you that to in order to never suffer a sting again, every plant within a several mile radius would have to be destroyed — and that you could never leave the area of destruction?

You would have a completely different answer, I’m sure.

The question that needs to be asked in urban settings is not whether you ever want to sit in congestion again. Who does? The question is whether you want to eliminate congestion on your Main Street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year — knowing that the consequence would be a community with decimated economic and social value, increased reliance on car use, increased crashes, and, ultimately, more congestion.

Recognizing the need for balance, a number of entities are beginning to promote approaches sensitive to the context.

I was the New Jersey Department of Transportation’ s project manager for the “Smart Transportation Guide” (STG), adopted jointly by the state DOTs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The STG directs DOT designers to consider the tradeoffs between vehicular LOS and “local service.” It goes on to say that if the street in question is not critical to regional movement, that LOS E or F could be acceptable — and that designers may actually need to design to slow down cars.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers, an “international association of transportation professionals responsible for meeting mobility and safety needs” also promoted this concept in its landmark “Context Sensitive Solutions Guidelines for Urban Thoroughfares.” Florida DOT has adopted multimodal LOS standards, and cities like Charlotte, N.C., have elevated pedestrian and bicycle LOS to the level of that for automobiles. We have a long way to go, but the door is opening.

Creating balanced standards for roadway design will benefit transportation as well. In the Netherlands, the “Livable Streets” policy led to a remarkable improvement in safety on their roadways. They started in the 1970s with a crash rate 15 percent higher than in the U.S., and now have a crash rate 60 percent lower.

Design with the community in mind

It’s time for communities and transportation professionals alike to accept that we have been using the wrong tools for the wrong job. LOS and travel modeling may be effective when sizing and locating high-speed freeways, but are totally inappropriate in every other setting. If travel modeling with high rates of growth is used to make street decisions, your community may be doomed to a series of roadway widenings or intersection expansions. If vehicular LOS C or D performance measures are adopted as non-negotiable targets, major road construction will be heading your way.

Village, suburban and city streets need to be designed with the community in mind using the PPS principle of Streets as Places to create a vision for a great community and then plan your streets to support that vision.

Lets not be fooled by the appearance of science behind Levels of Service and Traffic Modeling. As I pointed out in an interview with Wayne Senville that was published in the November 2010 “Planning Commissioner’s Journal,” LOS standards are easy to understand — and that’s exactly what makes them so dangerous.

Most of the Javits Center site is devoted to a single superblock that divides Hell's Kitchen from the waterfront. Image: Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association

After Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State address last week, Streetsblog looked a little closer at the governor’s plan to build the nation’s largest convention center at the Aqueduct racino in Ozone Park, Queens. Counting on a huge convention center near JFK airport to deliver economic development seemed like a dubious proposition, but the other side of the plan — converting the Javits Center site on the West Side of Manhattan into a mixed-use neighborhood — has a lot to recommend it.

The Javits Center, built in the 1980s, controls 18 acres on the far West Side, from 33rd Street to 40th Street. Most of the site is an enormous superblock occupied by the main convention center building. The only cross street that provides access to the waterfront and Hudson River Park is 34th Street. (39th Street, while not part of the main building, is barricaded off to serve the facility’s needs.)

The Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association proposes an integrated street grid with housing, parks, and a mix of other uses at the Javits Center site.

“You look down the street and all you see is a black wall,” said Meta Brunzema, an architect and professor at the Pratt Institute who chairs the planning committee of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association. “It’s very difficult for the community to have waterfront access.” Meanwhile, the area around Javits never caught on as a retail environment, said Brunzema, because the convention center is empty 100 days out of the year.

Cuomo’s plan to redevelop the Javits site using “the Battery Park City model” — presumably by offering long-term leases piece-by-piece to different developers, working from a set of planning guidelines — could create a cohesive district on the western edge of the neighborhood and finally reconnect city streets to the waterfront. “It’s really important that the Javits site be an extension of urban fabric, with a critical mass of residences, commercial uses, cultural facilities, and parks,” said Brunzema, noting that Hell’s Kitchen is also divided by bulky, traffic-choked approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel. “The neighborhood is completely fragmented.”

The Javits site sits next to the larger Hudson Yards special district, which the city rezoned in 2005 and will eventually be served by the extension of the 7 train to 34th Street and Eleventh Avenue. One important detail to keep an eye on is that the hard cap on parking spaces in the Hudson Yards district does not apply to the Javits Center site.

Selling the Javits site would also provide a windfall for the state. Speaking to the New York Times last week, Regional Plan Association President Bob Yaro pegged the value of the site at $4 billion. Proceeds from the sale or lease of land could be funneled into the MTA capital program, the construction of a 7 train station at 41st Street and 10th Avenue, or the development of Moynihan Station — the long-envisioned project to renovate Penn Station and build a new train hall inside the Farley Post Office building.

One project Brunzema would like to see funded is the construction of a garage to house the increasing number of commuter buses that park curbside and idle on West Side streets near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which can’t handle any more buses.

The bus facility is part of a plan for the Javits site that HKNA put forward in 2007, which proposes to reintroduce the street grid and add a mix of uses to where the convention center now stands. Brunzema said HKNA is in touch with State Senator Tom Duane and Assembly Member Richard Gottfried about what’s next for the site.

The authors of the comprehensive plan for Brainerd, Minnesota (pop: 13,590) probably thought they had a great idea: Take the properties along busy Highway 210 in the east part of town, an assortment of run-down or vacant storefronts, and encourage their replacement by “highway-oriented businesses.” The plan bases this strategy on the idea that “having a strong highway commercial area… provides for a healthy downtown.”

“The problem,” writes Charles Marohn of Strong Towns, “is that ‘strong’ and ‘highway commercial’ are – in almost all cases – mutually exclusive terms.” Furthermore, the “fast food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations and other auto-oriented businesses” promoted by the comprehensive plan are actually worth less to the city than the marginal establishments that are there already.

Marohn compares the “old and blighted” development on one block — the kind of development the town would like to get rid of — to the “shiny and new” development down the street, a fast food joint with lots of surface parking:

The eleven old and blighted lots [above left] — some of the most undesirable commercial property in the city — arranged in the traditional development pattern along the incompatible, major arterial of Highway 210 have a combined tax base of $1,136,500.

To compare, the Taco John’s property [above right] — the one that is not only shiny and new but configured precisely as the city of Brainerd desires the old and blighted properties to someday be — has a total valuation of only $803,200.

At its nastiest and most decrepit, fighting the negative auto traffic speeding by and the absence of pedestrian connectivity, lacking all natural advantage from the neighboring land uses that would ideally accompany a traditional neighborhood design, the old and blighted traditional commercial block still outperforms the new, auto-oriented development by 41%. [emphasis his]

The city is shrinking its own tax base by encouraging businesses to turn their backs on traditional Main Streets in favor of busy arterial highways. A cheaper way to maximize these parcels’ value, according to Marohn, would be to restore connectivity to the nearby residential area.

The City of Grand Rapids was awarded $459,224 for the Michigan Street Corridor Plan. Image: City of Grand Rapids

HUD granted nearly $96 million in 27 Community Challenge grants and 29 Regional Planning grants.

“The communities selected to receive these grants have a great opportunity to put their plans for smarter development and economic revitalization into action,” said Geoffrey Anderson of Smart Growth America in an email. “These grants are bittersweet, however, since they come just days after Congress passed legislation that did not include specific funding for another round of HUD grants next year.”

The Community Challenge grants are awarded to communities and organizations working to integrate transportation and housing, a key smart-growth goal and the focus of many livability advocates, like the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which seeks to include transportation in the calculation of housing costs. With a HUD grant, communities can update their local plans and zoning and building codes to support mixed-use development, affordable housing and the re-use of older buildings, according to HUD.

Regional Planning grants do much the same thing on a regional scale, with a priority on partnerships, including arts and culture and philanthropy. These grants aren’t just for planning, either; they’re also available for implementation of well-drawn plans for sustainable development.

As if it weren’t tragic enough to see Congress kill off the office’s funding, it’s especially sad that it had to happen during a banner year for interest in the program, in which applications outstripped available money more than 5 to 1. And, according to HUD, they’re encouraging just the kinds of partnerships they’re designed for:

This year, HUD’s investment of $95.8 million is garnering $115 million in matching and in-kind contributions – which is over 120 percent of the Federal investment – from the 56 selected grantees. This brings to total public and private investment for this round of grants to over $211 million.

In truth, HUD’s Office of Sustainable Communities wasn’t completely zeroed out – there’s enough in the budget to keep the lights on, but not enough to make grants. I’m not sure what the office will do if it’s not making grants, though. Maybe some low-level cooperation with DOT and EPA can continue – after all, it seems like a no-brainer that the efforts the three agencies have made fit well within the goals lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been trumpeting this reauthorization cycle: streamlining federal process, eliminating duplication, accelerating project delivery. Aren’t those things Republicans and Democrats can get behind?

Apparently the members of the conference committee thought such federal cost-cutting – and the livability programs the partnership supports – were dispensable. But HUD’s extensive documentation of the grants in this cycle proves otherwise.

For example, Michigan brings home more than $7 million for four different projects: corridor planning in Grand Rapids, denser housing for the county where Ann Arbor sits, tri-county sustainability planning in mid-Michigan, and region-wide data analysis in the northwestern part of the state.

Kaid Benfield of NRDC’s Switchboard blog spotlights a worthy project in Boston:

Consider the distressed neighborhooods along Boston’s Fairmount/Indigo transit corridor, for example. Ninety thousand people live within walking distance of the line (but not within walking distance of the limited number of stops), their median income some 35 percent below the state average. Two-thirds of the Boston region’s foreclosures were along the corridor. But currently the rail service lacks stops in the low-income communities that most need them; as a result the line primarily serves commuters passing through. HUD is awarding the City of Boston $1,865,160 to facilitate mixed-income, mixed-use development in conjunction with the construction of four strategically placed new stations (and improvements to existing stations) along the line.

The Sustainable Communities Initiative isn’t just about federal bureaucratic efficiency, though it is about that. It’s also signaled a sea change in mainstream thinking about planning. If even big, ossified agencies like HUD, DOT and EPA can learn to intertwine work on housing, transportation, economic development, and environmental protection, the barriers between those sectors begin to blur and fade away. Community and regional planning grants like the ones announced this week were a celebrated symbol of the long-overdue integration of those fields, and they’ve made an incalculable difference in the communities they’ve assisted. With any luck, the next Congress won’t be so short-sighted in making spending cuts.

New York City's unpassed 1969 comprehensive plan. Photo: Historic Districts Council

New York City’s zoning regulation turns 50 this year. Though the zoning ordinance has been amended extensively over the last half-century, land use in New York is still governed under a basic framework established under Mayor Robert Wagner. In a panel discussion held last Friday by the Municipal Art Society, experts put forward a vision for a brand new planning paradigm for New York City. The panelists called for fewer restrictions on how buildings are used, a merging of the city’s various land use codes, and a shift toward strategic planning.

Last week’s panel focused on the underlying structure of the zoning code rather than particular provisions. Rather than discussing the city’s many downzonings near transit or its parking minimums, each of which promote automobile use and increase the cost of housing, participants talked about the overarching principles that should govern land use regulation.

Each of the panelists endorsed a move toward what moderator Vicki Been, a professor at the NYU Law School, called the “Vegas principle” of zoning: “What happens in the building, stays in the building.” Zoning, they argued, should be more concerned with how buildings meet the public realm or impact public infrastructure than what people choose to do inside their property. “There’s nothing unsafe about having a business on the same floor as an apartment, if the people in the building agree to it,” said Michael Kwartler, a national expert on planning who helped write the zoning laws for midtown Manhattan.

When asked what she would change in the city’s zoning code, Jerilyn Perine, the head of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council and a former city housing commissioner, said “the word ‘family’ should be eradicated from the zoning resolution.” The definition of ‘family’ currently used in the zoning code limits the number of unrelated individuals who can legally share a single unit. The code “dictates not only how many people but who lives in places,” said Perine.

The desire to deregulate the use of buildings doesn’t mean that the MAS panelists were leaping to the New Urbanist solution of form-based codes, which can regulate the design of buildings as strictly as conventional zoning regulates use. The form-based code for the area around the Bay Area’s Pleasant Hill BART station, put forward by the Form Based Code Institute as a model, requires all buildings to be between two and four stories and for half of all upper-story units to include a balcony. “Figure out what elements of form really matter,” urged Don Elliott, the co-author of The Citizen’s Guide to Planning. “A lot of the details: it doesn’t matter, despite what the architects say.”

Kwartler and Perine, too, warned against over-regulating urban form, and especially against the current planning vogue for “contextual zoning,” which has been a hallmark of the Department of City Planning under Amanda Burden. “I hate this idea of contextual, this idea that what’s there should dictate what could be there in the future,” said Perine. Kwartler added that the Empire State Building is out of context with its surroundings, to the benefit of the entire city.

Panelists also called for reforming the city and state environmental review processes. “It’s reactive rather than planning,” said Been, who called environmental review “one thing we know is broken.” The panelists suggested that to the extent possible, environmental regulations and land use regulations ought to be unified rather than left as separate legal regimes. In Duluth, Minnesota, said Elliott, the city sat down with state environmental officials to determine what land use patterns could guarantee compliance with stormwater runoff regulations. They then wrote those patterns into the zoning code, eliminating one procedural hurdle for developers.

“Blend all of the regulations that deal with a piece of land into one code,” agreed Kwartler, citing overlapping environmental, zoning, building and preservation codes. Those regulations can sometimes work at cross-purposes, he said, and often create redundant and costly review processes.

Ideally, that unified code would come out of comprehensive planning processes that develop an integrated vision for the future of a neighborhood. New York City does not do comprehensive planning, making it an outlier among municipalities. Under the Bloomberg administration, PlaNYC is meant to serve as a “strategic plan,” setting priorities for the city, but since it is not site-specific, it doesn’t always help the city balance competing priorities. Mitchell Silver, the planning director for Raleigh, North Carolina and president of the American Planning Association, said that rewriting Raleigh’s comprehensive plan made rezoning the city easier and more effective. “We understand what we’re solving and what we’re coding for.”

Instead of the often-ineffective public outreach done at the end of each legal review, said Elliott, developing a comprehensive plan would also let the public engage at the beginning, when input can be both more constructive and more impactful than in the current process, which Kwartler called “public hearings as public screamings.”

The positions presented on Friday represent only a sample of the competing visions for the city’s planning process, others of which were put forward at a MAS conference held last year. These big ideas notwithstanding, however, there is no indication that the city is considering starting over with a new system of land use regulation, rather than continuing to rewrite the city’s zoning one neighborhood at a time.

Though the 2 train runs up White Plains Road, the Department of City Planning has proposed downzoning all the areas bounded by yellow on either side of the street. Image: NYC DCP

The Department of City Planning’s commitment to rezoning the city along more transit-oriented lines is a critical component of its sustainability agenda. Allowing more people to live and work next to transit means more people will ride transit and fewer will drive.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, upzonings have indeed been concentrated near transit. But what the administration gives with one hand, it takes with the other. Over the last decade, the Department of City Planning has also downzoned large swaths of transit-accessible land, preventing further development in these locations. Indeed, under one representative five-year period of Bloomberg and Burden’s city planning, three-quarters of the lots rezoned for greater density were located within a half-mile of rail transit, but so were two-thirds of the lots where development was further restricted, according to research by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The pattern still holds. In fact, some of DCP’s most recent rezonings are restricting development on blocks literally around the corner from a subway stop.

Take the Williamsbridge/Baychester rezoning in the Bronx, which the City Planning Commission certified last month. There, an elevated train, the 2, runs up White Plains Avenue. Along White Plains itself, DCP proposes to either maintain the existing rules or allow slightly more growth. But turn the corner off the main street even a fraction of a block, and the department is seeking to sharply curtail the opportunity for growth.

At the 219th Street station, for example, the allowable floor area ratio (or FAR), a measure of density, would drop from 2.43 to 1.25 as soon as you move east off of White Plains. Parking minimums would rise, requiring 85 parking spots for every 100 homes (up from a 70 percent ratio). To the immediate northwest of the station, the proposed zoning would be even stricter, with a FAR of 1.1 and a parking space required for each new residential unit.

The story is the same one stop further north at 225th Street. Walk one short block south of the station, turn left and the allowable FAR drops to 0.9, again with a parking space required for each unit.

Two sides of the Baychester Avenue stop on the 5 line are slated for the same extremely restrictive zoning, but in that case there won’t even be any upzoning along a main street to compensate for it.

Those neighborhoods are in the northeast Bronx, near the end of the subway system. Even so, transit is heavily used in the area; in that City Council district, less than half of residents drive to work.

Moreover, DCP is tightening its zoning precisely because developers want to build in these areas. Explaining the need for the new restrictions, the department writes on its website that “the residential neighborhoods in the rezoning area have been experiencing development pressure” and that the new rules are needed to “preserve the scale and context of these areas.”

Richard Gorman, the chair of Bronx Community Board 12, put it more explicitly. “We are all extremely excited about the proposed rezoning,” he told the Bronx Times-Reporter. “We have low-density communities, and we would like to keep that character alive here.”

Surprisingly, City Planning claims that this rezoning is transit-oriented. Said DCP Commissioner Amanda Burden to the Times-Reporter, “In keeping with our commitment to transit-oriented growth, this rezoning would direct development away from residential side streets with small homes, to blocks than can accommodate new commercial and housing opportunities.” DCP did not respond to Streetsblog inquiries for this story.

Williamsbridge and Baychester are far from exceptional cases. Another DCP proposal currently working its way through the public review process will change the development rules for Sunnyside and Woodside in western Queens. That plan includes some significant upzonings near transit, near the 40th Street 7 station, for example. But while DCP pushed for more growth near some rail stations, it proposed restrictions near others.

In the four-block area between the 65th Street station on the M and R lines and the 69th Street station on the 7, for example, DCP is seeking to reduce the allowable density of development while adding a requirement that all new residences include a front yard. The yard must be at least as deep as that of the yard next door and no less than five feet deep.

Every time the Bloomberg administration restricts development near transit, it means people who would want to live or locate businesses there cannot. The forestalled development will be pushed somewhere else, perhaps away from transit, out in the suburbs, or out of the New York region altogether. Those would-be transit riders will drive and New York housing prices will rise. It’s hard to see how actively halting or shrinking development near transit squares with the goals of PlaNYC.

Detroit sure has a lot of groceries for the country's most notorious food desert. Image: Google Maps

This whole storyline reached a fever pitch earlier this year when it was widely circulated that the city of Detroit — all 140 miles of it — lacked a single grocery store. This was, of course, patently false. A quick Google search shows that there are dozens, even hundreds, of foodsellers populating Detroit’s neighborhoods.

What type of grocer does business in down-and-dirty Detroit? One example is the Honey Bee Market, a family-owned business that has been operating in the city for five decades. It carries a wide selection of Central American ingredients, in addition to plenty of fruits and vegetables. The store was voted “most fun” by Detroit’s Metro Times.

So how did the Wall Street Journal, Dateline and NBC get it so wrong about Detroit? I argue that it is all about semantics, along with a large dose of cultural relativism.

The argument about food deserts seems to be premised on the assumption that supermarkets — suburban-style, big-box, corporate chain stores with plenty o’ parking — are inherently superior to walkable, family owned food markets that serve low-income populations. The media portrays these corner markets as liquor stores or “discount” stores carrying little fresh produce and lots of Hostess cupcakes.

While there is certainly a class of convenience store that lacks healthy food options, many analyses have completely ignored the presence of small, family-owned food markets and their important role in feeding urban populations.

The USDA — which recently released its “food desert locator” to wide fanfare — admits to using “supermarkets and large grocery stores as a proxy for sources of healthy and available food.” Mary Reardon, a spokesperson for USDA said, “We define supermarkets and large grocery stores as food stores with at least $2 million in [annual] sales that contain all the major food departments found in a traditional supermarket.”

“We do not address smaller outlets that have fresh food,” she said. But she added that there are some local studies that have examined the issue. Here definitions are important. One of the two studies cited by the USDA [PDF] showed that depending on which definitions are employed, between 17 and 87 percent of New Orleans is a food desert.

To say that food sellers who do more than $2 million in business provide fresh food and those who sell less do not is a rough estimate to say the least. In fact, in my experience, it’s false. According to the locator, I live right on the border of a USDA-defined “food desert.” The thing is, I’ve never had better access to food in my life. The corner market by my house is exactly the type of place the USDA or CNN would ignore. The Deli, as it’s called, is kind of shabby looking from the outside and there’s no way it’s more than 10,000 square feet. But I love it.

The Deli in Cleveland is a small food seller, but it carries all the essentials. Photo: Angie Schmitt

It’s run by a family. They sell fresh-sliced cold cuts, fresh fruits and veggies. They have everything you’d need on a day-to-day basis, at prices I think are more than fair. I know because it’s helped me many times in a pinch. You can get eggs, potatoes, grapes, cheese (real cheese), sardines and even even pulpo (octopus) in a can. And of course you can also get essentials like band-aids, cheap beer, good beer, baby formula, toilet paper and macaroni and cheese. I have a recipe that calls for Jiffy corn bread mix and sour cream. They have them both.

It’s not the only market within a short walk from my house; there are literally half a dozen. There’s a Vietnamese market that I’ve grown to like for its unusual baked goods, selection of fish and exotic produce including escarole. There is Stockyard Meats, a family-owned butcher and general grocery, where you can order a whole pig for roasting. Right next door is a Save-A-Lot, which is a grocery in every other sense than the USDA/CNN definition. It’s no Whole Foods, but it has produce, meat, canned goods, frozen foods at prices that are appropriate for the neighborhood’s median household income ($25,000 at the last Census).

Just over a mile away is a “traditional” grocery store, by USDA definition, with a fish counter and a dairy aisle. It’s an easy trip by bike. But most of my neighbors, the low-income folks that that these types of studies are generally concerned with, don’t drive and don’t bother making the trek. And why would they? You can get everything you need in a short walk.

What the USDA fails to realize is that if food stores are located very close to your house, they needn’t be as large. You can pop in many times a week and pick up a light enough load to carry. That’s what many of my neighbors and I do. As a result, we don’t need SUVs. We don’t need acres of asphalt. Our neighborhoods are more livable thanks to corner markets.

What The Deli lacks in selection, it makes up for in accessibility. I’ll take walkability over 50 kinds of cereal and 14 kinds of peanut butter any day of the week.

Women haul groceries on foot in near west Cleveland. Photo: Angie Schmitt

As for the claim that that small food stores are unfairly exploiting their consumers, even the USDA’s analysis doesn’t support that conclusion. A 2009 study by the agency [PDF] found that those in the lowest income bracket (those that make between $8,000 and $30,000 annually) pay just 1.3 percent more than those in the next highest income bracket for food. Factor in the fact that many of these folks don’t need to pay for gas, car insurance and maintenance, and suddenly walkable food markets start to seem like a bargain.

Why does all this matter? The food desert problem, at least the way it’s been framed, seems to make a strong argument for cities to offer tax incentives for suburban-scale grocery stores to enter the city. Indeed the Obama Administration has offered $400 million to help expand food access in American food deserts. But if a big, corporate supermarket gets an unfair, taxpayer-funded boost, what will that mean for The Deli or Stockyard Meats?

There is a very logical, business explanation for why this hasn’t occurred already. The new grocery store would have to be within one-half mile to serve people who don’t drive, which is a significant part of the Cleveland market. The city simply doesn’t have the density to support so many large, walkable groceries. Instead, small markets fill that niche.

Without small markets like The Deli, food access and malnutrition would be a much bigger problem in Cleveland and many other cities throughout the United States. Rather than dismissing these businesses, the USDA should study these stores, how they make their stocking decisions and what room there is for improvement. Large grocery stores may offer a wide variety of fresh produce, but they come with a built-in deficit when it comes to accessibility for car-free people.

The first in what should be a series of regular four-year updates of the plan was released this morning, and it includes 132 initiatives. While those encompass significant transportation improvements like bike-sharing, faster buses, and the extremely important addition of parking reform to the city’s green agenda, top billing today went to other initiatives.

Headlining the mayor’s speech today were plans to eliminate dirty home heating oil, provide financing for energy efficiency improvements, and install solar panels on top of landfills — projects that while eminently worthy, reflect a shift in the administration’s emphasis.

“Unlike every other city in the country where 80 percent of pollution comes from transportation and 20 percent from buildings, in New York City it’s exactly reversed,” explained Bloomberg. On transportation, the PlaNYC update goes for a slew of incremental changes rather than any new signature program, although it does give the city’s previously announced commitment to bike-share some more momentum.

During his speech, the mayor praised Select Bus Service, saying that “it gets some cars off the road and some pollutants out of the air,” though he didn’t mention any new plans to expand it. In discussing the steady progress on the 7 train extension, Bloomberg called MTA chief Jay Walder “a godsend to our city” for his management of the transit system. Finally, Bloomberg touted the impressive reductions in traffic deaths over the last decade. He did not mention any new transportation initiatives.

Bloomberg also had no choice but to address what he called the elephant in the room: congestion pricing. “The problems of not enough mass transit and too much congestion on our roads, too many pollutants spewed out by combustion engines still persist,” he said. “I don’t think we should look back and say why it didn’t get done,” he continued, saying he was still willing to work with the state to find answers to those problems.

The PlaNYC update discusses the need to find a stable source of revenue for the MTA and fund the agency’s capital program, but offers only a promise to work with the state toward finding a solution.

Beyond those few mentions, however, transportation didn’t really make it into Bloomberg’s speech.

In the update itself, the biggest transportation-related addition is the inclusion of parking policy, which was all but left out of the original plan. Unlike congestion pricing, major parking policy reforms can be implemented by the city without needing a vote in Albany. While the update hints at the potential reforms, the new PlaNYC still contain few firm or ambitious commitments to use parking policy to tame traffic.

In terms of on-street parking, it promises to expand the congestion-cutting Park Smart program from Greenwich Village, Park Slope and the Upper East Side to three more neighborhoods. (NYC DOT has publicly had the goal of rolling out Park Smart pilots in six neighborhood for some time now, however.)

Reforming off-street parking is mentioned twice, though in neither case with any kind of firm commitment. The city will complete two studies of parking requirements, one in the Manhattan core and one in the rest of the city, to shape future decisions on parking policy.

It is a breakthrough, albeit a limited one, that PlaNYC now states that “requiring too much parking to be built in a dense city like New York can encourage driving, contribute to congestion, and unnecessarily raise the cost of new development.” Up until now, the Department of City Planning’s position has been that parking requirements do not significantly affect car-ownership rates, much less congestion.

Parking requirements were also mentioned in the specific context of affordable housing, where forcing parking into new buildings increases housing prices and decreases supply. PlaNYC now commits to determining whether parking minimums add unnecessary costs to affordable housing development (they do), though it appears the study will be limited only to more densely populated neighborhoods with lower car-ownership rates.

Here are some more observations and details from the plan itself:

• On many transportation issues, the PlaNYC update proposes little new. In its section on cycling, for example, the plan promises to meet its 2007 goal of tripling cycling by 2017 through “continued expansion of the bike network, initiatives for bike parking, education, and implementation of a bike-sharing program.” Those are all previously announced initiatives, though it’s fantastic news to see bike-sharing included in a mayoral-level policy agenda, with a firm 2012 launch date and the promise that an annual membership will cost less than a 30-day MetroCard. In terms of the bike network, however, this is actually a less detailed commitment than what’s in the original plan, which promised to build out 200 miles of bike lanes by 2009.
• Similarly, the update mentions past programs like the car-sharing zoning amendment passed last year and the mayor’s State of the City promise to expand metered taxi service outside the Manhattan core, but no new initiatives in those areas.
• The upgrade announces plans for further improvements to the city’s slowest-in-the-country bus system. In addition to expanding Select Bus Service to Nostrand Avenue and Hylan Boulevard, as planned, the update says that the city is studying how to improve bus service to LaGuardia Airport. Transit signal priority, which holds green lights a little bit longer for buses approaching the intersection, will be rolled out on 11 bus routes in all five boroughs. Finally, buses will in some way be given priority going across the Queensboro Bridge, a project which has been underway for a while.
• In terms of rail, the PlaNYC update touts Staten Island’s North Shore as a possible location for new transit. Both the MTA and the city Economic Development Corporation are already developing plans for the corridor.
• As we’ve reported, the Department of City Planning’s over 100 rezonings have generally placed areas slated for growth near subway stations, ensuring that new residents and businesses will be able to easily access the transit system. The update promises to continue this pattern in neighborhoods like West Harlem and East Fordham Road. It doesn’t, however, mention the city’s many downzonings, which have simultaneously made it more difficult to build near transit in many parts of the city.
• The central premise of PlaNYC is that the city needs to find room for a million new residents by 2030, and an important challenge is finding room to house everyone. When discussing possible areas for new development, the update mentions the city’s ongoing study of the area around the Sheridan, suggesting that building on the footprint of a torn-down highway is on the table. And of course, anything that allows more people to live the very low-carbon lifestyle of a New Yorker is critically important.
• In terms of public space, the update commits to continuing the popular Summer Streets program on Park Avenue as well as opening 15 smaller Play Streets each year. It promises to have completed 13 of DOT’s pedestrian plazas by 2013 and mentions the current roll-out of new pop-up cafés.
• Pedestrians can expect to see 32 more Safe Routes to Schools projects and new guidelines for parking garages to minimize conflict as cars cross the sidewalk.
• On freight transportation, PlaNYC promises to work with businesses to increase off-peak deliveries, increase turnover in loading zones through parking meters, expand rail and barge transport at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, and ensure that the redesign of the Hunts Point market allows food to be brought in by rail as much as possible.

Chicago's GO TO 2040 plan to link transportation, land use, and economic development was awarded a $4.25 million Regional Planning grant from HUD last October. Image: CMAP

That’s still a significant reduction from the $150 million the partnership had last year, but in this time of shrinking budgets, it’s a lot more than some livability advocates feared. If the Sustainable Communities program had been killed in this budget, it would have been all the more difficult to revive it for inclusion in the upcoming reauthorization of the transportation bill.

The president wants to keep the partnership going, and indeed, within the administration and among reformers, the funding for the partnership is seen as a money-saver, consolidating duplicative agency programs, cutting through red tape, and using outcome-based metrics to identify and fund effective projects. Still, it’s an administration program labeled “livability” and was, therefore, extremely vulnerable to the GOP ax.

The Partnership for Sustainable Communities is the name for the coordination among DOT, EPA, and HUD to promote planning and infrastructure investment according to their six tenets of livability: transportation choices, affordable housing, economic competitiveness, support for existing communities, coordination of federal policies and investing in healthy communities. The two planning grant programs, which are funded and managed out of HUD, are a centerpiece of the entire partnership. The other main part of it, TIGER, is run through the DOT and also saw the bulk of its funding — the lion’s share of TIGER, if you will — preserved (perhaps somewhat surprisingly, in the current budget bill), suffering only a 12 percent cut.

Meanwhile, transit capital funding (the FTA’s New Starts program) was reduced by about a quarter, high-speed rail was zeroed out completely, Amtrak took about a 10 percent hit, and TIGGER (a greenhouse gas reduction program for transit) got cut from $75 million to $50 million.

State and local recipients of partnership grants deserve much of the credit for keeping these programs alive. They made a powerful case to their members of Congress for the necessity of continuing the grants. According to Geoff Anderson of Smart Growth America, more than 60 national organizations signed a public letter to members of Congress in support of the partnership’s programs, and over 150 state and local organizations sent letters to Congress voicing their support as well.

Of course, with this round of the budget fight over, it’s time to regroup for the next one, starting now. “Congress will decide budget provisions for 2012 in the coming weeks and funding for the Partnership will once again be at great risk,” Anderson said. Indeed, the lines are drawn. House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) is pushing for his brand of deep and painful cuts, the Democrats have released an outline of a gentler budget, and the president released his budget proposal, only to get behind a deficit reduction plan last week which would amend his previous budget.

Another notable aspect of the FY2011 budget passed (at long last) by Congress: It contains no earmarks. And as if it were trying to exorcise the ghost of past earmarks, it even cancels previously allocated transportation earmarks that hadn’t been spent. That’s a big shift for a legislature that used to be addicted to pork as members’ way to prove their worth to constituents before re-election time. Still, there are some good programs out there that historically get funded through earmarks, and their future in an earmark-free world is uncertain. Biking and walking paths, some transit projects, Safe Routes to School and the Job Access and Reverse Commute program to provide transportation to work for low-income people are just some member-designated projects that may not have received adequate funding if it weren’t for earmarks, since they’re often ignored by state DOTs.

Bringing together transportation officials from 20 major cities to discuss progress on bikeway designs in the U.S. produced quite a few “aha moments,” said Birk. For one, transportation officials learned that many of the bikeway innovations they had been adopting from Europe aren’t as innovative as they had thought.

The protected bike lane on New York City's Ninth Avenue.

For example, Birk said, 20 American cities use bike boxes, one of the design features that isn’t specifically endorsed by the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of Highway Transportation Officials’ design guide.

“It’s not like it’s some fringe thing anymore,” Birk said.

She added: “There’s a comfort in knowing that your colleagues are on the same wavelength.”

Conversations throughout the course of the NACTO guide development process also revealed that federal officials aren’t as unfriendly to new bike treatments as many city-level transportation officials had expected. Federal transportation officials have indicated that many of the 20 bike treatments recommended by NACTO are allowable within federal guidelines — while not explicitly endorsed — and therefore eligible for federal funding, Birk said.

“They’ve basically green-lighted a few of them a yellow-lighted a few others,” she said.

Birk described the conversations with federal transportation officials as “really effective and positive.”

Over the course of the past two decades, transportation officials from Portland to Washington, D.C. had separately come to the conclusion that they needed to adopt some bike treatments that had originated in Europe, such as cycle tracks and bike signals. But the lack of a guiding document forced each city to rely on its own experimentation, Birk said.

The NACTO group began working on the guide about a year ago. The product of their collaboration contains renderings, street cross-sections and other tools that will help local engineers zero in on the best practices in new bike treatments in use across the U.S. This will be particularly beneficial for cities that have less advanced bike infrastructure, Birk said. Baltimore, for example, is taking measures to implement NACTO’s recommendations, following the lead of trailblazers Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco and New York.

“We expect there to be a big groundswell of American cities that will adopt these bicycle treatments,” Birk said. “That will lead to increased bicycle use and that will significantly improve safety.”

Another benefit of NACTO’s guide is that is it digital and available over the web. It’s important to distinguish the guide as a living document because by the time many of these types of guide are printed, they’re already out of date, Birk said.

Birk said NACTO’s Cities for Cycling committee still has a long way to go and they plan to continue working. One issue that isn’t addressed in the new design guide, for instance is how to handle potential conflicts between bikes and streetcars and bikes and buses.

Around 1928, streetcar tracks ran down Broadway and 34th Street. When they were ripped out of 34th Street in 1936, it was a major event attended by Governor Al Smith and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Photo: New York Public Library.

In the media hyperventilating over plans for 34th Street that led up to last night’s cancellation of the pedestrian plaza between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the biggest constant was the fear of change. An editorial in the Observer on Tuesday summed up the strange preference for the status quo: “From river to river, 34th Street moves cars, trucks, buses and pedestrians as efficiently and quickly as humanly possible in one of the world’s most crowded pieces of real estate.”

There was no indication that improvement is achievable, nor any understanding that the least efficient modes on 34th Street — private cars and taxis — slow down the far greater number of people who take the bus, and make the street more dangerous and unpleasant for the even greater number of people on foot.

What the naysayers never seem to acknowledge is that 34th Street has changed and changed again over the course of New York City’s history. To argue that 34th Street should never change again is to argue that at some point in the mid-20th Century, the city’s planners hit on a solution that was perfect for all eternity.

Since then we’ve learned a lot about how traffic works. We know that traffic volumes are not constant, and that when streets change, drivers adjust their decisions and their behavior. We know that on 34th Street and other major crosstown streets in Manhattan, traffic is strangling transit service, slowing buses to walking speeds. And we know that other cities have successfully created transit malls in their central shopping and business districts.

So we’re posting some photos of what 34th Street once looked like, not because we want to return to the good old days, but to show that there’s nothing sacred about the current design of the city’s streets.

Looking back, it’s clear that at least until painted bus lanes were installed along 34th Street in 2008, the current configuration of the street gives more space to the automobile than any before it. In 1911, for example, the city took seven and a half feet from each sidewalk on 34th Street in order to widen the street. 34th Street has changed a lot, and it will have to change again to work well for New York City in the 21st Century.

In 1931, elevated railroad tracks shadowed the east end of 34th Street, taking New Yorkers to the ferry terminal. Photo: New York Public Library.

A clearer look at how much of the width of 34th Street went to streetcar tracks. Photo: New York Public Library.

In the 1890s, Herald Square was dominated by the el, with horse-drawn trolleys ferrying passengers along 34th Street. Photo: New York Public Library.

Pedestrians on 34th Street no longer have to worry about Greyhound buses crossing the sidewalk north of the old Penn Station. Photo: New York Public Library.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: This week, we continue our 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” This is installment number three. Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form.

For many people, urban is a bad word that implies crime, congestion, poverty, and crowding. For them, it represents an environment that moves people away from a healthy connection with nature and the land. Its stereotype is the American ghetto, a crime-ridden concrete jungle that simultaneously destroys land, community, and human potential. The reaction to this stereotype has been a middle-class retreat into the closeted world of single-family lots and gated subdivisions in the suburbs. As a result, much of the last half century’s planning has been directed toward depopulating cities, whether through the satellite towns of Europe or the suburbs of America.

But, for many others, the word urban represents economic opportunity, culture, vitality, innovation, and community. This positive reading is now manifest in the revitalized centers of many of our historic cities. In these core areas, the public domain—with its parks, walkable streets, commercial centers, arts, and institutions—is once again becoming rich and vibrant, valued and desirable. There is new life in many city centers and their public places, from cafés and plazas to urban parks and museums—ultimately drawing people back to the city.

In fact, since 2000, many of our major cities have increased their share of new home construction while their region’s suburbs have declined. For example, in 2008, Portland issued 38 percent of all the building permits within its region, compared to an average of 9 percent in the early 1990s; Denver accounted for 32 percent, up from 5 percent; and Sacramento accounted for 27 percent, up from 9 percent. There is an even stronger trend toward urban redevelopment in the largest metropolitan regions. New York City accounted for 63 percent of the building permits issued within its region. By comparison, the city averaged about 15 percent of regional building permits during the early 1990s. Similarly, Chicago now accounts for 45 percent of the building permits within its region, up from just 7 percent in the early 1990s.¹³ This represents a dramatic turnaround as cities regain their roles as centers of innovation, social mobility, artistic creativity, and economic opportunity.

Urbanism of this caliber is desirable but, unfortunately, too often limited and very expensive. A home in the metropolitan center is, in some places, the most valuable in the region—an economic signal of just how desirable good urban places can be. In such cities as New York, Portland, Seattle, or Washington, DC, urban residences command a premium of 40 to 200 percent per square foot over their suburban alternative. ¹⁴ Meanwhile, in our ghettos and first-ring suburbs, the working poor—and now even the middle class—are suffering and struggling. Urbanism is again proving its value; but if in limited supply, it soon can become too valuable.

At the same time, the bread-and-butter subdivisions at the metropolitan fringe experienced the greatest fall in value during the 2008 housing bust.¹⁵ Their physical environments along with their economic opportunities, cost of transportation, and social structures are becoming more and more stressed. Many economic and social factors are at work in this equation, but certainly a better form of urbanism is one necessary component of the renewal we need. But first, a clear definition of urbanism is needed.

Much confusion surrounds the differences between suburbs, sprawl, and what I mean by urbanism. Suburbs are not always sprawl and can be urban in many ways. Sprawl is a specific land use pattern of single-use zones, typically made up of subdivisions, office parks, and shopping centers strung together by arterials and highways. It is a landscape based on the automobile. We all know it when we see it; nevertheless, much of the debate about sprawl and urbanism is rife with misrepresentations.

For example, sprawl is typically described as discontinuous developments that wastefully hopscotches across the landscape. But healthy forms of suburban growth can also be discontinuous, as villages and towns with greenbelt separations demonstrate. Suburbs are criticized for their low densities, as if we should abolish single family homes and yards, but many great urban places integrate a full range of densities, from large-lot mansions and single-family homes to bungalows and townhomes. The classic streetcar suburbs of the turn of the twentieth century were not sprawl— they were walkable, diverse in use, transit oriented, and compact—but they were relatively low density and outside the city center, in a word “suburban.” Conversely, urban renewal programs transformed decaying urban districts into denser versions of suburban sprawl, substituting superblocks and arterials for walkable streets and single-income projects for complex, mixed-use neighborhoods.

It is the quality of the place that is most significant in sprawl: its relentless parking lots and oversized roads, uniform tracks of houses, isolated office parks, strip commercial areas, and, above all, its near total dependence on the car. To be against sprawl is not to be against suburbs or small towns. All suburbs are not sprawl, and unfortunately, not all sprawl is suburban.

Traditional urbanism has three essential qualities: (1) a diverse population and range of activities, (2) a rich array of public spaces and institutions, and (3) human scale in its buildings, streets, and neighborhoods. Most of our built environment, from city to suburb, manifested these traits prior to World War II. Now, most suburbs succeed in contradicting each trait; public space is withering for lack of investment, people and activities are segregated by simplistic zoning, and human scale is sacrificed to a ubiquitous accommodation of the car.

None of these urban design principles are new. Jane Jacobs postulated a similar definition of urbanism in her landmark 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The difference here is that urban issues are also being considered in the context of climate change and environmental protection. In fact, one can arrive at the same design conclusions from the criteria of conservation, environmental quality, and energy efficiency that Jacobs located largely by social and cultural needs. By investigating the technologies and formal systems scaled for limited resources, climate change concerns add a new and critical element to Jacobs’ rationale. If traditional urbanism and sustainable development can truly reduce our dependence on foreign oil, limit pollution and greenhouse gases, and create socially robust places, they not only will become desirable but will be inevitable.

To Jacobs’ three traditional urban values of civic space, human scale, and diversity, the current environmental imperative adds two more: conservation and regionalism. Although the traditional city was by necessity energy and resource efficient, it commonly showed a destructive disregard for nature and habitat that would be inappropriate today. Bays were filled, wetlands drained, streams and rivers diverted,
and key habitat destroyed. A green form of urbanism should protect those critical environmental assets while reducing overall resource demands.

Indeed, the simple attributes of urbanism are typically a more cost efficient environmental strategy than many renewable technologies. For example, in many climates, a party wall is more cost effective than a solar collector in reducing a home’s heating needs. Well-placed windows and high ceilings offer better lighting than efficient fluorescents in the office. A walk or a bike ride is certainly less expensive and less carbon intensive than a hybrid car even at 50 MPG. A convenient transit line is a better investment than a “smart” highway system. A small cogenerating electrical plant that reuses its waste heat locally could save more carbon per dollar invested than a distant wind farm. A combination of urbanism and green technology will be necessary, but the efficiency of urbanism should precede the costs of alternate technologies. As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute famously advocates, a “nega-watt” of conservation is always more cost effective than a watt of new energy, renewable or not. Urban living in its many forms turns out to be the best type of conservation.

In addition, the idea of “conservation” in urban design applies to more than energy, carbon, and the environment; it also implies preserving and repairing culture and history as well as ecosystems and resources. Conserving historic buildings, institutions, neighborhoods, and cultures is as essential to a vital, living urbanism as is preserving its ecological foundations.

Regionalism sets city and community into the contemporary reality of our expanding metropolis. At this point in history, most of our key economic, social, and environmental networks extend well beyond individual neighborhoods, jurisdictions, or even cities. Our cultural identity, open space resources, transportation networks, social links, and economic opportunities all function at a regional scale—as do many of our most challenging problems, including crime, pollution, and congestion. Major public facilities, such as sports venues, universities, airports, and cultural institutions, shape the social geography of our regions as well as extend our local lives.

We all now lead regional lives, and our metropolitan form and governance need to reflect that new reality. In fact, urbanism can thrive only within the construct of a healthy regional structure. The tradition of urbanism must be extended to an interconnected and interdependent regional network of places, creating polycentric regions rather than a metropolis dominated by the old city/suburb schism.

This last point is critical to understanding urbanism and the climate change challenge. City life is not the only environmental option; a regional solution can offer a range of lifestyles and community types without compromising our ecology. A well designed region, when combined with aggressive conservation strategies, extensive transit systems, and new green technologies, can offer many types of sustainable lifestyles. New York City may have among the smallest carbon footprint per capita, but to solve the climate change crisis we do not all have to live in the city.¹⁶

Identifying an appropriate balance among technology, urban design, and regional systems in confronting climate change is now the critical challenge. As a greater percentage of the world’s population increases its wealth, the definition of prosperity will become critical. If progress translates into the old American suburban lifestyle, we are all in trouble. If China and India adopt our development patterns—auto-oriented,
low-density lifestyles or even a high-rise, high-density version of the same—we will truly need breakthrough technologies to accommodate the demands. If they develop an enlightened and indigenous form of urbanism, we all will have the opportunity to address climate change in a less heroic and more cost effective way.

In fact, many developing countries are fast approaching a tipping point of urbanism. As auto ownership grows, the infrastructure to support it expands. Slowly at first, then in a landslide, the logic of surface parking lots, low-density development, freeways, and malls becomes irresistible. As cars make remote destinations viable, the historic logic of density and urbanism erodes and the economics of single-use, lowdensity suburbs grows. The built environment shifts to focus on auto mobility in ways that are hard to reverse—and with this shift urban culture dies. Traditional landscapes and neighborhoods are demolished at astonishing rates to make way for what is now seen as modern. Certainly, we cannot romanticize or literally replicate the complex historic urban fabric of, say, the Hutong in Beijing, but we can learn from it.

At the center of energy and carbon problems in the United States (and in many developing countries in the not-too-distant future) is transportation. It represents almost a third of current U.S. GHG emissions and is the fastest-growing segment.¹⁷As industry becomes more efficient and jobs continue to shift toward an information economy, transportation becomes a more dominant issue.

It seems obvious that the more we spread out, the more we must drive. But the numbers are still startling. From 1980 to 2005, average miles driven per person increased by 50 percent in the United States, a change that can be linked to the nearly 20 percent increase in land consumed per person over roughly the same period.¹⁸ By comparison, Portland, Oregon, with its regional focus on transit and walkable neighborhoods, has seen a reduction in vehicle miles traveled per capita since the mid-1990s.19 At the same time that it reduced auto dependence, the Portland region has preserved valuable farmlands and provided a widening range of housing options. Short of such regional efforts, even a doubling of auto efficiency will not keep up with the typical growth in sprawl-induced travel. We cannot solve the carbon emission problem without changing our travel behavior, and to do that an alternative to our auto-dominated communities is essential.

The good news is that truly great urban places also happen to be the most environmentally benign form of human settlement and are at the heart of a green future. Cities and urban places produce the smallest carbon footprint on a per capita basis.²⁰ New Yorkers, for example, emit just a third of the GHG of the average American.²¹ In addition, it is generally accepted that population growth in developing countries drops as a rural population urbanizes. Urbanism therefore leads to fewer people consuming fewer resources and emitting less GHG at a global scale. Urbanism is a climate change antibiotic and our most affordable solution to foreign oil dependence. Urbanism is, in fact, our single most potent weapon against climate change, rising energy costs, and environmental degradation.

Yet our towns, cities, and regions cannot be shaped around a single issue like climate change or peak oil, no matter how critical they may be. Urban design is part art, social science, political theory, engineering, geography, and economics. I believe it is necessarily all of the above—urban design cannot and should not be reduced to any single metric. In the end, great urban places are qualitative; they are ultimately defined by the coherence of their public places, the diversity of their population, and the opportunity they create for our collective aspirations. We will never treasure our cities and towns just because they are low carbon, energy efficient, or even economically abundant; we will treasure them only when we come to love them as places—as vessels of our cultural identities, stages for our social interaction, and landscapes for our personal narratives. But that does not mean that they should not also play a critical role in the climate change challenge.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

13. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions” (Washington, DC: EPA, 2010).
14. Christopher B. Leinberger, “The Next Slum?” Atlantic, March 2008.
15. Natural Resources Defense Council, “Reducing Foreclosures and Environmental Impacts through Location-efficient Neighborhood Design” (New York: Natural Resources Defense Council, 2010).
16. Andrea Sarzynski, Marilyn A. Brown, and Frank Southworth, “Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008).
17. Author’s analysis of data from World Resources Institute, “US GHG Emissions Flow Chart.” (accessed April 1, 2010).
18. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “National Transportation Statistics 2009” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009), table 1-32; Natural Resources Conservation Service, “National Resources Inventory 2003 Annual NRI,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/
technical/NRI/ (accessed February 12, 2010).
19. Metro Regional Government, “1990–2008 Daily Vehicle Miles Traveled, Portland and the U.S. National Average,” Metro Regional Government. (accessed March 1, 2010).
20. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has done extensive research revealing that urban dwellers commute shorter distances and rely on public transit more often. Their per capita emissions, as well as spending on transportation, are consistently lower than those of the average American.
21. Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, “Inventory of New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions” (New York: Mayor’s Office of Operations, 2007), 6.
22. Assuming advanced natural gas combined cycle plant technology.

A future San Jose Diridon Station with high-speed rail. Image: CHSRA

Editor’s note: This week and next, we’re presenting a 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” This is installment number two. Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form.

California’s effort to implement its new greenhouse gas reduction laws has provided a comprehensive look at urbanism and its potential in relation to a range of conservation and clean energy policies. The Vision California study, developed for the California High Speed Rail Authority and the California Strategic Growth Council, measured the results of several statewide land use futures coupled with conservation policies through the year 2050.⁵ The results make concrete the choices before us, the feedback loops, and the scale of both benefits and costs.

California is projected to grow by 7 million new households and 20 million people, to a population of nearly 60 million, by 2050.⁶ It is currently the eighth-largest economy in the world and therefore provides an important model of what is possible. The study compared a “Trend” future dominated by the state’s now typical low-density suburban growth and conservative conservation policies to a “Green Urban” alternative. This Green Urban alternative assumed that 35 percent of growth would be urban infill; 55 percent would be formed from a more compact, mixed-use, and walkable form of suburban expansion; and only 10 percent would be standard low-density development. In addition, the Green Urban alternative would push the auto fleet to an average 55 miles per gallon (MPG), its fuel would contain one third less carbon, and all new buildings would be 80 percent more efficient than today’s norm. It does not represent a green utopia, but it is heading in that direction. The results of this comparison highlight just how much is at stake and what the costs will be.

Remarkably, the quantity of land needed to accommodate the next two generations was reduced 67 percent by the Green Urban scenario, from more than 5,600 square miles in the Trend future to only 1,850 square miles. By comparison, the state’s current developed area is 5,300 square miles.⁷ This difference would save vast areas (up to 900 square miles) of farmland in the Central Valley along with key open space and habitat in the coastal regions of the state. The more compact future means smaller yards to irrigate and fewer parking lots to landscape, saving an average of 3.4 million acre-feet of water per year—enough to fill the San Francisco Bay annually or to irrigate 5 million acres of farmland.⁸ Less developed land also translates to fewer miles of infrastructure to build and maintain. The annual savings would be around $194 billion for the state, or $24,300 for each new household—not including the costs of ongoing maintenance. In addition, the Trend future would cost more in police and fire services as coverage areas increase.

If we are to arrest climate change at about 2° Celsius, developed countries must reduce carbon 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. Meanwhile, in the U.S. alone, population is projected to increase 140 million by 2050. That means that by 2050, per capita emissions must be reduced to just 2.7 metric tons per capita. To achieve this each person in 2050 must on average emit only 12 percent of their current rate. Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Surprisingly, such a future would not dramatically change the range of housing choices available in the state. In fact, some would argue that the outcome would be more market responsive, providing a long overdue adjustment of housing types and prices. Specifically, while large single-family lots would decline from 40 percent of the total today to 30 percent in 2050, small-lot homes and bungalows would increase slightly and townhomes would double to 15 percent. Multifamily flats, condos, and apartments would actually end up the same, at around a third of the market. Overall, detached single-family homes would drop from 62 percent of all homes today to just over half. Many would conclude that this would be a reasonable shift, one ultimately making the housing stock more diverse and affordable—not, as some would argue, the end of the American dream.

In the Green Urban future, auto dependence drops dramatically—in fact, average vehicle miles traveled throughout the state would be reduced 34 percent, to 18,000 miles per household, from a Trend projection of 27,200. Closer destinations, better transit service, and more walkable neighborhoods all contribute to this significant shift. We would all still have cars, but they would be more efficient and we would use them less. The implication of this reduction in auto use is far-reaching. In terms of congestion, it is the equivalent of taking over 15 million cars off the road.⁹ There would be fewer roads and parking lots built, less land covered with impervious surface, and less runoff water to be cleaned and stored. The list of collateral benefits is long. In fact, the need for new freeways, highways, and arterials is reduced by 23,000 lane-miles, a saving of around $450 billion for the state.

Less driving means fewer accidents, in this scenario potentially saving around 3,100 lives and $5 billion in associated costs per year.¹⁰ Less driving means less air pollution and less respiratory disease.¹¹ More walking means healthier bodies and less obesity, affecting diabetes rates and all of its associated health costs.¹²

Most significantly, the Green Urban scenario reduces carbon emissions and comes very close to achieving the 12% Solution in the transportation sector of the economy. When the savings in vehicle miles traveled are combined with low-carbon/high-MPG cars, emissions for transportation drop from more than 260 million metric tons (MMT) to just 29. Moreover, we would consume 352 billion fewer gallons of fuel over the next forty years, for a saving of over $2.1 trillion. These numbers are almost too big to imagine, but by way of comparison, the proposed high-speed rail system running from San Diego to San Francisco is projected to cost $42 billion, less than one-fifth the value of the potential annual gas savings. Put simply, at a projected $8 per gallon in 2050, these gas savings represent around $6,100 in savings per household.

There is more. The efficient and compact buildings of urban development use less energy, produce fewer greenhouse gases, and cost less to operate. The carbon reduction in the building sector is projected to be over 62 percent less, not enough to achieve its share of the 12% Solution but a significant and necessary step. In total, the average household in the Green Urban future would save around $1,000 a year in utility payments. When this figure is combined with reduced auto ownership, maintenance, insurance, and gas costs, California households would save close to $11,000 a year in current dollars. With an interest rate of 5 percent in 2050, this could pay a mortgage of $200,000.

What is not to like in such a Green Urban future? For some, exactly the thing that makes most of these savings possible: a more urban life.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

5. Information about the assumptions, methodology, and results of the Vision California study and modeling tools can be found here.
6. California Department of Finance, “Population Projections by Race,” State of California. (accessed February 12, 2010).
7. Natural Resources Conservation Service, “National Resources Inventory 2003 Annual NRI,” U.S. Department of Agriculture. (accessed February 12, 2010).
8. San Francisco Bay estimate based on William Emerson Ritter and Charles Atwood Kofoid, eds., University of California Publications in Zoology, vol. 14 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1918), 22; agricultural data from Economic Research Service, “Western Irrigated Agriculture,” U.S. Department of Agriculture. (accessed April 1, 2010).
9. Research and Innovative Technology Administration, “Table 5-3: Highway Vehicle-Miles Traveled (VMT),” Bureau of Transportation Statistics. (accessed February 12, 2010).
10. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “National Transportation Statistics 2009” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009), table 2-1. The fatality rate per mile traveled is assumed to hold consistent from 2009 until 2050. Hospital costs data from National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, “The Economic Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes 2000” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2002), 60.
11. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “National Air Quality: Status and Trends through 2007” (Research Triangle Park, NC: EPA, 2008).
12. David R. Bassett Jr. et al., “Walking, Cycling, and Obesity Rates in Europe, North America, and Australia,” Journal of Physical Activity and Health 5 (2008): 795–814.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: Today we are very pleased to begin a five-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” Keep reading this week and next to learn how you can win a copy of the book from Island Press.

I take as a given that climate change is an imminent threat and potentially catastrophic—the science is now clear that we are day by day contributing to our own demise. In addition, I believe that an increase in fuel costs due to declining oil reserves is also inevitable. The combination of these two global threats presents an economic and environmental challenge of unparalleled proportions—and, lacking a response, the potential for dire consequences. These challenges will in turn bring into urgent focus the way our buildings, towns, cities, and regions shape our lives and our environmental footprint. Beyond a transition to clean energy sources, I believe that urbanism—compact, diverse, and walkable communities—will play a central role in addressing these twin threats. In fact, responding to climate change and our coming energy challenge without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible.

Many deny either the timing or the reality of these challenges. They argue that global demand for oil will not outstrip production and that climate change is overstated, nonexistent, or somehow not related to our actions. Setting aside such debates, my book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change,” accepts the premise that both climate change and peak oil are pressing realities that need aggressive solutions.

Responding to climate change and our coming energy challenge without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible.

The two challenges are deeply linked. The science tells us that if we are to arrest climate change, our goal for carbon emissions should be just 20 percent of our 1990 level by 2050. That, combined with a projected U.S. population increase of 130 million people,¹ means each person in 2050 would need to be emitting on average just 12 percent of his or her current greenhouse gases (GHG)—what I will call here the “12% Solution.”² If we can achieve the 12% Solution to offset climate change, we will simultaneously reduce our fossil-fuel dependence and demonstrate a sustainable model of prosperity. Such a low-carbon future will inherently reduce oil demands at rates that will allow a smoother transition to alternative fuels—and the next economy.

In addition to these twin environmental challenges, the United States has two other systemic forces to reckon with in the next generation: an aging population and a more diverse middle class with less wealth. We are now a country in which a third of the population are baby boomers or older and less than a quarter are traditional families with kids. And for the past decade, median income has actually fallen; in fact, “the typical American household saw its inflation-adjusted income decline by more than $2,000 between 1999 and 2008.”³ So, at the same time that we must respond to climate change and rising energy costs, we must also adjust our housing stock to fit a changing demographic and find a more frugal form of prosperity.

Such a transformation will require deep change, not just in energy sources, technology, and conservation measures but also in urban design, culture, and lifestyles. More than just deploying green technologies and adjusting our thermostats, it will involve rethinking the way we live and the underlying form of our communities. The good news is that our environmental, social, and economic challenges have a shared solution in urbanism. Shaping regions that reduce oil dependence simultaneously reduces carbon emissions, costs less for the average household, and creates healthy, integrated places for our seniors: one solution for multiple challenges.

The urban solution involves both technology and design. For example, we will need to dramatically reduce the number of miles we drive as well as develop less carbon intensive vehicles. It will mean living and working in buildings that demand significantly less energy as well as powering them with renewable sources. It will involve the kinds of food we eat, the kinds of homes we build, the ways we travel, and the kinds of communities we inhabit. It will certainly involve giving up the idea of any single “silver bullet” solution (whether solar or nuclear, conservation or carbon capture, adaptation or mitigation) and understanding that such a transformation will involve all of the above—and, perhaps most important, that they are all interdependent.

In fact, the viability of new technologies and clean energy sources will depend on the success of our conservation efforts at the regional, community, and building scales, which in turn will be determined by our basic lifestyles and the urban forms that support our changing demographics. The key will be designing the right mix of strategies, a “whole systems” rather than a “checklist” approach to climate change, energy, and economics.

There are three interdependent approaches to these nested challenges: lifestyle, conservation, and clean energy. Lifestyle involves how we live—the way we get around, the size of our homes, the foods we eat, and the quantity of goods we consume. These depend in turn on the type of communities we build and the culture we inhabit—degrees of urbanism. Conservation revolves around technical efficiencies—in our buildings, cars, appliances, utilities, and industrial systems—as well as preserving the natural resources that support us all, our global forests, ocean ecologies, and farmlands. These conservation measures are simple, they save money, and they are possible now. The third fix, clean energy, is what we have been most focused on: new technologies for solar, wind, wave, geothermal, biomass, and even a new generation of nuclear power or fusion. These energy sources are sexy, they are relatively expensive, and they will be available sometime soon. All three approaches will be essential, but here I focus on the first two—lifestyle and conservation—because they are, in the end, our most cost effective and easily available tools.

Perhaps just as important as greenhouse gas reductions and oil savings is the fact that urbanism generates a fortuitous web of co-benefits—it is our most potent weapon against climate change because it does so much more.

The intersection of lifestyle and conservation is urbanism. Consider that in the United States industry represents 29 percent of our GHG emissions; agriculture and other non-energy-related activities, just 9 percent; and freight and planes, another 9 percent. This 47 percent total represents the GHG emissions of the products we buy, the food we eat, the embodied energy of all our possessions, and all the shipping involved in getting them to us. The remaining 53 percent depends on the nature of our buildings and personal transportation system—the realm of urbanism.⁴As a result, urbanism, along with a simple combination of transit and more efficient buildings and cars, can deliver much of our needed GHG reductions.

Perhaps just as important as greenhouse gas reductions and oil savings is the fact that urbanism generates a fortuitous web of co-benefits—it is our most potent weapon against climate change because it does so much more. Urbanism’s compact forms lead to less land consumed and more farmland, parks, habitat, and open space preserved. A smaller urban footprint results in less development costs and fewer miles of roads, utilities, and services to build and maintain, which then leads to fewer impervious surfaces, less polluted storm runoff, and more water directed back into aquifers.

More compact development leads to lower housing costs as lower land and infrastructure costs affect sales prices and taxes. Urban development means a different mix of housing types—fewer large single-family lots; more bungalows and townhomes—but in the end provides more housing choices for a more diverse population. It means less private space but more shared community places—more efficient and less expensive overall. Urbanism is more suited to an aging population, for whom driving and yard maintenance are a growing burden, and for working families seeking lower utility bills and less time spent commuting.

Urbanism leads to fewer miles driven, which then leads to less gas consumed and less dependence on foreign oil supplies, less air pollution, less carbon emissions. Fewer miles also leads to less congestion, lower emissions, lower road construction and maintenance costs, and fewer auto accidents. This then leads to lower health costs because of fewer accidents and cleaner air, which is reinforced by more walking, bicycling, and exercising, which in turn contributes to lower obesity rates. And more walking leads to more people on the streets, safer neighborhoods, and perhaps stronger communities.

The feedback loops go on. More urban development means more compact buildings— less energy needed to heat and cool, lower utility bills, less irrigation water, and, once again, less carbon in the atmosphere. This then leads to lower demands on electric utilities and fewer new power plants, which again results in less carbon and fewer costs. As Bucky Fuller exhorted us, urbanism is inherently “doing more with less.” Or, as Mies van der Rohe famously asserted, “Less is more.”

But for the past fifty years, our economy and society have been operating on the premise that “more is more” and “bigger is better”: bigger homes, bigger yards, bigger cars with bigger engines, bigger budgets, bigger institutions, and, finally, bigger energy sources. In contrast, urbanism naturally tends toward a “small is beautiful” philosophy. This then involves trade-offs: less private space but perhaps a richer public realm; less private security but perhaps a safer community; less auto mobility but more convenient transit. Compact development does mean smaller yards, fewer cars, and less private space for some. On the other hand, it can dramatically reduce everyday costs and leave more time for family and community. The question is not which is right and which is wrong or that it must be all one way or the other—urbanism works best with blends. The question is how such trade-offs fit with our emerging demographics, our desires, our needs, our economic means—and perhaps our sense of what a good life really is.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright © 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

1. U.S. Census Bureau Population Division, “2008 National Population Projections: Summary Table 1,” U.S. Census Bureau. (accessed February 10, 2010).

2. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2007” (Washington, DC: EPA, 2009), ES-17.

3. The State of Metropolitan America, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. (accessed June 22, 2010).

4. Author’s analysis of data from the World Resources Institute, “US GHG Emissions Flow Chart.” (accessed April 1, 2010).

The waterfront plan sets out six goals to balance: providing access to the waterfront, supporting economic development on the working waterfront, protecting wetlands and water quality, enhancing on-water experiences including transportation and recreation, building the city’s resilience to the effects of climate change, and enhancing the efficiency of waterfront operations.

“The document itself is a quantum leap forward,” said Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance President Roland Lewis, who said it will help “break the barrier between land and water.” The city’s current waterfront plan was passed in 1992 and quite a lot has changed along the city’s shores since then.

One exciting promise laid out in the draft plan is a massive expansion of greenways across the city. The city should “seek to establish and extend borough-wide Waterfront Greenways in all five boroughs wherever feasible,” says the plan. It also suggests improving wayfinding from upland areas to the greenway network.

Rob Pirani, director of environmental programs at the Regional Plan Association and the head of an informal coalition in support of greenways, suggested that such a commitment is an important step forward for the city. “Instead of it being one-off projects, what’s being proposed is that the city would be forwarding these waterfront greenways throughout the city.”

Of course, added Pirani, a general commitment isn’t enough to develop a full greenway system. “Part of it is money,” he explained, “but it’s also guidance from the Mayor’s Office to get DOT, Parks, in some cases EDC, and City Planning for the private properties, to work together on a specific vision.” After that, the difficult work of block-by-block siting also needs to occur.

When it comes to waterfront transportation, many in the city have long had interest in expanding New York’s ferry system. This plan, however, remains largely silent on waterborne transport, choosing to wait and follow the NYC Economic Development Corporation’s forthcoming report on the issue. “That’s a criticism right now,” said Lewis, who said that at public meetings in each of the five boroughs, ferry service emerged as a top request.

The draft plan does, however, suggest weaving ferries into an intermodal network, such as by integrating them with MetroCards, and encouraging development near ferry stations to create ridership. Recently, some ferry lines have had to cut off service, unable to operate continuously without substantial subsidies.

One aspect of the city’s draft plan that has drawn criticism is the treatment of heavy industrial uses. The plan suggests a variety of ways to use the waterfront to support industry, but according to Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, it isn’t revising a policy that has overburdened certain low-income communities with disproportionate pollution and truck traffic.

Under current policy, in the city’s six Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas development applications are subjected to much less strict regulations, he explained, leading to clusters of heavy industry, not all of it water-related, in these neighborhoods. The draft plan offers to review each SMIA individually, but Bautista is hoping for a full-scale policy change. “There’s an overarching policy that has driven these uses to a handful of communities,” he said.

DCP’s draft plan also has site-specific recommendations for the length of the waterfront. Here’s some of the more notable transportation-oriented ones:

• On Manhattan’s East Side, study a swap that would allow the greenway to continue past the United Nations.
• On the West Side, improve pedestrian and bike paths along the Midtown cruise terminals.
• On the Upper West Side, add more connections between Riverside Park and the waterfront.
• In the Northwest Bronx, reopen the High Bridge and improve pedestrian access over the Major Deegan.
• In the South Bronx, support the implementation of the South Bronx Greenway plan.
• Along the Bronx River, “Identify improvements to waterfront access and open space connections along the Bronx River in conjunction with the State’s Bruckner-Sheridan Interchange project access and open space connections along the Bronx River.” Helpful hint: this would be far easier without the Sheridan Expressway in the way.
• In the East Bronx, possibly build a bike path from Co-Op City to Pelham Bay Park.
• In Queens, continue implementation of the Queens East River and North Shore Greenway.
• In Southeast Queens, demap the unbuilt Nassau Expressway through Idlewild Park.
• In Brooklyn Heights, explore mass transit options to Brooklyn Bridge Park.
• In Red Hook, seek to minimize traffic conflicts between trucks and pedestrians and cyclists.
• Along Staten Island’s North Shore, redesign the length of Richmond Terrace ot have wider sidewalks, bike lanes, and turn lanes.
• At Fresh Kills Park, consider ferry, light rail, or BRT service to expand access.
• Over the Bayonne Bridge, incorporate a transitway, bikeway, and walkway into the new design.

Local activists gave the plans for their neighborhoods mixed reviews. “Overall, it’s headed in the right direction,” said Miquela Craytor, the executive director of Sustainable South Bronx. While she was encouraged that the plan supports the South Bronx Greenway, she was disappointed with the silence on her neighborhood’s working waterfront. On the one hand, she didn’t see enough that would “ensure the opportunities for business and economic development along that waterfront,” while on the other hand, she said that not enough was done to mitigate truck traffic driven by existing waterfront industry. “The South Bronx has plenty of those, and some of the highest asthma rates in the country,” she said.

With regards to the East Side Greenway, Upper Green Side president Michael Auerbach suggested that the draft plan didn’t offer anything new; the city having laid out its hopes for the greenway at a town hall meeting in June. “Without dedicated funding to make the project happen,” he said, “it will remain as a recommendation on every waterfront plan from here to eternity.”

The plan remains just a draft for now, of course. To give feedback, you can attend a public hearing scheduled for October 12. The final report is expected at some point this year.

New York City's unpassed 1969 comprehensive plan. Photo: Historic Districts Council

Though the Charter Revision Commission looks likely to take a pass at reforming the city's land use process this year, the door will remain open in the years to come to tackle the complex and controversial issues that surround planning and development in New York. The Municipal Art Society and Manhattan Community Board 1 held a conference yesterday to begin tackling some particularly thorny questions. The most difficult, perhaps, concern the roles of comprehensive planning and community-based planning in shaping the future of the city.

The lack of comprehensive planning is obvious if you look at the intersection of New York's transportation policy and land use decisions. Take a project like The New Domino, where the city's innovative Kent Avenue bike lane will run right alongside huge garages with 1,428 new parking spaces. The city's right hand is helping people get around without cars while the left hand gives them more incentive to drive. What is really the goal for the Williamsburg waterfront?

At the same time, local communities routinely feel powerless to shape their own neighborhoods. Brooklyn Community Board 1 called for significant reductions in the amount of parking at the New Domino, for instance, but only received a minor cut.

In practice, these two approaches often conflict. Comprehensive planning can help set broader targets but tends to centralize decision-making. Community-based planning can create grassroots momentum for big changes like the transformation of Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza. But the political units assumed to speak for neighborhood residents -- the city's 59 community boards -- often elevate parochial concerns that can thwart citywide goals, like creating safer streets and more sustainable development. (Most CBs are not as enlightened on parking policy as CB1.)

These are meaty issues, and ones worth thinking about. Here are some of the big questions and big ideas from yesterday's conference:

Image: Pratt Center

While a series of major revisions were floated at last month's land use forum -- like requiring comprehensive planning in addition to targeted rezonings, increasing the power of borough presidents and community boards in the land use process, and reforming the weak 197-a community planning process -- today's report recommends any proposals that "significantly implicate important structural issues... should be reserved for future consideration."

With regards to land use, the report makes only two small recommendations, each based on practices adopted by two borough presidents. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer now uses a formal application process to become a community board member, tries to select members from diverse constituencies, and provides members with training in land use, parliamentary procedure, and conflict of interest law. Staten Island BP James Molinaro holds regular meetings bringing the borough offices of a variety of city agencies together in one place. Each of these practices was put forward for further consideration by the commission. 

Adam Friedman, the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, said that holding off on reforming the land use process is understandable, but that the need for change shouldn't be forgotten. "It's appropriate to take this lead time," said Friedman, "but you do have to begin the process." Friedman also urged the Commission to act immediately on strengthening the "Fair Share" provision of the charter, which requires public facilities to be spread across the city, due to a particularly large set of projects in the works in this coming year. The Pratt Center has been advocating for a more comprehensive, community-based, and equitable planning process.

Today's report is only preliminary, laying out which changes seem desirable and feasible based on the commission's work so far. The commission itself will make final decisions later, after another round of public meetings, so these recommendations are just one step in what commission chair Matthew Goldstein has referred to as an "iterative" process.

The Velo City founders, ready to ride. Left to right: Samelys Lopez, Karyn Williams, Naomi Doerner.

On seven Saturday sessions, equipped with orange Batavus bicycles donated by the Dutch government, they will bike the streets of the LES and visit different public spaces -- connecting planning concepts to places the students encounter in their daily lives. They hope to open students' eyes to career options they may not otherwise encounter until a later age. (Velo City is in the home stretch of a fundraising drive to provide the students with stipends for the summer -- you can help put them over the top here.)

Doerner, Lopez, and Williams recently sat down with Streetsblog to talk about Bikesplorations, why they banded together, and their goals for Velo City. Here's what they had to say.

Ben Fried: So tell me a little bit about how Velo City got started. Where did the idea come from?

Karyn Williams: Samelys and I met and we’d been going on bike rides, and we were discussing that we were all urban planners and wanted to do something different. And through our bike riding, we’d go on rides to different neighborhoods, exploring the city, and we decided that we wanted to give back to the community. And we noticed that one way we thought we could do it was through urban planning and through cycling. So we came up with the program, the idea to introduce students to issues of urban planning and design through cycling.

Naomi Doerner: We thought there really was no better way to see our city, learn about the city, explore the city than to access it quickly and sustainably on a bike. So that was really the impetus. We began researching groups that do cycling programs for youth, and we didn’t really find any that were specifically focusing on urban planning. We found advocacy groups, we found groups that focused on bicycle maintenance. And they were all really interesting, but we kind of thought there was this other component. And what we could offer, in terms of our skills and knowledge base, was planning and design.

KW: I guess I should also say that another impetus for it was that we noticed there wasn’t much diversity, one, in our chosen profession of urban planning, and also in terms of the cycling community here in New York. So that was one of the things we also wanted to address through our program, to target under-served communities and under-served youth.

BF: Tell me about the curriculum. How do you make that connection between the activity of cycling and the discipline of urban planning?

Samelys Lopez: The curriculum is geared towards exposing kids to urban planning and community development. Every week, we’re going to have guest lecturers come and introduce different topics, because really the purpose is to introduce students to these issues so that they can become active, engaged citizens in their community and effect change. We are trying to inspire them to make change in their communities through urban planning and social justice.

KW: The theme for this session is going to be public space. So the first two weeks we will look at public space as it relates to parks, what we traditionally think of as public spaces. And then other days we’ll be looking at NYCHA housing and the tower-in-the-park, and how the buildings relate to the public space.

SL: While we know a lot of kids cycle, we really wanted to have them see things from this urban planning bent. The whole purpose of what we’re trying to do is introduce urban planning and community development at an early age, so that they can consider urban planning as a profession.

BF: You mentioned one of the impetuses behind the program is the lack of diversity in the urban planning field. If we had a more diverse planning profession, do you think the product or the process of planning would change?

SL: It is interesting because I find Naomi and I kind of bonded in graduate school because we took these urban planning classes, but we felt like the professors weren’t necessarily addressing the issues that affected our communities the most. And when you would bring up these issues people did not feel comfortable talking about it. Even though the program was housed in the school of public service.

BF: What issues weren’t people comfortable with?

SL: I think issues of race, class and diversity and how that affects things like affordable housing, economic development.

ND: They were talked about, but the discussions would unfold around these very controlled topics, like people really couldn’t venture out to say or talk the way that they felt. We could see that there was a lot of holding back from the program administration, and from the students.

Also, we were in a minority in our program, and one of the reasons I came to New York City is because it is the cultural mecca of our country. I thought that going to planning school here would be representative of the diversity in the city. And I found, sadly, that it wasn’t.

And we thought, “What if there weren’t as many barriers to access information about urban planning? What would communities look like then?” Just as you were saying: how would development unfold if more communities of color were actually participating and making decisions about their own communities? And we think it would be very different, so we’re trying to do that.

KW: I had a bit of a different experience, working in planning and in the design field as well. I worked in Baltimore City for a while as a community planner, and I sort of felt that I was hired to represent an African American community -- in a little bit of tokenism because it felt like nobody else wanted to touch it. It was like, “Let’s put Karyn in there.”

It was a huge project I was working on, and I’m like 24 and I’m managing a multi-million dollar project which really should have been left up to a senior planner. But I felt that everyone was scared of that base issue and didn’t want to touch it, so they’re like ‘Let’s put Karyn in there’ in a situation where I was well over my head. And that speaks to a larger societal issue, where people feel in order to relate to another group you must be from that group. And on some level it is true and on some level it is not necessarily true, but...

ND: We just need to be able to talk about it.

KW: From the design perspective and the design field, people sometimes think that architects or landscape architects, they really just work for huge developers doing condos or rooftop gardens. It doesn’t seem that there are other facets to the professions and that design can be used as a tool for advocacy. I almost feel that if the design professions are to remain relevant to a larger group of people, I think we need to encourage more diversity.

ND: Karyn and I went to the Academy for Urban Planning -- They had a career day so we went. The Academy for Urban Planning is a high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn. And they do all of their education just like a normal public school, but they do it through urban planning. Math, science, all through the same lens of urban planning. So we went and presented what we do on a day-to-day basis.

The kids were kind of like, ‘Wow,’ because we showed all these different models and schematics. And one of the questions that a girl asked, who was very interested, she said, ‘So how long did you have to go to school for that?’ And this really speaks to our point.

We said, "Well, a lot, but it doesn’t mean that you have to go to school for the whole time. You can become involved in your community and work on things like this if you think this is what you want to do. We just didn’t find out about it until much later." Then she said, "How much math do you have to do?" [Laughs]

But it was a great experience because a lot of young people, particularly young people from diverse communities, they don’t even know this is a possibility. And I think that is really what we want to do, we want to present these opportunities. We really want them to know, “Yes, we did, and you can, and you will if you want to, and we will support you. Let us know how.”

SL: I feel like youth really want to get involved with their communities and they want to have a voice and they want to effect change, but they may not know the best way to go about it. Like when we discovered urban planning at a later age in life we realized wow, you can pursue this as a profession and you can make changes this way. And it would be great to have youth feel the same way and feel just as empowered.

BF: On the bicycling side of things, in your experience has the bike advocacy community seemed like it is not as expansive as it could be?

KW: I moved to New York about three years ago from Toronto, and I never learned how to drive until I was 25, so I always just rode my bike and it was never a big deal. When I moved to New York everyone was saying, "You ride a bike? I didn't know you were that kind of person." One friend said, "I didn’t think you were that cool." I’m like, "How does riding a bike make you cool? It is just something you do."

I have noticed that there is a different culture here around bike riding that hasn’t existed in other places where I have lived, or that I have noticed.

ND: I think that with the infrastructure you are starting to see different types of riders, but I think the diversity within the cycling community in and of itself, we think that it could use a boost. But I mean any progress is good progress. One really cool thing about the Lower East Side: There are a lot of inter-generational riders. There is a whole host of Asian Americans and Puerto Ricans and they are older, they are seniors. And yeah, I like that, especially on the Lower East Side, but I don’t think New York as a whole -- it is a very, very diverse place but...

SL: It would be great to bring those different sub-cultures of cyclists together, if they can ride together and just explore different aspects of the culture that makes them similar.

BF: What is the next planning or transportation project, big or small, that you would really like to see in New York?

KW: We would like to see, similar to how they have Walk Score, we would love to see something that talks about how livable is your neighborhood, which includes not only walkability but bikeability, transportation, public space, parks -- a comprehensive study.

ND: It would definitely be a technical, GIS-based project. We would really love to take maybe the Lower East Side or a small subsection of New York and do something like that and then have it expanded. We have talked to a couple of organizations about the possibility of doing that.

BF: So we’re talking about a neighborhood map, where you can add layers to show where certain qualities are lacking or something like that?

ND: Like a web-based map similar to Walk Score, where you could put a location in or your address. So then based on maybe a certain radius, take all these different layers or components and run it through this algorithm that would then give you an index or score for livability, and use that as an advocacy tool, really, to say, "Hey look, there is an issue with safety here. And even though you have all these great things going on there is a problem, so maybe you need to work on that.:

KW: I’d love to see, on a different note, just the East Side connected and be able to ride all the way down around Manhattan on an off-road bike path basically connecting the Hudson River to the East River.

BF: So what happens after the summer? What's next?

ND: There is talk of a summit. I’m not going to go any further, but there is talk of a summit.

KW: A bike summit.

ND: I guess it has got to do with bikes, right? Yeah, there is talk of a summit.

KW: But in terms of Velo City we do want to keep going.

SL: And expand it potentially to every neighborhood in New York.

ND: We’d love for Velo City to be in every city. Not necessarily us, but open source. We want other places to do this because we think it is needed everywhere.

"Brooklyn Bridge Remix/Redux," by Terreform and Michael Sorkin Studio

In the middle of the 20th century, cities across the United States were redesigned to accommodate the car. As people flocked to the suburbs, cities were retrofitted with highways and parking lots. Roads expanded, public transit declined and so did our cities. In the decades that followed, cities around the world imported this auto-dominant urban design and began to suffer from its devastating impact. Our Cities Ourselves proposes an exciting alternative path.

The aim is to think about what sort of cities we want to live in, the sort of street we want to walk along, and the sort of future we want for ourselves and our children. Looking ahead, how will each of us help create our cities for ourselves?

Though the program focuses on cities in developing countries, New York is among the 10 represented. For its contribution, Manhattan firm Terreform proposes road pricing for Lower Manhattan, bike lanes on the lower level of the Brooklyn Bridge, and public space in place of the FDR.

"Our Cities Ourselves" runs through September 11. Admission is free. Hours, location and other details are here.