Streetsblog New York City

Miami’s Overtown neighborhood was once known as “the Harlem of the South.” In this historic black neighborhood, legends like Nat King Cole and Billie Holiday would play to big crowds late into the night.

As decried by 70 year-old, long-time Overtown resident, General White:

Well there’s nothing but a big overpass now!

He’s referring to Interstates 95 and 395, which Nadege Green explains were built in the 1960s. After that:

Overtown was never the same. [Mr. General White] and thousands of other people here were forced out to make room for the highway.

The Florida Department of Transportation recently made a bid to take over more of the roads in the Overtown neighborhood. But City Commissioner Spence Jones issued a strong objection, saying the agency was responsible for destroying the neighborhood and displacing its residents. “FDOT gets an ‘F’ for our community in Overtown,” she told attendees at a City Commission meeting.

Elsewhere on the Network today: The State Smart Transportation Initiative reports that transit spending by state DOTs has increased slightly. We Are Mode Shift described the insane plans to widen two urban freeways in Detroit, despite the devastation such road projects have wreaked on that city. And A View from the Cycle Path considers how best to reach young people and teach them to become lifelong transportation cyclists.

Does your city have a parking crater problem? If so, it’s probably time for an ordinance prohibiting property owners from demolishing buildings and turning them into parking lots.

In the 1990s, this type of legislation helped dramatically transform part of Denver from a surface parking wasteland into more of a real downtown. Today, other cities are considering laws along the same lines, including Tulsa, which recently took home Streetsblog’s Golden Crater Award for America’s worst downtown parking crater.

Network blog GUD Thoughts (based in Kansas City and short for Good Urban Deeds) reviews some of the better ordinances addressing this issue around the country:

Over in Salt Lake City, city council “recently” passed a demolition ordinance that does the following:

1. Buildings in the downtown area cannot be demolished for parking garages (heck yeah)
2. Parking garages cannot be built on corners, or along Main street
3. New surface parking lots are allowed either behind buildings, or 75 feet away from the street

That’s all really great news in my opinion, especially when parking lots supposedly cover 20% of downtown. In addition to the above, city council is also working their way toward banning demolition of buildings throughout the entire city, unless an owner has submitted plans to replace the structure. Thankfully, city council is thinking this little tidbit through: normally, if an ordinance forbids demolition, but a property owner really, really wants the building gone, they sometimes let it fall into disrepair, making it unsafe and eligible for demo. Not the case with this ordinance. In the event that a building is deemed unsafe, the owner actually has to provide a bond for landscaping and maintenance of the site. Clever, right?

GUD Thoughts also cites Knoxville and the Tulsa proposal as promising examples, and says Kansas City needs to do better when it comes to creating a walkable environment:

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The long legal ordeal is finally over for Raquel Nelson, the mother who faced three years in prison after her four-year-old son was killed by an impaired driver in suburban Atlanta.

Charges of vehicular homicide against Nelson — who was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when her son A.J. was struck and killed — were dropped yesterday in exchange for a guilty plea on jaywalking charges alone. She will pay a $200 fine, according to Transportation for America.

Nelson’s case gained national attention as an illustration of poor road design as a civil rights issue. The homicide charge was based on the idea that she was recklessly “jaywalking,” but Nelson was simply trying to get from the bus stop to her apartment, and the closest crosswalk was one-third of a mile away.

David Goldberg at Transportation for America says that while Nelson was finally cleared of the unjust charges, many other people around the country face the same kind of conditions that took the life of her son:

That particular ordeal is over for Raquel Nelson. But the underlying crime persists – not just in Cobb County, GA, but also in cities and inner-ring suburbs all over the country. Areas built since the 1950s to be automobile dependent now are home to many lower-income families who don’t have access to cars. Nevertheless, the busy roads around them typically have not been retrofitted with safety measures for people on foot, bicycle or getting to and from the bus. The situation is getting exponentially worse as low-wage workers and recent immigrants move to these areas for their more affordable housing.

Fortunately, Goldberg reports, some progress has come out of this case. Greater Atlanta is starting to change the way it approaches road design:

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Gary Howe has been seeing things differently since he suffered a foot injury when he slipped on an icy patch of broken sidewalk in his hometown of Traverse City, Michigan, this winter.

Since then, hobbling has replaced walking for Howe, who runs Network Blog My Wheels are Turning and lives car-lite in this northern Michigan city.

The injury has been an eye-opener, he explains, showing how difficult things are for people who move at a slower pace:

I’ve written about walking speeds and speeds at crosswalk before. Normally, I’m one of the faster ones and well within the 4-feet per second that most people cross a street. With this injury, I’m reduced to about half of my normal pace, around 2-feet per second, maybe a tad faster, sometimes a little slower. I really noticed it the other day when my pace tested the patience of an otherwise considerate driver. The driver stopped (as is city ordinance) and waved me to cross, only to lose patience as I proceeded and finally giving me a gesture from behind the windshield communicating something like, “WTF? Can’t you go faster?”

Before the injury, I was already aware of the need for streets/sidewalks and crosswalk times to be designed with a wider range of abilities and speeds. During the last two months I now have the empirical understanding of what it is like for people with injuries, disabilities, or just slower cadence than the majority of people to get around.

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There’s a proposal on the table in Boulder, Colorado, to preserve 25 acres in the heart of the city for agricultural purposes in perpetuity.

The problem, says Zane Selvans at Flat Iron Bike, is that from a sustainability perspective there are better uses for such a big parcel of urban land. Selvans says the proposal — on a property known as Long’s Garden in North Boulder — is at odds with the city’s goal to become more walkable and livable for people.

The proposal is problematic on a number of levels, he says:

The opportunity cost of acquiring the land’s development rights is very high in terms of land outside the city’s growth boundary that could be preserved with the same amount of money. For example, the City purchased a conservation easement on the 243 acre Windhover Ranch in 1993 for $1M, about a fifth the cost of the proposed agricultural easement on Long’s Garden. Two decades of inflation make that equivalent to roughly $1.6M today. The easement on the 25 acre Long’s Garden parcel is proposed to cost $4.7M. This means that per acre preserved, Long’s Garden costs nearly 30 times as much as the Windhover ranch.

Long’s Garden is immediately adjacent to the Broadway high frequency transit corridor. Purchasing an agricultural easement on this property would permanently degrade the value of our investments in transit service along Broadway by unnecessarily reducing the number of households and businesses that the transit corridor can serve. The functionality and economic efficiency of transit depends heavily on land use patterns. We should not needlessly hinder transit’s ability to serve our community, further incentivizing driving as the dominant mode of travel.

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Yesterday, an Ohio newspaper reported that the state’s urban schoolchildren are 3.3 times more likely to be hit by a car on their way to school than students in suburban districts. More than one out of every 500 children in the state’s eight largest urban districts had been hit by a car in the last five years.

Jason Segedy, the head of Akron’s metropolitan planning organization, said the problem isn’t walking to school, like the Akron Beacon Journal suggested. “Walking to school is not an inherently dangerous activity,” Segedy said. “It becomes so when streets are poorly designed and when drivers behave poorly.”

Tom Fucoloro at Seattle Bike Blog points out today that in his city, streets that fail to work for children are the norm, not the exception:

I was poking around Google Maps over the weekend when I stumbled on a Street View scene [above] that made me stop in my tracks. This group of kids, holding hands, escorted by two adults have to run to make sure they can get across the five lanes of Fauntleroy Way SW at SW Alaska Street in West Seattle.

The red hand is already flashing, the countdown at 12 and the first kids have not even reached the double yellow line yet. There’s no way to know how many of them make it across in the first signal. Are the stragglers still in the street when the light turns green? Are the drivers waiting patient, or do they give a little engine rev to tell them to hurry up? We don’t know because this is the last image from this day in July 2011 that Street View shows.

But that’s beside the point, because this image is incredibly, frustratingly and terrifyingly normal.

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The Federal Railroad Administration’s burdensome safety regulations have long been criticized for putting rail transportation in America at a competitive disadvantage. But a new study says it’s even worse than that: FRA’s over-the-top safety standards actually make us less safe.

David Edmondson at Network blog Vibrant Bay Area, a co-author of the study, explains:

A new report out by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (and I suspect you’ll recognize half the byline), says the FRA’s safety regulations, enforced in the name of safety, perversely make us less safe. Rather than use the best practices of Europe or encourage train manufacturers to innovate, the FRA’s rules prescribe antiquated crash management technology from the 1910s. Dangerous and more expensive trains are the result.

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Last month, the city of Boston released a bike safety report, and it was something of a disaster.

Network blog Boston Streets explains the data was misinterpreted by the city’s bike director, and the report falsely claimed cyclists were responsible for most of the collisions in which they were involved:

Reports immediately focused on an unbelievable finding: cyclists running red lights were the most common cause of crashes in Boston. No doubt guilt-ridden drivers were relieved to learn that scofflaw cyclists were the problem all along.

Within a few hours, however, reporters were correcting their stories. The most common behavior actually cited in bicycle crashes was the ambiguous “Driver did not see bicyclist,” whatever that means.

So what happened? The Boston Cyclist Safety Report combines two crash data research efforts: one summarizing police reports and one revealing EMS data. These studies make up the second and third chapters, respectively, of the Report. Chapter 1 is essentially an executive report written by the city’s Bicycle Director, Nicole Freedman.

Freedman is responsible for erroneously reporting that red-light running was the most common crash contributor, despite that the claim is contradicted within the same report. And despite the fact that it flies in the face of every other bicycle safety study. Transportation professionals are well aware that right-hook crashes and “doorings” are far and away the most common bicycle crash types. How our city’s Bike Director could have overlooked this is truly puzzling.

Regardless of the gaffe, the report did convey some valuable information. Too many people are getting killed and injured on bikes in Boston, and they’re getting hurt most often in a handful of places. However, data from police and other primary sources is often vague and inadequate. “’Driver did not see bicyclist’ does not provide useful insight,” said Boston Streets.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Peninsula Transportation finds that taxpayers in Palo Alto, California, aren’t fond of the idea of chipping in for parking structures. PA Walks and Bikes says Pennsylvania has for the first time added a dedicated fund for walking and biking to the transportation bill. And Transit Miami reports that planners in Fort Lauderdale are leaving bike and pedestrian safety to a vote by neighborhood residents.

The trend of parking-free residential development continues in cities around North America: first there was Portland, then Toronto. The latest city that seems to be catching on to the craze is none other than Miami.

It’s not quite a parking-free project, but Filipe Azenha at Transit Miami reports that a developer in Miami is hailing the “transportation revolution” and its building’s position near transit as a key selling point:

Looks like we finally have a developer in the 305 that understands the importance of mobility options for urban dwellers. Newgard Development Group will soon begin construction of Centro in downtown Miami and they are marketing the building to potential buyers as a project that provides transportation choices for future residents. Not only will Centro be located in the heart of downtown, just blocks away from premium transit, but the developer has partnered with car2go to provide a car-share service at the building’s doorstep. In addition, Centro will have a bike share program for its residents as well.

The problem is, in Miami, developers like Newgard are still required to provide some parking. Azenha interviewed the developer, Harvey Hernandez, who said it’s driving up the cost of doing business:

Zoning allows us to provide parking offsite; therefore we don’t have to build parking. The parking garage is within 100 yards of Centro. We have entered into an agreement with the Miami Parking Authority to provide parking. We also provide 24-hour valet service and there is always the car2go hub at our doorstep.

When Azenha asked if having no parking on-site was hurting business, Hernandez replied:

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Skywalks, pedestrian overpasses, or, as our friends at Transit Miami like to call them, “hamster tunnels,” are an ugly symbol of the last century’s transportation sensibilities. In an effort to comfortably integrate pedestrians into the street fabric and boost sidewalk activity, some cities, including Cincinnati and Baltimore, have been tearing down their pedestrian bridges.

But Miami isn’t there yet. Matthew Toro at Transit Miami says the city’s planners — a bit on the old-fashioned side when it comes to streets and transportation — have installed these things all over the greater Miami region. And it’s not doing the city any favors, Toro says.

These overpasses reify the misguided mid-20th century notion that the automobile reigns supreme. All other modes of transport must make way for, and bow their heads to, the tyrannical king of the road.

Through these pedestrian overpasses, the built environment is effectively screaming at people who choose to use their own energy to get around the city: Step aside, petty pedestrians! Out of the way, bumbling bicyclists! The automobile is coming through!

These are not the messages we should be physically inscribing into the nature of our city. This is not the infrastructure needed to support a socially, economically, and ecologically thriving urban geography.

You want to keep the streets safe for pedestrians? There’s only one real solution: Make the streets safe for pedestrians!

Another slow-adapter, Cleveland, recently inspired a national round of head-scratching over its plan to install two of these babies downtown.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Beyond DC presents a short animation showing sprawl spreading across northern Virginia. WABA reports that federal officials have withdrawn some dubious claims about bike helmet safety. And Better Institutions says construction jobs are not a good justification for infrastructure projects.