Urban Renewal: Getting Cars Out of the City Center
Posted by Glenn on March 12, 2006 - 9:29pm in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: automobile, congestion, oil, peak oil, traffic, transportation [list all tags]
Despite some lip service against the evils of Robert Moses type highway building, public policy has focused on facilitating as many automobiles into the central business districts as technically possible. Great sums of money and planning effort are still spent on trying to allieviate traffic congestion, only to find that once one bottleneck is "fixed" many other arise. We see this in the timing of traffic lights, the widening of roads at the expense of sidewalks, pedestrian barricades, the number of traffic police used to facilitate traffic at bottlenecks, etc. And yet where has it all ended - more and more automobile traffic constantly congesting the scarce public space of our urban centers.
Building on the last post on 21st Century Urban Renewal, the new study "Necessity or Choice? Why People Drive in Manhattan" released by NYC's Transportation Alternatives and Interloafer's fairly detailed list of policy fixes (which I agree with 100%), I would like to start a conversation about auto-dependency by debunking many of the traditional assumptions about automobile traffic in the urban environment. It's time to revisit the thinking and assumptions that got us here.
A) Large numbers of automobiles entering a city's Central Business District (CBD) are necessary and essential to the flow of commerce.
B) The automobile is the only way that many people can enter the city to do business.
C) Necessary delivery trucks/vans, commercial vehicles (like taxis, livery cabs) and Mass Transit Buses are the main source of traffic congestion, which is the main deterrent of more people entering the city.
D) Any attempts to limit the number of automobiles on the road are economically harmful, politically unpopular and only causes more traffic congestion.
E) Therefore we must deal with all the negative effects of automobiles as a necessary cost of doing business
Based on data from the Transportation Alternatives report on New York City, which used publicly available government information, it's time to completely throw out these assumptions for New York City and many other large urban centers:
A) Automobiles contribute very little to the overall economic activity of the Manhattan CBD. About 30% of automobiles entering the CBD drive through it without stopping or doing any business. Automobiles contribute less than 14% of all trips to the CBD. Those 14% of trips are no more valuable than trips made by foot, bike or mass transit.
B) Ninety percent of people who drive to the CBD have a mass transit option. People drive instead of taking mass transit to the CBD for convenience, not as a necessity. In many cases the time difference is less than 10 minutes.
C) Passenger cars, many of which are occupied by only a single person, make up 60% of the automobiles entering the CBD. Personal cars (low value traffic) are the real source of the congestion that inhibits higher value traffic like commercial deliveries, buses and short distance taxis from making their trips efficiently.
D) Rather than causing economic harm, reducing the number of passenger cars in the Manhattan CBD would appear to increase the efficiency of higher value automobile traffic. This is no doubt why during the recent transit strike that the Bloomberg administration chose to restrict entry to the Manhattan CBD to only cars with 4 people or more.
Politically, this should not be a big deal. Most people in NYC do not own cars and most of those that do would never think of using it to commute into the CBD during the peak commuting hours due to lack of available parking. The disconnect politically lies not with the voters, but with their representatives and public employees that have special parking permits which encourages them to drive at 2-3x the rate of most classes of workers.
Traffic planners now readily accept the assumption that if you relieve bottlenecks, build more and wider roads, more automobiles will show up. In fact, that's usually the main reason to build more roads or widen existing ones - to accomodate more traffic. If that logic is true, why wouldn't closing roads and narrowing roads will result in fewer cars over time?
E) Given how low value passenger automobile traffic turns out to be, it is surprising that we continue to tolerate the negative impacts they cause - pedestrian and cyclist deaths, traffic congestion, air pollution, noise/honking disruptions and just the sheer waste of scarce public space.
Based on this analysis, governmental action to limit the number of low value automobile traffic on the streets of dense urban areas can only serve the public interest, regardless of energy prices. Peak oil is only the latest reason to provide carrots and sticks to encourage more use of mass transit and less dependence on automobiles in dense urban environments.
The disconnect is with people who don't live in the city.
I worked for the NYSDOT in NYC several years ago. Some in the community were calling for expanding "the world's longest parking lot" (AKA the Long Island Expressway). We dutifully drew up rough plans for making the LIE a double-decker highway, thus doubling the capacity, but we all knew it wouldn't happen. Not only would it be insanely expensive, but it wouldn't do any good. It would just encourage people who were carpooling, taking the bus, or taking the LIRR to drive in their own vehicles. Call it a corollary of Parkinson's Law: traffic increases to fill the capacity of any highway you build.
At the same time, a perfectly good ramp was being torn down and replaced upstate, in the Albany area. Why? There was a 10-minute wait during morning rush hour. New Yorkers considered it hilarious that 10 minutes was considered a long wait, and ridiculous that ramp is almost-new condition was being torn down.
If you've ever been to Austin, with a core city of 750K and metro area well over 1 million (plus exurban sprawl, but we won't count that), you'll see one state capital that, mass transit quality or no, is underserved by freeways.
Austin at 5 p.m. Friday is worse than anything we normally have here in Dallas, and approaches the Southland or NYC in congestion levels at times.
The east reliever freeway will help, but it won't be done for several years.
I'm not sure what the answer in the west is. Many of those cities were built for the car.
But in the northeast, the best answer may be to simply do nothing. The cities there were built before WWII, and were designed for limited car use. They may be ideally designed for the post-carbon age. The downtowns will renew themselves as gas prices rise.
Even where there is good rail connections, the service stinks...
I think the key for the Northeast will be revitalizing the old city centers and linking them to each other with good rail. Connecticut is a good example of a state with good serviceable rail system that it can fall back on. New Jersey is quickly catching up with some of their light rail projects. The NYC, Boston and Philly metro areas are very well connected to their suburbs.
Buses can be a short term fix until rail can be restored.
The only thing that gives me pause about trains is that the infrastructure is so vulnerable. As it is, metal theft is an increasing problem. It's often treated as a joke. Three miles of train track dug up and stolen in Germany. Police in Canada ordered to guard recycling bins because so many cans are stolen. Aluminum goal posts stolen and sold for scrap.
The crack epidemic was raging when I worked in NYC. Someone peeled the aluminum trim off a car while I was sleeping in it. He could get $2 a pound for it. People would occasionally fall through the street, because some crackhead had stolen a cast iron manhole cover. Grand Central was shut down one Friday afternoon, leaving 300,000 people stranded, because someone stole 100 feet of copper signalling cable.
Just another reason why I think it's going to be hard to maintain our infrastructure in the post-carbon age.
Rail can be protected by placing fences on both sides of the rail line, but I guess the problem has not risen yet to an extent that it would be worthed the effort.
BTW I know for example that in Bulgaria sabotaging rail lines is a heavy felony. Think that could help a bit if implemented everywhere.
I suspect most people don't even know where the oil and gas pipelines are. (If they ever find out, perhaps oil "bunkering" will catch on here, too...) But everyone knows where the train tracks are.
We had several such cases in Bulgaria even though there in not that much pipeline network. Not to mention about the electricity being stolen by people, mostly from the poor minorities - the amount is in the range of tens of millions kwth yearly. You would think it is dangareous and you would be right, but the thiefs get better and also better-equipped with time.
It is amazing what people do when energy is scarce or they can not afford it.
"
Theft or attempted theft from pipelines has been a
consistent feature of operations, particulary in
Eastern Europe, over a number of years and a major
cause of incidents. A recent case in Italy unfortunately
led to the death of the perpetrator. One
presentation described the measures being taken in
Hungary to address this problem. Between 1992
and 1999, the Hungarian system was attacked more
than 100 times. Although not all of these attempts
were successful, the value of fuel lost was substantial.
Even more expensive was the cost of clearing
up the spilt oil. To counter this threat, a sophisticated
leak detection system has been installed. This
not only detects leaks, but also pin-points the position
of the leak which facilitates rapid intervention.
As a result, the number of attempted thefts has now
decreased dramatically.
"
Day bin robin dat gas wid hot taps down sa Na'orlens town na on 100 yera.
There's too many pipeline qualified welders and too much wild swamps to keep an eye on every foot of pipeline. Those guys get out there and make hot taps (welding on the pipeline while under pressure) to run a 1 inch line over to the house. Fortunately, that's gotten harder to get away with since the advent of leak detection. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
Down in Colombia they just used explosives. If they didn't have that, they would unbolt the flanges. Not very discrete and makes a BIG mess.
You can also run a parallel wire under a Hi V electrical transmission line and induct power off of it without ever touching it, but also illegal.
It's really amazing what you can get away with if you're wearing a coverall or a hardhat. People just ignore you, assuming you're on some kind of official business.
Someone stole the soda vending machine from my office. He just dressed in a coverall and brought a handtruck. Not only did we not stop him. We helped him load it in his truck.
Take out 3 or 4 high power electrical towers and poof most places have to re-route. I have only written in Fiction, I am wondering If I should even try to publish that story. "Sucidial mailman car bombs city" But the Mailman save the day.
Almost all of our inplace day to day living is in a map somewhere and is up for public veiwing.
If they really wanted to hurt us, we could not stop them.
There is a guy who drives a beat up Toyota pick-up and is always here on tuesday and wednesay to pick of anything metal, to sell. Keeps himself in spare parts for his Toyota.
I pull apart old computer parts for the items inside.
But I am like you, once we go to far down a road, we are never going to get back up it. Just hiking a round trip make sure you can travel all the way back the way you came. OOpps Oil is gone joe,, what do we do now??
For all I care, WTSHTF, you can eat me, I just want to make sure the two of you get along. As long as you keep me laughing before that.
The largest place I lived was Long Beach in Califormia. The smallest, The USGS did not include a spot on the map for it, though it had been a house at some time before cars, Ozark mountains. The wild reclaims thing very fast.
As to Crack dealers, or other drugs. They sell it openly on my street. Until mid-May or At the latest late-May I live in Huntsville Alabama, Relocating to Colorado. I doubt they are bold everywhere. But the cop traffic goes down when the complaints reduce or stop.
I learned to drive in a town so small there weren't even any traffic lights.
The cost of road maintenance is soaring
Due to high fuel prices, of course.
Even considering that, Austin saw considerable growth as a tech center in the 90s -- all the high tech areas saw considerable traffic congestion. Or maybe the disastrously designed double-decker part of I-35 turned Austinites off to freeways. :)
I'm a suburban Dallas newspaper editor, and have to go down there at least once a year for state high school sports championships. It takes me as long, literally, to drive the last 30 miles as the first 175, at times.
Of course, the whole way from Dallas to Austin, you have "left-lane lopers," etc. bollixing traffic up in non-urban areas.
It is true and results in less cars on the roads. In many areas in Europe, the base infrastructure is hundreds of years old and some areas simply will not even handle 2 lanes of traffic. A lot of times, one car is a squeeze. Many city centers, especially those within the old city walls that have narrow streets anyway, but once did allowed automobile traffic, are now found completely closed to traffic. Strangely enough, modern closures to traffic were initially resisted by the store and business owners in the area, but many have found their businesses revitalized when cars are denied access. The areas where cars are newly prohibited spring immediate life as many people gladly abandon their cars, leaving them parked in garages or on the street, outside the old walls to spend a nice afternoon away from the noise, pollution and dangers of crossing the narrow streets with little cars zooming all around. Sidewalk cafes quickly take up the vacant space and become an enjoyable place to spend the afternoon.
Some of the other busy but smaller capacity highways between closely tied cities have begun to plan on reducing the capacity of the highways to force the motorists up to the toll highways that bypass the local cities completely. Traffic lights are taken down and replaced with round-abouts and the roads are constricted in the areas entering the rounda-bouts. A two lane street will become a 1-way street and, just before the round-about entry, one lane will be eliminated. The added benefit is that the vacant lane is then available for parallel parking, something sorely needed in most European commercial areas. A 4 lane/2 way street will be reduced to 2 lanes, with parallel parking on each side. At first its a little difficult to get used to the changes, but once one discovers the new routes and parking areas and the new spaces that have opened up, you realize that it was a change for the better.
The other alternative is the "conjestion charge" which I will let our GB friends tell you more about. I think that, if I'm not mistaken, the daily charge for entering London centre during business hours is about 8 £, or about
$15.00. From what I can tell, it does seem to keep the traffic down to minimum levels there. Lots of people walking now. Unfortunately, the weather is absolute crap most of the time.
We've had the opposite experience here. About 30 years ago, there was a big push to "revitalize Main Streets" by closing them to traffic. Instead, there would be pedestrian malls, that would encourage people to stop and shop.
The effect was the opposite of what the merchants and city officials hoped. Instead of revitalizing downtown areas, it killed them. People just avoided downtown altogether, instead driving out of town to the malls.
Now many of the pedestrian malls are being torn up, and the roads being put back.
Have you been to the Ithaca Commons? Through a combination of preventing bigbox sprawl and preserving the downtown area with a pedestrian friendly mall mixed with a dense residential area nearby have helped it avoid the decline of many similar small towns. For instance, when one of the anchor stores - Woolworth's - closed down, they used it as an opportunity to construct a first rate library in it's place. The Commons have never been more popular.
But then again, Ithaca seems to be an oasis of progressive ideas...
Some pedestrian malls have been successful. I think the one in Honolulu has worked out okay. At least it looked like it was thriving the last time I saw it.
Victor Gruen, the guy who came up with the Main St.-to-pedestrian mall idea, thought the key was to realize what the real problem with downtowns were. Most of them were designed before Americans became car crazy. They simply could not handle the post-war explosion of cars. He felt there was no point in just closing Main St. without dealing with the traffic issue.
Gruen's design did not just close the street. It involved ring roads and parking lots that would encourage traffic, but keep it out of downtown. Not conincidentally, Gruen was from Vienna. His plan was directly modelled on Vienna's Ringstrasse.
I lived out in Strebersdorf, which is the last stop on on the streetcar. Instead of endless sprawl beyond that, I could walk to active farmland within a mile of the tram station.
Public transportation (or anything that keeps cars out of the downtown but gets people in) does help. I suspect that's one reason Honolulu's mall worked out okay. They've got an excellent public bus system. (Helped by the extremely high population density there. When you live on an island, sprawl really isn't an option.)
I think your earlier comment about the Political Possibility of reducing highways not being really feasible until more people accept the 'end of car culture' is also going to be the rub with Downtown malls, and I imagine there will be a lot of 'We tried that, and it doesn't work' going on with city councils for years to come. Portland, Maine (my home) has just a ridiculous amount of its limited peninsula devoted to parking garages, and more are under construction. I can only imagine the amount of energy these are eating up, to continue committing us to an urban model that assumes the continuous availability of the same levels of energy-use.
I'm glad to hear people offering examples of restructured downtown areas that have already prospered, and what combinations of coordinated features, timing, ingenuity and luck.. helped make them succeed.
Vancouver, BC is an interesting example of an explicit strategy to limit vehicles and encourage ped and bike as well as mass transit (busses and ferries).
When I was in school, we were reading things like Streets for People, by Bernard Rudofsky, and hearing about Peter and Alison Smithson's Streets in the Sky. But, as you noted, many of the US projects they inspired were flops.
But, once inside, Americans will walk all day in suburban malls. They'll walk up and down a vacation boardwalk, or in the trendy Rouse projects Inner Harbor and Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Go figure.
And that's the key, I think. It's convenient. There's plenty of parking, and it's free. It's perceived as being safer than downtown. You're protected from the weather. Once you're in the mall, you don't have to worry about rain, snow, sleet, mugging, 100F temps, etc.
Plus the selection is huge. Malls are out in the suburbs because land is cheap (and taxes are often lower, including sales taxes). So the stores are a lot larger.
Some downtown revitalization projects have been a success. It seems to help if there's a tourist attraction involved. (A beautiful waterfront, for example.)
I think the problem was the idea was so poorly implemented. It was like they thought they could trick people into shopping. You're driving along Main St., and suddenly, bam! It ends, and you're facing a pedestrian mall. Oh, well. Might as well stop and shop, since I can't drive through.
Even the guy who invented the pedestrian mall idea hated the way most cities did it. It was never his intention that it be used that way.
But when you're in a place that's designed for people, and it's filled with just right the right number of people, it tends to be a great place. When you think of all the money and resources spent on strip malls, and just imagine the same resources spent on livable neighborhoods, it's kind of heart breaking.
Maybe if a baseball field replaced the parking lots, we could make stripmalls kind of nice.. hrm...
Most or many US cities and downtowns were created around cars and are anything but a nice place to walk. Everything - the buildings, the parks, even the cafes are much bigger. As a result the distances are longer and it takes a lot of time to get from point A to point B on your feet. In addition what lacks is the long history of culture of a walkable city - as an European the style looks too uniform and boring to me.
The bigger problem though is that you can easily close the streets downtown but if you do not provide enough parking places nearby, people will not have a way to get there. And it dramatically rises your bill for visiting downtown if you need to leave your car in a more distant place and have to walk to your destination. If the municipalities took the burden of building enough free parking near the walkable areas the results would be completely different IMO.
Some Catholic U professor wrote a book identifying "Myths of Modern Architecture," one of which was the Myth of Zoning. Here's a zoning list for one small city (parentheticals mine):
Agricultural (until needed for intense development)
Low Density Residential
Medium Density Residential
High Density Residential
Residential-Office (Mostly dwellings)
Office Commercial (Dwellings by exception)
Neighborhood Commercial (No dwellings)
General Commercial (No dwellings)
Downtown Residential
Downtown Residential and Limited Commercial
Downtown Office Commercial
Downtown Commercial/Residential
Limited Employment (Light Industrial - No dwellings)
General Employment (Heavy Industrial - No dwellings)
Planned Industrial (Park-like Industrial - No dwellings)
(Nice, substituting Employment for Industrial.)
This historic downtown was not designed around the automobile, and even with all the mixed uses is the most popular and expensive area. Nevertheless zoning ordinances for the rest of the city separates the homes from everything else. The goal is controlling the risk of fire or industrial accidents, but the physical separation means that people have to travel between the zones. It becomes that much harder to find an apartment a few blocks from work, or a job a few blocks from where you've always lived. Given the condition of roadways between zones, you almost have to own a car to travel. The one guy I know who lives downtown drives to teach at a suburban school.
Here it is the other way around and will not be flipped easily; I can say that the "bad design" overtakes the "good design" because of the cheap resources (energy, land, pavement, low-rise building materials). The bad design is the energy intensive suburbia which overtakes the urban pattern because of the much lower cost of development and living. Until energy becomes at least close to be as expensive as housing, this will not change.
Unfortunately we in the US bulldozed much of our 19th century towns and cities in the name of progress. AFAIK, Spain wasn't stupid enough to raze the good parts of Barcelona.
Plus we just had a lot more open spaces....
On the economic side, in the first half of the century and after WWII when European citis were rebuilt, the continent (with the exception of Russia) did not have its own oil and had to import almost all of it, which made additional imprint into the high-tax anti-car policy of all European governments. The North Sea oil appeared much later - in the 80-s and thanks God if I may add.
On the other side USA had plenty of oil and I guess for them it seemed a good idea to build suburbia the way it is now. Which goes to show again that having a plenty of natural resources is not always a blessing.
The whole Mall Died over time, then when Arkansas' second largest Employer needed room MOST off all those nice office building and Rock work went to cover over the Paper Pushers of Gov't.
Gone were the confectionary shops and the soda fountain and the bagel place and bank just did not have the feel as the book store's it took over.
Unless a great deal of understanding go into it, we die in the center and spreadout ward,
Penalties for non-payment are £50 if you pay within 14 days £100 if you pay within 28 days and £150 after that. Three or more outstanding charges and your vehicle may be clamped or towed away and if you do not pay the unclamping fee (£65) or the storage fee (£25/day) your vehicle will be auctioned and all dues subtracted from the money raised.
It is has resulted in a 15% drop in traffic in the zone and a 25% increase in average speed of public buses there. There has been a 30% reduction in congestion and a 5% reduction in accidents. Subjectively the air seems cleaner to me. there has been a corresponding increase in the use of public transport. London, like New York has a excellent underground local railway system.
All the arguments against traffic restrictions in New York were applied to London. There were even death threats to Ken Livingstone the Mayor of London that had the political courage to introduce the scheme. It now has widespread support and is very unlikely to ever be removed
And yes, the weather is absolute crap most of the time but this is England. Shakespeare called it a green and pleasant land but he did not say why it is green.