Rat Running, City Streets and the Urban Grid

Here in our city, we live on a street that is a prime conduit for zooming rush-hour traffic attempting to avoid congestion. The phenomenon is called rat running, and we have some pretty fast rats.

We yell at the drivers, we write letters to the City, we try to organize our neighbors, but the street racing drags on (pun intended). We have even thought of sitting at the end of the driveway with Amy’s hairdryer, ala a very funny clip we saw not too long ago, hoping to put the fear of radar into our adversaries.

As we sip our morning coffee, it is not uncommon to observe cut-through commandos with gas pedals mashed to the floor, roaring by us in a Muybridge-like blur (Muybridge was an early photo master in depicting motion). For us to try and combat this nonsense with what is euphemistically called traffic calming, we would need 70 percent of our neighbors to agree with us. This in a city where the kar is king – tough math, and especially with a handful of absentee landlords. So no speed bumps or speed tables for us. And our suggestion – to allow parking on both sides of our narrow (24’ wide curb to curb – I measured) residential street at all times instead of alternate evenings – will surely never fly in our city of convenience. Who knows – maybe even the Fire Chief (Fire Chiefs design most of our cities these days. We wouldn’t want to have to redesign their equipment, would we?) would get cranky….

And it’s not just our street, in our neighborhood, where this is a problem. Residential streets and neighborhoods are bad, and even main drags are bad as we rush from work to home, from home to work. Every year hundreds of pedestrians and bicyclists collide with these speeding dinosaurs, and often this causes injury, (and sometimes mortal wounds), to the less armored. I know whereof I speak – I got nailed not long ago by a giant pickup truck.

To make matters worse, our block is nearly 1,000 feet long. Many here are much longer – much more than a quarter mile (dragstrip). There is plenty of time to get up a full head of steam – we think 60 mph or more is often the case. As I was reflecting on this unpleasant conundrum I consulted our City Code. I was wondering what it said about street widths and parking arrangements for a street such as ours. And what did I discover? That the Code (Chapter 128, Article IV, section 128-7, Paragraph 9 – I am sure my nomenclature is wrong, but you can find it if you look) specifies “In general, block lengths shall not exceed 1,200 feet or be less than 500 feet.” WHAT??!?

As if speeding weren’t bad enough! All over the city we have these unendingly long blocks. Long blocks make for all kinds of problems in creating a lively, permeable, fine-grained urban fabric – there is quite a literature on this subject. The biggest urban blocks that get diagrammed frequently are in Salt Lake City – 600 feet square. We got ‘em beat.

I have written here before about the problems with our city’s grid of streets, and our blocks without alleys. Even without hurtling cars, this poses all kinds of problems throughout our city. Add the speed demons and it’s good reason to stay on the sidewalk, or the front porch. Or the backyard.

Rat running and our city grid: a one-two combo of punches. We did get the city to post yellow “SLOW DOWN” strips signs on a few light posts, but that has had exactly no impact on the speeding. And hoping for fewer cars on city streets any time soon is truly a fantasy. Perhaps autonomous cars will make a difference….

In the meanwhile, speaking of backyards, one of our neighbors is cooking up what may be a terrific new approach.

 

 

 

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In Delhi, but not in a car

 

While it is true that Prime Minister Modi just dedicated two GIANT expressways in a city where the car is pretty much completely obsolete, it is also true that this last week the Magenta Line on Delhi’s Metro Network was opened, with 25 stations.

The system is new, clean, well designed, and very heavily used. It carries about 3 million riders every day. And there are still additional lines and extensions in the works.

Planning began in the late 60s, and construction finally began in 1998. The first phases of the system opened in 2002, ahead of schedule, and work has continued unabated, and will until at least the end of this year.

As one starts to investigate the system, one discovers how heavily used it is.

In fact, really heavily used:

202 stations, 1 billion riders in 2016-17, 172 miles of track, 360 trains, 6 lines. Go, Delhi, go!!

 

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If Only They Knew….

Indian Prime Minister Modi was busy on Sunday. He dedicated two expressways – the last portion of the Eastern Peripheral – a giant looping expressway that will, eventually, strangle Delhi, and a 14 lane (!!!) segment of the expressway northeast to Meerut.

During the dedication he told us that these roads would curb pollution by keeping 50,000 cars a day from entering Delhi. Mr. Prime Minister, I am afraid that you are delusional. These expressways you are building as fast as you can – the Western portion of the Peripheral is almost done – are the wrong answer to questions about pollution, congestion, and the future of Delhi – and India.

Modi is the one with upraised arm….

Traffic is already so problematic in most Indian cities that NO road – of any kind, not matter how many lanes – will help. My only counsel to you – I appreciate that you are trying to transform the national infrastructure – is to follow the example of Madrid. In Madrid, they are about to ban cars – any cars – from the central city.

Prime Minister, save your Rupees. Ban cars. Do not build roads for cars. It is too late to build roads for cars, and especially in your nation. You have the worst traffic on the planet.

Madrid.

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Present City, Future City: India

In the Old City, Ahmedabad.

In February and March we spent a month visiting seven cities across India, from south to north, from west to east. Our time there was completely exceptional: invaluable, surprising, educational, revealing, depressing, infuriating, eye-opening and more. I continue to reflect on those days, and it has taken me until now to begin to digest, and therefore to be able to begin to describe, what we saw and experienced. Herewith, some first thoughts.

First, this: it seems certain that the best opportunity to understand the city in the 21st century and its challenges, obstacles, options and solutions, may be in India. India’s 1.3 billion souls live in the largest democracy on Earth, they own a rapidly expanding and developing economy, they face nearly insurmountable problems, and they are working as hard as they can to build a better urban future. Perhaps once we might have gone to Rome or Paris or Vienna to build a foundation for 20th century urbanism in the west. But now it’s time for the American Academy in Rome to become the American Academy in Delhi, or Chennai. I urge you: go, look, learn – you will be changed forever.

The seven cities we visited were, in the order in which we saw them, Chennai (once called Madras), Mysore, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Delhi. Together, their populations equal over 70 million. To put that in some kind of perspective – a central operation both during and after this remarkable journey – the largest 72 cities in the U.S. add up to about 70 million.

In the U.S., 82% of us live in metropolitan areas. In India, 32% of the population live in a metropolitan area. India’s urban populations are exploding – most have doubled in size since 2000 – and this explosion gives potent urgency to the need to solve a panoply of problems that we face, and that they face, as the future races toward us all.

Sarojini Nagar Market, in Delhi.

These cities feature an average density of 30,000 people or more per square mile. To say that slightly differently, each citizen has just over 900 square feet in which to dwell. In U.S. cities, we average about 5,000 people per square mile, or approximately 5,600 square feet per person. Indian cities are really dense.

And loaded with unbearable traffic, too many cars and motos, and endless honking and pushing and shoving. In the context of a measureable poverty of road infrastructure, the cities we visited had – nonetheless – over 20 million cars. Chaos.

Traffic in Bangalore.

Vehicular traffic is so bad that there is NO solution that involves cars. The car is over in many places in this world, and in India expanding wealth will most definitely not want to hear this, but there is no urban mobility solution that involves cars. In Bangalore they twice tried an even/odd license plate number scheme to control congestion, and there were nearly riots in the streets. In that city, the average speed for traffic is projected to be 6 mph by 2030. We sat in one Bangalore traffic jam for over an hour and moved only the length of a ruler. A short ruler.

Gather all of the traffic engineers and transport experts in a room, tell them that they must solve problems in urban mobility, and let them know that no solution they devise can employ cars. We will see what they come up with, and it seems likely we’ll see it first in a city in India: their current state of urban transportation demands as yet unimagined solutions.

Traffic in Delhi.

So many other challenges exist. In Bangalore, for instance, the city has seen 525% population growth, a 78% decline in vegetation, and a 79% decline in water bodies in the last few decades. Some Indian urban experts call Bangalore a dead city. And yet,

Bangalore.

life goes on there.

Traffic in Bangalore, beneath the Metro.

Another challenge: when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, one of his early pledges involved toilets. In India, 53% of homes have no toilet, and this is causing and has caused giant health problems. While 89% of this problem exists in rural locales, it is significant that many Indians prefer NOT to use toilets.

Sprawl on the horizon, Delhi.

And then there is sprawl. As I have noted, Indian cities are expanding at breakneck speed, and while the improvisational and makeshift nature of much vernacular Indian urbanism covers some of this expansion, each of the cities we visited, big or small, is struggling with sprawl. Indian planners and architects and developers, using western and mostly U.S. patterns and models for ongoing contemporary development – single separated uses, car domination, and a pronounced lack of walkability – are creating places (well, not really places, but locations) that they will very soon come to regret. In the context of  the rapid urban growth of each city, the weaknesses of this method of dealing with needed newness shows up really fast. We had a mid morning flight one morning (commercial aviation in India is well developed and quite sophisticated) and we were told we had to depart for the airport at 6:30am for a 10:00am flight. We drove for hours through dreadful and very recent developments, in horrific traffic. Try something else, folks.

Bangalore’s 2031 Master Plan – a bit of a puzzle.

And that something else could find its roots in the contingent and provisional urbanism so characteristic of the oldest parts of Indian cities. While it is true that much of this ad hoc urbanism has all kinds of structural and infrastructural problems, it is also true that the density of this urbanism, its mixture of uses, its walkable intimacy, are potent paradigms for growing a city. Some of the most powerful and moving places we witnessed were these older places. They are so vividly alive, so robust and vital.

The images: two from Ahmedabad, one from Jaipur, and two from Delhi.

That vitality of Indian cities, more exuberantly than almost anywhere we have been, is situated in the  life of the street. In Indian cities, the street is a conduit for, and the principle stage of daily life. Dodge the motos and walk the streets – it is worth every second. Everywhere are merchants on the ground floor, usually open to the street, and often grouped by type: the jeweler’s street, the baker’s street, the tailor’s street.

Jaipur.

Jodhpur.

And above? All kinds of things: apartments, clinics, hotels, more shops – a real mix. These streets filled with commotion are active and vigorous day and night. The theater of these cities has no intermission.

Chickpet and Avenue Roads, Bangalore.

In the end, the challenges are colossal. But these cities are so full of life and energy. And they seem to be – except maybe for the politicians – mostly free of cynicism. And marked by a substantial good will. There seems to be some hope that these cities can and will, eventually, show the rest of us how to make a 21st century urbanism. We can watch, and we will anticipate, how this struggle unfolds. Onward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Song is Ended, But the Melody Lingers On

The intersection of South Clinton and Bly, in Rochester. The green and tan building on the right of Bly is early – from before 1890. The red building on the left of Bly dates from around 1915.

Recognizable? It should be – it is almost certainly present in your city – perhaps right around the corner. Even now this configuration can be found in every neighborhood in our city. Most often, two two-story buildings to the left and to the right at intersections of busier and less busy city streets. Storefronts on the ground floor, apartments upstairs. Beyond them, houses to the left and right, and down the side streets. A familiar tune, but can you make out the lyrics?

Sometimes the houses adjacent to the storefronts are replaced by other two story mixed-use buildings, if the intersection is of two busy streets. In extreme cases there may be a few three story buildings. There are almost always ground floor storefronts. What is the story this tune is telling us? This.

Electric streetcars began here in 1890. The population of the city was about 135,000, and growing fast. Really fast – about 25% to 35% each decade until 1940, when for the first time the population decreased. So let’s focus on that half-century: 1890 to 1940.

(To add a bit more context, in 1920, when the population of Rochester had reached 296,000, a 35% increase over 1910, there were 45,000 cars in the city, but still less than 15% of the population owned one.)

During those fifty years, mobility for most in this city was on foot, by bicycle, or by streetcar. And the two and three story buildings? They marked the streetcar stops. In mornings or evenings, as you hopped on or off the local streetcar, you could do a bit of shopping, or nibbling, at these places: cafes, bars, shoe shops, cleaners and launderers, bakeries, green grocers, and much more. Then you could walk a block or two and be home.

In the city where I grew up, Chicago, these streetcar stops were tied to the grid, were very regularly spaced at 1/4 miles apart, and exerted enormous force in this same half-century in shaping the city and its neighborhoods.

Interestingly, the streetcar stops here in Rochester tend to be spaced about 1/4 mile apart also, even though our grid of streets is anything but regular. Even then, we understood that a five minute walk – a 1/4 mile walk – was something almost all of us could manage, even in terrible North Coast weather.

In 1925, our streetcar map looked like this:

All the streetcars went downtown because that’s where we all needed to be: for work, to do our major shopping, for our most important entertainment, to participate in our city’s critical institutions. Automobiles wrecked this later, but that’s not a part of this particular melody.

And so in neighborhood after neighborhood, on all the city streets that had them, we can find a similar formal expression borne out of the presence of the streetcar. Even though the streetcar vanished here in 1941 – 75 years ago – it is compellingly clear that the city took its shape and form from streetcars, ideas of walkability, the 1/4 mile walk, and the presence of locally based retail and markets. Here are a few more views.

Webster and Parsells

Webster and Grand

Webster and Grand, The Rochester Foresters of America, June 1922

Goodman and Garson

Genesee and Sawyer

This melody, which most can’t hear anymore, is everywhere around us. And the song is actually more resonant than some may suspect. Listen a bit more.

The development community saw the streetcar and its rails plopped down across the city, and they were happy to follow. We can examine plat map after plat map, and we find that as the streetcar developed, so did the form of our city. At first there may only have been one or two buildings at a streetcar stop. But later, as the car stop became more important or the neighborhood density increased, developers were happy to put up more 2 and 3 story mixed use buildings adjacent to the stops.

By the time of the 1926 plat maps, the streetcar routes were well established, and nearly every streetcar stop was built up. Here’s Clinton and Bly in 1918. The blue checks mark the mixed use buildings at the streetcar stop.

And though these buildings, and many, many more like them, are either gone now or are becalmed in the idling breezes of our cities, they nonetheless constitute the narrative of how Rochester, or Anytown, got to look and feel the way it does. Even today the truth of this tune is well known – urban development follows the rails.

As with any story in any city, musical or otherwise, somebody always comes up with a revised version – some new take on the old standard tune. Rochester is no different. Here we go.

This is the intersection of Park and Colby, only a few blocks from us. Yes, it was a streetcar stop. Colby, which runs perpendicular to the plane of this picture, once upon a time dead-ended at the Erie Canal. Here’s a plat of the intersection in 1918.

The two-story masonry building in the photograph is shown here in pink. You can see the streetcar tracks, and at the bottom right you can see the pale blue indicating the Erie Canal.

Now it gets even more interesting. Here is the plat from 1926.

Now the large apartment building shown in the photo is present – it’s the big pink building opposite the little two story pink guy.

But wait. Colby doesn’t dead-end at the canal anymore. Well, the Erie Canal got moved from here in 1918. Where it once was became a fairly large ditch. And what did we put in that ditch? The Rochester Subway. It began operation in 1927, and ran until 1956. Colby Station, shown in this 1926 plat, picked up passengers from both sides of the former Canal, and a pedestrian overpass with stairs gave access down to the platform. Today this exact same place looks like this:

The Colby Station access, now I490, looking east.

After 1940 here we ripped out the streetcar and moved to the suburbs. Population here peaked in 1950, and then plummeted as quickly as it had risen between 1890 and 1940. New mobility caused a fundamental shift in how and where we lived and shopped and worked, just as it had before. Nonetheless, the force of the streetcar was slow to fade, and as we have seen, many of us live in the streetcar city even today. It’s just that there are no streetcars….

How we move defines our urban places. How we move is  powerful, even seductive music. The city of walking and density and mixed-use and localness is a city whose song has ended here in Rochester. But if we can remember that melody, if we can relearn that song, then we can have that place again.

“The moon descended
and I found with the break of dawn
you and the song had gone
but the melody lingers on”

Irving Berlin, of course

Thanks to Jason and Jane.

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Convenience

In a hundred years in any city, change is pervasive. We constantly reshape our urban places to suit our sense of what is most important, most desirable, most necessary. And so here, on Scio Street just north of East Avenue, in Rochester, we can see what that refocusing has created, thanks to Mr. Stone.

Scio Street, looking north from East Avenue, in 1912.

Scio Street, looking north from East Avenue, 2015.

Yes, as far as the eye can see on the west side of Scio, that is a parking garage, for about 750 cars.

The little street visible in the 1912 image, on the right, is called Bell Alley. Today if you strolled over to take its measure, you would find this:

If you walked down Bell Alley to Matthews Street, and then looked back towards Scio, you would see this:

So it has gone, in almost every city in America. Ahh – progress.

I should probably stop snooping around at these photographs….

 

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The Good City and the Culture of Convenience, continued

For those of you who have been following us here at A Town Square for a while – 8 years(!?) – what follows may seem like a bit of heresy, but, as we often say, onward.

It didn’t have to turn out this way. It’s true that the way it has turned out is what Henry Ford wanted, and the Rockefellers, and Le Corbusier, and GM, but it really didn’t have to turn out this way.

Mr. Ford, looking rather smug.

Mr. Corbusier’s Voisin Plan for Paris.

GM’s Futurama – the nightmare that came true.

Cars have wrecked nearly everything in most every city in the world, and almost everywhere it’s getting worse.

But the car has never required us to behave with almost unfathomable stupidity. The car never required us to build beltways and inner loops, to raze our downtowns, rip out our terrific multi-modal transit systems, sprawl across our countryside, and build ridiculous strips of monomaniacal shopping. Cars themselves never said we had to abandon the dense, fine-grained, walkable and heterogeneous fabric of our city centers and neighborhoods. It could have been otherwise.

So, car people, you can keep your cars, and motor along. That’s the heresy part – we haven’t usually left much room for the future of the automobile in the next city.

Here in Rochester, as in cities across the world, our task is clear: find ways to put the car in its proper place. And we are actually making some progress. Our inner beltway, here called the Inner Loop, which savaged our downtown for nearly 60 years, is at least in part going away at last. Hurrah!

Finding the proper place for cars is, quite simply, a very difficult task. Achievable, certainly, but very challenging. And so as we travel to cities, we watch carefully for evidence that others are getting it right. We want to learn these lessons, witness the results, and then share the good news. Here are a few examples.

The Old town of Krakow, Poland is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, first on the UNESCO list as that list began in 1994. Old Town is encircled by Planty Park, constructed on the foundations of the city’s medieval walls. At the heart of Old Town is Rynek Glowny, Market Square, one of the most sensational bits of urbanism on the planet, and unknown to me until 3 weeks ago. (When we stepped into Market Square a few days ago, I had two instantaneous thoughts: “Why have I not known about this place – -it belongs in the top five anywhere”, and “Where are the cars that are usually molesting even the finest urban spaces on earth?”).

The cars, except for local residents and service vehicles, were banned in the Old Town in 1998. The qualified ban certainly does not mean no cars – it just means cars in their place. The streets are commanded by walkers, and the cars – with a few exceptions in our experience – do not assume that everyone will instantly jump out of the way. Truly, shared space.

Ahhhhh: shared space.

Another great example of a city with the car increasingly in the right place is Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Yes – on an island in the middle of the Atlantic.

Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

Tenerife is the largest of the Canary Islands, and boasts a population of around a million. Santa Cruz is the largest city, and the island’s capital. We have been visiting Santa Cruz for quite a while – our first visit was not long after they began service on their streetcar system (now 2 lines, 27 stations, about 10 miles in length).

During each visit we could see the city, already a very nice walking city in 2007, improving, becoming less car-centric, with rights-of-way increasingly biased to pedestrians and flaneurs, or as they may say in Santa Cruz, paseantes ocioso. In our most recent visit, the transformation was startling. Plaza de Espana, redesigned by the Swiss architecture firm of Herzog & de Meuron, is wonderfully revived and enlarged, and has become a true downtown centerpiece.

But best, the coastal highway that was once a barrier, and introduced rapidly moving automobiles to downtown Santa Cruz, is now GONE. As it approaches downtown from either direction (remember this is an island – it’s all about the edges), it dives beneath the city, includes turn-offs into hidden parking, and then rises to emerge on the other side, clear of the central city.

The residue of this, of course, is a very substantial increase in the walkability of Santa Cruz. And as if this wasn’t enough, this has been coupled with changes to most of the downtown streets. They are now paved in cobbles, many feature bollards (or no bollards, ala shared space), and all are linked to the already substantial network of ped streets. Progress!

When we were in Berlin recently, we found their “Urban Transportation Development Plan 2025: Sustainable Mobility.” Berlin is not exactly a car-free city, nor even a shared space city, but the city’s Senate recently adopted the plan (politics and transportation are always uncomfortable bedfellows) which says, in part: “In the future, mobility is more barrier-free, socially just and eco-friendly. Compact and traffic-efficient spatial structures (hmmm – I wonder about this) facilitate active mobility for all, and improve conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. As a result, Berlin can look forward to the image (and reality, I trust) of an appealing major city which is, at the same time, one of the most pedestrian friendly in Europe.”

Berlin – the future.

Now this is not exactly breaking down the door of progressive downtown planning, but it is remarkable for the fact that a city of almost 4 million can find the collective will to say that cars are not their only, and probably not their best, future.

I wonder what it would take to get our City Council to enact such a document? Or your city.

The work of putting the car in its rightful place is the work of building a truly convenient city, and a much better, if not good city. Perhaps if we could see our way to merging convenience and goodness we could make some progress. Onward!

Cairo – Reuter/Abd el Ghany.

 

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