This week we’re joined by Tony Jordan, President of the Parking Reform Network at the Mpact Transit + Community conference in Portland. We talk about getting rid of our cars, the arbitrary requirements for parking around the country, and Donald Shoup’s legacy.
Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA.
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Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the show:
The City of Toronto has plans for 20km more bike lanes, pushing back on Premiere Ford’s wishes to rip them out to appease car drivers. To get around any prohibitions and limits, the city will reduce car lane widths in order to give bikes more space, technically within the mandate that the number of vehicle lanes not be reduced.
It seems that officials won’t push back too hard as they feel that the total number of lanes matters more than the space cars are given, which is fine. But I wonder what would happen if states here in the US with preemption strategies would go along with the narrowing of lanes and whether they would heed the research on the topic.
We had Dr. Shima Hamidi on the podcast about two years ago to discuss how narrower travel lanes for motor vehicles are significantly safer.
“We found that 12-foot lanes have actually significantly higher number of crashes than nine- or 10-foot lanes, which is counter to the street design practice and most policies and lane width standards that you see currently happening in the US.”
What she also found was that speed limits mattered when measuring the safety of narrow streets. Streets limited at 25mph didn’t see a big difference, but when the speed limits went over 35 miles per hour, the lane widths at 12 and 11 feet had a significantly higher rate of crashes compared to ten foot lanes.
If cities are in fights over more bike lanes and need more space, a three lane road with 12 foot lanes could probably net 6 more feet of space if reduced. Then when the rules eventually change, there will be a whole ten more feet to take another lane if needed in the future. Win-win.
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This week on Mondays at The Overhead Wire we’re Han Solo, but we’ve got some interesting news from the world of transportation and urban planning to share. We talk briefly about tram trains, the NAVI electric vehicle program, Chicago’s big win, and much much more! Below the fold are the show notes with all the items we cover in our digest show.
This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Olivia Plotnick, Founder of Wai Social in Shanghai China. We discuss her summer trip to over 30 different Chinese cities to experience different retail, the impacts of high speed rail, and the social e-commerce ecosystem. We also discuss how competition has made Chinese retail sharper, electric vehicle saturation, and emotional consumption.
Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA.
Find all our episodes on your podcatcher of choice, or in our hosting archive.
In a recent Eno Center for Transportation series on re-imagining USDOT, the items got me thinking about what a complete revamp might look like if we thought outside of the box on transportation. Early on in this newsletter’s history I was asked if I would ever just focus on transportation, and while tempting I ultimately decided against it because everything is connected. And so if you’re not including the things that are tied to the subject, I don’t think you can cover the subject properly.
And so that makes me wonder what it would look like if we took a deep dive at the different agencies under each cabinet secretary or the different committees in congress from the lens of transportation. And not just reforming the DOT itself, which seems sorely needed.
What if we rethought how the Department of Education interacted with transportation policy? Or the Department of Agriculture? What would that look like if we’re trying to get kids safely to school or imagine what is keeping produce from getting to market or the people that need it most?
I realize that would be a huge undertaking but it might be worth the thought experiment. How do we break down all these silos that lead to missed connections. A few years ago we had Chris Fabian on the show to talk about how he helped cities look deep into their budgets to see how they could reduce emissions in each department. The number of small ways that were found to help improve environmental outcomes while find money for programs was quite amazing.
I imagine if a new mayor or governor or even president wanted to think about our systems in a different way, they might find something they can address easily to get some quick wins in addition to the things that are obviously hard to change.
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Something I think about a lot is how our transportation system actually interacts with natural systems. In his book Crossings, Ben Goldfarb shares the many ways that our obsession with road building blocks off animal movements and in some instances even reduces the gene pool for some. While he talks about creatures big and small, he mostly discusses animals and the impact of “road ecology” on them.
But what about flora? Lately we’ve seen a lot of discussions of the need for creating green spaces in cities to reduce temperatures and absorb the impacts of the urban heat island humans have created. We want them to help us, but how in turn do we help them?
The first thing, as Kelly Turner notes, is that we need to measure heat properly. Often we don’t and our mitigation strategies suffer. The parking lot for instance might be shaded, but there are other aspects to heat aside from direct sun that are deadly.
But the second thing is we need to understand better is the actual processes which create thriving biodiversity in cities including natural infrastructure networks. Trees and other plant systems are part of interconnected networks which provide mutual aid in times of stress. But often underground connections through fungal growth are cut off and trees and other plants are left to fend for themselves between the sidewalk and road.
Understanding these connections exist allow us as planners to facilitate aid in our own infrastructure. Vanessa Harden, an environmental designer, has created such a tool; a soil conduit. Soil conduits are are small tunnels under hardened infrastructure that connect natural tree networks together such that they don’t have to endure urban stresses alone.
Through her research, Harden found that trees could connect with others within 30 meters if given the opportunity. Conduits for the fungal networks could create substantial support systems that allow trees to thrive when they would otherwise wilt.
What this type of innovation allows is a synergy between our urban systems and natural systems that could help us thrive and adapt over the long term. As Michael Neuman notes, we have a lot to learn from nature. Human civilization is only around ten thousand years old and our ancestor proto-humans are only a few hundred thousand years old. Trees such as the redwood have been evolving for millions of years. What wise beings they must be.
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This week we’re joined by Cortni Desir, Executive Program Manager for Public Transportation at the Connecticut Department of Transportation at the Mpact transit + community conference in Portland. We discuss her international influences, upgrading bus stops, customer experience, homelessness and transit, and being curious.
To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited transcript of the episode:
This video from the Flying Moose is from several months ago, but it’s the best explainer I’ve seen on Hong Kong’s rail + property model of developing the MTR subway network. What they are clear about is that you can’t just prop up this type of system overnight, it takes decades of planning and lessons learned to get to where they currently sit in terms of fiscal and operational sustainability.
But it also got me thinking about city building and who is on the receiving end of profits from development and who is left holding the bag. During Mpact two weeks ago I was asked by a friend what I thought about California Forever, a development project set between the Bay Area and Sacramento funded by billionaires which would create a whole new city from scratch. Now the program is looking to be annexed by proximate local cities, taking advantage of their current fiscal pain.
My initial and visceral reaction is to oppose it, no matter how good the planning or urban design. It was hard for me to come up with a reason until now that wasn’t just “I don’t like rich people spending a billion dollars to buy land for a city because they don’t like voters in theirs”. But slowly it’s come into focus as my thinking on common wealth and value capture evolve.
The first reason for disliking the current plan is transportation. The city will likely be built with new urban principals and be walkable, but it will need to be connected by public investments in infrastructure to the rest of the state. In the eyes of these developers, that doesn’t mean being part of a high speed rail link between Sacramento and the Bay Area or extending BART to the community. It’s more likely that highways will be expanded as this place will be a commuter town. More VMT, more cars on the road, less actual value and more status quo thinking.
That’s just a minor quip compared to my next point however. New towns and new places from scratch should be a product of public policy and like the rail + property development program of the MTR, the value created by them should not go to land developers alone but rather back into the community, whether that’s transportation or housing investments over the long term.
I know California Forever has a community benefits agreement planned of over $500m, but that’s pocket change when it comes to the amount of value this land will generate over the long term if you built a whole new city on it. It’s a “bread and circuses” type of gesture.
Thinking back to our discussion with Daniel Wortel-London about growth and running government like a business, the decision in New York City was made to make public investments that primed private development that could be taxed. But that taxation was subject to the boom and bust cycles of development rather than the city being the private steady developer creating value on land it owned. And those private profits didn’t go back to the public who had invested in creating value, they just absorbed the losses when they happened.
The results of the MTR rail + property model is proof that if we are going to embark on creating new towns and neighborhoods, the developer or majority stake must be a public entity that can absorb and distribute the value created. But we don’t need only to look to Hong Kong to see where this works, though the example is very illustrative.
On a micro scale, we see this type of process work with affordable housing today in places like Montgomery County Maryland. A government agency, the Housing Opportunities Commission, makes investments in new development by private developers, but since they are the majority owner, the “profit” is used to subsidize affordable housing in a market rate building.
And this way of looking at city building could be a way for an entity like the State of California to think differently about the housing and accessibility crisis than just changing zoning codes and rules for housing elements or building public housing buildings. California could be the majority investor in new places rather than a bunch of unaccountable billionaires, some of whom subscribe to some pretty nutty theories on how the world should operate and would probably be ok if the venture ultimately failed.
Public entities have a strong incentive to get the basic structures of cities right from the start. Decisions made hundreds of years ago on street layouts for example still have impacts today. If new cities is a direction we wish to go, it’s possible to start over and think about them from a different perspective, one where the public wins, not a group of rich individuals.
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I know that everyone is talking about the mayoral race in New York City and I’ll get to that in a second, but I do also want to marvel over what has happened in the last few weeks pertaining to transit and governance as well.
On Halloween, the Illinois legislature sent a transportation reform and funding bill to Governor Pritzker’s desk that looks likely to be signed. The bill included funding for transit through a quarter cent sales tax in Northern Illinois that would need a vote as well as a transfer of two types of fuel taxes.
A new transit authority and board was also created, the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) that would support fare and service integration efforts across all agencies. The Streetsblog Chicago piece linked above has the board chart which I highly recommend looking at. There’s more including parking reform and other things but it’s interesting to have watched the media back and forth to all of a sudden getting a win from an outside perspective.
The other big win was Charlotte’s ballot measure victory that also creates a new transit authority and creates $19B in funding over the next few decades for transit and roads. The roads piece was inserted by state Republicans who wouldn’t allow a vote without it.
In both of these are agency reforms and new governance structures, but there’s also a hope that transit in the US isn’t quite dead yet despite posturing from the current administration and their lackeys.
I’m also heartened to see that revenue was taken from roads in Illinois and given to transit. For too long we’ve seen one step forward for transit and three steps forward for roads in funding. There’s a little bit of that in Charlotte, but there was at least money for transit expansions as well as bus service specifically. We saw the road transfer in PA, and it’s something that more people are seeing as a valid way forward.
Since I started thinking about urban issues in college, transit has been a part of the mix of programs I thought were important in creating cities for people. For many years housing and transit were a singular focus. But the fact that many agencies and transit systems are suffering has been painful and I think started me and perhaps many others on this path of trying to articulate what our personal values are in regards to how society and cities should operate and be organized. How should we move around in them? Should they be for the few? Or the many?
In listening to Zohran Mamdami’s victory speech last night, I could see more clearly why he appeals and speaks to so many. And this morning, a piece in Time Magazine by Fahad Zuberi laid out quite succinctly how his positions and promises fit into the frame of city building.
“Urban development in America has never been just about buildings, budgets, or blueprints. It has always been a reflection of our moral imagination—of what, and whom, we believe cities are for. To understand Zohran Mamdani’s rise, we have to place him within this longer story: the struggle over whether cities should serve capital or justice.”
I’ve intimated over the last year and a half that I’ve been writing longer form pieces in this intro that all of these things we do in the process of city building should also be done for the common good of its residents. Transit, housing, care infrastructure, public health, energy and environmental protection should all be about fairness and justice. They are all intertwined.
Our friend Karel Martens in his book Transport Justice argues from a philosophy standpoint that we should create sufficient transportation systems that work for you whether you are rich or poor. But cities across the country have moved away from being places where you can thrive whether you are rich or poor.
In today’s US cities, housing is scarce and expensive, you’re forced to purchase a vehicle and a smart phone to participate in society, and if you have a little bit of an unlucky streak and get sick, you could suffer for a long time. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If you put into the system, you should get something out of it. Of course there are tradeoffs and fairness looks a lot different to some people than others. But it’s not fair to work hard and get nothing while others get everything. So I hope we can move more towards an urban politics of fairness for the many, not the few.
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This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Corrigan Salerno of Transportation For America. We discuss three transportation principles for a better federal transportation bill, how to create better reporting data for MPOs, and better bus manufacturing.
Listen to this episode first at Streetsblog USA, or find it in our hosting archive vault.
Below is a full unedited computer generated transcript:
