The Way I Feel About You: "In praise of streetcar suburbs."

Two photos from 13th Street in New Albany, just around the corner from our house.

Those parallel lines follow 13th Street north to Spring, then take a long westward curve. As a side note, with each passing day, I detest automobile supremacy more and more.

In Praise of Streetcar Suburbs, Defined and Illustrated, by Pete Saunders (The Corner Side Yard)

... Personally I love streetcar suburbs because they often have a mixed use character that places built after them lack. There's also often a community or neighborhood connectivity within them that I find appealing; many streetcar suburb communities are full of proud, organized and vocal residents who advocate strongly on behalf of their community's values. But I find three reasons that highlight why the streetcar suburb was -- and is -- a superior development type, and why it will make a comeback as American suburbs mature.

They are adaptable.
Streetcar suburbs were often built along grid networks, but not exclusively so; variations in block sizes and topographical adjustments can create differences in them. Streetcar suburbs were built and designed with streetcar systems in mind, but they generally have been able to succeed far longer than the streetcars themselves.

They are efficient.
Streetcar suburbs can accommodate a broad range of residential types and sizes, from large-lot single-family homes to midrise and high-rise multifamily developments. This is largely due to the kind of street networks given to them by the initial streetcars that created them. Another key efficiency: streetcar suburbs are well-suited to the "missing middle" of multifamily residential development, the townhouses, duplexes and small (2-12 units) multifamily buildings that create housing diversity and improve housing affordability.

They are inherently multi-modal.
As perhaps the original transit oriented development type, they are quite able to accommodate public transit; it's in their DNA. However, even if streetcar networks never come back, they usually have transit supportive densities that make other modes, like buses or bikes, quite useful.

Sunday Fact Fest, Episode 03: "How the ‘15-Minute City’ Could Help Post-Pandemic Recovery."

Automobile supremacy is a virus, too. 

How the ‘15-Minute City’ Could Help Post-Pandemic Recovery, by Patrick Sisson (CityLab)

A new C40 Cities report touts Paris’s model for putting essentials within close walking or biking distance as an economic boost for coronavirus-ravaged municipal budgets.

The Covid-19 crisis in the U.S. has torn a hole in city budgets, decimating urban economies across the country even as infections continue to roar back and the specter of second-wave lockdowns loom. Las Vegas faces “the most serious fiscal crisis” it’s ever faced. The pandemic is hitting Houston’s finances harder than Hurricane Harvey, according to Mayor Sylvester Turner. Tallahassee, Florida, city officials are trying to “defuse a time bomb” due to $23.4 million in lost revenue this year. Local governments may face a cumulative shortfall of hundreds of billions of dollars, small businesses are closing at staggering rates, and when the temporary boost in unemployment benefits expires, municipal sales tax shortfalls may get even worse.

An international coalition of cities believes that the only path forward for mayors is funding green stimulus plans focused on job creation. The newly released Mayors’ Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery, released July 15 by C40 Cities, an international coalition of urban leaders focused on fighting climate change and promoting sustainable development, was developed by the organization’s Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force. The far-ranging series of plans offers a green prescription for financial stabilization that emphasizes several familiar pillars of progressive urbanism — renewable energy investment, energy-efficient buildings, improved mass transit, and spending on new parks and green space. One core idea: Cities are the “engines of the recovery,” and investing in their resilience is the best way to avoid economic disaster.

One of its recommendations has a more novel ring to it. The agenda recommends that “all residents will live in ‘15-minute cities.’” That term echoes the transformative ambitions of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has doubled down on car-free transit and pedestrian infrastructure in the French capital. Hidalgo made the idea that Parisians should be able to meet their shopping, work, recreational and cultural needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride a centerpiece of her recent reelection campaign. The C40 proposal suggests that following such a model would help global cities live up to the document’s promise of equitable access to jobs and city services for all, and rebuild areas economically hard-hit by the pandemic.

“Fifteen-minute cities, micromobility, and more space for walking and biking are innovative solutions that will help our cities rebuild and restore our economy while protecting lives and cutting dangerous pollution,” Carol M. Browner, former EPA administrator and board chair of the League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement supporting the agenda ...

Pay attention, local theoretical Democrats: "Public Transportation Is a Human Right."

It's a review of James Wilt's book Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?: Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk.

Everyone in the upper echelons of municipal government should read it.

They won't, though -- will they?

Imagine how far ahead of the curve we'd be if Jeff Speck's street grid plan for downtown had been implemented in full instead of gutted.

Sad. So very sad.

Public Transportation Is a Human Right, by Paris Marx (Jacobin)

For a century our cities have been transformed by the car industry, making way for drivers at the expense of cyclists and pedestrians. A renewed movement for urban public transport is pushing back.

After decades of building new roads and expanding highways, commuters are still losing more time in traffic and their commutes keep getting longer. The evidence shows that adding more roads doesn’t relieve traffic; it simply encourages people to drive more.

That reality seems to finally be sinking in with a growing segment of the American public. There simply isn’t the room to fit more cars on congested roads, and that’s leading to renewed investments in other forms of mobility.

In recent years, ballot measures have been proposed around the United States to expand public transit and other non-auto transportation — and they’ve been very successful. Los Angeles’ Measure M passed with the support of 70 percent of voters in 2016 and will funnel $120 billion into transport projects over the next forty years. It’s not alone. In 2019, nearly 90 percent of transit ballot measures were successful, continuing a growing trend over the past few years of residents voting to raise their own taxes to fund better transit.

But not everyone’s excited about such a future of public transit projects. For the past decade, the tech industry has been adamantly pushing technological enhancements to cars that they promise will solve the congestion, the carbon emissions, and the deaths that, in the US alone, number in the tens of thousands every year and balloon to 1.35 million around the world. But the electric cars, ride-hailing services, and autonomous vehicles that are proposed as our mobility saviors aren’t the silver bullets they’ve been presented to be. In fact, the Kochs have even been financing opposition to transit ballot measures using the prospect of self-driving cars to position transit as outdated.

With transport volumes much lower than usual as a result of the pandemic and growing calls to open streets to cyclists and pedestrians, we face a rare opportunity to start making major changes to our transportation system. James Wilt’s new book Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?: Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk was published at the perfect time to give us the tools to challenge tech’s arguments for more cars and imagine a better, collective way of organizing our transportation system.

(Subheadings include: Car Tech Won’t Save Us ... Coronavirus Won’t Kill Transit ... Better Transportation for a Better Future)

During the pandemic, people around the world remarked at the clean air in their cities once most of the cars were off the road. Now, polls show people want new restrictions to keep it that way. Similarly, bike shops in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, have reported increased sales as cities around the world are planning to build new bike lanes and give more space to pedestrians — some temporary, but many permanent.

There is a serious shift taking place, and we must seize the opportunity to reclaim our cities from the automobile as much as possible. In 1973, André Gorz wrote that, “After killing the city, the car is killing the car.” It wasn’t dead yet, however, because it had successfully arranged “for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory.”

The fight for better transportation should be driven not just by getting rid of the automobile, but, as Wilt writes, it must be “one for democratic control over communities” — of which transit is a key part — and “to build a much more beautiful world.” After the death and devastation wrought by the pandemic, especially in the United States, that’s exactly the kind of vision we need.

Multi-modal planning to break the pattern of automobile dependency.

"Many current planning practices reinforce a cycle of increased automobile use, more automobile-oriented community redevelopment, and reduced mobility options. There are good reasons to break this pattern."

What I like about this piece is the way Litman refutes the familiar and shrill "either-or" war-on-cars paradigm by which car-centrists tend to frame the debate.

Multi-modal planning is nothing more than redressing an unsustainable and counter-productive imbalance. As Bluegill noted elsewhere yesterday:

Drivers are often very quick to point out proportionality when they think they pay for all the streets and roads. I like to hook them up with actual facts and then ask which half or so of street space they prefer so other users can have the other half.

It's important reading.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be walking downtown to get my hair cut.

Breaking the Cycle of Automobile Dependency, by Todd Litman (Planetizen)

... People sometimes misrepresent these issues, implying that the alternative to automobile dependency is a car-free transport system, but in most cases the best system is multi-modal, in which people use the most appropriate option for each trip: walking and bicycling for local errands, public transit on major travel corridors, and automobiles when they are truly most efficient overall, considering all impacts. Multi-modal planning ensures that everybody, including people who cannot, should not, or prefer not to drive receive their fair share of public investments in transport facilities and services ...

At Strong Towns: Three reasons drivers should be celebrating and championing bike lanes.

Every time you see one of these ...

 ... think instead of this:

The word "sharrow" is a synonym for abject capitulation. It's a white flag flown by cowardly public officials, of which New Albany unfortunately enjoys an annual bumper crop.

A sharrow enables planners to pretend they're protecting cyclists, while actually doing absolutely nothing except praying drivers might occasionally share the road.

Maybe HWC's engineering guru Jim Rice can tell us more:

(insert gurgling sounds about immutable INDOT regulations) 

Are drivers a privileged class, Jim?

The Constitution fails to mention it, but then again, it says nothing about robber baron capitalism, either.

Now say hello to Rachel, who'll try yet again to penetrate your thick car-centric skull.

Why Drivers Should Support Bike Lanes, by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

 ... In the last month, I’ve gotten back on my bike after several months of infrequent riding. Every trip reminds me how perilous this mode of transportation is when coupled with fast-moving vehicle traffic.

But every trip also reminds me how practical and affordable bike riding is. Each minute on my bike is a minute I’m not using up gas and incurring wear-and-tear on our family’s car. Each time I lock my bike at a new destination, I’ve saved myself $1.75 in bus fare. Each pump of the pedal is time spent in practical exercise, not at a gym that costs me $40 a month to utilize.

More significantly, every time I ride my bike, I’m saving my city money by riding a lightweight vehicle that doesn’t damage the road and rack up maintenance costs for which my local government has likely not budgeted.

What I’ve realized, as someone who both bikes and drives, is that drivers benefit a ton from bike lanes; they just might not realize it. The average driver’s reaction to a bike lane being installed in their neighborhood or along their commuting route is anger that precious road space has been taken away from cars and given over to bikes.

Here are three reasons drivers should, instead, be celebrating and championing bike lanes ...

ON THE AVENUES: Sniffles, gratitude and mental exhaustion. Apparently vacation is over.

ON THE AVENUES: Sniffles, gratitude and mental exhaustion. Apparently vacation is over.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

All things considered, I’d have preferred to return from vacation not suffering from a cold, although perhaps it was a tolerable price to pay for the sheer joy of returning to Europe.

That said, the overall tone of our travels was slightly different this time around. I’ll come back to these feelings in a moment, but before this, allow me to describe the first morning back home.

It was Monday, and with the fridge purposefully denuded of groceries, a bit of foraging in the pantry produced my last tin of kippers and enough stale crackers to soak up the oil. The espresso machine purred nicely back from enforced dormancy and produced three savory shots.

I carried breakfast to my customary upholstered seat in the living room, powered up the laptop in preparation for the daily regimen of recreational polemics, and watched contentedly as headlights reflected in the front window, traveling eastbound on Spring Street.

The last time we returned home from Europe, this hadn’t yet occurred. Now, rationality finally has been allowed to prevail, and a full month into the Downtown Grid Modernization Project’s phased inception -- and with my snarky notation of “rumor” no longer necessary for qualification -- downtown New Albany lacks only laggardly Elm Street's compliance to conclude the long overdue reversion.

Did I mention long overdue?

It appears that our two-way street grid changeover has been implemented with a bare minimum of problems – no multi-car pileups, head-on collisions or sheer panic attacks.

It’s a good thing, too, or else social media pundits with the attention spans of gnats wouldn’t have had enough time to endlessly pontificate about taking the knee or demanding to know when the Dunkin’ Donuts will open.

14 years later, at long last, we’ve arrived at the end of the beginning – and as such, if you think local street sanity advocates are finished bitching, you haven’t been paying attention … at all.

In the coming weeks, months (yes, and years), there'll continue to be necessary questions, because Jeff Gahan has gifted us with the bare minimum of two-way grids. I hope we haven’t forgotten the manifest possibilities Jeff Speck showed us.

• Are the “enhanced” yellow-blinking crosswalk lights designed to assist pedestrians or to maim them?
• When commercial vehicles block bicycle lanes, will they be held accountable?
• How does the city plan to ensure the safety of sharrows?
• When will pedestrian connectivity extend between the north and south sides of Main Street?
• What does City Hall intend to do with those portions of the downtown street grid nearest the interstate ramps, which in 2017 were sacrificed to the same old political cowardice and kept primitive?

There are dozens more questions just like these, and make no absolutely mistake: if someone doesn't continue asking them and expecting coherent answers, the same old civic time-servers can be expected to shift into absentee coasting, because it’s a simple fact that if we hadn’t kept pushing, prodding and provoking them these past 14 years, the current round of grid reforms likely would not have taken place.

May the revolution of rising expectations live long and prosper. Without it, we’re doomed to the same frustrating mediocrity from the C students.

---

If you look in the dictionary for “multi-modal transportation options,” there should be a map of the Netherlands.

Last Friday afternoon we were seated at a table attached to a café in Haarlem. The table was located across the street from the café, by the river. As our server passed back and forth, she was watching for persons, bicycles and automobiles.

She was impeccable. Drivers and cyclists seemed attentive, and there were no issues.

Try imagining the chaos in New Albany.

Boats sailed past on the river, and a bus stop was around the corner. Had we boarded one of the buses, we could have been at the train station in ten minutes, or Schiphol Airport in 35.

In America, it was ordained long ago that we subsidize cars to the exclusion of other options. In the Netherlands, other options are prioritized, and while cars are not excluded, they’re contextualized.

Gasoline costs $7 (or more) a gallon. People are walking at all hours of the day. In central Haarlem, there’s an underground parking garage used strictly for bicycles.

I’m compelled to fall back on my Theory of Stunted Imagination. It seems to me that for many folks hereabouts, it isn’t only that they can’t grasp multi-modal transportation options in the real world. It’s that they can’t even imagine them, and what can’t be imagined obviously cannot exist.

But at least we’ll always have college basketball to keep us safe and warm at night. On second thought, if it’s okay with you, I’ll read a book. After all, reading helps with the ol’ imagination.

---

You’ll enjoy the next section, because I'm about to contradict myself. Get used to it. I'm getting old, you know.

---

2016 brought the opportunity to visit both Estonia and Sicily. There were plenty of space/time ghosts inhabiting these locales, but because Tallinn and Catania were almost entirely new to us, these spectral yardsticks were mere calibration models.

Haarlem and Poperinge (Belgium) are different. They’re places previously visited over a period of years, where the passing of time (and sadly, people) is much more in evidence. It’s harder to keep familiar eyes fresh, and yet there are rewards from familiarity.

Consequently, there was an elegiac quality to them, although in fairness, “elegiac” is a property I’ve associated with Europe since the first time I traveled there 32 years ago. History is everywhere, whether your own variety or the stories of previous generations. It’s hard for me not to be introspective about something so intense.

As Americans, we tend to focus on the Europeans who left their homelands and came across the water. However, the vast majority stayed right where they were. Conversely, it’s not exactly a secret that for most of my adult life, I’ve felt misplaced in my own country.

I haven’t done anything about it because of a problem that outweighs even that of a drunken, errant stork: a vein of stubborn contrarianism compelling me to stick around and try to change (some might say eviscerate) my surroundings rather than run away from them.

Earlier this month, while enjoying the hop parade in Poperinge, a Moroccan feast in Mechelen and most importantly, the reclaiming of lapsed friendships in Haarlem, I was keenly aware of all these intersecting lines: where I’ve been, what I’ve learned, the state of my own consciousness, the absence of those who’ve left the room, and the sands in that damned cliché of an hourglass.

I thought a lot about the 14 years it took us just to make that street in front of the house run both directions … and how I’m not sure I want to devote another decade and a half to the next incremental, delayed and imperfectly understood example of what I just saw with my own two eyes in the Netherlands.

And so, frankly, here I am.

Where “here” is remains unclear, as it has since 1985. The short term pub comeback plan hasn’t altered; if anything, observing time-honored methodology in the Low Countries made for High Times in what passes for my soul, and I’m aching to get back to what I know best.

Assuming it all works out, the focus of my immersion almost surely must change, and I suppose the point is that since the conclusion of this month’s trip to Europe, the tipping point may have been reached.

Another 14 years just trying to convince Jeff Gahan and a motley collection of “Let’s Pretend We’re Democrats” that 2 + 2 really does equal 4?

That’s not civic engagement.

Rather, it’s masochism, and I may be getting too old for this.

---

Recent columns:

September 21: ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Getting in tune with the straight and narrow.

September 14: ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Beef Steak and Porter always made good belly mortar, but did America’s “top” steakhouses get the memo?

September 7: ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: We are dispirited in the post-factual beer world.

August 31: ON THE AVENUES: On a wig and a prayer, or where's the infidel gardening column?

Them's fightin' words: "Streets are for everyone, not just motorists."

At the risk of repeating myself, allow me to repeat myself.

From Victoria, British Columbia, comes another reinforcement of well-reasoned points that consistently elude so many New Gahanians as they stare at their phones while driving.

A few bucks more for complete streets?

Of course. We have a hundred years of redress to accomplish.

Comment: Streets are for everyone, not just motorists, by Todd Litman (Times Colonist)

... Many urban streets are becoming more complete and multi-modal, including better sidewalks and crosswalks, bike lanes, bus lanes and bus stops.

Some people assume that this harms motorists. They are wrong. Everyone benefits from improved travel options that reduce traffic and parking congestion, increase road safety and reduce motorists’ chauffeuring burdens. Most people will experience times when they cannot drive; better mobility options prepare our community for our future selves.

Of course, roadway changes are disruptive, but please give them a chance. Slowly but surely, complete-streets policies are helping to create more efficient and complete communities.

Thanks Victoria, for improving walking, cycling and public transit. Please don’t stop.

Death to auto-centrism: "If widening roads worsens congestion then is it also true that narrowing or removing roads reduces congestion? Yes."

Undoubtedly one of the clearest explanations I've read.

Why Road-Widening Doesn’t Work ... And What Does, by Adam Greenfield (The Plaza Perspective)

 ... No longer can road widening be justified as a congestion-easing tool. Road widening lengthens commutes, increases household costs, worsens pollution, harms the economy, and, let us not forget, kills and injures millions of people globally every year. Transportation departments and politicians had the evidence decades ago and many continue to ignore it to this day. We need to make them understand.

The solution to congestion is compact development and multimodal (and sometimes pedestrian-only) streets. Wherever cars come into contact with well-designed human-scaled cities there’ll always be congestion; cars are extremely inefficient uses of space, after all, and are incompatible with great places. The question is: Do we want a lot of traffic congestion or a little?