A fun post from Kaid Benfield at NRDC. What if the NCAA basketball tournament was determined by Walk Score? The Full Article includes a breakdown of each arena. Check it out!
BTW, just to see how my Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets would do: 75, respectable. That was good enough for Ohio to make it to the final four.
McCamish Pavilion Walk Score Results - Home of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, Atlanta, GA.
So I was nominated by Treehugger for a Best of Green Reader’s Choice Award. That is very cool! Especially considering all the other awesome websites from that category. Check ’em out.
But what’s really interesting is that I haven’t set out to be a green crusader. All I want to do is increase quality of life in cities and towns because I never bought into the suburban version of the American dream. It’s just a great coincidence that many of the qualities that make towns and cities great places to live, work, and play also makes them green. Walking, cycling, and transit are not just easy ways to get around a city, they are also quite green. I prefer small cars because they take up less space and make less noise than large cars It’s a lucky bonus that they pollute less. I like trees because they are nice to look at. The fact that trees reduce the urban heat island effect is a wonderful side-effect. I prefer denser neighborhoods because density makes more locations easily accessible. The fuel saved from unnecessary travel in these neighborhoods is just icing on the cake. It appears that living the good life goes hand in hand with saving the planet. What luck!
Joel Pett cartoon from USA Today.
So the other day I was standing in line at McDonald’s to get a delicious Shamrock Shake in honor of St. Patrick. It’s busy, I’m third in line of about 8 people. I’ve been waiting about 5 minutes, and I’m beginning to get impatient. When the person at the front of the line finally wraps up placing her order, the guy in front of me doesn’t notice. He’s too busy staring down at his iPhone to notice that he was holding up the entire line. After about 3 seconds of the cashier failing to get his attention, I walked up right behind him, about two inches away from the back of his head, and screamed in his ear. He did not appreciate this in any way. He responded with a middle finger and tossed a few choice words back at me. So I countered with two middle fingers and upped the volume and level of profanity a few notches. He then threatened to kill me and my entire family. Then he stepped up and placed his order. I placed my order and we went our separate ways. No one around us seemed to be bothered by this whole ordeal. It was just business as usual.
You have probably gathered that this did not happen. What really happened was I said, “hey, you’re next”. He looked up and said “oh, sorry, thanks”. That first story was completely unrealistic and absurd. Except it isn’t. If you replace the McDonald’s cashier with a traffic light, it suddenly seems somewhat normal.
Why do some of us (myself included) act like jerks when we drive? When walking down a busy sidewalk, I don’t feel the urge to lash out at the people around me for being in my way (ok maybe sometimes, but I don’t do it.). I actually enjoy the experience of walking down a bustling city sidewalk. It’s nice to do a little people watching and enjoy the sights and sounds of the city as I make my way from point A to point B.
Obligatory cliche road rage image. Although I believe these people are still parked.
However, behind the wheel of a car things are different. The effect happens to many people. When driving, we no longer view the other road users as people. We view them as competitors in some imaginary race to nowhere. If someone passes you or cuts you off, that is a personal attack on your character and freedom. It must be met with a swift and disproportionate response. Pedestrians and cyclists are viewed as second class citizens, clearly not good enough to drive a car. They are treated as mere obstacles in this frantic race, and honking at them may help you win the race. The city and store fronts around the drivers disappear into a blur. Their presence is but a distraction to winning the race.
I'm the only qualified driver on the road.
It’s amazing how our chosen mode of transportation can have such profound effects on our personalities. There are a lot psychological reasons for this.
This behavior is not conducive to creating communities. How can we cooperate with one another when the mere presence of other people makes us so angry? How can we create communities with so much hatred coursing through the veins of our towns? I can’t blame drivers for raging though; when they have no other options for transportation, they can seem trapped into driving. Maybe if we offered more and better choices, the task of driving wouldn’t seem so overwhelming. This was the case for me at least. I moved closer to work and began bicycling for most of my errands. The result is that I drive much less, and when I do, I am more tolerant of those around me and able to handle the inevitable traffic jam with a little more dignity.
Anyway, this entire post was inspired by one of my favorite cartoons. Leave it to Goofy to so aptly portray the experience of a motorist and pedestrian in a car-centric world. What’s amazing is that this cartoon is over 60 years old and it’s still perfectly relevant today.
Seriously, what do you want out of life? How do you want to live? Where do you want to live?
I get very frustrated when I read commentaries or hear people discussing ways to alleviate traffic or expand transit infrastructure as solutions to short-term problems. People get into heated debates about HOW to go about “improving things”. What the hell do we mean by that? People are always coming up with solutions without ever stating what they are actually solving or explaining the desired effect.
As an example, consider this article from a few years ago titled In Transportation and in Technology, Packets Beat Circuits (Part 2 here) by someone I greatly respect from Georgia Tech. He is making an analogy of cars/transit to packet-switched/circuit-switched networks. In this article Mr. Fleming concludes that cars are better than transit in Atlanta and similar cities. He accepts that cars will dominate most cities and we should “[d]eal with it, or move back to New York.” He then proceeds to make many suggestions to help ease traffic. (Many of which are very good ideas). However he never tells us why easing traffic is a good idea. Easing traffic is not an end goal, it is a means to an end. What kind of city is Mr. Fleming envisioning when he lays out his ideas? One can only assume from his attitude towards transit that Mr. Fleming is attempting to realize some version of Le Corbusier‘s Radiant City, a city built at the scale of the automobile with little need for walking. Unfortunately the Radiant City utopia is even less likely to occur in Atlanta than improving walkability downtown. Besides who wants to live in a place like that? I actually like the idea of a walkable, person-oriented city and I’m just a country bumpkin from Rocky Face, GA. The plan of traffic easing is short-sighted and does not consider long-term effects. It is without vision.
A similarly flawed argument that we hear a lot in Atlanta, is that we should expand MARTA rail into the suburbs. What will that accomplish? How will spending billions of dollars on rail into the suburbs improve quality of life? People who enjoy the suburban driving lifestyle sure aren’t going to be taking the train. People who would prefer living in-town but have been priced out to the ‘burbs might take the train, but taking the train from the ‘burbs requires first driving to the train station. Once I get in my car, it’s just as easy (and a lot faster) to drive past the rail station and all the way into work. Despite what people say about traffic, Atlanta’s highways are top notch. 15 lanes baby!! All I’m saying is that we need some sort of vision for how our city should look, and sending rail into the suburbs isn’t going to have any sort of big positive change. Perhaps it would be better to improve the transit within the city first and add more affordable housing to get people moving back into town. (This is actually happening via the Beltline and similar projects.)
Why do we need to fix traffic? Do we need to fix traffic? Why do we need to expand transit lines? Do we need to expand transit lines? I’m going to spend a few minutes trying to explain the type of life that I would enjoy. This is what the hell I want, not necessarily what others may want. But when I discuss transportation planning and the effects of technology, this is the end goal that I have in mind. You must begin with a destination in mind.
What the hell I want:
I want to know my neighbors. I want to be able to walk to the grocery store. I want to be able to walk or bike to work. I want to go to high school football games. I want to be within 15 minutes of hiking in the woods. I want good coffee. I want to walk into my local pub and recognize the bar tender and meet up with friends unplanned. I want to be able to walk home after 3 pints. I want some sort of night life until at least 3AM. I want my future kids to be able to walk to school. I want my future kids to be able to play in a park without needing me to drive them there. I want to know that even though I haven’t tagged my kids with embedded GPS devices, that they will be safe, because my neighborhood/town/city is a safe place to be. I want to go to the museum or symphony a few times a year. I want a huge library with millions of books. I want to eat at restaurants that are not chains. But I like chains too. I don’t want to stand in line for 20 minutes to buy groceries. I want to get fresh bread/fruit/vegetables from the grocery store EVERY day. I want public places to hang out that don’t require me to buy something. I want to loiter. I want to be able to meet up with friends without having to schedule a date. I want a good mix of strangers and familiar faces. It keeps things interesting yet familiar.
I want a little street life,
Charlottesville, VA
a little culture,
New York Public Library
and a little nature.
Piedmont Park, Atlanta
This is my wish list. Others may want to live way out in the middle of God’s country and never see another living soul. That’s cool by me. Whatever you want, you need a goal in mind, otherwise how can you make “progress” towards it?
Notice in my rambling, I did not mention where to build a highway or a train stop. I am not concerned here with the HOW, I am concerned with the WHAT. What the hell do we actually want when we discuss expanding roads or transit? What result are we trying to achieve? Because simply making cars move faster or increasing population density are not goals, they are means to reach goals. At least they should be.
Next time you hear some people arguing for traffic easing or expanded transit, ask them what the hell they really want. Will that new highway really make your life better? Will it help you achieve the dream life that you imagine for yourself? Will that new train stop help? If they can’t define a goal and draw a line between whatever they are proposing and reaching that goal, then they don’t deserve our attention. Enough with the band-aid, temporary, short-sighted solutions. Before we get into arguments over where to build the next exit ramp, lets step back and consider what we really want out of life, and will this change help us get there.
If anyone actually reads this, I would love to hear what the hell you really want.
That last post got quite a response. It was really fun reading all the comments. Thanks to everyone for keeping the conversation civilized and productive.
One recurring theme that kept appearing in the comments section was that of self-driving cars. If self-driving, autonomous, driverless (whatever you want to call them) cars still seem like science fiction to you, they probably won’t seem that way for long. I am not even going to make the argument about whether or not they are coming. They ARE coming! Google seems to have nearly perfected the technology behind it. At this point, it is only a matter of sorting out the legalities of introducing millions of self-driving cars onto our roadways.
Just for fun, here is a short TED Talk on Google’s cars. The technology is absolutely awe inspiring.
If we assume that these cars are coming, the next question is: How will this change our driving habits and our lives? I have two very different expectations of what will happen when Ford, Chevy, Toyota, and all the other big manufacturers start putting out self-driving cars.
First the optimistic expectation. In the optimistic future, self-driving cars will provide a complete paradigm shift in the way we think about transportation. If self-driving cars become the main form of transportation, there is no practical reason to own a personal car. Think about it, when cars are in storage approx. 95% of the time, that is a wasted resource. This is the reason that we require so much parking. What if during that 95% of downtime, the cars were off handling other trips like driver-less taxis? When you needed a car, you summon it and it appears Batmobile style within seconds, or at the worst a few minutes.
How great would that be? You no longer have to worry about maintenance or parking and you get to split the cost of the car with everyone who uses it. Parking would free up all over the city because it is no longer needed. You don’t get stuck with a single car. If you need a 7 person SUV, you get it. If you need a pickup truck, you get it. If you need a single passenger vehicle, you get it. And since you aren’t tied to your car, you might even walk more. Previously you would drive that 1 mile to the grocery store, now you may walk it and simply opt for a ride back. The sunk cost of owning and operating a car would vanish. You would only pay for what you actually use. This might actually prompt alternative transportation use. It is hard to justify taking the train, when I have already sunk 20 grand into my car. If enough people exchange a few car trips for walking or transit, we may even see a return to more walkable communities. This would, of course, lead to even more people choosing walking and transit. I can really see some positive momentum coming from intelligently used autonomous vehicles.
Now for the pessimistic vision of the future. Nothing changes. It is the same model that we have now. Every single person owns his or her own car. We still have to store all those cars 95% of the time and the only real difference in the commute is that you can watch cartoons on the way to work instead of driving. Granted safety would be greatly improved and maybe some increase in efficiency on the highway. Although as long as some people are still driving themselves mixed in with the driver-less cars, not much efficiency can be gained.
What would really happen in this scenario is that urban sprawl would increase dramatically. When people are deciding on where to buy a house, they are weighing cost per square foot against commute times. People who currently tolerate a 45 min. trip to work in exchange for the 6000 square foot McMansion way out in the exurbs, can now really spread out. Instead of driving 45 min. to work, you can move 2 hours away from work and sleep in your car on the way in each morning. Hell, why not live 8 hours away and do all of your sleeping in your car. (OK maybe that is a little crazy)
Each time a new mode of transportation is introduced (bikes, trolleys, trains, cars, highways, etc.) our cities change shapes. Make no mistake, self-driving cars will not be a simple improvement over our current system. They will have a dramatic effect on the shapes of our cities. Ultimately we will probably have a mix of both the pessimistic and optimistic views. After all, what is pessimistic to me may be optimistic to someone else. This is OK, as long as the net effect is an increased quality of life in the towns and cities where most of us live.
EDIT: The blog Narrow Lanes has an interesting post on driver-less cars with more examples and a skeptical POV from someone who doesn’t want to lose the joy of driving by turning control over to machines. It is worth a read.
OK, I’m finally getting a chance to make another post. I have temporarily relocated to Mountain View, CA and have been up to my eyeballs in work, both ‘real’ work and research work. It’s nice to get back to this blog.
Cars do not belong in cities. A standard American sedan can comfortably hold 4+ adults w/ luggage, can travel in excess of 100 miles per hour, and can travel 300+ miles at a time without stopping to refuel. These are all great things if you are traveling long distances between cities. If you are going by yourself to pickup your dry cleaning, then cars are insanely over-engineered for the task. It’s like hammering in a nail with a diesel-powered pile driver. To achieve all these feats (high capacity, high speed, and long range driving), cars must be large and powered by fossil fuels. So when you get a few hundred (or thousand) cars squeezed onto narrow city streets, you are left with snarled traffic and stifling smog.
Even if you ignore the pollution, cars simply take up too much space. Next time you are stuck in traffic behind what seems like a million cars, try to imagine if all those cars where replaced by pedestrians or bike riders. Suddenly, the congestion is gone.
60 Cars, 60 Bike Riders, and 60 Bus Passengers in Munster, Germany.
But why am I complaining about traffic? Traffic only affects those stuck in it, right? Once all cars go electric, essentially eliminating inter-city air pollution, then there will be no more problems for pedestrians, right? Wrong!! Probably the biggest problem with cars in cities is that they require huge amounts of land for storage (a.k.a. parking). Here is a photo of Midtown Atlanta between 5th street and 12th street. This is one of the densest and most pedestrian-friendly ares in the entire state of Georgia. The red blocks indicate parcels of land that are 100% dedicated to car storage.
Red Squares Indicate Land that is 100% Dedicated to Parking in Midtown Atlanta
Dedicating all this land to car storage basically reduces the density by about half, doubles the average distance between locations, and reduces walkability. Throw in the 16-lane interstate and the 45+ mph traffic on most of these streets, it becomes exceedingly hard to believe that this is one of the most walkable areas in the entire state. Such is life for pedestrians in a car-dominated city.
It wasn’t always this way. Atlanta, like all cities, used to be walkable and people actually lived IN the city instead of commuting 50 miles every day. But as more people moved away from the city, the more Atlanta had to become like a suburb, being retrofitted to handle all the automobile infrastructure required by a million 40 hour-a-week temporary citizens. The result of this retrofit is a wasteland of asphalt and isolated neighborhoods, a slow decimation that has rolled along since the innovation of the automobile.
Contrary to how it may sound, I do not want to rid the earth of cars. I just want to use them smarter. Do you really need a 2-ton vehicle to pickup your dry-cleaning? Probably not. Although I do see the appeal in loading a family of 6 into an SUV and traveling to Florida for vacation. That is a totally reasonable use of an automobile. What I really want is clean, walkable, safe, affordable, and family-friendly cities and towns. In a strange way, I kind of want to live in Mayberry.
In the next post, I promise to discuss a few ideas that may get us a little closer to this goal.
To answer this question, we must first realize what streets are NOT. Streets are NOT roads. Roads are designed to connect two places (towns, cities, neighborhoods, etc.) They are meant for transportation, typically via a motor vehicle. Roads do not contain, or sparsely contain, homes, stores, and businesses.
In contrast, streets are located within towns, cities, and neighborhoods, and provide much more than transportation. Streets are lined with homes, store fronts, and businesses. Streets are intended as a public place where people can mingle, conduct business, live, and play. Despite what your mother says about playing in the streets, actual streets are great for playing. If this seems like a crazy concept to you, I will point you to the following three videos.
The first video is Barcelona in 1908, you will notice pedestrians everywhere, children and adults on bicycles, stores and homes directly on the street. This street is not the exclusive domain of cars, as we are used to. It belongs to all citizens despite their chosen mode of transport. Feel free to skip around these videos if you wish. It really is fascinating to view 100 year old street life.
This was a very common sight in modern cities 100 years ago. Here is a video of San Francisco from 1906 with a very similar scene.
Now let’s take another look at the first video. This time with video from the present-day spliced in as a comparison. You will see that these are no longer streets, they are roads. There is little to no pedestrian traffic (or any traffic for that matter, I wonder if this video was shot during a holiday), and the road has become the exclusive playground for motor vehicles. Pedestrians have been relegated to sidewalks only, and roads have been setup for high speed travel. Personally, I would not classify this 100 year change as “progress”.
This post, and the previous post, are intended to describe some of the characteristics that I look for in healthy communities. I look for walkable streets, a good mix of people and modes of transportation, and ease of mobility. Future posts will begin to look at how we can address the problems of our modern cities and move toward more livable communities.
Extra: If you have 15 minutes, here is a Ted Talk from someone much smarter than myself, explaining the importance of separating roads and streets.
Where did you go on your last vacation? Probably the most popular answer is the beach or some other attraction provided by nature (camping, fishing, etc.). I am not concerned with these trips so much. When was the last time that you took a trip a new city? Where did you go; San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Savannah, Charleston? Those cities are all very popular for tourism. Why do you think that is? It can’t be the weather (Chicago, New York, and San Francisco have notoriously bad weather.) It can’t be exclusively for high society and culture (as much as I love Savannah and Charleston, I don’t go there for the museums or opera). What common thread binds these cities? The most obvious answer that I see, is that they are all old and well planned cities.
When we visit places like Savannah, Charleston, San Fran. etc., we go there because they provide an escape from the drudgery of day-to-day life. Which for many of us consists of lengthy commutes between suburbs and distant work places. We live in homes where there is no street life or culture, and we travel to soul-less office buildings in downtown areas that shut down after 5pm. We do all of our shopping at big box stores, fighting for parking spaces and spending a large percentage of our lives waiting in lines to purchase our weeks’ worth of groceries.
Savannah, GA's beautiful historic district.
This is a far cry from those cities listed above. They all have street life, easy walking between hotels and pubs, restaurants, and grocery stores. They are laden with parks for people watching and interacting with strangers. I submit that the street life and walkability of these places is what makes them so attractive as vacation destinations. It is the only common attribute shared among the cities that I mentioned.
If we are attracted to these places due to their walkability, accessibility, street life, and charm, why do we choose to live in places that lack all of these features? I’m sure there is whole list of excuses that we can come up with for why we choose to visit these places on vacation, but somehow ignore their design when deciding where we will live the bulk of our lives. But, is there really any reason that every town, city, or suburb in the USA couldn’t offer many of the same attractive features of these popular vacation destinations?
Perhaps I am being overly romantic and not practical. After all, if we all lived in places like San Francisco and Savannah, where would we park our cars?
Progressive Transit 