Entering A City: Chicago and Comparisons

I wanted to think about how cities ask you to enter them when you arrive as a tourist (or anyone, I suppose, since tourists don't have a monopoly on entering cities, but I'm going to focus for the moment on the tourist experience). I want to suggest that what the entering space emphasizes deeply affects the sense the tourist may get of how to navigate the city and what it's like, and compare a few examples. 

Note thatI'm going to try to avoid comparing total apples to oranges here. The temptation to compare say Amsterdam Centraal to Chicago O'Hare would be unfair; a rail station and an airport come with different affordances, to use a technical term: different possibilities and options for what they could communicate. So train station to train station or airport to airport is a fairer approach, and the one we'll use here.

1. Amsterdam Centraal vs Chicago Union Station: what place does the car have?

So if not O'Hare, let's consider Union Station. I spent a whole school year commuting for my PhD between Chicago and Rochester, NY monthly (approximately) and mostly by train, so I have a lot of experience entering the city via train. The Megabus to Louisville also used to drop off across the street from Union Station, adding to my knowledge of this spot. I even took the train to Seattle from here, which was the only picture of from it I could actually find:

So even though we might think of the airports as the distinctive way of entering Chicago, there are plenty of us first experiencing the city via Union Station too (Amsterdam Centraal is an obvious entry point, given the greater prevalence of passenger rail there and the high speed lines to the UK and France).

At Union Station you'd be forgiven for not noticing that Chicago has mass transit besides buses and commuter rail. It has no L stop for some reason -- you can walk to the Blue Line or with a bit more effort the other lines in the Loop but it's neither obvious nor signed for visitors. There are bus stops and the Metra is present, but for travel within the city you're really not clearly given anything to do or anywhere to go except on foot or by car.

This Greyhound depot isn't quite next to there--but that's also kind of the point, isn't it? Union Station isn't well-integrated even with the long-distance buses, let alone the city transit.

Amsterdam Centraal has the Metro, the boats across the IJ, and multiple tram routes (as well as also pedestrians and buses, and well-indicated bike routes). It's a completely different experience of the city, one that emphasizes the ability to go about your day without a car and your interconnection with the rest of the city. It also physically presents those options to you more clearly.

I know I probably overuse the shots of this angle, but it's so notable: the tramlines are between this metro entrance and the main station, and the main station itself is clearly in a mostly pedestrian zone.

Here we can see the trams better, as well as yes, a motor vehicle as well--but that's not what the spot is emphasizing.

2. Chicago Midway vs. Toronto Billy Bishop 

Now let's look at airports, specifically smaller, secondary Great Lakes-region airports. The irony here is that Midway has much better connections to the city than Billy Bishop: more bus lines to the point of being a major bus hub, and an actual L stop! Billy Bishop has a tram line not tooooo far away, a bus line or two, and a shuttle to downtown. 

But Billy Bishop presents the connection to the city much more positively: you can just walk out of the airport into Toronto. Midway hides its bus and L depot as far from the active part of the airport as possible and does not want you exiting on foot if you can help it. It is all car-oriented, and the other options (which, again, are superior) are hidden like a separate secret level in a videogame.

How close to the airport do you think this is? Whatever you guessed, I'll bet it's too far.

And that's not even considering the ferry, which again just makes a visibly pleasant integration into the city.

Midway is so much more transit-integrated, but not showing it.

This is after ten minutes of walking within the terminal to get to the bus depot.

And actually getting to the train (here) takes another few minutes of walking. It's like they are ashamed to be connecting their airport to the city so well!

At least there's nice public art.

3. Boston Logan vs. Chicago O'Hare 

Lest this just look like dumping on Chicago, let's think about the big airport. O'Hare has a much easier and more clearly communicated link to the city than Logan, and a better system of transit within the airport too.

Cute lil' people mover.

O'Hare gives the vibe of being very connected to Chicago by transit even though it is much farther out than Logan is. And it wears its urban nature proudly.

Enjoy the trains to the City! They go straight from the airport!

For Logan, the line is still Blue, but there's an issue:

This train doesn't actually go to the airport.

This bus does. But since it's a bus, you have less tracking, less visible clarity on where it will be or where it goes, and (unlike O'Hare) no walking path.

Actually, there is a walking path.

But I don't recommend it.

Basically, while Logan is actually much closer in to Boston and much easier to get to from major parts of that city than O'Hare is from Chicago in terms of travel time or crow-flies distance, it's not actually presenting that part of itself except from the plane window.

What it's really showing you is just that it's a bunch of tarmac and buses--and eventually those will get you towards the city. O'Hare wins hands down.

What do you think? What other cities do a good job of clarifying how the city and its transit interact? Where else does Chicago do a good job? Let me know what you think!

Public Art

 When thinking about how to build cities, one thing that strikes me as particularly important to making a place feel distinct and memorable is public art. 

Obviously, this doesn't mean that all the other urbanist things that I tend to talk about in this blog are unimportant, or even less important. But when I was going through my pictures to think about what sticks with me about places, it's often the art. And so I wanted to talk a bit about what elements tend to make art feel memorable, rather than pointless or uninspiring.

1. Visible But Not Invasive

To me, a key element of placemaking with art is that it should be visible (that is, you should notice it) but not invasive (the space should still operate for other purposes than just being an art piece, and it shouldn't interrupt the use of the space).

These birds in Milwaukee strike me as a good example of this, near the Public Market:

I notice them literally every time I'm there, though admittedly that hasn't been too too many times, and they make it feel like this is a particular place, one that isn't like others. But at the same time they don't take over the space; they're there, but not forcing me to avoid them to go use the public spaces they're occupying.

2. Usefulness Is A Plus

Those birds are cute, but not adding a lot other than (admittedly valuable!) atmosphere. These columns in Amsterdam, on the other hand, also served to meaningfully light up the space they were occupying, which speaks to my second point: public art that serves a public function besides being art is a definite bonus.

Now, I was in a hurry and this picture may not do them justice. You might think this is just a lighted column, which could just be infrastructure and not art. But the lights are rainbow, and definitely intended to be beautiful and not just functional. I don't think they would be there if they weren't art (the other columns aren't lit up, for instance, and this was the only underpass with the lit columns at all on this walk). This is art! It is just art that happens to be extremely functional as well, and that's a plus in my book.

3. Use Wasted Space Well

Now, some public art, like the examples above, is in places people would normally go anyway. 

Some public art, however, is a use of a space that would otherwise really not draw crowds. But it can be a great use of those kind of spaces that would otherwise maybe be "wasted space," forgotten spots like the underside of a bridge, for instance, that could just be cement.

Well, the example I'm going to use is cement, but it's shaped, and used, and iconic. Yes, from my birth hometown, welcome the Fremont Troll:

See him looming up there? You weren't going to use that space anyway. It's too small for a building. It's underneath a huge bridge. 

But there he is, large as life and twice as scary. He could easily not be there. The above angle shows that there is a perfectly reasonable design choice right next to him that's just...arched bridge support. And that is just fine. But it's not art, and it's not a draw, and it's not beautiful.

He is. And people notice.

The Troll is his own attraction, and that's wonderful. It's a great use of a space otherwise no one would make any use of, and people who have to walk there would simply scurry by not realizing the lost opportunity.

So, make use of your spaces, provide things that are beautiful, useful, and non-invasive, and spend some time designing your city to have public art!

Compelling Scenes

I've been thinking a lot about what makes me want to take a picture of something urbanist--whether while I'm traveling or just here in the QCA--and I have some principles in mind about what makes a streetscape or a scene compelling to the viewing eye. At least mine. I suppose others might be differently compelled.

1. Profusions and Absences

One of the most striking elements of a streetscene is whether there is anything present in excess of expectation or anything that might be expected that isn't there. Think about the empty streets or the appearance of dolphins during the heights of the lockdowns over Covid-19. It doesn't have to be a pandemic to bring this about. Ordinary everyday things in one place can seem like a profusion or an absence to a different eye.

The bikes in this Amsterdam street scene are normal for Amsterdam. But they're striking to an American visitor.

So striking, indeed, that I took several such shots.

This is just an ordinary commuting day in Amsterdam, but not for me. 

Absences can operate similarly. 

This isn't really "urbanist" per se, except insofar as the concentration of museums in London is a function of urbanist principles themselves, but the lack of an exhibition in this hall of the Tate Modern was notable to me--so I took a picture.

2. Uniqueness and Typicality

Of course, the Amsterdam bikes above are also proof of another principle: it makes a good scene when you see something that seems typical of or unique to a particular place or environment. Amsterdam (and the Netherlands in general) is known for bikes, and biking culture, so the bike parking reinforces or typifies that.

This is part of why iconic monuments (as Notre-Dame de Paris, above) make for good photos. But also it helps if this uniqueness applies not just to the place (there is only the one Notre-Dame, as memorialized in one of my favorite video game series) but to the angle or other elements of the picture: this picture of the still-rebuilding Notre-Dame feels more significant to me than this one of the stereotypical view of the Eiffel Tower.

I was the only one photographing Notre-Dame from that angle; thousands of others were photographing the Eiffel Tower at the same moment.

This goes for urbanist scenes as well as for distinctive architecture.

This double-decker red bus is a transport of delight, and very distinctive.

So too is the above older-style Tube train. But because the bus has more distinctive elements in the photo to my trip (the specific 172 to Aldwych, the background, etc.) it feels more meaningful; the Tube train photo was fun to get but could be almost anywhere by almost anyone at almost any time.

3. Beauty in Composition

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that all the other elements that ordinarily make any art compelling can apply here as well: color, light, shade, angle, etc. And they can come in surprising ways to an urbanist view, compounding the urbanist elements in a scene:

I don't usually consider the old brutalist dorms of the University of Washington compelling, but the trees, the lighting, and the interplay of cement and nature practically forced me to stop and take this picture. And the fact that they highlight the density around UW didn't hurt.

Likewise, the train to the airport was the focus of my attention when I snapped this photo in Toronto, but the composition of trees in front, train in the midground, and dense but colorful urban apartments/condos in the background contributed to why this photo, and not any other.

Was all of this an excuse to just share some photos that I liked that I took? Certainly! But I think these principles are also useful for considering what to photograph and why going forward--and maybe for you too to consider when you snap your own urbanist photographs wherever you may go.

True Costs of Living

 The last section in this article on Tacoma made me think more about how cost of living estimates often misstate the "real" cost of living in a place.

Specifically, it made me think about how the "fifteen minute city" (which is the ostensible topic of the article as a whole) is fundamentally about reducing cost of living in invisible or semi-visible ways.

1. Commutes

The most obvious (and semi-visible) way in which a 15-minute city reduces costs of living is by reducing how far the average person has to commute. This is a cost in time (of course) but also a cost in, well, cost: with rare exceptions, the further you have to commute, the more you have to pay, whether in train fare, gas, or wear and tear on vehicles. Obviously these scale differently and may vary on the particular fare structure of a system or the difference in available routings, but at the very least shorter trips are not usually more expensive than long ones, and often much cheaper--even before you factor in lost time.

And of course you should do that. That time is valuable.

The other way in which a 15-minute city reduces commute costs is the one we briefly talked about with congestion charges: even if you yourself still work more than 15 minutes away, the more of your neighbors who work less, the less traffic you face, and the easier your commute is even if it stays the same distance.

If you live in the Loop, you don't need to go as far--but if you don't, it's still better for you to have your neighbors not also commuting to the Loop with you.

This doesn't change a traditional cost of living calculation, because the cost of moving a given distance (held steady to compare) doesn't necessarily change. But if you can reduce the distance you're commuting or increase the speed, the act of commuting becomes less costly, even if the per mile cost of a standardized commute doesn't.

2. Maintenance and Readiness

Another big cost of living that is hard to calculate changes in is the cost of needing to be ready to use multiple forms of transit, most notably the number of cars your household might need. Again, a traditional cost of living calculator is likely to give you the cost of a car, or of gas, or of both, held steady to make the comparison apples to apples. But a good 15-minute city reduces the need for an apple at all: if you can not have the car, then it doesn't matter if the car is more or less expensive to own or operate. Or if you can one car instead of two, or a fuel-efficient car instead of a behemoth, or any other way of reducing that car cost.

Even in semi-suburban Indiana, the bus is the cheaper option if you can use it.

This even goes for transit costs as well: if I can walk places, I don't need to expect to pay as much for transit. If I can pay by the trip because I'm using transit less rather than buying a monthly pass, my costs go down. If I can buy a single monthly pass instead of cobbling together three rides on three separate transit agencies because they weren't designed to operate together....you get the picture.

Good, integrated urban design means you don't need to have a car every day, which might mean you don't even need to keep a car in readiness for most days, which can create a virtuous cycle of cheapness without changing the actual cost of a car at all.

And don't get me started on the cost of maintaining and storing those vehicles--which is a separate cost not usually calculated in CoL calculations but definitely exists.

3. Time Is Money

I don't mean this in the above sense that saving time means saving money because your time is valuable, though that's true.

I mean that saving time in the rest of your life allows you the time to save money in it as well. Less takeout because you have time to cook; fewer doctors' visits because you have time to exercise (or build it into active lifestyles); less stress because you have the time to do things you enjoy or to make sure you get done the things you were squeezing out of your life.

If you have the time to sit here, you have the time not to worry about sitting here, and you'll feel better about yourself and your life.

So the cost of living can't just be calculated by looking at a basket of goods and comparing their prices (though that is certainly a useful exercise). Rather, it has to include what the city around you actually allows you to do--and how much of that basket (at what price point) you're actually using.

Build Streets Safer

If you want cars to be less dangerous, the best two ways are:

A. To have fewer of them

B. To have the ones that are there go slower

Unfortunately, A and B conflict, since when there are fewer cars, the ones that are there tend to be able to go faster.

But as recent studies show, there are ways to slow the cars down without just putting more of them on the roads.

1. Narrow the Streets

Now, of course, there is such a thing as a street that is too narrow for its needed use. But generally, our streets are usually too wide for the speeds that cars should safely be traveling in urban environments.

How many lanes do we need to move this many cars, Chicago? How many?

Wide streets, like Brady and Harrison here in the Quad Cities, which are four lanes one way, encourage speeding. They encourage treating a city street like a highway (and yes, those two streets are officially US highways, but they are also urban streets). They create an ease of fast travel that makes the posted speed limit basically meaningless.

Narrower streets, like this one in Haarlem, make cars go slower. Some of that is traffic: you can see the cars piling up behind this postal vehicle as it makes its stops. But a lot of it is also the fact that the psychology of driving in a narrow lane is fundamentally different from a wide lane, let alone four of them next to each other. You have to control the vehicle more, which means slower speed and more cautious driving.

In other words, narrower streets mean slower cars.

2. Change the Texture

Now, I'm not advocating for dirt roads everywhere, but if you want to slow cars down and make them drive more safely, changing from pure smooth highway-grade asphalt to something else can make a big difference.

This Parisian street is narrow, but it's also lightly cobblestoned. Without needing a speed hump (a blunt instrument indeed), it creates the constant reminder to the driver of speed through its rumble (both auditory and tactile). You can't drive fast on this street without realizing it, which undoes a lot of the danger of drivers becoming velocitized. 

3. Avoid Long Straightaways

I've been playing a lot of Formula D, a boardgame based on F1 racing. And in that game, which is literally about racing cars, the best thing to see in front of you is a long straight stretch where you can gear up and get going as fast as possible.

This is, to be blunt, a thing we should avoid when designing our streets, which are not racetracks even if F1 sometimes takes over city streets for some races.

Even on a grid street pattern like Toronto, we can avoid the appearance of a long straightaway by putting in things on the streetscape so that the drivers' eyes aren't fixed on a long, bare stretch of asphalt. 

Or, like this part of Toronto, you can lean into it and put a literal highway above a parallel street that might as well be one.

I know which version of this I prefer.

Boston buries is straightaways, which is an improvement as it avoids conflict with pedestrians or bikes, but does mean that the cars down there are going, as they say, wicked fast.

Well, unless there's traffic backup. But that's a different story.

When we're building our street environment, it matters how we do it--and making it as easy for cars to go fast in a single line as we can is not optimal if you want them to actually be safe for others to be around.

Why Suburbs Should Love Urbanism

We often see transit planning and urbanist design cast as a fight between suburban and urban interests: spending money on transit in urban areas, for instance, as an attack on suburban drivers, as in Ontario politics, or congestion pricing as an attack on suburbanists, as was widely suggested around New Jersey opposition to NYC's recent implementation of a congestion zone in lower Manhattan. But as this article reminds us, it's never that simple: suburbs are part of their urban design, and what benefits the latter often also benefits the former, no matter how much they complain beforehand.

Here I want to highlight a few ways in which urban development is good, actually, for surburban interests. These may seem obvious, but somehow they often get missed in the contrived binary between the two.

1. Suburbs Use Urban Amenities

Look, I'm not saying there's no one who primarily remains within their suburb. In fact, if we really built quality fifteen-minute city design into our suburbs, there could perhaps be many--and if we count people with limited mobility and car access, there undoubtedly are.

But by and large, suburban areas exist because they are "outside the walls" of urban areas, and they draw on the benefits of those cities in larger conurbations and metropolitan areas. The Patriots may play in Foxboro, but the Red Sox are in Boston proper; NYC congestion pricing operates precisely because so many people come across from New Jersey (and down from Connecticut and upstate New York, and over from Long Island); London has grown again and again up from the single square mile "City of London" out to what we know as Greater London today and still manages to have massive entanglement with the suburbs even beyond that. Imagining that what's good for the city is bad for the suburbs is like pretending that killing an oak tree would be good for the fungi growing on its roots. It's a mutualistic relationship: the city benefits too, of course. But it often makes more sense to concentrate building and development in the city itself, which allows every suburb to benefit, rather than focusing building in each suburb to make them equal.

There's a reason most of Sound Transit's first stage of building (and the second, and in theory the third) is focused in Seattle, even if the Board of Directors has required representation from the suburbs as well.

The expansion has taken these guys out of Seattle, and there was always an airport line, but service is still concentrated in the urban core--for good reason! 

This goes even for suburbanites who don't directly use the urban transit themselves, as in the NYC example linked above: suburban drivers in the city get to go faster if there are fewer others using the roads.

2. Virtuous Cycles

As we've discussed before in terms of Paris and London, extensive transit (and other urban development) builds on itself to something greater than the sum of its parts.

I love the Milwaukee HOP tram, but its downtown-only, limited functionality makes it less effective as transit. It implies a potential without delivering on it fully. I say that with love; I really enjoy using the HOP. But it's not a full-scale system.

Free her!

Also not a full system on its own? The Paris tramways.

But the Paris trams, unlike the HOP, are not the only intra-city rail service. They can be partial (albeit significantly more extensive than the HOP) because they are part of something greater. This particular tram pictured above is pulling into a stop at a station for the RER, which looks like this:

The integration between them makes both of them more effective: a heavy-rail can't go everywhere, and neither can a tram, but they can work together in a virtuous cycle to make the whole city easier to transit.

And before anyone points out that the HOP also goes to a train station, I know. Here's a sign about it, in fact:

But Amtrak at Milwaukee Intermodal Station isn't the RER. It's an intercity rail station, like this one in Paris too: Gare du Nord.

The tram doesn't go here, but the RER line does (in fact, I took line B between them on the trip where I took this picture). So Milwaukee has two but not three of these links in the Paris system (both stripped down to have fewer connections and less track as well), and thus has less access to the cumulative benefits of that kind of urban infrastructure.

What does this have to do with urban vs suburban? Well, the RER and the tram in Paris actually go primarily to suburban areas, because the virtuous cycle is so powerful that it enables transit outside of the urban core. Milwaukee's HOP is purely downtown. Heavier investment in the urban space allows suburban connections to that urban center become more viable, and thus benefits the suburbs as well.

I'm not dissing Milwaukee here. It punches well above its weight in US terms. I'm saying that the more we allow this kind of virtuous cycle anywhere, the more powerful it becomes.

3. City Borders Are Semi-Arbitrary

OK, quick quiz: what city is this photo from?

What about this one?

They're from the same metro area, but different legal entities. And neither is the city that most people actually associate with this metro area. The first is Cambridge, MA; the second, Somerville, MA. Both are part of the Boston Metro Area--there's a reason that Harvard graduates, who went to school in Cambridge, stereotypically say they went to school in "Boston," and its not just weirdness about saying they went to Harvard.

It's because the city-suburb division is a continuum, not a binary, and the lines are sometimes almost as arbitrary as some diplomats carving up the Middle East along straight lines. Inner suburbs of New York in New Jersey can be just as or more urbanist than the city proper. 

Yes, there are suburbs that differ widely from their city in terms of transit use and density. But there are also ones that are fundamentally part of the same place. And while politicians might have incentives to emphasize the latter, and I'm not advocating for wanton, willy-nilly absorption of suburbs into cities, we all benefit when we realize that "suburban" and "urban" investment in transit, development, and urbanist infrastructure is not a zero-sum game.

Build EV Charging Better

 I use two electric cars on the regular, and I've noticed a real problem with how we're deploying EV charger technology as a country here in the US: we're treating it like gasoline car filling technology, which it emphatically is not.

1. Better Places

Most basically: gasoline is toxic and so we have dedicated gas stations with tanks under the earth. Gasoline flows very quickly, so those stations are equipped for a light pitstop but not usually much more; where they are prepared to offer more, it's usually in the context of long-haul trucking (like our QCA neighbor the World's Largest Truckstop). And we're building out EV charging on the same model, often at the same locations. EV charging is often found at car dealerships and gas stations, spaces you would only go to for the charging, not on their own.

This is a serious mistake.

EV charging is not like gas: while I'm sure the batteries and electric charge can be dangerous if something goes wrong, they don't poison the ground, and they take much longer to charge (even at a Tesla Supercharger). 

So we should put them in spaces that people already want to visit, or will already spend a long time at. There are places this is already happening: Tesla has done some of its build-out here in the Midwest at Hy-Vee and other grocery stores; the Musser Public Library in Muscatine has a charger; around Rockford, IL a couple of Dairy Queens have chargers. But we're missing out on a lot of serious potential, especially if we treat EV charging as both a draw and an amenity (a reason to visit and a benefit of choosing one entertainment or location over another). Why don't movie theatres have EV chargers, since you'll be there for 2-3 hours anyway? Why not restaurants beyond fast food--since the longer the dining experience, the more you'll successfully charge? Why not more museums, libraries, and other venues where, again, the literal point is for people to spend hours there at a time?

To be clear, at this point we're not, in the US, at the level where any EV charging at all can be taken for granted. I'm not ungrateful for the EV chargers at rest stops, dealerships, and so on--but they could be better.

2. Everywhere

The real trick, though, is to go beyond specific-location-based charging. This is somewhat true in Iowa City, where every parking ramp has charging for EVs (though only 2 spaces/ramp, usually). There are proposals, already being piloted, to allow in-transit EV charging on highways (again, primarily aimed at long-haul trucking). But what I'm really suggesting is what I saw in a few European cities: EV charging available just...on the street. Where you'd park to visit any particular business in any area. Because an EV charging station isn't dangerous to the public in the way gas fumes are, you can do this, just like you can have a level-2 EV charger in your home but not (usually) a gas station there.

This kind of infrastructure really frees up EVs as a legitimate option, since they require more time to charge than a gas car does to be filled, but also have much more flexibility in where that time can be spent.

3. At Least A Place To Sit

Usually I try to build up in these little subsections, but here I'm going to go to a bare minimum: if we're only going to build out our EV infrastructure in places you don't want to spend your time, can we at least get somewhere to sit? Gas stations are really not built for spending even half an hour there (the minimum for the fastest EV charging, usually) let alone several (if you have a slower charger or a bigger battery--or more distance to the next stop). Can we at least get somewhere to be when it's raining, snowing, or freezing?

Basically, treating EVs as if they were gas cars in terms of where and how they fill means that the transition to EVs becomes less attractive and therefore slower: if we build it better, we can actually move in that direction.