Urban Freeways

 I grew up with urban highways, and I have never really lived anywhere without them, so I'm well aware of the costs of urban highways. 

I also understand the impulse to build them.

When you're in a city and all you have is a car, or all you imagine your population will have is a car, then access to a highway feels like a necessity. You want to get places faster, don't you? You want people from elsewhere to come to you, don't you? You want to be integrated into the nationwide system, don't you?

Well, yes, you do. But that of course ignores the negative externalities of urban highways. And while from Seattle to Boston to Chicago to Rochester to the Quad Cities, I've never actually gotten away from them, I want to expand on why I wish I could.

1. Making Pleasant Spaces Unpleasant

A highway is a fine place for driving, usually. But underneath or around a highway is not a pleasant place for people.

That's usually fine in the middle of rural areas where there aren't many people to experience the unpleasantness, and those who are there generally have wide open non-freeway spaces to escape into.

It's less fine in an urban setting where the literal point is to have a lot of people.

It's even less fine when the freeway is not only urban but taking up prime urban real estate, places you should want people congregating. Places that, because of the positive aggregate effects of density, would be really pleasant if there weren't, you know, a freeway overhead.

I'm going to pick on Milwaukee here for the paradoxical reason that they've done about as well as I think you can do with an urban downtown freeway. The area around the Public Market is great. But it would be infinitely better without a literal freeway just above you.

They've used this space very inventively, and it's nicely decorated, and it's a space I want to spend time in when I'm there.

It's also impossible to pretend you aren't actually directly beneath a huge multilane freeway deck.

This is a space that is pleasant, and should be more pleasant, but the existence of the urban freeway depresses its excellence. 

2. Disconnecting Cities

The  Milwaukee Public Market is the best case in some ways because it is made less pleasant by the freeway but at least you can walk under the freeway. In many places, the freeway is an actual barrier, cut across only by a few overpasses or literally nothing.

Here in Louisville, yes, I'm taking the photo from an overpass. But look: no one is going to cross this in any direction down there. And while there are nice trees implying that you're in a rural area where you wouldn't need or want to cross, that's not actually the case. Behind those trees are city. If there were no highway, that city could connect across (but it doesn't, of course).

Even in some cases where the main freeway is elevated, like here in Toronto, the Gardiner Expressway is accompanied by a big surface road, which breaks up the continuity of pedestrian or even just street-level non-car transportation. This is what Alaska Way is (or at least was) with the viaduct and the surface street both blocking Seattle's waterfront when I was growing up.

There are more vile examples of redlining and the destruction of whole neighborhoods by urban freeways, but even when that didn't happen freeways tend to break apart a city.

Even when there is legally a sidewalk, there isn't necessarily connectivity, Boston. This is why I say Milwaukee is the best version here: it's made less pleasant, but they at least put a there there.

3. Noise

All of this is about the physical built environment. Now let's talk about there being cars going 55-75 mph at all times on a freeway. 

This guy is quiet when parked, but not when moving.

The tires, the engines, the roar of traffic; freeways are loud. And if the cars aren't moving, that has other problems: gas fumes, to start, not to mention the removal of the supposed benefit of speed.

Basically this: almost every city I like has urban freeways but I'd like them a lot better without.

Hmmm, maybe there's a reason Vancouver and London, with their lack of (downtown) freeways did so well in my CityBracket...after all, no one wants to live next to a freeway.

Why Build Metros?

 This article on how metros divert trips from cars struck a nerve with me. Of course, removing cars is not the point; the point is that removing cars is necessary to larger issues (like the green energy transition that the article is about, or like allowing for better, more walkable cities). But I think it's worth reminding ourselves of what it is that metros do so well.

1. Space Available

A metro frees up surface space in two different ways. The first is the most obvious: the metro itself is not on the surface. That means it produces transit capacity that does not demand surface space (well, besides station space, and even that can be largely off the surface). 

These people are in a station, but they are not on the surface either.

This goes even for things like the Chicago El or Vancouver SkyTrain that are not below the surface. 

Pictured: a highly efficient way to move people off the surface of the street.

The second way a metro produces space is the way that the article I linked to brings up: it takes cars off the road and thus reduces the need to use surface space for other modes, as well as for itself.

None of the people in this train are in a car, obviously.

Trains like the above are why the Boston metro area can give up street space to bicycle lanes (well, that and the fact that bike lanes are actually very efficient people-movers themselves, but it certainly makes the political argument easier).

2. Non-Linear Transportation Options

Of course I don't mean this literally: a metro does indeed run in a line. Rather, I mean that a metro is not restricted to the existing linear layout of the city in which it is built, and can connect areas that are not easily connected (or connected at all).

Metro maps, like this MBTA map, are often schematic precisely because they don't model onto the existing street network easily.

And it's a lot harder to walk or drive to the airport here than to take transit.

Metros thus allow for a more integrated and effective plan of city transportation than streets alone can.

3. Centralized Development

A metro also provides a very clear opportunity for transit-oriented development and clear spaces for where development is happening and where it will happen in the future.

This development in Somerville, MA is intimately connected to the Green Line expansion there; no expansion, likely no development.

Likewise, Canary Wharf and its surroundings were revitalized along with the deployment of the Docklands Light Railway.

If you're the sort of pedant who is pointing out in your head that both of those are technically light rail masquerading as and integrating in with proper metro, first of all welcome, this is a safe space, and second of all how about the very development of Central London itself, both a driver of and a result of the origination of metro systems in 1863 and following? Not to mention the towns of Metroland built up by service from the original metro, the Metropolitan Line. 

Metros unlock the potential of so many places. Not only do they help us get to where we need to be in terms of energy use and car dis-use, but they actively make cities better.

Maybe we could stand to build and expand a few more.

Bike Infrastructure as Virtuous Cycle

 This article about bikes in Cambridge, MA suggests an unsurprising result: making it easier to bike places makes more people bike.

But while this is obvious, it is also massively controversial, as many efforts to make it easier to bike are routinely "refuted" by pointing out that few people bike anywhere right now.

The Catch-22 should be obvious, but let's try to unpack it here.

1. The Easier The Better

Look, I love biking, but I didn't start actually commuting by bike, transporting my children by bike, or doing other errands--I wasn't on my bike often--before I got an e-bike.

That's because with the current infrastructure where I live, here in the QCA, and with my current levels of fitness, and with the weather, and so on and so forth, it was hard to bike consistently or for any serious purpose. I know this because I had in fact commuted by bike before, in Seattle, without an e-bike. But the activation energy here in the QCA was higher than that, until I got the e-bike.

Not everyone needs an e-bike. The e-bike here is an example: biking needs to be a certain kind of easy to actually happen. For me that was e-bike here, but it was better bike lanes (and worse car options) back in Seattle. Better infrastructure will make it easier for everyone to bike, and that will make people do it.

2. Connections Connect

Again, we are explaining the obvious, but a connected set of lanes and trails will make it easier to get from place to place. 

A bike lane or trail that goes somewhere will help more than a bike trail that just exists like the one above. Even if you have an e-bike, or calm traffic, or some kind of other easiness that gets you on the bike, you want that to translate to actually using the bike frequently or regularly. And for that, having more infrastructure isn't just a matter of making biking easier; it's making biking effective. 

So building infrastructure creates connections that weren't there before. Especially for bikes, where there are chances that the connection may not be actually bikeable (say, if it's on a freeway or a high-speed road with minimal shoulder) or only bikeable if you're brave or desperate, built connections are critical to making biking not just easier but possible.

3. The Power of Crowds

Biking is also something people are more likely to do if they see others do it, or know others are doing it. So better bike infrastructure also draws in people who may not have been its first customers, but are still part of the change.

Bikeshare can help with this (this mostly empty bikeshare in Toronto implies that people are using the bikes). But it's really visible infrastructure with people biking on it that brings others in.

The host of bicycles at Sloterdijk makes a more compelling argument for biking in Amsterdam than any bikeshare could.

Another Amsterdam street scene, just to pound the point home.

Seeing others use bikes is the best way to get a bike culture going. Arguably, it's the only way. And better bike infrastructure employs points 1 & 2 above to make point 3 happen. Of course there's a virtuous cycle at play here: once people bike, you can no longer deny that they will.

EVs and Ebikes in Winter

 This article on electric buses in Wisconsin reminded me of the greatest flaw of electric battery-driven vehicles of all sorts: the changeability of battery power. 

Now, that article is about how the buses in Wisconsin are doing well despite this limitation, and I don't want to undersell that. It's good news! It's great news! We should be happy about it!

But I also want to speak to my own experience with how to best use these kinds of vehicles in winter, especially if you don't have public funding to improve your experience.

1. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

My first piece of advice is basically the same as it would be for any kind of trip in winter, up to and including walking--or a gas-powered car: the fewer trips, the better. The more you can double-up on a trip to include multiple purposes or destinations, the better. The less you have to leave the house in the bitter cold or heavy snow, the better.

This guy is gas-powered, all-wheel drive, and can get through anything. That doesn't mean I want to drive in those conditions!

Waiting for a train isn't always the worst in the snow, but it's still not the best.

EVs and ebikes might intensify this advice, with reduced ranges, but they don't originate it. 

2. Pick Your Spots

As I write this, we're supposed to get a hard to predict but noticeable amount of snow in the QCA this weekend along with a big drop in temperature. I would prefer not to drive or bike my electric vehicles, or charge them, in these conditions and those temperatures.

But guess what? I can drive and charge them now (I am charging them now) and they'll be fine! 

This picture was only a few days after the one of the Jeep above; note that the snow is entirely absent. 

There are always times and days you can pack your bigger trips and longer ones into, and times and days you want to stay at home. Having an EV might mean being more strategic about those, but it's important to note that you can still get everything done if you want to and you think about it.

3. Remember the Benefits

I never have to get out and pump gas in the cold or snow in my EV. I get places faster on an ebike than an unassisted bike. Both of those are benefits during the bad times in the winter, even if a gas tank or an acoustic bike might be more invariant relative to temperature.  

I didn't park this guy in the garage this time, but when I do, he can charge and stay both warm and dry, while making sure I don't have to fill up outside...literally ever.

This guy can live in the garage even with a car next to him, and the battery can unclip and come inside, and again--less need for me to be out in the cold.

These two both fit inside my back room, or my office, and so again--less walking outside to a car in the cold or snow, and they get me to my destination faster than a regular bike would.

Are there tradeoffs or even downsides to an EV in the winter? Certainly. But they aren't hard to work around, and there are benefits too. As Wisconsin has found, EVs aren't impossible in the winter for buses--or for the rest of us, if we take some care in the execution.

Modal Integration and the QCA

 I was looking at my transit cards from various agencies, and thinking how cool it would be if we in the Quad Cities actually had some fare integration, transit integration, or general modal integration: if you could get around the QCA consistently without friction, moving from one mode or agency to another.

And no, I don't just mean being able to stick my bike in the back of my car.

1. Cross-state Integration

I would love to live in a world where there were more real connections between the Citibus in Davenport and the Metro system in the Illinois side. The same company even operates the (inadequate) Bettendorf transit as does the Illinois system! We could do better! 

Look, they do fine for their scale at a US level: they do have buses across the river despite the differing state and municipal authorities. The timing is even OK for transfers, mostly. But holy moly is the opportunity there for more.

Imagine if we could be like WMATA, even though we obviously aren't the DC area, and just have one transit organization that plans and schedules and so on--and that includes multiple river crossings instead of one bus for each of two bridges.

I don't expect a Metro, just decent interstate work.

2. Last Mile Issues

QCA transit has a big last mile problem. You can take a bus a lot of places--sort of. Imagine if we had either more buses or real bike integration with the existing routes! Or even functional sidewalks near major streets! So much could actually work!

I hear protected bike lanes allow people to actually safely bike on the street, not just in Vancouver.

Rumor has it that sidewalks work in Louisville, and could perhaps here, on Kimberly Road even.

Or on Eastern Avenue...except not. 

3. Don't Forget the Ferry!

The Channel Cat is not like the world's most ideal transit mode, but it does provide valuable service shuttling humans across a very wide and inconvenient (in this sense) river. 

It's also not integrated at all with anything else.

Vancouver, like us, has a giant bridge--but they also have the SeaBus across that same body of water.

Toronto will also put you on a ferry as part of your public transportation. And that's not even mentioning that I grew up in Seattle...

I just miss having consistent, connected ferry service that actually feeds into other consistent transit as well.

Consider the possibilities! We could actually have an integrated system and you could get around smoothly and efficiently.

Or we could keep what we have I suppose.

Maintenance and Repair Priorities

 As it turns to spring here in the QCA, and thus to road repair season (as opposed to all the other times of the year...but I digress), I have been thinking a lot about how not only what gets built shows a city's urbanist priorities, but also (and perhaps more significantly) what gets maintained and repaired.

It is one thing to build a bike path, or a train line, or a road for that matter. It is another entirely to care enough about it to actually make sure it is functional, especially after something goes wrong.

Similarly, it is all very well to talk about how a space is a shared space (say, a road used by both bikes and cars--maybe with an iconic sharrow!) but it is a different thing entirely to actually maintain it as such, rather than prioritizing one group of road users over another when it comes time to patch the thing up.

1. Stop Repairing Roads Badly

On that latter point: there are a number of roads here that have gotten their pot holes patched recently. Huzzah! Hurrah! Or rather, not. 

Because for some of them, it was safer for me as a bicyclist to bike when there were holes in the road, which I could avoid, as opposed to a) a series of much larger bumps that caused me significant issues where they were covering the holes and/or b) random bits of asphalt scattered like confetti from where they had come off the patch.

The above street is not one that has recently been repaired, but it shows the issue. The layers of repairs over the years have produced something that is fine for a car (though by no means optimal!) but which presents serious tire damage and/or bumpy ride issues for a bike. 

This patch is a lesser problem, in that it hasn't actually made it worse to bike on, but it also hasn't made it any better. That is to say: this is a fix for cars but not for bikes.

The maintenance priorities show that this is not a bike space, even if legally it might be one. Stop repairing roads in ways that only help cars!

2. Clear the Edges!

Another version of this that we're coming out of (hopefully--always a chance for a freak March, April, or even May snowstorm!) is the building of barriers and ramparts out of snow that create lanes for cars and blockages for every other form of road use. Even buses are impacted, because they let out on the side of the road, which becomes an ice wall.

As you can see here, this goes for drainage as well. Design your drains to allow other things than cars to use the road when it rains!

Who gets to use the road in bad weather is another choice. 

3. Actually Repair Everything

It has been over a month since the Duck Creek bridge on Harrison Street in Davenport was repaired and restored to four lanes.

They have still not paved the path on the Duck Creek Trail underneath the restored bridge.

They removed the crossing that had been present during the construction, with a demand light for bikes and pedestrians, and now suggest a route that involves biking up the road across the bridge, crossing at the light at 35th Street, and biking back down. One of these directions will be against traffic on a thin sidewalk (and you shouldn't bike on the sidewalk by both law and safety, so it means walking the bike for several blocks). 

It's ridiculous.

If you're repairing infrastructure: repair all the infrastructure and don't call the repairs complete when they aren't. 

This photo isn't of that detour, but stands in for the larger point: if someone's still being detoured, your repairs aren't done, and you shouldn't go back to business as normal.

All of these show that in the QCA, the car is unsurprisingly king. There might be places where the same principles are used to devalue the car--but I have to admit, I've never seen them.

What A Biking Network Is and Isn't

Recently I was with a bunch of fellow Quad Citizens talking to a potential candidate to move here, and the topic of biking came up. My compatriots were eager to describe the biking trails here--the Duck Creek trail, the twin riverfront trails--as a bike network. 

I was a little less enthusiastic.

That isn't to say that I don't enjoy biking in the QCA. I do! I commute by bike, for goodness' sake, at least when it's not terrible outside. But I think we have a bit of a way to go before we can call our trails a network, and I want to talk about why.

1. Scope

The biggest issue here remains scope. A true biking network needs not just one or two routes, but a whole interconnected system. And not just "roads one could theoretically bike on" but roads, trails, routes you could actually see real bike volume on without creating major problems.

This is part of what makes Dutch (and Belgian/Flemish, as in the photo above) biking distinct from many parts of the world. It isn't just that there are marginal improvements over what we offer here in the QCA; it's that there are deliberate fietsroutes (bike routes) that work together to create a transportation network. This above is LF 5; it crosses the entirety (more or less) of northern Belgium, ending in Bruges where I took that photo.

The 5 is an important part of that photo. This isn't the only one, and of course they link into local lanes along the way.

And for once, comparisons to much smaller countries than the US aren't meaningless; the QCA is much smaller than Belgium, so in our local context a denser network would still make sense, as opposed to claims that there should be a single bike route across the whole US (which would be cool, but hardly of significance to commuters or other high-volume users). An integrated network in a region, though? That's what Belgium has.

2. Scalability

As I mentioned above but want to emphasize here, it's not just about the existence of routes (though those are important!). It's about the idea that they should be routes that a lot of bikes could actually use at once. A route that I can bike on myself is good for me; but if adding more bikes than just me to it would create problems (either conflicts with cars, conflicts with other bikes, conflicts with pedestrians, or just plain lack of space) then we don't have a biking network; we have a personal bike path.

I love my bike, but the lack of other bikes in the photos I take here is meaningful. 

Seattle here is doing a bit better.

The Dutch are on another level, though.

These pictures are of bike parking, which is a significant part of scalability, because if there's nowhere to put the bike when you get somewhere that means fewer people will bike (shoutout to Temple Emanuel for installing the bike rack above! Thanks guys!). But it's also about the actual paths. I do a lot of biking on this kind of thing in the QCA:

Ignore the piled up water (itself a problem, but bad drainage can happen on an otherwise good bike network too). It's just...a residential street. It lacks cars because it lacks density, but it's not actually optimized otherwise for bike use at all (see, bad drainage, for example). If there were suddenly 20 of me, we'd fill it up and create a massive traffic jam, not to mention the problems with the cars that would develop.

Toronto's bike lanes aren't actually wider, but they're designed for use: 20 of us biking here will bike through here, not bothering cars or pedestrians or anyone else, and we'd know where to be and where to go from the design. Not to mention the visible grate that would keep the water off ;).

The street alone doesn't scale up; actually intentional design can.

3. Optimization

A truly good bike network goes beyond these two, however, and provides benefits other transit options don't, because of the distinct benefits of the bike.

One of these is that the routes for bikes can go places that routes for other transit, including cars, can't, or can't for similar prices and difficulties of construction. Sorry to go back to the Netherlands here, but they do really do it well--and here near Amsterdam Sloterdijk, this bike path literally goes places no other approach (except walking on the parallel path from which I took the picture) does. It can go over things because a bike path needs less support than a car, bus, or train route due to the lighter weight of vehicles. It can go through places that are narrower, for similar reasons.

This means that a bike network can unlock options that other transportation options don't provide, rather than simply paralleling other routes.

And it can integrate well with other modes, to build something bigger than the sum of its parts, as the view from that same bike path shows (hello tram, pedestrians, and bike parking). 

So I would love a true bike network in the QCA: expand things like the Duck Creek and Riverfront Trails (which do, to be clear, provide routes that can't be exactly duplicated on the road network), build them into a full system that covers the whole area, scale them up to allow greater traffic volumes). But we aren't quite there yet, and it's a bit disingenuous to tell newcomers that we are.