Love/Hate/Interstate

I have, as the title might suggest, a love/hate relationship with the US Interstate system (and its cousins, like the TransCanada Highway). I love that there is a public infrastructure network to link together cities and towns across the country; I love, for instance, that I can get on I-80 and zip over to Lincoln or Chicago at need; I love the systemic regularity of where the numbers go in the country and how you can get to pretty much anywhere from pretty much everywhere.

I hate actually driving on it, especially for long distances, and I hate that it is the practical replacement to an equally comprehensive network of rails that used to carry passengers across the country.

So for today, I wanted to dive into those feelings: what makes the Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System great, and how that greatness masks a weakness in US public infrastructure, especially around cities.

1. So Many Roads, So Little Much Time

I grew up in Seattle, and spent formative years in both Chicago and Rochester. What these cities have in common is that they don't just have I-90 going through them (yes, it's I-90 in my blood, especially when you consider that Boston is also on it) but also other interstates intersecting with it. I-490, I-5, I-405, I-390, I-80, I-55, I-57, I-355, I could literally just keep going on.

Even the Quad Cities, small as it may be and non-I-90 as it is, has not only I-80, but I-280 and I-74 to call its own.

The highway system doesn't just connect like little lines on the big map of the US, in other words; it tentacles outwards so that urban and suburban spaces are continually covered with big, open asphalt. 

That's great in the sense that you can use those highways to get into the city, get around the city, get through the city. But it's terrible when you consider just how much of the city turns out to actually be the highway.

And somehow there are still massive backups on these highways (though much less here in the QCA than in the three cities mentioned above).

Somehow I-5 in Seattle's U-District manages to both massively divide two neighborhoods with a giant asphalt pit and also be bumper-to-bumper over the Ship Canal Bridge. 

Somehow I-90/94 in Chicago manages to both make it extremely unpleasant to walk across large portions of the city while causing the El to be noisy and windswept as it stops mid-highway and be incredibly dangerous and slow at the same time.

Pictured: one of the few northern Blue Line stations that isn't mid-highway. Of course, it's O'Hare, which has its own problems.

So you have to hurry up and wait, 55-60-65-70 mph signage or not, while you also depress the value of property and the pleasure of walking, and oh by the way the creation of these giant urban freeways wasn't great either.

2. Point to Point, But Not

At the same time, what urban highways don't actually do is the thing that urban railways do do, which is really bring you into downtown directly.

This OuiGo in Paris Gare du Nord is faster and more central than those highways I was talking about above--except maybe the capped I-5 under Seattle, but even that skirts the edge of downtown and is notoriously dangerous to exit there.

Basically, even in the cities where the highway goes "downtown," it doesn't actually go downtown, because if it did then downtown would have to move--because there'd be a freeway there and people and businesses don't actually like to congregate near a freeway (not to mention the space they take up).

A paradox that rail travel does not experience.

Even Boston's Big Dig which goes under the north side of downtown, isn't actually great for getting you to downtown--because of the abovementioned slowness and danger.

As I feel like I mention all the time: cars give the illusion of going point to point more efficiently than trains because you are in the car the whole time, but the actual access for the car and the time in the car are not necessarily all that efficient. Urban highways are a great example of this, because they don't usually go downtown for realz.

And when they do, like in Milwaukee? Well, I'm on the record about how I feel about that too. A good downtown shouldn't make me feel like I need to duck down to walk in it.

That said, I do like that I can get on the interstate and just go. As I said: love/hate relationship. It's great that I can slide onto I-5 and head out of town at the Seattle Convention Center, when I need to. It's just not great the rest of the time.

3. Breathing Free

The stereotypical view of the American highway is the open convertible gunning it down the empty open roads of the American West.

Something like this, but not parked and with the top down and the sun up.

But while that is a lovely vision (see, this is the love part), all too often the highway actually makes it much harder for everyone else to breathe. Gas fumes; tire particulates; a lack of sun and an excess of noise: the urban highway is not an engine of freedom for everyone who isn't on it (this is the hate part).

And again: what speed are you actually making on the way when you're in the city? Would you want your convertible top down if the car next to you has its exhaust pointed at your head (or is a truck with the exhaust above your head)?

On a map, the Interstate Highway System is a marvel, and if it could operate only on the basis of that map I'd be as big a fan as anybody. But when you get down onto it and actually drive? Well, I'd rather have a robust train network any century.

It's a shame we don't, at present, get to make that choice.

Who Runs the Transit?

 This article made me think about the question of how best to organize our local transit agencies here in the QCA for better service. Or, more specifically, what lessons we can take from other places about how to manage transit across multiple kinds of internal legal divisions: municipal, county, state, geographic. After all, the Quad Cities has (more than) four cities, by definition, as well as a state boundary that happens to be a major, wide river in the midst of everything.

But we are not the only place to have such boundaries, even if the Mississippi is a particularly large river. So what can we learn from others?

1. Collective Decision-making

The biggest lesson is that the more we make local decisions about a collective problem (how to move people around the area) the more problems we'll have. When Rock Island decides to make it harder to open shelters because they want to "spread services more evenly across the region," but does so unilaterally, we just end up with less services. The same goes for transit. 

Good transit services, like ThamesLink above, cut across administrative boundaries to provide service that will serve the people who live there regardless of their particularized municipal or regional government. What does that mean here in the QCA? It means not making Bettendorf Transit decisions for Bettendorf and CitiBus decisions for Davenport, or Iowa decisions for Iowa and Illinois decisions for Illinois, but making regional decisions based on populations and potential trips. If a bunch of Iowans work at the Arsenal, or John Deere, we should probably have transit that helps them get there. If a bunch of Illini work at Arconic, same deal--not to mention the two downtowns with their distinct cultural and social amenities.

2. Unify Agencies

More than collective decisions, there's also a collective action issue. You could argue that we actually have some decent collective decision-making here: there's one agency on the Illinois side, and it technically manages the Bettendorf Transit as well, and the Davenport transit connects to it. But the connections are clunky and they happen inconveniently by city boundaries rather than in logical places for a line to actually start or end. 

Just like the TTC used to end awkwardly around the boundaries of Toronto but now emerges into the Greater Toronto Area where it makes sense, it would make a lot more sense to have a single line running down Locust/Middle Road than to have to get off and transfer in a literal Burlington Coat Factory parking lot.

There is a 1-Line TTC stop right on the Vaughan/Toronto (North York) line, but it's not the end of the line or a transfer point; it's just there because there are meaningful things to go to. Similarly, there should still be a stop near I-74 and Middle Road/Locust, but it shouldn't be where the lines stop and force a transfer. 

The fix for this, ideally, is a unified agency (ala the TTC, TfL, WMATA) that runs transit with regard to where the people need to go and not where the city lines sit. 

The DC Metro would be a lot less useful if it only went to the boundaries of DC.

3. Meaningful Transit for an Integrated Community

Of course, the secret background lesson here is that all of these communities run more transit (even per capita) than we do here. And I'm not advocating for DC/London/Toronto levels of transit here in the Quad Cities! But if you want people to unite together to make a collective community, you need to make it not just possible but easy for them to get around.

In a way, the Mississippi could even be a major blessing here, paradoxically because it is so annoying to cross. We only have three main crossings (plus the I-80 Bridge out in LeClaire), which funnels traffic across them and creates major issues when one or more are shut, e.g. for a race. It's hard to put a lot of cars between the two sides of the river, and there's a reason that I meet people who (say they) never go across the river if they can help it.

But mass transit thrives in a situation where a lot of people want to get from one place to another across a narrow channel. 

If we truly integrated our transit, we could make it the easiest and best way to get from one side to the other, and knit the community together.

I'm not advocating for a Blackfriars Station-style bridge-as-transit-station (above) but wouldn't it be cool?

And more to the point, it's a good example that a river doesn't have to mean bad transit connections. In fact, it can mean that people gravitate towards transit, because it makes getting past that barrier easier.

I know this likely seems idealistic, since we haven't managed this in 190 years of having Davenport on the opposite side from Rock Island. But there's no reason we couldn't, if we take the lesson of not dividing our transit and letting it instead tie us together.

Boring Places

I was walking down the street near my house and it occurred to me that, boring as I found the street, it was no more boring than the street next to the hotel I'd stayed at the last time we were in Toronto.

But my memories of that trip are not boring at all, even though we walked there just as I was walking here--similarly late at night, even. 

So I wanted to think: if it's not the streetscape that makes it boring, what might it be? Or, to think more positively, if that's not what makes somewhere interesting, what is it?

1. Connections

The most obvious answer is that nothing actually makes it more interesting in itself, but rather the Toronto spot was more interesting because of where you could go from it and how--the connections that the space had.

The space itself was similar, but from that spot in Toronto, even well after dark, I could easily get anywhere else I wanted, without a car and without much effort on my part. Partly from a light rail line, but also just because of buses.

Here in the Quad Cities, well, I could walk a long way or I could drive. That was it.

And either of those options requires a lot from me: time, if walking, and both sobriety and the willingness to be in charge of navigating, conducting, and parking a vehicle, if driving. None of that responsibility and much less of that time was required in Toronto.

2. Community

I'm not going to lie: there were not a lot of people in that particular part of Toronto all the time. The Don Valley Freeway was nearby, and Eglinton Ave was not hopping. But there were more than there were in the QCA, for sure--and the fact that I was on foot was not itself inherently remarkable or unusual.

Kinda different here.

Actually, very different.

In Toronto even on a quiet street, the presence of the connections (see #1) creates a sense that the space is intended to be potentially used by people even if they are temporarily absent. In the QCA, the design makes it so that the street is clearly not intended for anyone even if the street temporarily has someone walking by it. The sense of community is different, as one implies an absent community of souls and the other implies that any present community is a threat or an abnormality, not a good thing. One is not excited to see another pedestrian here; the question arises of why they're out, even though you are too.

3. Accommodation

Part of this feeling is the little bit of a lie I told above: the street design does indeed differ somewhat in a meaningful way. Even though both are pretty boring, the Toronto (technically North York) area site is clearly accommodating of pedestrians and the QCA is not, or at least no more than minimally.

For example: the beg buttons in Toronto not only actually work but some are labeled as "audible signal only"--that is, they are there for visually impaired pedestrians to know for sure they can cross, but the pedestrian light will change anyway. For another example, the sidewalks were actually maintained to a point I wasn't tripping as I walked. Seemingly obvious, but...

I could go on. There was a staircase where it was needed to connect sidewalks to businesses despite a hill. The bus stops (present in both locations, technically) were not only marked but sheltered in Toronto. And so on.

Again, not to mention the light rail line--the bus stops did this too. But I like the light rail line, so that's the picture.

One space accommodates people; the other doesn't technically ban them. The difference is palpable, even in places--like, I re-emphasize, both these spots--that are basic, boring, and pretty empty.

We could do a lot better here.

Bloody Sidewalks Again

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I still go places on foot, I have been thinking about sidewalks again.

I recently read an article about how delivery robots require good sidewalk infrastructure to work. And this is likely true, but it struck me as deeply ironic that someone's reasoning for making sidewalks actually functional would be robotic, rather than human. After all, sidewalks are fundamentally something (that ought to be) designed for humans, even if robots may use them, and humans should matter enough that we design them and maintain them and repair them, robots or no.

But of course, we don't.

1. Sidewalks Get Least Priority

There's a lot of construction going on around the part of the Quad Cities where I live and work, and that means a lot of construction signs.

Can anyone identify for me the problem that this signage might cause? 

How about this one?

Yes, a delivery robot is going to have trouble with these, but so too does my human body. The need to tell cars that something is coming trumps the need to allow pedestrians to move safely at all. Can you imagine putting signs for a sidewalk blockage in the street in the way of cars just to make sure that it communicates without blocking the pedestrians? Of course you can't.

And yes, cars go a lot faster and there is a much higher chance of a serious accident if a car driver doesn't know that their lane is disappearing. But that's just more evidence of how dangerous car culture is, not a good reason to screw over pedestrians.

2. Sidewalks Are Abandoned 

Look, we have pothole problems in the QCA too.

As someone who bikes over these and has had so many popped back tires on my ebike that the back wheel is dented, I am highly aware of this. 

But potholes get fixed, even if slowly, badly, and without consideration for non-car road users.

The only times that I can recall our sidewalks getting fixed are for ADA compliance at intersections, and as you can see, that isn't near as...undisruptive a process as filling a pothole.

Note that there are multiple issues of mismatched heights on sidewalk pavers around this corner and the fix to the corner didn't come with any further repairs.

Our sidewalk infrastructure isn't just a lower priority, it's actively crumbling. 

3. The Sidewalk Isn't Even Access

And to add insult to injury, we've built our cities so much around the car here in the USA that you can't actually use the sidewalk to access businesses and services in some places--even when there is a sidewalk. I'm not even talking about the 1/3 of the population that lives where there are no sidewalks. I'm talking about walking somewhere with a sidewalk--but the sidewalk doesn't let you get where you need to go anyway.

Here's the front door of a local clinic. But you can't actually enter via the front door on the sidewalk. You have to walk around back to the parking lot. 

And the business next door, which I didn't feel comfortable photographing at the time, is literally drive-through only despite the sidewalk going right past it.

And just because there's supposed to be a sidewalk doesn't mean there actually is one, anyway.

It's just so very frustrating--and it makes me annoyed that this is being reported as a problem for robots when it's already such a problem for people.

Comfort Underground

Sometimes on this blog I will treat metros as one thing: the existence or absence of one standing in for a certain kind of urban infrastructure and planning.

But of course we know that's not true. And while there are myriad distinctions, small and large, between the physical systems as a transit design, I want today to talk about a slightly different feature: the comfort for the riders on a system, both aesthetic and physical.

1. Platforms

A platform is a necessary function even for the most frequent subway system, since people need somewhere to walk in and out of the train and to wait for the train before it comes.

But these can vary widely in how pleasant they are to be on.

I love the NYC system, but the platforms are usually pretty unpleasant, for instance. I actually like an island platform, so that's not an issue here, but they're crowded, smelly, and rarely have any seating or other amenities.

Amsterdam's platforms are much less dirty and smelly, but that's a function of lack of use: they don't bring a lot (or anything) to the table in terms of actual benefits or positives.

The TTC in Toronto, in my experience, does a slightly better job, though more so outside the downtown core. There are some places to sit, and the smell and noise are not as extreme.

Overall, this is a hard thing to work on, because the more use a system gets the more crowded stations get, and the harder it is to find time, space, and general opportunity to clean them effectively--especially on a 24-hour system.

2. Decor

One way to make a station less unpleasant even if it is crowded, noisy, or smelly, is to appeal to other senses. Now,  I don't have pictures of the Stockholm metro, which is famously gorgeous. But I do have pictures of how other stations I have actually been to make this work. Start with the Toronto station above: those little geometric patterns aren't much, but they break up the monotony of the station.

This public art in Chicago's Midway station is a little further from the trains, so it does less to brighten the mood actually down at the platform level, but it's a nice flourish when you're hustling to the train.

The Montreal metro does, I think, an even better job of a similar approach, and I love the above piece very much.

And of course I'd be remiss if I didn't mention WMATA, where the DC Metro makes the overall station design its own aesthetic feature that makes waiting much more pleasant (also note all those seats!).

3. Trains

And of course, another major element of "comfort" and "ease" in and around a metro/subway/underground/El/etc. system is the actual trains themselves.

Open gangways, like Amsterdam's trains have, make a big difference to me: the feeling that you're able to move around the train if you need to (whether that's for efficiency reasons of getting off where you want at the next stop or comfort reasons like finding a seat or even finding a friend) creates a sense of comfort and relaxation that a more cramped traditional car can't equal.

The Elizabeth Line in London isn't technically a metro, but it was the picture that I had of the moquette on the seats: this kind of branding (different on different lines) combined with comfort (much better than hard plastic seats) can contribute significantly to a sense of place and a sense of ease.

I have fewer pictures of interiors because I tend to avoid taking pictures with recognizable people in them, so even though I don't actually mind the DC Metro's interiors this will have to do as a picture of a less pleasant interior. The lighting is less strong, the car feels less open, and the seats are less comfortable.

Sorry DC. As I said, I actually quite like the riding experience, but it's not Amsterdam or the Elizabeth Line (there are certainly London Underground lines that would also be lower on this kind of ranking though).

What makes you feel comfortable on a metro? How does a subway catch your eye? 

The View Down the Tracks

 A perhaps somewhat strange thing that I like to do when I go to a new city--or even a new stop on a train line--or even an old city that I'm just visiting again--is to look around the city by peering down the railroad tracks and seeing what appears.

Most of the time, of course, this means that what I'm looking at is mostly more train tracks, but you can still get a vibe for a city and its transit by seeing just how the train tracks do--or don't--meld into their surroundings.

Sometimes you get tracks that disappear into the distance, giving you the impression that they go on forever.

Here in London, for instance, I don't really see much besides the tracks themselves (and that oncoming train) and it gives me the sense of a city where the train are arteries, connecting everything together in their own independent map of the city. There's a reason that non-geographic, systems-style maps work so well for trains, after all, and owe their prevalence at least in part to the Harry Beck London Underground map: London is that kind of city, with different connections popping up as you transit the city in different ways.

Other times, you get a different view.

This too is the UK, but here the trees and nature stand out to me; you get the sense of a place that can be accessed by train and not as much by car (false as that impression likely is) and thus the sense, again, that the train has different affordances, opens up different possibilities, than other forms of transit. 

Sometimes the view is more urban. Here the train station and its tracks blend not into nature, but into the urban environment, reminding you that the purpose of a train station is to bring you into the city, and to provide a portal between the space of transit and the space of life.

Sometimes the train gives you more of a sense of other trains than anything else: the endless width of a railyard is a sign of the coming together of so many other potential journeys and potential paths.

And sometimes, of course, what you really see is a parking lot.

Conversely, sometimes the tracks themselves are the road--used here by buses and trams--and so what you see is really the city, not a train station at all. These are very different views of the road from a station--and they tell you something about the difference between the way the trains and the cities operate.

I don't have much more of a point than that: sometimes my favorite kind of tourism is just staring down the tracks and seeing what this particular city has to show me.

Why Autonomous Cars Won't Save Us

We hear a lot that autonomous cars are the future. And there are distinct ways in which autonomous cars would improve the current car situation: in theory they won't violate traffic laws (like speeding), they can safely follow each other more closely than human-driven cars can, and they can have reaction times to things like pedestrians that are significantly better than humans, for example. These aren't true yet, but you can see the potential.

Yet autonomous cars have real disadvantages as well, and in light of their growing deployment in US cities, I wanted to touch on some of them.

1. No Fix for Congestion

The trigger for this post was reporting that companies like Uber and Waymo are projecting autonomous vehicles to increase, not decrease, the number of cars on the road. That means that autonomous cars won't fix the problems with traffic, because they won't be reducing car trips. Sure, they might go faster or more smoothly, but there's still a throughput issue, especially on city streets that have slow speed limits for safety reasons. And of course, stoplights still cause backups for any car.

These cars are stopped, whether they're autonomous or not.

There might be fewer crashes and cars might potentially move less jerkily through bad traffic, but cars on the road are still cars on the road--and the projections of increasing vehicle hours would make that worse, not better.

That's because autonomous cars, unlike regular cars, are not usually conceived of as stopping in a parking space (or parking lot) when they're empty. Instead, Uber and Waymo conceive of them as constantly cycling, looking for more people to drive. And that means that a not-insignificant quantity of those autonomous trips will be empty of people--a problem that unsurprisingly does not exist for human-driven cars, and which can create a massive uptick in traffic.

2. Not Scalable

A related issue is that autonomous cars, just like regular cars, don't really scale as population grows, especially if (as Uber and Waymo typically project) we're still looking at a model that is car-like, rather than bus-like, with individual people calling their own car for their own destination rather than carpooling or driving fixed routes. 

Making this autonomous does not increase its capacity. The driver is just...not driving now. 

It's true that it might have a major benefit for people who cannot drive themselves (youth, the disabled, the elderly, etc.) who can now get a car. But that would run us into problem #1, as it just increases trips and thus congestion. There's no efficiency gain here. 

Note that this does not apply to all autonomous vehicles: autonomous buses, and especially autonomous trains, do provide an efficiency gain, as bus and train operation is often bottlenecked by the ability to find trained operators, and autonomous operation allows more trains per hour on tracks or even the expansion of tracks to increase a system itself. 

But of course, that's older technology, since Vancouver SkyTrain has been autonomous for longer than I've been alive.

No driver, no problem, but also nothing new.

Should we expand driverless train operations? Of course. But that's not the sort of autonomous vehicles that people are excited about right now, and it's a different conversation. 

The car version simply doesn't scale the same way--or it if does, it basically turns into inefficient versions of the trains by putting a separate engine/tires/doors/drivetrain/etc. into every 4 or so seats, compared to having a vehicle like a train with a lot more seats per unit volume.

3. Pollution

And both of the above points contribute to the problem that cars are a polluting form of transportation, especially as compared to other options for moving lots of people.

In theory, I suppose, there's a big benefit to switching to autonomous cars, which is that they'd be newer cars and often electric cars and thus much more fuel-efficient and less polluting than the average of the actual car fleet, which is older and less efficient.

But...this car is an efficient car, but it's not a non-polluting car.

My Nissan Leaf may not produce tailpipe emissions, and in some places it may even not produce much emissions to produce its electricity (say, if I live near a hydroelectric dam). But cars produce other pollution too.

Tires are bad for the environment, and all cars run on tires. 

Sure, there are rubber-tired subways and of course buses also run on tires. But see above about scale: those move a lot more people per tire.

And of course not all autonomous cars are electric or even all that fuel-efficient. 

So increasing the number of cars on the roads is going to massively increase pollution.

And that's physical pollution; I haven't even mentioned other kinds like noise and light pollution.

So AVs may have benefits; I'm not pretending they don't. But they also won't actually save us from some of the bigger issues that cars produce, and they might actually increase some of the problems (like increasing traffic). So maybe we should stop treating them like an urban panacea and consider investing a bit more in some older technology--like our good friend the train.