City Expectations and Appearances

Today I want to talk a bit about how a city shows you the expectations you should have about what existing in that city will be like.

In other words, how do I see the built environment setting up expectations about what the city is like--plus a bit about the way the people are or aren't interacting on the street. I'm going to walk through three city examples, and then say a little about how I see them coming together more generally.

1. Davenport and Distance

Let's start right in the Quad Cities with Davenport.

The big impression that I think Davenport gives you is one of distance: there's a lot of space between buildings, except in the very center of downtown; the roads are wide (see above); there are lots of open spaces near them that aren't filled with sidewalks or buildings at all. 

Sometimes this is great: Vanderveer is a lovely park right in the midst of the city, and we have a lot of parkland in general. That's a positive kind of space and distance: space intentionally dedicated to recreation, relaxation, and play.

Sometimes it's less positive though: just space dedicated to cars and pavement. There's always a reason for the cars to be there, of course, but the proportion is a bit odd. Everything is so far away -- and the parking lots mean it's even far away from itself once you get there.

2. Toronto and Towers

Now, obviously Davenport is smaller than Toronto. There are parts of Toronto, or at least the Greater Toronto Area, that are similar in build to what I just described in Davenport. But let's think about places a similar distance from the center (or centre) of the city.

Toronto has, I suggest, an impression of height rather than width.

Now, this particular shot is from a park, so there is certainly some space between the buildings. But look how high they are! 

Looking horizontally from a high floor you still get a similar experience. Look at the CN Tower in that shot--one of the tallest buildings in the entire world--and consider how not-so-tall it looks against the broader downtown. Now, obviously, given that it is literally that tall, it's visible from a lot more of Toronto than these particular towers are. But the angle still gives that sense that Toronto is pretty tall, at least in the downtown area.

And the other major impression there is that there are so many of them, layered together, that they don't look as wide as Davenport's streets do.

The distance visible here is a couple of miles (about 3 km, for those scoring in Canada or the rest of the world). And yet it looks jam-packed.

And this impression doesn't end with downtown; the Yonge St. corridor is full of high buildings, as this park up the Yonge St. Subway from downtown can attest. Again, they aren't always crowded together (though they often are) but the dominant impression in Toronto is height, not width. It just looks dense because of all the high buildings (even though it too has sections that are much more single-family residential than anything else).

3. Paris and Proximity 

But while Toronto's heights are high, they're not as close together as are the buildings in the dominant physical appearance of a place like Paris.

Like many European cities, Paris is famously tightly knit, with (as discussed last week) a great deal of midrise height along the street. 

This is true even near significant monuments or other spaces that might limit density in other cities.

Notre-Dame is being repaired here, but that's not my focus: look at the heights of the buildings on the right.

Or look at this second wall along the Seine, which is seemingly just as uniform and impenetrable as the river wall below.

The shopping district lit up at night (and oddly full of cars!) is likewise consistently dense and midrise. 

That sense of everything being cheek-by-jowl, dense, and tight gives a very different sense of the city than the Toronto or Davenport examples above. 

Even when the streets are somewhat wide, the density of the buildings gives a different feel than Davenport does with similarly wide streets.

The city just feels like everything is nearby. And it lives up to that: if you walk a couple miles in Paris, it feels much less demanding than walking the same couple miles in Davenport--as we can see by looking at walk share in the cities (Toronto is much more similar to Paris, and may actually exceed it in some places). 

But regardless of the realities of how the cities are used, the visible built environment is also massively different. Everything being closer together makes a marked difference in the experience of the city, not just in first impressions but in the moment by moment experience of existing within the space.

It's probably obvious from, well, everything here what my preference is, but I want here to simply focus on that basic fact: the built environment creates expectations and understandings of the city that are both immediate and lingering, and these different cities fundamentally feel different because of the changes--before we even consider questions like "is there a transit line" or "are there functional sidewalks" or "can you safely bike here."

Urbanism can be visible from the very moment you cast your eyes on a place, and the different feels of cities (especially the city center) are immediately remarkable.

The Goose Creek Connector: The Short-Sighted

 This is the third of three posts on the experience and design of the Goose Creek Connector, following up on the good and the bad of the implementation of the design. Today I want to talk about the elements of the Goose Creek Connector design that aren't misimplemented in terms of what they decided to do, but rather that to me fall short of a good idea in the actual design or planning. 

To be clear, all of these would be fixable in the future! But these are missed opportunities or strange choices that were made. I expect a number of them were made in order to deliver the project faster, cheaper, or at all; I'm not, in this, trying to criticize the designers of this project. They had to actually cost, plan, implement, and negotiate the details of this route, and I'm very glad that they did.

But there are, nevertheless, some points where I think the design could have used some improvement, and could be improved in the future.

1. What The Heck Is Going On Around Kimberly?

So far I've been burying a key part of the design here: the Goose Creek Connector doesn't actually fully connect.

What is going on here, folks? Suddenly we're in Sharrowland, with a vehicle parked across the sidewalk for those who might be using the path as pedestrians. 

And then, as noted last time, it becomes hard to find where you reconnect to the trail proper if you're on a bike (not, admittedly, if you're on foot). Was I supposed to be on the path already? Should I be sharrowsing the road? Who knows!

That's not even getting into the tight turns around Kimberly:

The route takes a 180 here to get to street level.

That, I'm not necessarily critiquing: land is very tight on a major corridor like the Eastern/Kimberly intersection, and the creek itself and the railroad have clearly taken most of the best ways through that aren't the road. The tight turns are necessary, unless you had complete eminent domain power to just bulldoze people's buildings (which would have created massive costs and resistance to the project, so don't do that!).

But the road/sidewalk section sucks. If it were a protected bike lane on the street, that would be one thing. Mississippi Ave is wide enough there: it has parking on one side even though the businesses all have giant parking lots, so if you could take that and make it instead a protected lane you could make this actually connect. Would it cost more? Yes, and I expect that (plus the kneejerk resistance to losing even minimally valuable parking) is why it wasn't done. But it would be a great way to futureproof this route, which right now has a glaring hole.

2. Lack of Intersections

I don't literally mean intersections here, in that I like the fact that you can do an uninterrupted ride from about 33rd to 59th. I mean that there are a lot of missed opportunities to make what is currently a great recreational trail into a great bike connector more generally. I'm not suggesting we should be at Houten, Netherlands-level bike functionality, where houses front on bike paths without a street in sight. But I am suggesting that it would be a great step forward if the new north-south trail had more access points for people to actually get on and off it, particularly from the housing and businesses that are so close to connecting.

Here, the trail splits to go under Kimberly and to intersect with the Kimberly sidewalk (which is its own issue, see below). But there's also a Walgreens literally right next to me as I take the shot: why can't that Walgreens have a connection directly to the trail, instead of looping around?

More broadly, there's a lot of stuff at that intersection, but to get to the Hy-Vee across the street you need to bike about a mile and a half around to the Duck Creek Trail, across Eastern Ave, and back up Spring St. instead of just...across the street. 

Not designed with bikes (or pedestrians) in mind. I also used the beg button here but had it skip 2 straight cycles, so I don't think it works...

Why couldn't these connections be improved?

Likewise, these apartments back onto the trail--why not have a connection?

Now, some of this was outside of the designers' hands (they don't own that apartment complex!) and some would be challenging for political planning reasons (messing with lights/bike lanes around or on Eastern and Kimberly). But that doesn't make them not missed opportunities; it just means that I can see why they are currently missed. I hope they improve; it would be cool to see a path with a gate instead of just a fence at the apartment complexes, for instance. 

3. The Sidewalk Problem

Look, I know I harp on sidewalks a lot. But seriously: make up your mind if you're designing a big sidewalk or an actual mixed-use trail that you expect non-pedestrians to use. And then remember that you're definitely doing the latter, since you literally put bike signage on the trail.

And then stop terminating the exits from the trail onto pure sidewalks--both in terms of the legality of biking on the sidewalk and terms of sheer width. The path itself is a nice width for bikes and pedestrians to coexist. The sidewalks they deliver you to are not.

And sometimes those sidewalks just end themselves: Kimberly doesn't really have any, for instance, except the bit used for the trail itself.

Again, I see why this happens: dumping pedestrians into the street is bad, and the cost would skyrocket to redo all the sidewalks into full paths as well (though Bettendorf has a lot of those, so there's local precedent at least). 

But dang if it doesn't meant that you can't really use the connector for anything much besides driving from end to end: the places it delivers you in the middle are either not well connected to the path (see #2) or only accessible on foot.

It's great for recreation, in other words, if all you're doing is biking a long distance along the path. But as soon as you want to use it mid-path or to actually get somewhere, it doesn't work nearly as well. Short-sighted, in other words, though not necessarily bad.

And all of this is definitely improvable--if and only if we actually decide to do it.

Heights and Streets

 Well, since there seems to be some further chatter about optimal density in the air, this seems like as good a time as any to address some thoughts I've been having regarding streetscapes and density, particularly in terms of height. 

After all, height is a key to density in urban space: rowhouses are only so dense if they are still one story (and you can get a lot more density from buildings further apart if they're taller as well). But also density is key to density: that spacing is also critical. So what works?

1. Consistency is Key

One of the elements that I think the article I linked above does a really good job with is the idea that we're not necessarily talking about every building being the same size or shape (that's a different kind of urban form anyway), but we are talking about the default background of the city being consistent--and consistently dense.

The far side of this street in Amsterdam, for instance, is pretty much the same design (though you can definitely tell where each building starts and ends from coloration and decorative details) but the close side has clearer variation (though I'm sorry about the photo, which did not capture that as well as perhaps it might). The general overall sense of the built environment here is consistent though, on both sides of the street, even if there is more color and material variation on the closer side.

Likewise, this Parisian street scene has more variation (it's not literally all the same height) but a general consistency of size, if not appearance: it's all in the 3-6 story range. Nothing is short (no single family homes) and nothing is huge (no 8+ story buildings standing out). 

That consistency is key both for a coherent urban form and for efficient use of land.

This is especially true if you have narrower streets, as in the above London picture--which again showcases how consistency of size does not have to mean uniformity of building material or appearance.

You can have an interesting, varied city without having to radically alter heights--although I do want to emphasize that I quite like the left side of the street in that first Amsterdam picture too. There's nothing wrong with attractive consistency in appearance as well!

2. Width and Spacing Matter Too

Relatedly, the width of the street and the spacing between houses/apartments/buildings/etc. is also key to effective and consistent density.

Gazing across the Thames at St. Paul's Cathedral we have a natural experiment in heights: due to regulations of St. Pauls views, none of the buildings in front of it can be taller than it, or even rival it. But they're sitting on extremely premium land in the City and adjacent to it (the City of London, that is, the square mile at its heart, not just Greater London). So they want to get maximum value out of their parcels--which means that you can see very little space between the buildings.

That closeness can be key to density in an overall urban setting.

Take this shot across Chicago. Ignore for the moment the truly high-flying towers of the dense downtown core, and look at the overall urban fabric: most of the green is deliberate parks, not open space between apartments except where there are a few overdense apartment blocks surrounded by greenery--itself an intentional choice. By and large when you look at a dense, urbanist urban form (and Chicago does pretty well on this by US standards) you see this kind of close together, 3-6 story "midrise" apartment/condo construction.

That doesn't mean that your close together buildings can't have flair: I have concerns about the accessibility to people like my parents of apartments like the above, in Montréal, but they're distinctive and dense at the same time. And they even have a setback from the road to allow for the staircase and the front yard--though it helps that the street here is not particularly wide by North American standards.

To me, the greatest flaw in neighborhoods like Wallingford in Seattle (above), is the combined failure of these two elements: the street is too dang wide and while you can see one little apartment behind the grocery store in the above picture (and another is across the street to the right), the vast majority of what you see is separated single-family housing.

Of course we need to have that in the mix as well. But combining the spaces between houses with the lack of consistent height in the buildings we do have and the width of the roads...they collectively undermine the effective density of the city overall even if each individual plot has something not too bad on it.

3. Background and Variation

Again, the major point of the linked article I want to reinforce and highlight is that we're talking about the basic background of a city. There's plenty of space for variation, be it to parks and other open spaces, to single-family homes, or to high-rises.

This nice midrise part of Croydon is just a short walk from this open space (a park):

The idea isn't to banish parks and open space, but to make them deliberate and communal, rather than haphazardly attached to whatever property you individually happen to possess or occupy.

Likewise, this reasonably dense (if very wide in the street!) section of Chicago is just minutes from these high-rises:

So again, the idea isn't to say "only midrise housing please, get rid of the bigger stuff."

I've been pretty open on this blog about my love for Vancouver-style urbanism, and the mix of high-rise and mid-rise there is one of my favorite elements, for instance. 

It's really about making sure that the basic unit of a dense urban city isn't trying to somehow be detached single-family homes set against a wide four-lanes-plus-parking street. That is an inherently undense form, no matter how much you vary it with high-rises. Those should exist (at least the homes--the roads are perhaps a different question) but they should exist as a variation to a consistent urban emphasis on those 3-6 story buildings that allow for a mixture of density and openness that allows a city to actually house its residents.

Most of the time: it's not like Amsterdam doesn't have (like the whole West doesn't have) a housing crisis. But it's certainly a better start than just single family homes like a typical US design.

The Goose Creek Connector: The Bad

 This is the second in my series on the Goose Creek Connector, following up on the good last week.

I liked biking the Goose Creek Connector but there are some ways in which it is not well-implemented, and I wanted to talk a bit about those today.

1. Signage

Quick quiz: where is this?

The only sign you see in the picture is an (already damaged??) bikes-go-downhill sign. There's a small stop sign just out of frame to the right. What there aren't are trail markers, that would tell you where the two dividing sides of the trail go, or a marker on the bridge to tell you what road you're about to go under.

Here's a better view of another fork in the road with absolutely no guidance. 

And this isn't just abstract: I kind of figured I had passed 53rd St. at some point, but the first time I had an actual piece of official guidance of where I was was when I was suddenly dumped out on the sidewalks by 59th St. and could see the regular road signs.

The Duck Creek Trail itself has signs in most places where the road splits off--why doesn't the Goose Creek Connector? 

2. Maintenance

Let's zoom in on that already damaged sign above. That's not a great, well, sign for the trail. And there are other spots where this brand-new trail is already showing signs of less than optimal maintenance.

This is already overgrown to the point where I had to slightly swerve out of the way to avoid hitting the grass on my return trip.

This might, optimistically, be a sign of maintenance happening, but the fact that, again, the week it opened it was already having "sidewalk closed" signs prepared to deal with overgrowth is not ideal.

We'll get to whether this is a sidewalk at all next week.

Basically, I continue to worry about the ongoing state of maintaining, rather than simply opening, this trail--especially when (not if) the low-lying parts flood.

3. Getting Off It

This is where we start almost sliding towards next week's theme of what is short-sighted in the design here. We'll talk about where the trail goes and what opportunities it might miss elsewhere. Right now, I want to focus on this:

Great, the bike route ends. Where the heck am I? What am I supposed to do with the bike I'm on? I don't love trails that dead-end into parking lots, but at least those are clearly intended for people who bike to the trail--not me, but a defined population of people, many of whom use our trails. But this? Bikes are allowed on multi-use trails and paths in Iowa, but otherwise they're vehicles. Legally, they belong in the road.

And this doesn't deliver them to the road. Even if we assume that the bike route ends at the sidewalk, not the sign, there isn't a curb cut there--there is one a bit down the street, but it's not exactly well-designed to get bikes on and off the sidewalk to the trail.

The opposite problem happens just north of Kimberly, where the trail briefly detours into the street (more on that next week) but the signage is only in one direction for getting back on the trail? You can see the back of the sign, but there's nothing from this direction that tells you the trail is going to the left. You're just on either the street or the path (unclear directions on which is the trail coming from the south) and then you have to notice that the trail is going off--otherwise you're right into Eastern Avenue.

Why make this trail so hard to legally get on and off? Why not sign (see #1) more clearly? 

These are not insurmountable problems, and they're not hard to solve either. A few additional signs, a curb cut or two, and some consistent repair and mowing would do it. I'm hopeful that these are just growing pains and we'll see the Goose Creek Connector being well taken care of and well-marked going forward. It just isn't quite there yet.

Improving Streetscapes: Lincoln, NE

 I was thinking recently about underrated elements that make for a pleasant streetscape for me to walk through, and I decided I should give some love to some things I experienced in Lincoln, Nebraska--a city I've given some attitude in the past, and which deserves probably better than I usually give it.

So here are some things that Lincoln does that other cities could learn from to improve their streetscapes.

1. Let Us Dispose of Trash

Look, I am not downplaying that there are sometimes good historical reasons why some cities don't like to have public trash cans. 

But frankly, being able to throw something away without going inside a business (especially without paying them money) and without hanging onto a piece of trash forever is a deeply underrated benefit.

Extra points for having a recycling bin too!

2. Let Us Sit Down

I'm less sympathetic to the reason that a lot of cities don't have a lot of benches than I am to the reasons they might not have trash cans. 

Let people sit down.

Heck, let them lie down.

It's basic as heck, but a solid, uninterrupted bench is a blessing.

Double points for co-locating them with the above trash cans!

3. Let Us Avoid the Sun

A good shelter is worth a lot on a hot day--and also on a cold, rainy or snowy one.

Again, bus shelters might seem very basic, but Davenport rarely has them, so I can't exactly cast stones. And Lincoln generally does pretty well with cover--there are covered walkways in the Haymarket and lots of similar examples sprinkled throughout the city of covered spaces in public.

These may all seem very simple--but they're not present in all cities, and I want to shout out Lincoln for doing a good job with them, especially but not solely on the University of Nebraska campus. And sure, it helps to have a major university build some of that infrastructure for you. But plenty of places have universities that don't help, or don't build on what the university does, and I think Lincoln does a good job with these elements--at least compared to the QCA.

The Goose Creek Connector: The Good

So the Goose Creek Connector opened recently, and I decided it was worth biking on it and evaluating it as a significant piece of new bike infrastructure here in the QCA. 

It was a very pleasant ride, and I'm going to share my thoughts on the new trail in a three-part series, this being the first.

And because it is the first, I want to start positive, so here we have the good! Check back in for the bad (things that weren't implemented as well as they could be) and the short-sighted (things that were implemented as designed, but designed less than ideally for the future) the next two Sundays.

As I said, it was a good ride, so let's start there:

1. The Ride Experience

The Goose Creek Connector trail is a great trail for recreational cycling: the physical experience is excellent. I mentioned in my prior post that I was hoping that they'd improved the feel, because when it wasn't fully open parts of it felt bumpy. I'm happy to report that I had no such problems this time, and it felt much smoother--as it should, as completely new trail infrastructure!

It's smooth, mostly straight (but not so straight that people get going at ridiculously fast speeds or anything), and generally wide enough to pass two people walking or riding abreast.

The curves are generally pretty easy to navigate--the only places where there are hairpin-type turns are by the Kimberly Rd interchange--and even there the other elements of the design make it easy to tell you're going to have to slow down well before the turn. It was, frankly, a great ride, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

That's a really good thing. That might seem obvious, but I have definitely ridden new bike infrastructure in cities that did not provide a pleasant riding experience. This is one.

2. Completely New Angles on the City

Another really positive element of the new connector is that, because it angles through land that really hasn't been developed or used before along Goose Creek, it opens up a completely new angle on the city.

The back country, so to speak, has been largely inaccessible--a significant section is on the unused (and in some cases unusable) back-end of cemeteries, for instance--and the fact that you can now see these places is very cool.

Then there are things like this big soybean farm that you might not even realize were in Davenport proper until you bike by them. 

More metaphorically, the existence of such a connection that never previously existed opens up new angles on the city as a cyclist. My dad biked from his house to ours--something that was technically possible before but deeply unpleasant, and now can actually be done reasonably. I was able to get to 59th St from Duck Creek Park in about 15 minutes--something that would have taken much longer before, not to mention being almost entirely street riding with cars. It makes Davenport much more open to the cyclist, and much more pleasant to experience.

3. The Views

Relatedly, it's just a gorgeous experience to bike on this trail. I list this separately because you could have gorgeous views that aren't new angles on the city or that are unpleasant to bike along--think the current mess in downtown by the river where they're building the new Main Street Landing and have disrupted the bike trail. The bike experience is thus worse, and there's been bike access there forever, but it's still really pretty.

Here the experience is both new and pleasant--and the views are still pretty.

You can probably already tell that from the pictures above, but here are a few more.

Even the bits that are mostly pavement have nice trees and greenery.

The properties you back on are pretty too--nice fountain, apartment complex!

In all honesty the pictures don't do it justice. Partly that's the nature of foregrounding the trail in the pictures, but also I was busy enjoying the views rather than always taking pictures of them.

Trust me on this: it's a gorgeous ride, and you're in tree cover almost all the way. As someone who does not always enjoy the physical beauty of Davenport, this trail is a great advertisement for how pretty the city can be.

I'll be back next week with quibbles and concerns--some even featuring these same pictures--but for now let's end on a happy note: this was a lovely ride, and I am very excited that the Goose Creek Connector exists!

Airport Connections

How important is it that a city have a rail link to the airport?

Well, frankly, it's not that important, in the sense that there are lots of cities that don't, and the world has not ended.

But how important is it that a city have a high quality transit link to the airport? 

Well, that's a different question. I'd suggest that it's very important--for equity for those who don't have cars, for the reduction of traffic, exhaust, and other factors associated with cars going to the airport, and to reduce the amount of space that has to be given to cars around airports.

1. Rail and Transit Aren't the Same Thing

While transit advocates may sometimes be guilty of acting like a rail link to the airport is the only kind of transit that can work, it obviously isn't. To be clear: if you have a direct, regular stop on an already-useful rail line that stops at the airport, that's basically the gold standard here. 

Denver does this pretty well from Union Station, for instance. 

And I'm a big fan of Chicago's Blue Line El connecting directly to O'Hare.

But a good, consistent bus that has clear signage, lengthy operating hours, a relatively express trip, and frequent service can do plenty, like in Montréal, where the REM will eventually go to the airport but the 747 bus isn't bad right now.

Not bad timing at all.

Is it perfect? No. But it's good transit to the airport, and it's not hard at all to use or to then connect in to the rest of Montréal's transit. In fact, the ticket on the 747 is a daypass on the rest of the system within Montréal Zone A automatically, encouraging that transfer.

Then there are cities that do have a rail transit link to the airport but it's not well-implemented: e.g. Boston Logan.

I love the T, but "take a bus to the train to downtown and transfer again" is not the highest recommendation I could give to a "rail" link to the airport. Yes, the Silver Line exists, and it's not that bad, like the 747, but the implementation of the rail connection is mediocre at best. An airport subway station is not itself evidence of good transit to the airport.

2. Where Is the Terminal, Anyway?

Add to the above: where does the transit actually serve in and around the airport? A lot of airports rely on people movers to actually get people to and from the terminals where the planes are even if they've been dropped off by transit.

This example is Chicago, which is not the worst. Perhaps the worst is Seattle, where the transit connection to Link light rail requires a) a long walk from the terminal through the parking garage, with little assistance for the disabled, followed by b) using a people mover to actually get to some of the more distant terminals anyway. Neither the benefit of a close rail connection nor the speed of a people mover: the worst of both worlds somehow.

Look, I'll admit sometimes it's a function of size: O'Hare is huge, hence the need for the people mover. But there are other options. Heck, Heathrow has multiple Tube stations for its various terminals, which means that you don't have to switch transit modes, unlike the people mover model. More generally, it's worth considering: when you say you have transit to the airport, which part of the airport do you mean?

3. Foot Traffic

Now, I'll admit most airports don't do great at this. But you know what's better than just having a transit connection?

Allowing people to safely, easily, and efficiently walk to the airport.

And no, Boston, I don't mean the above giant roadway with a courtesy inclusion of a sidewalk.

I mean people actually wanting to walk in the space you provide. Technically the above photo is of the ferry to Billy Bishop in Toronto, but rest assured you can also walk through a tunnel underneath the lake, and it's very easy and drops you off in a nice enough neighborhood!

Obviously that's difficult for airports that are far from the city center and surrounded by hotels and parking lots. But hey--if you could minimize all that land used for car access, maybe you could make a few more of those airports walkable as well.

More generally: the better you do at making an airport approachable by other means than a car, the better the airport experience--train or not.