Bike Commuting and the Human Body

 If you've read this blog enough, you're probably aware that I prefer to commute by bike, but can't always for a variety of reasons. Some of these are practicalities in the Quad Cities (infrastructure, weather, etc.). Some are choices I've made interacting with those practicalities (school schedules, where I live, where the services I wish to access are).

And some are more about the human vessel that has to actually do the biking.

1. Weather Can Be A Problem

I, as a person, do not mind rain much.

I, as a bicyclist, mind it a lot more.

Ignoring for a moment its impact on infrastructure, weather also affects my body much more when I bicycle than when I drive--or even when I walk. The heat feels more hot because I am exerting myself; the rain beats down harder at speed; the cold feels more chill because the air is moving faster.

I can of course compensate for this. My dad is a pro at this; you'd think when he was biking that the rain didn't exist. But there are limits to this, especially as commute rather than a recreational choice (what I'm wearing isn't entirely up to me and there isn't a usable shower at my destination usually). 

There are even bigger limits when I'm carrying someone else with me or going shopping after work or any of the myriad other errands that attach themselves frequently to a commute.

Not to mention parking the thing...

This is fine in the sunshine; it's a pain that it's not covered at all when it's raining or snowing.

The Tern Storm Shield is great at protecting my passengers, but not my seat.

2. I Age

Cars depreciate; so, I suppose, do e-bikes, though there's a less familiar resale market there.

So, alas, do human bodies.

I have had a few ailments in the last few years that have made bike commuting harder. Tennis elbow makes grasping the handlebars as the street bumps you along painful. Gout flareups make pressing on the pedals difficult. Sciatica...well, enough said.

Infrastructure does play a part here: the street above, with its big pothole and loose gravel, makes most of those physical conditions worse. But they're barriers even on the best of roads or paths. And they can take weeks, months, or forever to go away.

Though one positive of the e-bike is that it does double as a scooter (at least here in the US in Iowa): the existence of a throttle up to 20mph (Class 2) makes for a major benefit. I'm not stranded if I biked in and had a flareup of some kind of condition at work.

3. Mood Matters

Now, I want to preface this as follows: I actually think I drive worse when annoyed, tired, or pissed off too, and it would best for all involved if I (and everyone else too) could avoid the car when in a bad mood.

But I do feel that biking exacerbates that in many ways as well.

If I'm exhausted, well, I have to move myself along now, which is more work.

If I'm annoyed, well, the way the city and the cars treat bikes is not going to help with that.

If I'm pissed off, I also think I tend to bike a little less straight and a little less clean and generally less safely (see: also not optimal with car).

Now, the bike brings its own prophylactic to this: biking does improve my mood.

And sometimes, how could it not?

But that only goes so far. When I'm really out of sorts, I often don't take the bike because I'm so aware that being in a bad mood makes my biking worse.

Now, if only we could do that with cars too...

Maybe the takeaway today is really that I just want better public transit, dagnabit.

Though then we'd be talking about level boarding, and distance from stop to destination--because the human body is ultimately the vehicle we all take everywhere.

So maybe this is actually covertly about the 15 minute city.

Either way: bike commuting is great, but it does have some limits due to human involvement--as does everything we do.

Transit and Sport: US and Europe

 So while the 15-minute City brand has been damaged by a lot of conspiratorial thinking, I do think the central idea that we should have easier, more consistent, and car-free access to the things that make life pleasant, easy, and livable remains a vital one.

And while that applies for sure to things like groceries, jobs, schools, and the other things that we need to live a modern life, it also applies to the things that make life better without necessarily being required.

So I want to talk about getting to sporting events.

1. Sports Are Perfect For Transit

Fundamentally, a sporting event is a natural fit for public transit, because it involves a lot of people travelling to and from a known location at a predictable set of times.

That's why even in cities that don't do transit well, sporting events often get better transit. Famously, it's a pain to get to Foxboro, the stadium where the NFL's Patriots play, but you can do it on gameday because they run a special commuter-type service.

This means that even sporting events that are not really "15 minute" events (since Gillette Stadium in Foxboro is hours outside of Boston) are transit hubs.

But we can do better than that.

2. Stadia In The Community

US sports stadiums are typically in the midst of giant parking lots. This makes sense, as the majority of people who will access the stadium are assumed to be arriving by car, since most trips in the US are by car.

This is not always the case everywhere.

Here's Stamford Bridge, a major football stadium in London, home of Chelsea FC, a top-ten global football club in terms of fanbase.

It's right on the street in the midst of that mix of Chelsea, Fulham, and Earl's Court that is its neighborhood.

I got there on foot, and it's a 4 minute walk from Fulham Broadway station.

Here's a picture I took just after getting off a tram in Paris, of the Paris FC stadium. Now, Paris FC is not Paris Saint Germain, and thus not one of those global top-ten in terms of fanbase: but it's a pretty darn accessible stadium:

Yes, in both cases there is space around the stadium, because on match days you need it: queues, crowd control, vendors, etc. But the space around it blends right back into the streetscape: you don't have to cross a huge parking lot to get there, you just have to walk up to the pedestrianized spaces around the stadium itself.

Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal (another of those big clubs) has a very visible street presence and a giant walkway to get to the stadium--but notice that it's just kind of a neighborhood as soon as you pass the sign.

Craven Cottage, home of Fulham, a smaller London club, is even more integrated. Would you know that was a stadium of a major league team if you didn't know from this post?

They even want you to help the neighbors by binning your trash.

This is how people exit Craven Cottage after a game: not a traffic jam, but a wave of walking people as far as the eye can see.

That's what integrating a stadium into a city can look like. It may not make it a "15 minute" city, unless you are like London and have a major football club every 15 minutes. But it certainly makes it closer to one when people can get to their sports as easily as to their grocery store--and neither by car.

3. Green Shoots

Of course, not every US stadium is like this. The old-school baseball stadiums, like Fenway Park in Boston, are nestled neatly into their neighborhoods too. But that's a legacy, not a current commitment. 

What's more impressive is that US cities are doing better going forward in some important ways.

No one would accuse St. Louis of being anywhere but the US, or anything but American, but when they built a new stadium for St. Louis City FC, they put it downtown.

During construction, they were very proud of their identity.

And what they built was nestled into the city, not separated from it (except by, you know, ticket barriers).

This picture isn't of the stadium--it's the zoo. But I took the train from one to the other. Magical! Admittedly, it took more than 15 minutes. But the larger concept of the 15 minute city--the idea that I should be able to do this easily, without a car--remained valid.

And St. Louis isn't alone. US cities are starting to return to the idea that a stadium doesn't have to be a parking lot. Let's just hope the movement continues, and is married (as it was in St. Louis) by transit improvements as well. 

And if it does, I look forward to taking transit to a lot more sporting events. 

How Late is Late? How Early is Early?

 One thing that I constantly find myself thinking when I visit larger cities than the QCA is that things are just open later.

Now, that's not always true. I've visited places where the only coffee shop closes at noon, and where you'll be lucky to get a dinner at 9 pm. The QCA does a lot better than that! But transit (such as it is) ends before my internal clock says dinnertime is over, and grocery shopping after 9 or 10 is a matter mostly of Walmarts. 

Conversely, you have places like New York, branded as "the city that never sleeps," where the trains run overnight and supposedly you can get anything anytime. But most cities aren't like that either: they do have a time when things are shut down, whether for people to sleep, for maintenance to happen, to save costs, or just because.

So how late is late and how early is early? Or, what are some benefits and drawbacks of when things are and aren't open?

1. Varieties of Schedule

One of the more legitimate critiques, in my mind, of 15 minute cities is that they may only be 15 minutes for some people--usually privileged and/or wealthy--who have the chance to take advantage of what they offer in the timeframes when it's available. If I'm working third shift, or rushing to get kids home and to bed, or anything that moves me off a "standard" time schedule, a 15 minute city may not be one at all.

And that goes for all cities too--there are people with all kinds of schedules in the day, and an ideal city should accommodate them all.

This 24 hour fruit stall in Montréal is great for someone (anyone) who needs fruit, whenever that may be. You don't need to make it when the grocery store is open, because it always is.

This market in Croydon requires you to be there at a particular time on a particular day. 

Now, there are benefits to both: the Croydon market will feel like an experience, and that can be a great way to organize a day or a week, and can serve as a relief from everyday pressures.

This Way Experiences indeed.

And the 24/7 shop may have create noise or light at times others would prefer to sleep, or traffic when it's inconvenient. 

But overall, having flexible and varied times (whether they're 24/7 or not) that amenities and necessities are available is a net positive for a city, because there are always people who need the flexibility.

2. Downtime Needed

That said, not everything does need to be 24/7.

The NYC subway is famously one of the only ones in the world that runs 24/7, and there are legitimate critiques of that, and reasons that other subways don't. Basically it comes down to this: almost every system (transit, business, a human body) requires downtime.

And as we know with our sidewalks even, if you don't schedule maintenance it may schedule itself for you.

And a lot of stations are pretty empty at night: is it really a good use of time, energy, and money to keep them all open and staffed?

That goes even more for a business, rather than a public good like transit.

3. Both? Both Is Good

The real key is that good urbanism does or should require both some things that are available later or earlier than a standard 9-5 schedule allows for and available downtime and maintenance on the system. I think of London's Night Bus system as a good model: it allows for transit all night, even if the Tube isn't running the whole time.

In fact, buses are usually the answer for transit issues like this, since they're more flexible than trains (hello Toronto buses!).

For businesses, a good rule of thumb to me is that the city should be encouraging late hours, but not necessarily mandating them: if the rest of the city's design encourages people to operate all day, so will businesses unless they're not allowed.

That means encouraging density (more people to use the businesses), providing transit (allowing people to move themselves around to get to the businesses), keeping the city inviting (lighting and such matter a lot at night, unsurprisingly!) and getting out of the way (don't make it hard for businesses to get permission to be open late).

This Parisian street lighting is not invasive, but it invites me into the space even in the dark.

So how late is late? As late as you need. And (even though I'm a night owl) the same goes for early. Cities should enable both--with reasonable reductions in services when people aren't as frequently present, but without shutting down with the sun.

The Good and Bad of Houses

 So as I mentioned in my last post, there's a bit of a blind spot to this blog sometimes, which is that while urbanism is about how people live and move in their cities, I tend to focus more on move than live.

I'm not going to fix that with one post and I'm not going to try. But I do want to talk a bit both about how I see the value in the urban form that is most commonly idealized in the US (the single-family detached house) and how I see it as a limiting factor--and that the tension between those two can be, and should be, mitigated to at least some extent by design choices.

This is particularly important if we're going to get the kind of density we need both for urban transportation to work well and to accommodate all the people who want to live in our cities, let alone if we have the idea of something like a 15-minute city in the back of our minds.

1. Why Houses Rule

Look, I have lived most of my life in a single-family detached house and I'm not going to pretend I don't see the appeal.

There's privacy (see the wall?). There's beauty (OK, I don't love the house color myself but look at those trees!). There's ample space (that house has so many bedrooms!). There's fairly efficient design given the space (it's pretty easy to heat and cool because of its compact nature, if done right). 

This is a good house to live in and a nice place to make your home.

You can have space you make your own; you hear relatively little from neighbors or street noise; you can park cars, play basketball, grill out, do whatever your heart desires in your own space.

Of course lots of people want and like these. It'd be stranger if they didn't, especially as we cannibalize and remove public spaces that might be venues for some of that personal expression and social activity.

2. Why Apartments Rule--or the Limiting Factors of Houses

What we have, in a sense, is a tragedy of the commons. Because single-family detached homes are great for the people living in them. But too many of them in one spot tends to bring a whole series of problems--not least that all those houses tend not to actually be full of families and so the space per person goes way up.

That building above? It's right next to an apartment building. I say this to make clear that you don't need to build only one type of housing in an area. It's not like joinery, where a certain cut only goes in with another cut. It's more like LEGO: you can stick whatever the heck you want next to each other and it works within some basic constraints.

But we often build out, especially in the US, through zoning that emphasizes or even allows only a single kind of home, and then act surprised when too much of that kind of home produces problems.

Gaze out into the fringes of Chicago, where everything becomes a single family home...

If every house is this big, every house is great for all the things listed in #1. But also every house has some limitations too:

a) Cost 

That house sold for over a million dollars. Not everyone can afford this (obviously).

b) Space

As mentioned above, that house is big. How many people are actually living in it? How many per square foot? How much space does that take to house your population? Some of these houses can be reconfigured to fit more than one family, but that's usually inefficient and awkward especially compared to purpose-built multi-family housing. I lived in one in Rochester, NY; I know from personal experience.

c) Size

The flip side: if I have a family over a certain size, I need a bigger house.

d) Flexibility

Due to the above, this house doesn't flip easily, it doesn't rent cheaply or easily (if it were even rented), and it doesn't provide much option for younger families coming up the housing ladder or elderly families downsizing. 

All of the above are things apartments and condominiums do a lot better. They cost a lot to build but recoup that by spreading costs over a lot more people. They can be carved up to allow more and less space in various configurations much more easily than a house (and can be built with multiple options in advance, even). They  allow families to move in and out of an area, or to find larger or smaller space, much more easily, and with a lot less friction than constantly buying and selling real estate.

And that's not even getting into the fact that it's rare for houses to have street-level retail, which pushes buying and selling into their own designated zones and feeds both car dependency and lack of options in a neighborhood.

3. Resolving Tension

The basic point of how to resolve this tension is of course to permit multiple zoning options. If you don't have to build single-family, someone will take a chance on other options. But it goes beyond that. We need to make apartments and condos attractive to people, not just force them into them.

What does that mean?

It might mean having a greater variety of apartment/condo options on the market: not just studios and 1-bedrooms that assume singles and couples, but more 3-4 bedroom options as well that allow people to be part of apartment or condo living while having children, even multiple children, and space.

It might mean using some of that space savings not just on more housing, but on housing-associated amenities, like this park in Toronto that's surrounded by high-rise condo/apartment living (and an urban highway, but sssh!).

It might mean emphasizing those unique elements of apartment-heavy streets, like the street-level retail and the attendant Jane-Jacobs-style eyes on the street, to drive home the benefits of that urban fabric.

It might mean better upkeep of social housing and other high-rise options that have a bad reputation so that people don't associate them with negatives as much.

There's a lot of things it means. But fundamentally, it means remembering that since we can't all have single-family detached homes and all the other things that make cities great, we have to make it appealing to live in other ways--and it can be. 

We can't do that by denying that single family homes are great. We do it by making the alternative just as great or better.

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.

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.

Optimism and Pessimism

 This excellent post on how trams and tramways can be built well or badly made me think more broadly about the significance of both optimism and pessimism for how we design, build, and think about our urban designs, especially in places like the Quad Cities. I want to propose that there is an odd mix of these two that manages to reduce our willingness to try transit, bike lanes, and other effective tools for reducing congestion, traffic, road deaths, and travel times--and that make slogans like the fifteen-minute city (as valuable as I think that concept would be in practice) counterproductive for some audiences.

1. Overly Optimistic Projections

Let's start with the point raised in the article: overly optimistic projections of tram speeds and thus travel time reductions. These occur not in the final stages, but in the planning and support-generating stages: no one in the final stages is denying that the Finch LRT in Toronto, for instance, is too darn slow. But as the first article I linked to points out, that wasn't true in the initial projections: it was supposed to reach speeds fifty-percent higher than it does on average! 

And that's where the optimism becomes destructive: when you overpromise and underdeliver. Yes, those projections may have gotten the Finch LRT built, but they now create conditions under which the average Torontonian is likely to be highly skeptical of claims for future transit projects (unless the mayor actually accomplishes the feat of speeding it up significantly, quickly). 

This is similar to some of the claims that come with vaporware transit: highly aggressive up-front assumptions about efficacy and speed, absolutely no follow-through. And as a result, there is either no transit or disappointing transit on the streets, which produces a potential for a cynical death spiral in transit.

Nor is this limited to transit: a bike lane that's promised as protected and signalized but doesn't deliver will poison-pill future bike lane building too, and the same with the shared street that isn't really shared, the bike share that doesn't work well, etc.

Don't tell me this is a bike lane and expect me to support building more bike lanes.

We could also add here overly optimistic estimates of cost and delivery timings, which then get bogged down in massive, expensive delays: both expensive in themselves and because they allow inflation to act on your costs, and delay your revenues.

2. Overly Pessimistic Projections

Of course, the flip side of this is when projections are kept low and that results in transit being delayed or never built because of an unwillingness to see a potential upside.

I would suggest this is highly often the case in the US, but because we don't build at all we never get to see that the projections were in fact pessimistic. But in the UK, they have recent evidence with the Northumberland Line and the Borders Railway that busted past expected ridership quite quickly.

Imagine if those had been built earlier! The demand was clearly there, but understated. 

These, I suggest, are cyclically behind the overly optimistic estimates above: a project comes in overly optimistic, then people reject it because it's genuinely not as good as anticipated, then future projects get lower projections. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Sort of like how people react to snowfall estimates, honestly: too many missed projections and everyone assumes it won't actually snow when the meteorologists say so.

3. Agency and Audience

But note a difference between what I'm claiming above about optimism and pessimism. Pessimism is about how the general public will respond; optimism is about things actually under the agency's and/or government's control (to some degree).

Basically, I suggest that these problems with pessimism and optimism are avoidable with proper practices.

Am I an expert who can specifically identify those practices? No.

But there are people who are. And their suggestions tend to be similar to what seems logical to me:

A. Standardize, as much as possible, designs: stations, roadways, intersections, vehicles, etc. Avoid extensive costs or delays caused by starting from scratch, and make your estimates of cost, timeline, and effects more consistent by reducing variables.

B. Establish standards for service and keep to them: a tweak to speed here, a concession to auto traffic there, and suddenly you're down to walking speed. That doesn't mean be inflexible, but it does mean standing up for the promised standard of service.

C. Build the right thing in the right place. This is the point of the initial article: don't build a tram when you want a metro, or an at-grade tram when you want a grade-separated one, or a bus when you want a tram (or vice-versa in each case). That will let you actually hit the targets you intended, or exceed pessimistic standards, by fitting the service to the use case.

But the key here is this: pessimism and optimism are a function of how we plan and what we build and how we advertise it. They're not inherent; trains don't need to be slow, costs don't need to overrun, and ridership estimates won't always be low (or high!). They're about what we do (our agency) and who we talk to about what (our audience).

We can and should build better--and I hope that isn't unearned optimism itself.

Who Walks?

 So when we talk about walkability, a basic question we need to consider: who walks? That is, who actually is going to be walking on the sidewalks, or paths, or whatever we put out there (or fail to put out there--people will walk where they're not supposed to too)? 

In answering that question, there are a few different angles we can take on it, each of which will produce a somewhat different result in terms of how we should design our streetscapes.

1. Everyone Walks

This is my favorite, though admittedly not the only way to think about this. At some level, everyone walks: even people taking other forms of transit, from the train to the car, rarely go all the way into their destination without taking at least a few steps somewhere along the way (cars ramming fast food joints excepted).

So in a sense, everyone walks. 

That's true in a more robust sense as well: almost everyone has some trips they make by foot, whether to the corner store, a park, a neighbor's house, or a child walking to school. They may not make all, many, or most trips by foot, but there's usually at least some places you can and do walk to.

They may not always walk in the middle of the street, like in this Vancouver shot, but they walk somewhere.

If everyone walks, that means we need to at some level accommodate everyone: we can't have sidewalks that don't function for strollers or wheelchairs, we can't have steps as a required part of the route, and we need to have sidewalks wide enough to accommodate a potentially large number of people.

Again, maybe not the whole street, but something bigger than one person wide.

2. Marginalized People Walk

Another way of thinking about it is that, at least in many US contexts, only the poor and marginalized walk. People with no access to other options, whether because of cost (a car isn't cheap, and depending on how good it is and how much money you have, neither is public transit in many places), age (kids can't drive, and sometimes neither can the elderly), or other disability or difficulty, will fall back on non-transit options, i.e. walking (and the other activities we typically classify with it, like rolling a wheelchair).

Narrow sidewalks, like this one in the Netherlands, can discourage this--but still, people can get pushed to walking in any conditions.

Now, this can be used as an excuse not to invest in walking infrastructure: it's rarely a political winner to install things that only the marginalized members of the community are seen as using. 

But from a more empathetic perspective, this should remind us to invest in walking infrastructure precisely because it's a last resort. Anyone can end up disabled or poor; everyone should still have the right to get around.

Also, if you don't like having homeless people camped out on the street, stop trying to pretend that making the sidewalk worse will somehow produce housing for them.

3. The Powerful Walk

The flip side of #2 is that when people have money and power, one of the first things they do with it is to make it more pleasant and easier for them to walk places.

Colleges (here Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, IA) are famous for good walking paths and frequent foot traffic. They spend their endowments and donor money on making it easier for their students and community members to walk places.

Beautified spaces (here the University of Washington campus in Seattle, WA) are often walkable spaces.

Tourist spaces (here near Pike Place Market, also in Seattle) are often walkable as well.

This aerial view of Seattle can give us a similar thought: the parks and green spaces are often the most walkable, and they aren't in the poorer neighborhoods.

So while the poor and marginalized walk by necessity, the rich make it more pleasant to walk on purpose.

This should teach us that walking is not just a last resort--it's also, in some cases, a luxury.

So in the end, I lied above: I think all of these examples teach us the same lesson. That lesson is that walking is something we need to invest in: whether because we all do it, or because some people have to, or because once they have options people choose to. Walking is a critical amenity at all levels.

Quasi-Urbanism

 I want to talk today about a very particular kind of urbanism, which I want to call "quasi-urbanism," that is getting more and more common on the fringes of the Quad Cities (and other similar urban and surburban areas in the US). This is an urban form that consists of the following:

A. Concentration of housing (usually apartments) even though the overall population density remains low

B. Presence of nearby destinations, such as grocery stores, coffeeshops, small other shops, etc., in reasonable proximity to the concentrations of housing as the crow flies

C. Large sidewalks, mixed-use paths, or other biking/walking infrastructure running through the area

But that also has the following feature:

D. Despite A, B, & C, walking is dangerous there, no one does it, and the place was clearly built with the assumption that cars will be by far the most common form of transportation, to the point where this undoes the benefits of A, B, and C for most people.

This is similar to the false walkability I talked about before, but bears a few additional elements with it to represent a more fleshed-out urban environment, beyond just the markers of walkability.

This is, as I said, becoming more and more common, and I want to talk about why it doesn't really work, despite seeming on the face of it like it should tick a lot of urbanist boxes; or, in other words, why does D happen despite A, B, and C? And for this, I'm going to use a particular example out in Bettendorf--not because it's uniquely bad, but precisely because it feels typical to me.

1. Too Much Empty Space

The biggest flaw of this form of urbanism is that despite ostensibly including things like density, good sidewalks, and walkable amenities, there is just so much empty space. Not parks--though this space is often "green," it's usually all-grass lawn, not organized into parks, and sometimes not even green (lots of asphalt.

Let's look at the example: the Villas apartments and surrounding area on Devil's Glen Road in Bettendorf.

There's the apartment building. I'm standing, to take this photo, on the nearby mixed-use path. And what do I see? Lots and lots of space between me and the apartment building, and between me and the coffeeshop, and between the coffeeshop and the apartment building.

Looking down the road, I see the exact same thing: a huge berm of mostly grass, not attractively molded into a park or anything, just...present. Everything here is actually quite far away from everything else, so the gestures towards density and walkability are undercut. You can just about see the two grocery stores in this neighborhood down this path, but both are so far away that they're not actually visible--and most of the space in between is just empty.

2. Too Much Parking, Too Centered

Here's a closer view of the apartment complex: 

Notice what is given direct access to the apartments, and what is indeed literally the only thing you are confronted with when exiting and entering them?

That's right, a parking lot.

The apartment is surrounded by parking, the neighboring businesses (coffeeshop, boutique, locksmith, bike shop, brewpub) are all surrounded by parking, everything is parking. That creates more of this empty space (see #1) but it also directly counters the idea that this is a space where one could or should walk. There isn't even a marked (let alone protected) walkway through the parking lots to the sidewalk or mixed-use path from any of the businesses or the apartment complex. It's like the separate pieces of an urbanist jigsaw puzzle are all kept apart by three inches of table space, rather than combined into the puzzle they could potentially make.

3. Odd Choices In The Details

Here's the mixed use path, looking north:

It kinda looks like a big sidewalk, which is really what it is. But there's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's big enough to allow people to pass. Let's zoom in.

So here's what I notice (and this is mostly true in Bettendorf): the explicit prioritization of cars over bikes/pedestrians (a literal stop sign for the path at every single place that the cars could cross it), with no protection for the path as it crosses the roadway (no continuous raised sidewalk, even though again this is also a bike path).

I have biked here and do bike here (though I was not on the bike for this particular trip, since I was dropping someone else off who can't ride on the back of my bike). And I can tell you that these are notable issues in practice: cars coming out of these drives do not look for or notice bikes, and if you were actually to stop (as opposed to Idaho-stop) at each stop sign you'd go really, really slowly.

My favorite example, which I didn't happen to get a shot of because it's a few blocks over, is that this mixed-use path coexists with a painted bike gutter lane on a major street--as if the designers themselves weren't sure if this was actually bike infrastructure or not.

And, honestly, these paths don't tend to go anywhere: they begin and end without necessarily having an actual destination--not quite where the sidewalk ends but close--and so that also is an odd detail that reduces usability.

The frustrating thing is that all of the basic elements are good! All of them are helpful! But they aren't combined helpfully. And I worry that this means that people who live here, if asked to vote for more urbanist infrastructure, will say "I've seen dense apartments, I've seen bike paths, I've seen these elements that you say make a 15 minute city, and no one uses them/they're useless/they don't work."

Because this looks like someone cribbed off the test of the person designing a 15 minute city (yeah! Apartments! Yeah! Bike lanes! Yeah, a grocery store nearby!) but didn't realize that the whole point was not to accommodate more cars but to make them less necessary. So instead we have a neighborhood where you need a car, despite all this infrastructure, and so no one uses the infrastructure except weird bloggers getting their caffeine fix.

What about your neighborhoods or cities? Do you see urbanist elements combined into a quasi-urbanist design that fails them? Or are there parts that actually work--or no parts at all?