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.

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 Perils of Light Snow

 This week in Iowa we've been getting a lot of light snow, and it made me have some thoughts about which kinds of transportation are best (or least bad) in such conditions.

Surprising no one, I don't think it's the car that's best here. And that's a shame because I kinda had to drive in these conditions a lot this week.

1. Walking Is Actually Fine

The two main differences, to me, that mark the distinction between light and heavy snow are as follows:

A. The city plows for heavy snow and not light

B. Heavy snow is thick on the ground, while light snow is only slippery, not deep

Look at those tracks: not too hard to walk through.

Both of these make walking much easier in light snow than in heavy snow, the former because it means that there aren't huge ramparts of snow at the intersections blocking the crosswalk, and the second that you don't waste huge amounts of energy shoving through deep drifts or unplowed/unscooped sidwalks.

It's really not that much different than walking a bit in the rain--except that you usually don't actually get that wet in light snow. 

Is it ideal to walk in light snow? No, but it's not actively bad, unlike heavy snow. 

2. Driving and Biking Are Worse

The above two differences between light and heavy snow actually make driving worse, though, because an unplowed street is worse to drive on, and the slippery street (combined with most drivers not driving much differently, in my experience) means that there are high potentials for crashes and other dangerous situations.

Not exactly clear, is it?

Seriously, I'd rather drive in snow that's going to be >1 inch than snow that's going to be <.25 inch, even though the snow itself is not ideal. 

Yes, blizzards are bad, but light snow is often blowing snow, which can create whiteout or near-whiteout conditions even with light snow. 

Biking is also bad, because it also has major issues with slippery roads and unplowed streets mean drivers don't understand why you have to take up more of the lane. At least when there's a rampart of plowed snow some people do seem to recognize that a bike can't magically go where that snow is. In light snow, they expect you to be in the gutter even though that gutter is both snowed in and extra slippery because of things like grates in the road.

3. Transit Helps

This is the real takeaway here: because walking is not as much worse as driving or biking, transit is also better, relatively, because you can walk to and from it. And on top of that, transit in light snow has some other advantages over other transportation in light snow (not in ideal conditions, of course). 

A. The worst part of driving or biking in light snow is being the one who has to control the vehicle--and in transit, you can hand that over to someone else, a trained professional. 

B. A difficulty in plowing or otherwise treating roads for light snow is that it's inefficient given the low volume of snow--but when you can specifically target a bus route or train tracks, you don't need to commit large amounts of effort to clear the route to get good results.

Places like this intersection with two bus routes and a hospital are easy to prioritize.

C. And the fewer people on the roads, the safer it is in light snow--so transit, by taking people off the roads, makes it better for all of us.

Sure, there are times that you might want a personal vehicle in bad weather (primarily when you're going to a destination that you do not want to or cannot walk to in those conditions) but light snow is the opposite. In light snow, we should emphasize transit and walking, so that even those of us driving can benefit.

Streetscapes and Peoples

So when you walk around the Quad Cities, it is unusual, except at very specific times of day (school out-time, major events, etc.) to encounter other pedestrians. This can make it uncomfortable to walk about, both because infrastructure may be missing (since no one is perceived to use it) and because it almost attaches a stigma to being on foot.

This is emphatically not the case in other places, scaling up to places where there are actually too many people on the street to walk comfortably for the opposite reason.

In this post, I wanted to think about the different levels of pedestrian streetscapes I perceive there as being, how they come about, and how they differ.

1. The Empty Scene

This can be empty in the way that quasi-urbanism produces, where there is infrastructure but no people, or empty because there's just nowhere to walk at all.

Or sometimes it's a failure of other elements, like a place that used to have people but now, due to population decline, changing transportation or entertainment options, or some other reason does not.

They used to wait for the interurban here, but no more.

2. The Open Street

Here we have people, but only occasionally; it's not actively unusual or strange to walk, but people always assume they'll have space to walk.

A university outside of actual instructional months may be this kind of space: there are still people around, but the space is quite large enough to accommodate more, and so they're almost swallowed up.

Another example would be a place that in summer might be populated, but when the weather turns a bit colder, wetter, or otherwise unpleasant, it is not.

Downtown Milwaukee can be like this in the winter: it's not quasi-urbanist, it is indeed urbanist, but it's just not currently occupied.

One could say the same about the Toronto waterfront as well.

Another cause for this is darkness, in places that quiet down at night, as here in Amsterdam:

Or the opposite: a hopping night area during the day can become this as here in Bardstown Road, Louisville:

3. Pedestrian Areas

Here we see actual human crowds, though not so much as to overwhelm the space. This can be because there isn't a huge space but there is enough, and demand to fill it, as here in Vancouver:

Or a deliberately pedestrianized area that actually fits its design, as here in London:

This is often seen at street markets as well, as here in Amsterdam:

Or here in Wimbledon:

These are ideal spaces, in my opinion, because they represent the match between a space that pedestrians can fill and the actual demand for pedestrianism by the people and activities that surround it. Ironically, I have the fewest pictures of this scale, because it feels sometimes awkward to take people's picture in public. It's also difficult to achieve, because you risk falling into the next category above:

4. The Overcrowd

Here we have too many people to comfortably occupy the space. This can be a temporarily filled area at a festival or other gathering, as here in Louisville:

Or too narrow of a space for the known demand, as here in  Boston's North End:

Or just a flood of people, as here in New York's Times Square:

These are spaces that I still find enjoyable, but which are beginning to overwhelm their streetscapes.

The difficulty, I find, in designing spaces to move up this scale is often imagination: if people are not there already, how can we dare think that they'll show up? But if the space is neither designed for nor inviting of them, why would they be there?

This is why intermittent events like this market in Croydon can be helpful for juicing the imagination:

It's much easier to imagine a space filled with people when you have a reason to bring them there. Even places like the Quad Cities have our farmers' markets and QCSO Pops that fill downtown streets. The key is making spaces that make those events feel reasonable, not eccentric, and trying to build the city to encourage that kind of pedestrianism outside of a big event.

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?

Making Walking* Rock

The asterisk in the title here is intended to indicate that when I say walking, I don't just mean locomotion on two feet. I mean whatever way someone gets around legally on a sidewalk: walking, rolling in a wheelchair, pushing a stroller, jogging, running, etc.

I mean, in other words, not taking transit but also not taking a personal vehicle or hired car.

And the best way to design cities is to make this experience as good as possible and as usable for as much of life as possible. 

Why? Because every other mode requires this too, at some level. The train or bus stop may be a few blocks from your destination or the parking space you find might be distant and the Uber won't take you inside your destination either. So boosting walking boosts it itself but also all other modes.

So the more we make walking attractive, the better transportation outcomes become. And the converse.

So how do we make it attractive?

1. Pedestrianized Areas: A Beautiful Boon

I want more of these, pretty much always. Cities used to be all pretty much like this, if you go far enough back (ie before the car) because the ironclad division of different road uses was less, well, ironclad before cars showed up.

But also we have a lot more people now, so I'm certainly not advocating all cities be all pedestrianized (even if you include spaces for bikes, or even buses/trams, as some cities do). I'm just saying that this:

in Toronto and this

in Croydon are fundamentally appealing to the senses, especially sight as in the above examples that are pictures, but also sound (less car noises!) and smell (less exhaust!). 

Also they produce a situation where walking can get places and do things other modes can't, which also makes it a more attractive way of getting around.

Note that, like the Croydon example, this can be a temporary market: it doesn't need to be a forever pedestrian zone (though I would suggest that you can do a better job of making a real pedestrian-friendly zone if you commit to the bit).

2. Good Sidewalks Make Good Neighbors 

With apologies to Robert Frost's neighbor, it's not fences but sidewalks that make for a good neighborhood feel. By this I mean that not only functional sidewalks (a must!) but also actual elements of the sidewalk environment that actually make it a pleasant place to exist are beneficial. 

This is a very basic example--not like the world's best sidewalk, but a space that Vancouver has that has a good basic sidewalk. Note the following elements: a clear, flat surface with minimal visible points where someone could trip or a wheelchair would catch; enough space (though barely) for both a line to form outside this one shop and people to still navigate past that line; trees providing cover from sun, protection from the street and its cars, and an aesthetic bonus; space between the trees for a newspaper holder (pink, on the left). 

Negative examples abound, so I won't belabor the point, but here we can see a narrow, obstructed sidewalk in Davenport that doesn't have much going for it. Yes, they're improving it by finally putting in a proper curbcut at the corner, but there's no alternate way to get around it in the meantime and the sidewalk is just kind of...minimally there. 

Note how in Toronto there is also a major piece of construction material (the signboard) on the sidewalk, but there's still enough room to get around it and actually walk somewhere.

I'm not advocating explicitly for a massive overhaul of our streetscape so everything is broad and smooth and beautiful (though that would be a great thing), just for something a little more accessible, beautiful, and pleasant to experience.

3. Consider How Much Street Is Street

That might sound tautological, but consider this from Haarlem:

The pedestrian space itself here is fine but basic, like the Vancouver example above: smooth (note the use of tiles or small squares rather than the typical US giant blocks of cement, which I find makes for a more pleasant sidewalk texture), with space for planters and bike parking, and just enough space to pass people. What's key is that there is only one lane of cars to two sidewalks (you can see the other one on the other side just barely in this photo). The narrow street is not used as an excuse to squeeze the pedestrian space, as it would be in the US. Instead, the pedestrians get their space and the remaining space is given to cars. It ends up squeezing the cars, who are all backed up behind that mail vehicle, but there was a lot more pedestrian throughput than cars could have achieved. 

This is not surprising. Good sidewalks get people moving.

What else could we use street width for other than wider cars and more cars? 

Well, this one in Amsterdam has tram tracks (right) and bike path (left) and bike parking/trees (center)--and very little space for cars at all.

(Lest I be accused of overfluffing the Netherlands, here's a Dutch street with plenty of car parking

...though it's still a good sidewalk)

It's not just the Dutch who do this, anyway. Here's a wide Parisian sidewalk, taking up space that in the US would probably be car-centric:

And here's multimodal space that is both pedestrian-friendly and tram-conveying in Paris:

Let's hop across the Channel to London, which can do this too, by Camden Town:

And not to forget North America, here are a couple examples from Vancouver

And DC, where the sidewalk is wide enough to encompass a bikeshare dock easily:

Basically, if we don't assume that the width of the street belongs to the car alone, we can do amazing things for pedestrians. But when we do, we run into the Karl Jilg illustration of our cities, where there is just a massive void where the cars go.

We can do better, and a great place to start is just making pedestrian spaces more attractive--which often translates most effectively to "larger."