Orphan Road - urbanplanning - Comments

If you know what to look

serial catowner — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 08:57:55 -0800

If you know what to look for, you can watch while people go where their cars tell them to go.

I was working the graveyard one night, looking down on a scene where firefighters had blocked off some intersections. At one point drivers seeking collateral circulation would turn right, drive up to the roadblock, be refused and turn around and go back the way they had come.

The drivers turning right could plainly see the whole sequence, the roadblock, the refusal, and the denied cars returning past them, but as long as I watched they continued to do it.

In another case, a friend of mine came back from a two week vacation in the Southwest. To my great amazement, he described his whole trip as his car had seen it. Here, there was a detour, here, they got stuck in sand, here, the road was bad, here (the horror! the horror!) a Park Service proposal to ban automobiles. He had nothing to say about what he, as a person, had seen. He just described what his car had seen.

And this is a guy who doesn't even like cars! He's totally dependent but has no affection or nostalgia for the car.

Watch how people drive and it won't take long to see some people letting the cars make the decisions.

Notice the "No Turns" signs

Oran — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:11:32 -0700

Notice the "No Turns" signs installed on the signal masts for both streets.

We have our own scrambles at Pike Place Market and in West Seattle.

That's weird... doesn't seem

tvjames — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:06:51 -0700

That's weird... doesn't seem to be very many people turning at this intersection. Looks like in at least one direction turns are not even permitted. Turning really screws with this type of crosswalk. Also wonder how many people are regulars here. This type of intersection works a lot less well with tourists and turns permitted.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=pasadena,+ca&sll=47.307...

And that'll just be the

BenSchiendelman — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:01:33 -0700

And that'll just be the first round of construction. :) Just wait until we're out of SLU and Belltown space.

Honestly, I can't make any

serial catowner — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:56:33 -0700

Honestly, I can't make any sense of the maps- whichever of the colors you assume to represent "affordable" doesn't seem to work- and in any case, affordable for whom? Mercer Island, for example, is turquoise, but there are obviously people who can afford to live there. In any case, whichever color you assign, the map doesn't change that much in the example offered- certainly not more than the difference I would expect a sharp buyer to find in the marginal area between affordable and not affordable.

For my own part, I would buy a roadmap and use a felt-tip marker to put a dot on each major potential employer- and I sure wouldn't trust any on-line tool I've seen to get that right.

I understand that younger people might be more inclined to use a computer (to a man with a hammer, every problem...) but, in view of recent events, I'm also inclined to think that may be one way we've become so, shall we say, "highly leveraged".

Carper also rides Amtrak to

The Overhead Wire — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:31:38 -0700

Carper also rides Amtrak to work every day. Seems to me like more of those guys need to ride transit to see what its really like out there in the trenches.

I think that's exactly

Frank — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:43:35 -0700

I think that's exactly right. I'm pretty sure that the reason that this think tank (in collaboration with Brookings) came up with this tool is specifically to convince banks to re-think how they lend money and to whom.

My favorite map is the

Matt the Engineer — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:40:45 -0700

My favorite map is the transportation as a percentage of income map.

Affordability is a tricky concept. In my post I ignored affordability and assumed a person can either spend their money on transportation or a house. In reality, you're limited by how much the bank will lend you. I think it's this effect more than anything that pushes working class families to the exurbs.

doc, thanks for the

Frank — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:52:51 -0700

doc,

thanks for the comments. I think there's definitely some sclerosis in urban planning, but overall the cities we build are often a reflection of our collective priorities. We get the cities we want (or maybe the cities we deserve). We've been building auto-centric, class-stratified cities for so long, this is what we end up with.

I found that TNR article

docbadwrench — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:54:39 -0700

I found that TNR article fascinating, too. I wonder if urban planning, like so many human institutions, suffers from the mentality of having a vision and then stubbornly holding to the vision regardless of the changing dynamics that take place within the culture. Keep the great observations coming, this is a great blog.

When I read: the medieval

Queegmire — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:25:59 -0700

When I read:

the medieval wall that had surrounded the city's central core for hundreds of years was torn down. In its place there appeared the Ringstrasse, the circle of fashionable boulevards

I started to think about what old structures in this area could be torn down and replaced with "fashionable boulevards". For a second, the viaduct popped into my mind, but then I realized that the ability to enjoy the waterfront is just another of those "19th century technologies", like trains and streetcars, that we are better off without.

In the urban planners

downtown creator — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:33:40 -0700

In the urban planners community, the construction of the "20th century city" has become a sort of religion, whose Ten Commandments was the Athens Charter by Le Corbusier. From 1945 to 1990, all the efforts of the urban planning community were made to follow the athens charter as strictly as possible, without any doubt wheter it was adapted to the exigences of the city.

The "trains are a 19th century technology" debate seems to derive from the same way of thinking: there is no debate over the needs of the city, just on what is modern ad what is not.

http://downtowncreator.wordpress.com

I don't think densities have

pitchblende — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:27:15 -0700

I don't think densities have that much to do with it. It's all about what transportation is available to a person. New York is very low on that list technically speaking, but it has the 3rd busiest Subway system in the world. Dubai is building a Metro that will open in 2009. The density of that country is 1/3rd of typical US cities, yet they expect 600,000 daily riders.

The problem is that most of our cities just don't have effective rail transit and the cities that do have it don't have enough of it.

I don't think New York is

Matt the Engineer — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:46:05 -0700

I don't think New York is that dense (compared to other big cities) when you consider the city as a whole. Manhattan is certanly dense, but then it's mostly offices so even then it wouldn't count very high.

One of my favorite cities I've visited is Shanghai. There are parks for people to gather and interact, excercise is done in the street in groups, and there's a real sense of community - which is astounding for such a huge and dense city. There were certainly plenty of people, but the city is well planned with good transportation systems so it doesn't feel crowded. I could get anywhere I needed to go using nothing by the subway and my feet. Suburbanites travel via bicycle or electric scooter.

I think the real take-away

serial catowner — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:55:09 -0700

I think the real take-away here is that there are peak periods. Damn, I'm so old I can remember when the streetcar started running and all the critics were saying "It's so slow people will just walk" and "Nobody's going to ride that to get to their job". A 30% increase in patronage and clearly visible peak periods won't shut them up, but now the rest of us can comfortably ignore them.

As far as I'm concerned, filling the fallow land within the city limits is way better than spurring development further out.