Suburban sprawl an irresistible force in US

[Hipster Duck]

Suburbs in the GTA at least have an open design that makes it easier to walk in a straight line and minimize the actual walking distance. I remember someone posting a photothread on SSP about some suburb in Texas and literally everyone in the photo was either overweight or obese, it really jumped at me. Definitely different from Mississauga, Brampton, etc.

The suburbs of major Canadian cities are at least dense enough and pay lip service to sidewalks and transit. However, there are many places in Canada that are just as inhospitable to walking as the worst parts of the United States. You just have to go to places like cottage country here in Ontario, or Atlantic Canada to see this. A good swath of Peterborough County, for example (I grew up there, so this is what I'm most familiar with) consists of exurban-style bungalow sprawl with houses on acre lots. They're not rural, per se, but have densities so low that you need septic tanks and you have to drive your own garbage to the dump. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 to 20,000 people live in "communities" like these in that county alone.

 

[doady]

The suburbs of major Canadian cities are at least dense enough and pay lip service to sidewalks and transit. However, there are many places in Canada that are just as inhospitable to walking as the worst parts of the United States. You just have to go to places like cottage country here in Ontario, or Atlantic Canada to see this. A good swath of Peterborough County, for example (I grew up there, so this is what I'm most familiar with) consists of exurban-style bungalow sprawl with houses on acre lots. They're not rural, per se, but have densities so low that you need septic tanks and you have to drive your own garbage to the dump. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 to 20,000 people live in "communities" like these in that county alone.

I don't know about Peterborough, but north of Montreal along autoroute 15 there's a lot of US-style exurbia I have seen, though technically it is probably not located in the Montreal CMA. Thunder Bay is probably the worst in Canada when comes to US style exurban sprawl even though ironically it is one of the slowest growing cities in Canada in terms of population...

 

[adma]

I think such exurbia's also common within Ottawa's outskirts...

 

[TrickyRicky]

I think you guys are making too much of a value judgement when you say "worse".

The issue is not what is "bad" and what is "good" rather who is going to pay? There always has and always will be suburban and exurban areas around a city. The question is are the people living there paying an appropriate amount of the true costs of this land-form now in the present and also considering legacy costs to be born by future generations?

Before you answer that question consider that our entire society is predicated on the existence of a large powerful middle-class around which we craft most of our policy and subsidization. If you suggest that this group should be subdized less or should have fewer opportunities to say own their own piece of land or home, you would need to decide how you feel about the future of this demographic in our society.

 

[Hipster Duck]

I think you guys are making too much of a value judgement when you say "worse".

Have you ever heard of a policy that was not based on some value judgment? Name one.

 

[Long Island Mike]

From Streetsblog.net:

WKL: I was looking for this map-I find this quite interesting noting how the Buffalo area has developed...

I wonder since I have not looked at any links at this point (May 22) if there are other cities shown in this manner...

I will bet the Long Island map herein will be quite interesting...

As many know Long Island has some of the USA's most extensive suburban sprawl...

LI MIKE

 

[W. K. Lis]

From DC.Streetsblog, at this link:

Five Media Myths That Perpetuate Car Culture

Another day, another news story, another media outlet wielding an old saw like this one: high gas prices are a political problem for the president because Americans “love their cars.” American car culture, fed by everything from our sprawled out landscape to a daily bombardment of car ads, is kept alive by journalists’ use of a set of hackneyed narratives. Beyond clichés, these story lines represent a collection of myths that shore up an unhealthy, unequal, and ultimately unsustainable car system.

Americans love their cars. A Google search for this statement returns 2.8 times as many hits as “Americans love their pets” and 6.3 times as many as “Americans love their guns”. Yes, there will always be automotive enthusiasts and drivers fond of their cars. But our car culture is both shifting and conflicted: The last time they were surveyed by Pew, Americans saying they saw their cars as “something special”, more than just a means of transportation, had dropped from 43 to 23 percent. Americans may need their cars in our transit-starved and poorly planned landscape, but with mind-numbing traffic and volatile gas prices, the luster is off the chrome.

Teens can’t wait to grab the car keys. The press persists in romanticizing a teen’s first trip to the DMV as the ultimate coming of age ritual. But it’s their middle-aged parents who are more likely to be champing at the bit, fed up with schlepping their kids and steeped in nostalgia about the freedom they felt when they first drove. But this generation is different. Already connected by smartphones and computers, and graduating into a terrible job market, young people are less car-happy than their parents were at the same age. Today’s teens are delaying getting their licenses and purchasing vehicles, and college students are more interested in living in urban centers where they can be less car-dependent.

The economy depends on the auto industry. The popular, business, and political media alike echo the fallacy that a healthy US economy depends on a healthy auto industry. This chorus helped justify the 2009 bailouts of GM and Chrysler. But the auto industry knows that the dependency is reversed: it needs economic growth, tax breaks and subsidies, and vibrant credit markets to sell cars. A nation more reliant on transit and active transportation would be one in which households had lower debt and more discretionary income to spend on housing, leisure, and other products, enriching a wide swath of industries. It would also be a nation, in the next downturn, less hostage to how a single industry’s fate might affect entire communities and supply chains.

The America car industry can return to its former glory. This theme, sounded in Eminem’s paean to the resurrection of Detroit in recent Chrysler ads, is a media favorite. It resounds in stories about car companies that succeed because they “build the cars that consumers want”. The reality is that profitability in an industry so mature, when most families already own multiple vehicles, requires money be made mostly on auto loans and extended warranties. Toyota, which rose to #1 in an era when the press blamed Detroit’s troubles on its having the wrong products, has been making more on car loans than on selling cars. The auto industry’s next heyday, if there is one, will be as a finance business, not a manufacturing or transportation business as it was at its, and the American economy’s, mid-20th century glory days.

We can’t fix the car system because poor people will suffer. Raise the gas tax? Institute congestion pricing? Eliminate oil subsidies? Limit risky offshore drilling? The news media regularly regurgitates the idea that these policies would make driving more costly and that this would necessarily hurt the working poor most of all. Of course, no group suffers under our current car system more than the poor, who devote a heftier chunk of their budgets to transportation than the rest of us and who are disproportionately victims of auto sales fraud, predatory lending, discriminatory insurance pricing, and racial profiling in traffic violations. Simple solutions like redirecting oil and auto subsidies to transit improvements and exempting the poor from new gas taxes would increase equality of mobility.

These myths about our car-dependent transportation system, and the industries that benefit from it, too often go unquestioned by journalists and opinion leaders. Advocates for transportation equity and for a modern transportation system must challenge these assumptions. Rather than let ourselves be paralyzed by these truisms or lulled into thinking these myths harmless, we must tackle these obstacles standing between us and a better transportation future.

Too bad there are still people (IE. Rob Ford) who continue to believe in such myths and will try to build on them.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Here's an interesting link to an article called My Way Or The Highway: Why Mega-Roads Rule The City.

...the Collier-Burns Act. This California state law passed in 1947 and is named for a pair of then-leading politicos. At the time, the legislation was intended in part to relieve urban traffic congestion.

Instead, Collier-Burns wound up sparking a local, regional, and nationwide road-building frenzy that began in the 1940s and `50s and hasn't yet come to a full and complete stop.

For reasons as basic and base as bureaucratic power grabs, expediency, and zero-sum options in lieu of smart and nuanced planning, Los Angeles -- and many other major cities -- wound up smothered with concrete and asphalt goliaths named like Hollywood sequels or Super Bowls -- the 5, the 105, the 605, on and on.

How did this all come to pass? Collier-Burns increased transporation-related taxes and allocated millions and millions of additional dollars for freeways. Collier-Burns raised the fuel tax by 50%, vehicle registration fees by 200%, and in a maneuver with an efficacy that should never go underestimated, centralized bureaucratic power in one agency -- the California Division of Highways (which later became Caltrans).

The Collier-Burns legacy? Within just five years after the Act's passing, the Golden State increased its freeway mileage by four and a half times.
Prior to Collier-Burns, many Californians -- and Los Angelenos in particular -- had worked towards developing a multi-modal highway system with a relatively limited footprint inside cities, left the mega-roads we know today for more spacious rural routes, and incorporated and expanded public transit.

Instead, catalyzed by the Collier-Burns-inspired highway funding spigot, with the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act (more about this in a future Laws That Shaped LA column), cities received a Godfather-style offer they couldn't refuse: money, and lots of it, to build freeways, lots of them.

Cities such as L.A. wound up accepting state and federal money for new highways and interstates, but gave up having much say in how the roads would be built, where exactly they would go, and what communities would be bypassed or bisected in the process.

You've heard of buyer's remorse? How about funder's remorse? The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act was so immediately and immensely abhorrent in urban areas that President Dwight Eisenhower, the man most (erroneously, as it turns out) associated with pushing this particular law apparently mocked it.

"There is an interesting story," Brian D. Taylor says, "where later Eisenhower was held up in his limousine by all of this traffic and he said, 'What numbskull is building all of these freeways into the city?' His aids told him, 'Well you are, sir.'"

The Act also led to such other actions as the rapid conversions of orange groves into suburban subdivisions; the construction of iconic Southern California infrastructure such as, "The Stack"; and to the eminent domain evictions, with shockingly little notice -- fifteen days, Taylor reports -- of residents of a then-predominantly African American neighborhood in South L.A. Fifteen hundred homes were taken for the 110 Harbor Freeway, writes author Eric Avilla.

Read the whole article at this link.

 

[W. K. Lis]

From Strip Mall to Neighbourhood.

See link.

A mixed-use development rises where a strip mall once stood. Photo: Dan Reed/GGW

Pushing the envelope on suburban retrofits

See Link.

Federal Realty's mixed-use developments have transformed suburbs from Bethesda to San Jose. But the size and ambition of their newest project, Pike + Rose in White Flint, is their most ambitious attempt yet to create an urban place from scratch in what's now a very suburban space.


Rendering of Pike + Rose from Federal Realty.

Last week, the Rockville-based developer unveiled their plans for Pike + Rose, a new neighborhood that will be built over the next several years at the former Mid-Pike Plaza shopping center at Rockville Pike and Montrose Parkway.

As the Friends of White Flint blog wrote last week, it will be huge, with 3.5 million square feet of apartments, offices, shops, restaurants, entertainment venues and a hotel on 24 acres. The first of four phases at Pike + Rose broke ground this summer and will open in 2014; when finished, it'll be 5 times the size of Bethesda Row, which took Federal Realty over a decade to build.

But unlike Bethesda Row, which was built in an established community with some urban features, Pike + Rose will attempt to create an urban environment from scratch. The challenge is to create a place that feels "authentic" without the benefit of time and to encourage tenants and visitors to get out of their cars in an area where driving is often the only way to get around.

As the first big project to be built under the White Flint Sector Plan approved in 2010, county planners, elected officials, other developers and residents will be watching to see how successful it is. If done well, Pike + Rose could become a standard-bearer for White Flint, a glimpse of the community's future and a signal to other property owners to step up their game.

Will it be "authentic"?

Bethesda Row, another Federal Realty project. Photo by eddie.welker on Flickr.

New suburban town centers are often derided as fake and contrived, though they have the ability to create meaningful urban places. Like other Federal Realty projects, Pike + Rose tries to avoid this by looking like it's been built over time.

One way is through having a variety of building forms. Along Rockville Pike are tall office towers with large retail spaces, which will give big companies and big-box stores alike the visibility and prominence they want. In the center of the site is Grand Park Avenue, a street with smaller shops, restaurants and a plaza that could become Pike + Rose's social heart.

And along Hoya Street are a line of "point towers," apartment buildings whose ground-floor units have private entrances and yards, providing a transition to the residential neighborhoods to the west.

Another is by having different architects design each building. Three firms worked on Pike + Rose, including WDG Architecture of the District and Street-Works of New York, which also worked on Bethesda Row and Rockville Town Square, and Baltimore-based Design Collective.

As a result, the architecture varies widely from building to building. In the first phase is 11800 Grand Park Avenue, a modernist office building with huge panels of glass and metal accents, and PerSei, an apartment building made to resemble a brick warehouse. In the second phase is a building with terra cotta panels and a heavy cornice that mimics architect Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis.

Some of these buildings are more successful than others. This approach is hard to do, and when executed poorly, it really can feel artificial. But it can be avoided if each building, regardless of architectural style, is done to a high standard.

A building with poor details or cheap materials in any style will look bad, but if those things are done well, the building should mature with time. Federal Realty did a good job with this in Bethesda Row and Rockville Town Square, though it may be too early to tell how they'll look in the future.

Will it be "connected"?

Site plan showing Pike + Rose's street grid and blocks. Image from Federal Realty.

To its potential tenants and visitors, Pike + Rose claims to offer a complete live-work-play environment. But Ben Harris, who writes a local blog called North FlintVille, notes that a truly "organic" development is one that "is itself a small part of a greater whole."

The White Flint Sector Plan calls for a grid of new streets, which will divert traffic from Rockville Pike, provide multiple connections between each development, and make it easier to get around by foot or bike. Pike + Rose does their part with their network of streets and pedestrian passages, which divide the site into 9 city blocks. Those streets will eventually link up with new streets built by Montgomery County and the state of Maryland, such as an extension of Hoya Street to Old Georgetown Road.

Though the streets are pretty narrow compared to the arterial roads surrounding the development, they appear to have generous sidewalks with lots of landscaping and street trees. The blocks themselves are fairly small; most average about 300 feet long, comparable to blocks in older, inner-city neighborhoods.

Federal Realty's renderings show lively streets lined with restaurants and shops, but it's important that they don't simply stop at the edge of the development. That's what happened at Rockville Town Square, which has two great internal streets but presents blank walls, loading docks and parking garages to the rest of the world.

If Rockville Pike is going to become an urban boulevard, it needs to have buildings open onto it, whether with shops, restaurants, or even large windows that people can see into. The same goes for Old Georgetown Road, where the Sector Plan calls for a two-acre Civic Green across from Pike + Rose that could become White Flint's answer to Dupont Circle.

The stakes are high

Aerial rendering of Pike + Rose from Federal Realty.

Ten years ago, Federal Realty decided to stick with building and running strip malls. They'd literally been burned by Santana Row, an ambitious town center in San Jose that suffered a catastrophic fire and opened half-empty in a recession, and decided that the risk and complexity of urban redevelopment wasn't worth it.

Today, it's a nationally recognized development success; buoyed by demographic patterns that favor mixed-use development, Federal Realty has moved on to even bigger projects.

Like Santana Row, the stakes at Pike + Rose are high. Judging from the details we have so far, it could not only transform White Flint, but light the way for suburban redevelopments across the country.

 

[W. K. Lis]

The Decline of the Suburban Office Park


From this link:

Is the suburban office park going the way of the shopping mall?

​

That’s what Erik Calloway of Bay Area planning firm Freedman Tung + Sasaki told an audience in the heart of the Silicon Valley recently, making the case that the inwardly-focused, fortress model of the workplace is an industrial-era relic.

Adina Levin at Peninsula Transportation Alternatives caught the presentation and relays some of the highlights:

The business parks that emerged in the mid-20th century were designed to be standalone centers for industrial manufacturing, far from homes and stores. They have plenty of landscaping, but no public space — the activity is inside the complex.

Today the largest companies can still be self-contained — companies including Apple, Facebook, and Google are building internally focused headquarters — see Facebook HQ below. But a greater proportion of the economy is taking place among networks of collaborating business partners.

Increasingly, people prefer public spaces to interact and collaborate. So there is demand for workplaces that have public space, and that have access to restaurants and services that people like to have nearby.

​

The shift in workplace preferences is accompanied by a shift in the places where people many prefer to live. More people prefer places where they need to drive less. During the “great recession,†homes in urban areas maintained value more strongly than homes in remote suburbs.

Driving is declining, in an age of more expensive gasoline and changing preferences. Because of these preferences, a much greater share of startup companies are starting to locate in center cities and walkable suburban downtowns, according to a new report highlighted in Atlantic Cities.

Skeptics in Sunnyvale and other Bay Area suburban communities argue that there is no need to create new development, because the existing area is “built out.†The presentation by Erik Calloway suggests that much of the existing building stock no longer meets today’s needs, so changes will be needed to keep up with how people want to live, work and shop.

An alternative, of course, is to continue to lose market share to more highly preferred walkable places with public space.

​

Elsewhere on the Network today: Getting Around Sacramento posits that traffic signals optimized for cars are what prompts some cyclists to run reds. Urban Review STL shares photos of a new road diet in St. Louis that creates a protected pedestrian space on a busy road, as well as a bike lane. And Bike Delaware explains “armadillos,†easily-installed plastic humps that can be used to separate bike lanes from motor vehicle traffic.

 

[W. K. Lis]

With speed humps, four-way stops, and other "traffic calming" ideas, I'm guessing Toronto has had some opportunities where they attempted to create cul-de-sacs out of grid patterned streets. This video, linked from here, asks the question:

Why St. Louis Should Stop Turning Its Street Grid Into Cul-De-Sacs By Lindsay Toler

Sometimes, getting around St. Louis by car feels like driving in a maze.

A straight line is not the shortest path from one neighborhood street to another when the road is blocked off by planters, barriers and Schoemehl pots -- the concrete sewer pipes filled with dirt named for former mayor Vincent Schoemehl -- to make a cul-de-sac.

An electrical engineer and the man behind the @STLUnite Twitter feed, Richard Bose, says if he had his druthers, St. Louis would ditch the cutoffs, open up the streets and, as he puts it, "heal the grid."

"The grid is an outcome of millennia of urban building, and it turns out to be the most efficient way to arrange cities," Bose tells Daily RFT. But in some St. Louis neighborhoods, the grid is instead a series of cul-de-sacs. "If you explore the city, you run into this all over the place."

Bose argues that when city officials cut off neighborhood streets from one another, they only worsen the problems the cutoffs were supposed to fix in the first place -- especially traffic congestion. In a nine-minute video, he compiles all the Google Street images he can find of streets blocked by barriers:

[video=youtube_share;JdT6TMgqkOU]http://youtu.be/JdT6TMgqkOU[/video]

"It makes traffic worse," Bose says. "Streets like that are more of an infrastructure burden because their utility is only for the residents there. Whatever street traffic would have gone through that area has to find a new place to go."

Bose says he sees this every day during rush hour at Forest Park Parkway and Skinker Boulevard, where surrounding cut-off cul-de-sacs force more cars onto the two nearby arterial roads.

"You get dumped out onto these bigger streets, and it makes rush hour worse," he says.

That's not to say all of St. Louis' faux cul-de-sacs should be opened, Bose admits. He points to the 4500 block of Oakland Avenue, where blocking off the street helped with the drive-through drug dealing coming to the neighborhood from the nearby highway.

"I'm never going to say we should open them all right now," Bose says.

But turning through streets into cul-de-sacs might not be as effective in deterring crime as you think, Bose says.

Lindsay Toler

Street Not Thru...because we closed it off with concrete balls.

Blocked-off roads are a one-size-fits-all crime-fighting tool, Bose says. Smart criminals know the barriers mean police can only enter a street from one direction, so they park their get-away cars on the other side of the barrier for a quick escape.

Not only that, police have to wind their way through the maze of cutoff streets, increasing the amount of time they need to patrol a neighborhood for car burglars and prowlers.

"Whatever motivation there was 30 years ago [for closing a street] might not be relevant today," Bose says. "We should at least be able to talk about it."

Bose wants an official, streamlined process for neighborhoods that want to reopen their blocked-off streets. Neighbors who want to open or close a street have to get an ordinance passed by the board of aldermen.

Bose blogged about the need to make it easier for neighbors to open up their streets on Next STL, named the best blog by the Riverfront Times in 2013. A reader suggested making street closings like liquor licenses: Neighborhoods should have to get nearby residents to sign off before the city blocks the street.

"The cul-de-sacing of St. Louis hasn't solved our problems," Bose writes on his blog. "It's given us the worst of both worlds -- streets that don't go through and stroads (streets + roads) that can't handle peak traffic volumes -- all at high cost.

"Removing them just takes courage and choosing to have an open city."

 

[Johnny Au]

St. Louis took their idea from Target with their concrete balls or was it the other way or a third party?

 

[W. K. Lis]

One reason why it very, very hard to reduce sprawl in the U.S.:

From this article, at this link:

Uncle Sam Wants You to Drive: 5 Tax Breaks for Cars in the U.S. Tax Code

by Tanya Snyder

It’s April 15. If you bought an electric car in 2013, you can claim a tax break today. If you bought a plug-in hybrid, you can get a tax break today. But if you don’t own a car and walk to work instead? Sorry, Charlie.

Bought a shiny new electric car? Congratulations, you get a huge tax break. Photo: Chris Potter/Flickr

There’s a whole array of goodies in the U.S. tax code for drivers, the automobile industry, and oil companies. Here are the ABC’s (and the DE’s) of these tax-day gifts that help clog our streets with cars.

Alternative vehicle logistics. President Obama wants to extend the tax break for people who invest in properties involved in the production of advanced vehicles or the fuels they use. The Treasury Department argues that the $2.3 billion allocated for this incentive under the 2009 stimulus wasn’t enough, and that it didn’t reach more than two-thirds of eligible applicants.

Biofuels. You can get a dollar from Uncle Sam for every gallon of biodiesel you produce, though this is the last year for that one.

Car commuting and driving for work. The granddaddy of all tax incentives for driving is the $250 per month that car commuters can claim in tax-free income to cover parking expenses. Once you’re on the clock, your driving expenses are also eligible for a tax deduction. The IRS lets you write off 56.5 cents for every mile you drive for your job. As Turbo Tax’s fact sheet says plainly: “More miles, more money.†You can even write off trips to search for a job, see a rental property you own, or do volunteer work (though that one gets a lower rate). In some cases, you can even claim deductions for car washing and polishing.

Drilling. Oil companies can write off costs associated with drilling and for the amount of oil taken out of (“depleted†from) their wells. They also get a big thank-you from Uncle Sam for not exporting jobs to China. According to The Atlantic, those three tax expenditures alone will cost taxpayers $37 billion over the next decade. Despite repeated efforts to repeal these subsidies, including for deficit-reduction purposes, they live on.

EVs. The Obama administration announced last month that the tax incentives for alternative fuel vehicles aren’t big enough yet. The White House wants to increase the maximum tax credit for purchasing electric vehicles from $7,500 to $10,000 and broaden it to include a wider range of “advanced technology vehicles.†The reason? President Obama thinks putting a million of these cars on the road by 2015 would “reduce dependence on foreign oil and lead to a reduction in oil consumption of about 750 million barrels through 2030.â€

You know what else reduces dependence on all oil, foreign or otherwise? Not driving. It’s also a great way to reduce wear and tear on roads, decrease congestion, and make places more economically productive. (Is there anything that not-driving can’t do?)

Plus, according to the Federal Highway Administration, zero-vehicle households are disproportionately low-income. Sixty percent of them have incomes under $20,000, compared with just 16 percent of the vehicle-owning population. Meanwhile, the affluence of the EV-owning population is off the charts: A recent survey of electric car owners found that 30 percent of them make over $200,000 a year [PDF]. So credits for EVs are fundamentally regressive.

Obama also wants to increase the maximum tax credit for advanced technology medium-duty trucks from $20,000 to $25,000 and to maintain the $40,000 benefit for heavy-duty trucks.

Fuel Tax. And while it’s not a tax-day thing, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the federal gas tax, stuck at 18.4 cents a gallon though improved fuel efficiency and inflation combined have reduced the value of the tax by 28 percent since 1997 [PDF]. Despite a widespread understanding of shortfalls in federal transportation funding, the political will to actually raise the gas tax is nearly nonexistent.

 

[doady]

Suburban sprawl is an irresistible force in Canada too. For example:

 

[junctionist]

That's not sprawl.