[M II A II R II K]

Compact chaos: taking it to the streets


November 20, 2010

By Andrew West

Read More: http://www.smh.com.au/national/compact-chaos-taking-it-to-the-streets-20101119-180zg.html

JOHN NORQUIST has learnt how to stop worrying and love congestion. ''It's like cholesterol,'' says the former mayor of Milwaukee, the northern US city made famous by radical politics, beer and the '70s sitcom Happy Days. ''There's good congestion and bad congestion.'' Everyone knows about bad congestion. It's the type you encounter on arterial roads - such as Parramatta Road, Victoria Road and the suburban motorways during peak hour - when you sit, white-knuckled with frustration, in stalled traffic, the car spewing greenhouse gases.

- ''You don't want cars sitting there, burning energy,'' Norquist says. ''Nor do you want trucks going through the centre of town and not stopping to do business. There's no economic benefit.''

- Norquist - a progressive Democrat, who, after 16 years as mayor, retired to head the organisation Congress for the New Urbanism in Chicago - says motorways should be ring roads around the edges of metropolitan areas, leaving streets free to clog up occasionally with buses, walkers, cyclists, train commuters and, yes, local cars carrying people who patronise businesses.

- ''That's the good congestion,'' he says, ''when you generate traffic and passing trade that keeps a neighbourhood vibrant.''

- As mayor, Norquist tore up more than a kilometre of freeway through Milwaukee, liberating 10.5 hectares of prime land for mixed-use development, with an estimated value of more than $US250 million.

- He told the conference that urban freeways rarely relieve congestion, and, when they do, it is at a huge cost, scarring streetscapes, razing neighbourhoods and diverting income from main streets to malls and business parks. ''Building roads so cars do not have to slow down does not work.''

- So the city of the future can be a dystopia of rumbling, choked motorways, main street stores abandoned for shopping centres, gated estates for the wealthy, and where blackouts from coal-fired power are increasingly common.

- Or it can be a compact, if occasionally chaotic, place with lots of public transport, short streets on a grid pattern, corner shops, flats and townhouses, markets and even Middle Eastern-style souks.

 

[The Mad Navigator]

Congestion is good when it spurs higher order transit construction. 'Nuff said, buoy!

 

[gweed123]

I agree with some of this. I do agree that expressways leading into downtown certainly contribute to a decline in property values and in neighbourhood health for areas around downtown and around the expressway. However, I don't think that relying on arterial roadways leading into downtown is a good choice either. These streets were not designed to carry the amount of traffic that they would be carrying. Just think of Richmond and Adelaide Streets. Basically the entire DVP dumps onto these two streets. Is it better than an expressway? Absolutely. Does it help contribute to a vibrant street life? Not really. People want to live, work, and play along vibrant streets, but not necessarily streets that are clogged most hours of the day with cars. I think there needs to be a clear distinction made between "busy" and "full". "Busy" is good for shops and streetlife. "Full" isn't.

Another thing is that how many of the people using these urban arterials to get to work are actually stopping at the shops located along them? Just because a street has traffic doesn't mean the businesses are selling. You need the right KIND of traffic in order to generate that. That traffic comes from walking, biking, transit, and the occasional vehicle trip, not from the commuter heading into and out of downtown (unless it's a gas station or convenience store).

 

[Chuck]

New York roads work. They are crowded and full, but almost always moving along at about 20 km/hr thanks to flawless signal sequencing. You don't have cars driving along at 70 km/hr like you do on Toronto roads when they open up, nor do you have traffic moving at a standstill like you also have in Toronto because our traffic lights aren't timed properly. A dense wall of slow but still moving traffic is best for arterial roads. It's not overwhelming or dangerous, adds to the overall sense of activity, yet efficiently carries an incredible volume of vehicles.

 

[sjc]

People want to live, work, and play along vibrant streets,

Some people do, and some people would prefer to live in Mississauga and drive in to work in the morning. If you don't want these people driving in to work, you can encourage businesses to move to Mississauga which would signficantly reduce the amount of traffic downtown. Mississauga, Markham and Vaughan wouldn't exist if everyone really wanted to live on "vibrant streets" downtown.

Just think of Richmond and Adelaide Streets. Basically the entire DVP dumps onto these two streets. Is it better than an expressway? Absolutely. Does it help contribute to a vibrant street life?

One solution is to accept that Richmond and Adelaide will not be "vibrant streets" and encourage cars to use them, rather than other downtown streets. Then focus on how to improve (and speed up) traffic flow on those streets.

A lot of people don't seem to understand the importance of the workers that come in from outside downtown. Downtown is more than a place to live and play.

Personally, I don't want to live on a "vibrant street".

For the record, I don't have a car and take the subway to work.

(There is no such thing as good congestion)

 

[The Mad Navigator]

(There is no such thing as good congestion)

Bollocks.

There is when you have congestion charges and road tolls paying for new Transit lines!

 

[Dan416]

Bollocks.

There is when you have congestion charges and road tolls paying for new Transit lines!

If, you know, the city had had the guts to implement congestion charges while Miller was in power. But no, instead we got Transit City. I know which I'd pick.

 

[junctionist]

Some people do, and some people would prefer to live in Mississauga and drive in to work in the morning. If you don't want these people driving in to work, you can encourage businesses to move to Mississauga which would signficantly reduce the amount of traffic downtown. Mississauga, Markham and Vaughan wouldn't exist if everyone really wanted to live on "vibrant streets" downtown.

It's not just a downtown street that can be vibrant. A street beyond downtown can certainly have a healthy sidewalk culture and be vibrant. There are different degrees of it, so it's a mistake to think a person's choice is solely the intensity of the downtown arterial or the deadness of the suburban residential street. That perspective misses a lot like the Junction, the Beach, or even North York Centre. Mississauga, Markham, Vaughan exist first and foremost for the affordable housing options people take advantage of and because of the government planning and infrastructure that allows their suburban communities to develop. Many people would prefer more vibrant streets, if not to the degree seen on downtown streets.

 

[Chuck]

The average person wants a house and yard, but also a vibrant neighbourhood with trees, parks, and a main street they can walk to. Land value isn't high in the city "just because," it's high because is has the types of neighbourhoods that people most want to live in, which interestingly could only have been created given the conditions which existed 60+ years ago. For probably about 50% of the people who live there, the suburbs are a compromise, and they would have initially moved to one of the previously listed neighbourhoods first if they could have afforded them.

 

[Automation Gallery]

Toronto’s gridlock is never going to be beautiful

Toronto, you've grown old and rigid long before your time. Other cities are racing to provide new ways for people to move fluidly through them. Meanwhile, Toronto suffers from a kind of urban arthritis: Its roads and highways are clogged; its sidewalks are corroded and narrow, and it lacks enough subway lines and dedicated bike lanes.


The astounding lack of a national transportation strategy in Canada means that while other cities around the world become easier to penetrate on foot or by high-speed transit, Toronto, like Calgary, is becoming increasingly gridlocked. Beauty in a city has as much to do with ease of transportation as it does with the aesthetics of a particular building. The truth is that the postwar road is dead. We need to unpark our brains, so we can reclaim the thousands of kilometres of roads criss-crossing our cities and convert them from economic dead zones to places designed to attract people and revenue.

Consider that Hong Kong has consistently invested an amount equal to 1 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product in that city’s public transit over the last 20 years. Singapore, too, has invested heavily. Despite a multibillion-dollar price tag, the City of London remains firmly committed to building subways and regional rail lines, public-private partnerships that provide new linkages from north to south and east to west allowing passengers to travel fluidly from Heathrow to Canary Wharf in about 15 minutes.

Along with the province’s contributions, Toronto’s public transit has only tasted bits and pieces from the federal slop pail: $300-million toward the Spadina subway expansion, another $300-million toward a previous vision of the Sheppard Avenue East Light Rail Transit line, though that funding has been frozen since Toronto Mayor Rob Ford cancelled the Transit City plan earlier this year. A trip through the city that takes 20 minutes by car takes three times that long by a disheartening and exhausting relay of streetcar, bus, subway and bus.

Canada has enjoyed economic good times over the last decade, but still there’s been an astounding blindness to the need to invest urgently in public transit. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s fresh majority could help push forward a national transportation plan. According to the City of Toronto’s Economic Development and Culture Division, Toronto’s share of Canada’s annual GDP is roughly $144-billion. One per cent of that contribution would amount to $1.4-billion, which each year could be put toward new subway lines and safer, more energy-efficient subway cars and buses.

Imagine if, like Singapore or Hong Kong, Toronto had attracted billions of dollars to buoy its subway and streetcar system over the last two decades. Instead of having among the longest commute times in North America, we could enjoy the shortest. Fewer cars on the road would mean cleaner air. Our carbon footprint would be dramatically reduced.

That’s not an expenditure, it’s an investment in people and the planet.

There’s also comeuppance money for mass transit to be found in the $1.7-billion in bailout loans that Chrysler Group repaid to the governments of Canada and Ontario earlier this week. The estimated 20 per cent in interest charged by the Canadian government for the bailout could go a long way toward financing at least one of the many badly needed subway lines in Toronto.

In Toronto, the average amount spent on public transit annually (by governments and from fare revenue) is about $338 per capita. New York spends twice that. London, three times. Is it any wonder that 70 per cent of Torontonians choose to drive to work?

More.............http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...s-never-going-to-be-beautiful/article2037428/

 

[nfitz]

Lisa Rochon doesn't seem very knowledgeable ... Heathrow to Canary Wharf in 15 minutes? Has she ever been to London? The non-stop express train from Heathrow Central (west of London) takes 16 minutes (21 minutes from Terminal 5!) just to get to Paddington (west side of London). There's no plans to build anything that would get you from Heathrow to Canary Wharf (east side of London) in 15 minutes.

When Crossrail is completed in 2018 or so, it will take 40 minutes to get from Heathrow to Canary Wharf - according to Crossrail's website (though you might save a couple of minutes by taking Heathrow Express to Paddington and changing to Crossrail there - but it's still supposed to be 16 minutes just from Paddington to Canary Wharf). It takes over 50 minutes currently.

 

[Electrify]

That was a good article, but I commented that it began to slip when talking about converting spaces dedicated to mobility to spaces dedicated to place. I posted a link to an article from Jarrett Walker, which sums this trend in new urbanism quite well:

imagining cities without mobility
Philips Corporation, like everyone, is running a livable cities program, in this case a set of awards for individual projects rather than big-picture rankings of cities. I just stumbled on it, and got a rude shock.

There are eight categories: Neighborhood, Mobility, Care, Education, Water, Shade, Sport, and Regeneration -- all excellent things. Obviously, I'm professionally interested in mobility, so I looked to see who was winning there.

The leading candidate for the Mobility award is Plaza Movil Street Park, a proposal (for Buenos Aires, Argentina) for temporary street closures to create community park space. Its benefits are described like this:

Creating recreational spaces for local communities to relax, play, meet, and chat.

That's wonderful. It's glorious. I'm all for it. To use Philips's terms, it's great for Neighborhood, and probably also for Shade. But it's not mobility!

The only relationship that this plan has to mobility is that it takes space normally used for mobility and uses it for something else.

St. Augustine observed that we are always either being or becoming. In urbanism, "being" corresponds to placehood, and "becoming" corresponds to movement or mobility. The late 20th Century car-centered model led to the massive conversion of land area from placehood functions to mobility functions. Transit's great virtue is that it provides a lot of mobility using relatively little space, so that more area can be devoted to places, both public and private.

And yes, a great street provides an experience that integrates placehood and mobility to a degree. And yes, good urban redevelopment also reduces our need for mobility up to a point.

Bravo for well-designed street closures. But to give a street closure a mobility award seems to imply that mobility -- our ability to get to places we want to go to -- just no longer matters.

There is a strong current in New Urbanism, not without detractors, that does seem interested in abolishing mobility. Patrick Condon's idea for Vancouver, for example, would cancel a single proposed subway line and instead replace all of the city's electric trolleybuses with streetcars that go the same speed as the buses do. He would cancel a mobility-improving project and instead spend money in way that that may do great urban things but doesn't increase mobility at all. Once his network was complete, nobody could get anywhere any faster than they can now.

This makes sense only in a context where going places (even under renewable elecric power) is an objective evil. Streetcars, in this vision, supposedly cause greater urban density to be built at livable neighborhood scales, so that people meet more of their needs close to home. People spend most of their time in their own "villages" and others nearby. They simply do not travel far across the city, and had better not be in a hurry when they do.

It's understandable that "urban village" is a winning concept right now. We do need to increase the self-reliance of each part of a city, so that travel demand for many of life's needs can met closer to home. The pendulum swung far the other way in the late 20th century, toward surrendering placehood to movement. I support and eagerly participate in efforts to help it swing back.

But I think we can see what it might look like to swing too far in the new direction. We stay close to home, and thus evolve transport systems that are useful for going short distances and useless for going long ones. And the obvious retort to this is: In that case, why live in a city? Why not just live in a country village, or in a small city?

The whole point of living in a city is to have access to unusual things that are only possible at a large scale. If you want major league sports or a good symphony orchestra or a world-class major university, you need to be in some kind of urban area. If you have a very unusual interest, only a place with lots of people will have a few people who share that interest. If you want choices, you need redundancy, also known as competition. You need there to be two or more sources for whatever service or product or experience you're looking for, readily available from where you live. For those things, you need a certain amount of urban mass, and some options for moving around within it.

The great irony of anti-mobility village-first thinking is that it inevitably leads to monotony -- less choice and therefore less opportunity for people to form specalized communities where unusual thought and creativity can flourish. More disturbingly, it leads to a world where only the internet offers those things, which leads in turn to nightmare images of a world of plugged-in couch potatoes, people who never go outside anymore because their social and intellectual needs simply aren't met by the 500 people who happen to be within walking distance.

The antidote to conformity and monotony is the city. For a city to function as a city, you need mobility. Streetcars are fun to ride, but not if you're in a hurry. Closing a street on Sundays so people can dance is a great thing. But you can't run an economy that way, nor can your citizens feel free.

http://www.humantransit.org/2011/03/imagining-cities-without-mobility.html

 

[Woodbridge_Heights]

Factual errors aside the article has a very valid point. If Toronto had been investing in transit for the past 20 (nay 30 years) we wouldn't be stuck here arguing about mode choice on certain lines (LRT vs HRT), we wouldn't be trying to squeeze every dollar possible and make difficult decisions such as where to spend that money (DRL, Crosstown, YUS subway extensions), we wouldn't be wondering when all day regular regional rail would be coming because we'd have it, and on and on and on.

Each and every day this forum has arguments over how to use the scarce resources rapid transit has to gain the greatest return and instead we could, should, have all these things.

Just imagine, starting from 1980 on if the network 2011 plan (or whatever plan would have resulted during that time). We would have a DRL, we would likely have a YUS loop, we would have an Eglinton line, we would have rapid transit to the Airport region which in it self would be a multi modal transit centre and employment hub, we would have a true regional rail network one that not only serves the 905 but also serves the 416 just as well.

End Rant

 

[BMO]

Factual errors aside the article has a very valid point. If Toronto had been investing in transit for the past 20 (nay 30 years) we wouldn't be stuck here arguing about mode choice on certain lines (LRT vs HRT), we wouldn't be trying to squeeze every dollar possible and make difficult decisions such as where to spend that money (DRL, Crosstown, YUS subway extensions), we wouldn't be wondering when all day regular regional rail would be coming because we'd have it, and on and on and on.

Each and every day this forum has arguments over how to use the scarce resources rapid transit has to gain the greatest return and instead we could, should, have all these things.

Just imagine, starting from 1980 on if the network 2011 plan (or whatever plan would have resulted during that time). We would have a DRL, we would likely have a YUS loop, we would have an Eglinton line, we would have rapid transit to the Airport region which in it self would be a multi modal transit centre and employment hub, we would have a true regional rail network one that not only serves the 905 but also serves the 416 just as well.

End Rant

+1..nuff said

 

[Dan416]

+1..nuff said

+2