Randall, I checked with the museum and was told that there is nothing in The Greatest Grid exhiition that directly relates to Collect Pond. The pond does, however, appear in some of the historic maps on display.
margaret schucker (not verified)Fri, 2012-02-03 19:09
Sorry, I still don't agree about the alleys. Walking by an alley at night is a very scary thing, especially when you live in a rough neighborhood. Many things look good on paper when you're planning a new (probably expensive) town according to the principles of New Urbanism, but they don't hold up in real places. When I was getting my degree in Landscape Architecture, one of my professors told me that very few LAs come from urban areas; they mostly come from suburbs. So there were a lot of ideas floating around that just don't play out in the real world.
The house that I grew up in had a storage space under the stoop where we kept the garbage cans, so they were not always on the sidewalk. Because they were right inside the front door, we had an incentive to keep them clean. The alleys that I've seen, mostly in Philadelphia and Baltimore, become repositories for all kinds of junk. They start to smell and attract vermin.
My neighborhood was very dense, as dense as residential neighborhoods in Manhattan. There were about 60 three or four story rowhouses on the side streets and apartment buildings or stores with apartments over them on the avenues. Think Upper East Side before they they started replacing everything with large apartment buildings.
So, you can have your alleys in commercial areas, but not in residential ones. IMHO
Excellent overview! I visited the exhibit and loved it as well. Unfortunately the concurrent exhibit "The Unfinished Grid" was disappointing. The projects on display lacked both substance and clarity. See my blog post about it at http://www.thegreatamericangrid.com/2012/01/15/visiting-the-greatest-grid/
For every tenant crime is one of the major cause of concern. People prefer to live in apartments where there is less incidence of crime. I appreciate interesting features that HOPE VI insists and works, which result in reduced crime. It is a very informative and encouraging post. Eviction Letter
Anyone interested in learning more about pre-development days on Manhattan Island should turn to Mannahatta, by Eric Sanderson.
I wonder if the exhibit mentioned and illustrated the story of Collect Pond, a truly remarkable natural feature centered around a huge spring producing enormous amounts of pure fresh water. Sadly, the land around it became so heavily urbanized in the worst possible way that the this water supply became grossly polluted. Not knowing how to reverse that situation, officials decided to fill it in, piping the water to the river, where it continues to flow today. Ironically, the city that polluted and erased this wonderful natural feature spent very large sums creating artificial ponds and lakes in Central Park just three decades later.
A short history of Collect Pond can be found on wikipedia, and current efforts to partially restore a fragment of the pond are described on the forgotten-ny.com website. Fortunately, today's environmental laws generally prevent such pollution and losses from happening again, and many urbanists look for ways to sentitively design around such natural features, incorporating them into parklands and greenways that add value to the surrounding new development, rather then building over them (as was done at Las Ramblas in Barcelona, a great street that could have been created anywhere and which did not require the filling in of a major ravine to give it its memorable serpentine alignment).
Margaret, I understand your point about alleys not being so necessary in a residential neighborhood. But I think alleys would have been very helpful to have in the business and high-density sections of Manhattan, where there are mounds of trash to be collected and where deliveries by trucks often obstruct the streets.
margaret schucker (not verified)Thu, 2012-02-02 14:24
Yes, I grew up in a part of Brooklyn that also had a grid plan. it wasn't monotonous at all. I would much rather walk on any street in New York that in some boring suburb. What's on the street is more impotant than how the street is shaped. Besides, it's much easier to navigate.
As for alleys, I think they're overated. Not having an alley is what enabled our row house to have a back yard. Even though I was a city rat, I've grown tomatoes and grapes and roses. To me, that's much more necessary than having the convenience of keeping the garbage cans in an alley. You only have to take out the garbage once a week. So what?
I thought to recommend this article on my blogspot, but when I saw the cold modernistic design of the proposed houses, I understood this guy had only got the half of the point, not understanding how the lack of natural geometry in the buildings itself impacts on our health: Why Monotonous Repetition is Unsatisfying, by N. Salingaros
Dan Parolek, good question, and thanks for the encouragement! The Code Study tracks municipal form-based codes, and generally not those that act as PUDs (Planned Unit Developments, for the non code geeks). Otherwise, the study would track a few hundred more than it does, for many TNDs and TODs that have been built. However, some FBCs that were initially instigated by a developer, but are available and incentivized elsewhere within the jurisdiction are included. I'll email you the full study -- it'll be online at www.smartcodecomplete.com in the next few weeks.
Dan Frazier, interesting perspective, which may be true in some places. Particularly the places which don't take the time to develop a strong collective local vision before implementing it with a form-based code. If that's the case, they may not last an upturn. We often see governments on the pendulum swing between pro and anti-development, which can go either way about whether they support a FBC or not.
That being said, a few interesting things are happening. Since the majority of the FBCs have been just before or shortly after the recession hit, it's easy to see how the recessionary performance has been. Planning Directors with optional overlay FBCs in place for a portion of their jurisdiction (and perhaps mapped replacement codes elsewhere) are telling me they're seeing a majority of development applications under the optional code. Take Montgomery, Alabama, for instance. Since January 2007, approximately 1,000 acres have been permitted for construction under the SmartCode, equating to $100 million in new development over 5 years. That's significant compared to sluggish local development in the previous decade.
Places are adopting FBCs for all sorts of reasons -- econ dev, jobs, environment, character, walkability, historic preservation, redevelopment, etc. Just like every code is different, so are the reasons behind them.
The 41% difference in property value between the traditional block and the auto-oriented block is the underlying value. So that would be after the project. The tax break would be applied to the increment of gain from before the project. This would make the difference in the effective rate of taxation greater than 41%.
This city has a 1/2 cent sales tax dedicated to wastewater improvements. The new establishment was merely moved up the street four blocks so it is not clear how much new tax revenue there is. I'm not aware of a way to obtain sales tax data for individual businesses.
I had found that too, but going to Google Earth and measuring you’ll find there is actually a large variety of block sizes. Downtown is around 380×400, north of the river is around 220×320, west of the river is around 280×380. So maybe the 330x660 size just didn't pan out?
Saw somone else inquire about sales tax both as a percent of government revenue ovrall and as a percent of government revenue from these properties and I would like to see that followed up on. As often there is a bed-board-beverage tax associated with promoting tourism or community enhancement it may be worthwhile to know how the community prioritized that. Finally, the author reports on a 41% differential in property tax returns. Is that before or after the TIF is applied and are both properties included in the TIF? Also, what is the value of the TIF improvements to both those properties.
Thanks to kenf for the additional information. The blog posting that he refers to, "Lenny Greenberg, dreaming of Wheaton beyond the strip mall," shows a huge range in the character of work that developer Leonard Greenberg has done in Wheaton and Bethesda—from a one-story strip shopping center with parking lot in the front (in Wheaton) to a handsome, 10-story residential building that meets the street in a traditional urban manner (in Bethesda).
The blog points out that two decades ago there was an effort by the county to protect small businesses in Wheaton, but according to some, it hindered development. The blog says:
In 1990, the county passed a plan for downtown Wheaton that instituted a "Retail Overlay Preservation District." (See a map of it here.) The district was supposed to protect small businesses while ensuring that new construction was of high quality. However, by limiting the density of new development and requiring that all new buildings be reviewed by the Planning Board, even ones that complied with the zoning code, it actually repelled investment.
For another view on TOD in Wheaton take a look at what blogger and planner Dan Reed has to say in this "Just Up the Pike" post:
http://www.justupthepike.com/2012/01/lenny-greenberg-dreaming-of-wheaton.html
According to the post local develope Lenny Greenburg has been trying to urbanize this area for years, without county cooperation.
Paul, are the bulb-outs you speak of been built out far enough to have replaced bicycle lanes?
New York City, and many others, have strategically built bulb-outs on residential and commercial streets with the highest crash rates. They don't get in the way of cycling. Indeed, they've improved the site lines between people driving, walking and bicycling--as a daily cyclist I appreciate seeing people at intersections and have them see me more clearly. A well-designed bulb-out does not interfere with the a bike lane or shared use lanes (marked with "sharrows").
While some urbanists deride these traffic-calming treatments, they are a great tool within a built condition needing a safety retrofit--they're proven to help slow people driving, which facilitates a safer environment for all.
When cycling I feel like bulbouts are dangerous, but when walking are good.
The solution for cycle-friendly bulbouts are to push them out a bit more, and make a bike lane-width gap between the bulbout and sidewalk. Europe's got lots of examples of these. That way, bike lanes are more continuous and keep drivers away from cyclists.
Paul, I can understand that bulb-outs may push cyclists farther into the path of motor vehicles, a potentially dangerous situation. But as an everyday cyclist myself on the streets of New Haven, where there are a few bulb-outs, I haven't found them to be much of a problem. The bulb-outs that I encounter most frequently are in the downtown, where traffic moves fairly slowly, and motorists and cyclists can notice what everyone on the street is doing.
Perhaps the problem is more acute in higher-speed areas. I'd be interested in whether other cyclists also view bulb-outs as hazards.
I cannot imagine a case where a City would "shut down" a major development project for generating too much traffic. Can you imagine the economic and political firestorm, especially if we are talking about a major employment center or retail sales tax generator?
Plus...most cities are cutting staff and services, it is too easy to say "monitor traffic levels" but such monitoring requires substantial staff time or an (expensive) consultant contract.
In the San Joaquin Valley, we don't have quite the same political climate as Patrick's Bay Area situation.
What we do have in common is the California Environmental Quality Act: CEQA. CEQA is little more than a public disclosure process with teeth. If your traffic modeler fudges the numbers, the study can be successfully challenged in a costly court battle, and the city has to foot the bill. Then do it over to the court's satisfaction.
Our city reduced traffic room at intersections. The result is that the streets are harder for bicycles to navigate. Someone is going to get injured someday.
Calming traffic on the backs of the bicyclists (literally!) is indefensible.
Perhaps it is time to reevaluate the onerous zoning which causes people to drive to downtown areas from suburban residential areas to get to needed services. If we could loosen the spot zoning up a bit, and allow for local small community stores, banks, etc. dotted within residential areas, wouldn't that make more sense than to force a body of suburban area citizens to get in their car and drive a few miles to condensed city centers every time they needed a bottle of milk?
I think this type of zoning would increase walkers and decrease traffic problems.
I think this was what we had before someone came up with the idea to concentrate all services inside a city center rather than dotting certain needed services within walking distance from local residential districts. It is the GMA that is causing our traffic, pollution and road problems by onerous zoning.
Nit-pick: the block sizes in most of Chicago are not 400 feet long. They are 330 feet (1/16 mile) by 660 feet (1/8 mile). Downtown Chicago is a little different though and some may be about 400 feet.
I want to see your video exchange between a reporter and an ECB official regarding Ireland and it's obligations to pay back bondholders.It's very important article.Thanks.
The streets don't necessarily have to be narrow. Take Bungalow Heaven, Pasadena, CA as an example: http://g.co/maps/gsxxh On one side of the block you have high commercial traffic that gets bogged down. On the other side of the block you have low residential traffic. Why doesn't everyone just cut through the residential street? Because there is a stop sign at every intersection.
Block shapes do come into play when the conventions of construction are important. The squareness of the grid lends itself perfectly well to almost everything in our lives: from rectangular desks to rectangular rooms to rectangular houses, etc. While an Olmstedian grid is fine in terms of connectivity it sure is difficult to get a continuous street wall on a curving street.
Keep in mind that the "number of intersections" is merely the byproduct of the fundamental unit of urbanism (the block). You cannot regulate street connectivity with intersection density; it simply does not work. I presented a paper on this topic at CNU19 titled "Chicago is Rural: the Inconsistencies and Absurdities of Street Connectivity Indices". You can find it here: http://www.cnu.org/nuresearch
As Daniel Burnham said in his Plan of Chicago: "The rectilinear system certainly accords with the idea of rightness inherent in the human mind; and also it involves a minimum waste of ground space... It is only when and as the city increases in population that diagonals become necessary in order to save considerable amounts of time and to prevent congestion by dividing and segregating the traffic. Thus it happens that no rectilinear city is perfect without the diagonal streets; and conversely, having the rectilinear system, the Cretan of diagonals produces the greatest convenience."
wow great i have read many articles about this topic and everytime i learn something new i dont think it will ever stop always new info , Thanks for all of your hard work!
In gengeral, I agree that the grid is what you make of it. Within America, when preparing to visit or move to a city, I look for the tight part of the street network to check out first -- thinking that will be the most walkable, diverse, and interesting part of town. Here in the U.S. the tight part tends to be a grid. But I have visited Europe and have enjoyed the dense, non-rectangular networks as well. (Speaking of Europe... square shapes don't always help with navigation: I was lost in Vienna for a little while because the square opera house looks the same on every side, without close observation.)
Straight streets can include elements to block the view to infinity -- for instance, the Squares in Savannah. (Those squares, being symetrically designed in most cases, can cause visitors to get lost just like the opera house in Vienna. But getting lost is not always a bad thing -- the Vienna incident is one of the most memorable parts of my trip 20 years ago.)
So, I am not picky about block shapes -- just give me lots of intersections.
Higher densities and tighter regulations show benifits only when used properly, otherwise they seem to benifit the quick profits of a few.
Walkable communities are wonderful as long as it's coupled with adequate public transportation and buisness centers.
Ecologically, high density usualy ignores impact and sustainability, claiming a smaller foot print is good for the earth and people. In some respects this may hold true, in most the opposite is so, placing concentrations of people in a dependency on what are tedious and cumbersome systems to supply the basics of life ie... energies, food and water.
Coupled with the social problems associated with over crowding, high density "smart growth" in my opinion is anything but "smart".
The higher property values of "smart growth" results in the lower income population who are usualy the "service" personel being pushed to the fringes with the added transportaition burden placed on those who can afford it the least.
There are so many factors that need be considered in true "affordbility"?
"For a city, N roughly equals the number of people. Setting N = 200,000 gives us the following estimates for the relative number of connective paths. A modernist city of this size has 105 paths, whereas the randomly-connected city has 1.2x106 paths, or 12 TIMES those in the modernist city. Furthermore, a completely-connected city has 2x1010 paths, or 200,000 TIMES those in the modernist city. The mediaeval city was completely connected via direct pedestrian paths. We built such cities precisely so as to allow direct connections among all nodes, and our collective memory has never forgotten the personal freedom of movement and interaction that this gave us." - Nikos A. Salingaros
It's strange, but in the "dark ages" people were 200.000 times more connected than what we are today, with all our technology. And we look upon ourselves as an advanced civilisation?!?
I was referring to the efficencies gained with a grid network (greater connectivity)vs a hierarchical network where all traffic is funneled to a few main roads with multiple lanes and in general consists of a disconnected network.
A grid network allows local traffic to stay on local streets for local trips. Thus the same amount of traffic is distributed over a larger network.
Page 10 of the following PDF has a good graphic showing the difference
Is the grid boring though because of bad urban design or its uniformity? There are many great cities laid out on a grid that are anything but boring because the urban design is great. Just as there are plenty of "organic" curvilinear subdivisions where you would choose to do anything but walk because of a complete lack of public realm.
Because grids make every diagonal journey up to 41% longer than a straight-line distance, they are inefficient for transport. They are also boring for orthagonal journeys, because you can see just how far you have to travel on foot. A gently winding street gives you many more waypoints (vide Kevin Lynch).
And a truly transport-efficient city would be based around triangles, because then distances would tend to be shorter. Of course nobody builds triangular houses, so a blend of grids at micro scale and triangles at macro scale works best (vide Paris, London, etc).
Paul Murrain pointed out in a lecture to my students that the traditional layout of country roads in the UK is always in a series of triangles at all scales. You can see it illustrated here: http://binged.it/yrsuOr
Also, Christopher Alexander states that the roads must be layd out after the houses are built, not before: Integrated Design.
When you build the buildings first and the streets after, of course, the result will be organic.
Christopher Alexander states:
The following examples are all harmful:
Conventionally: Roads are built before the buildings they serve.
Conventionally: In a tract development, street sewers are laid long before the houses are built.
Conventionally: Houses are placed, and the garden – whatever is left on the lot – comes second.
Conventionally: Windows are designed and positioned at the time the building’s plans are submitted for plan check.
Conventionally: Drawings are completed before any construction work is done.
Conventionally: Neighborhood plans are completed, before any construction work is done.
Conventionally: Public spaces are designed after individual buildings.
Conventionally: Changes are done by change orders, and therefore become very expensive.
These practices do not support the creation of living neighborhoods!
To obtain an organic street pattern is very simple, it's just to build the buildings first and the roads after. Why don't we do so? Because our minds are blocked by the "technologies of deadth"!
Its my SWAG that cul-de-sacs are popular because they are a refuge from high volumes and speeds. The high speeds are the result of excessively wide streets. The high volumes because all traffic is forced onto a few streets. To avoid this people are drawn to houses on a cul-de-sac where its impossibe for high volumes or speeds. But a GRID with narrow streets will prevent cut-though because non-local traffic won't cut through if they are forced to drive 20-25mph and the grid is highly efficient by distributing traffic over a much larger number of road segments.
I also think the sprawling cookie cutter neighborhoods who happen to be laid out on a grid can also lead to the preception of gridded streets being boring. People wrongly precieve the straight "boring" streets as the cause of a placeless neighborhood when in reality its the garage dominated streetscape, cheap architecture, poor spatial enclosure, auto-centric street design, single-use zoning, lack of urban design are all the culprits, not the grid.
michael mcdonough (not verified)Wed, 2012-01-25 17:55
In the late 70's, I witnessed other forces at play. In the relentless South Florida east coast sprawl, one city, Boca Raton, through visionary leadership, decided to enact tough sign and landscape ordinances. As new construction and sunsetting signage met these new guidelines, Boca began to become much more appealing than the adjacent sprawl, which then drew demand, developers and homeowners that placed aesthetics over cheap and easy. Not surprisingly, those that prefered higher quality in the built environment had more money, and spent more money on nicer housing, landscaping, etc.
So, what I saw was that tighter regulations attracted wealth, which of course, resulted in higher property values.
This is a debate that has never quite been resolved in the urban economics or planning literature. The crux of the problem is that there are two reasons why prices could go up in a housing market in response to regulations: supply or demand. Demand-driven price increases within a jurisdiction represent a good thing: they mean that municipal regulations have created positive amenities that people are willing to pay extra for. An indicator of this is when prices go up just in a jurisdiction (or cluster of jurisdictions with the same policy) and not in neighboring jurisdictions. Then there is supply-driven price increases: this happens when there's regionwide constraints on building that cause prices in the entire regional housing market to go up. The most common culprit in this case is large lot zoning; one town tries it, sees that it saves them money on service costs, and then many of the neighboring jurisdictions want to try it too--in essence a "copy cat" syndrome. Pretty soon enough jurisdictions are doing it that regional supply is constrained and everyone's prices go up. We tend to see this happen a lot in metropolitan areas that have strong growth pressures but are of an age where many of the suburban jurisdictions are beginning to reach a congestion point in their provision of services--and hence want to regulate growth with large lot zoning.
Randall, I checked with the museum and was told that there is nothing in The Greatest Grid exhiition that directly relates to Collect Pond. The pond does, however, appear in some of the historic maps on display.
Sorry, I still don't agree about the alleys. Walking by an alley at night is a very scary thing, especially when you live in a rough neighborhood. Many things look good on paper when you're planning a new (probably expensive) town according to the principles of New Urbanism, but they don't hold up in real places. When I was getting my degree in Landscape Architecture, one of my professors told me that very few LAs come from urban areas; they mostly come from suburbs. So there were a lot of ideas floating around that just don't play out in the real world.
The house that I grew up in had a storage space under the stoop where we kept the garbage cans, so they were not always on the sidewalk. Because they were right inside the front door, we had an incentive to keep them clean. The alleys that I've seen, mostly in Philadelphia and Baltimore, become repositories for all kinds of junk. They start to smell and attract vermin.
My neighborhood was very dense, as dense as residential neighborhoods in Manhattan. There were about 60 three or four story rowhouses on the side streets and apartment buildings or stores with apartments over them on the avenues. Think Upper East Side before they they started replacing everything with large apartment buildings.
So, you can have your alleys in commercial areas, but not in residential ones. IMHO
Well, there is Ronchamp. But that's competely different from the rest of his work. So, no, I don't understand why he's revered.
Puh-leez --
I think they were just making a point about how statistics can be massaged.
Excellent overview! I visited the exhibit and loved it as well. Unfortunately the concurrent exhibit "The Unfinished Grid" was disappointing. The projects on display lacked both substance and clarity. See my blog post about it at http://www.thegreatamericangrid.com/2012/01/15/visiting-the-greatest-grid/
If the block is a wee bit deeper or the house footprint a mite smaller, you can have your tomatoes, and alleys, too!
I like this, it's really speakin my language! 2 subjects I care a lot about.
I can show you any number of curving street walls in British cities. You're not trying hard enough on the other side of the pond! ;-)
Philip, I cede your point. I was just thinking about how great those tomatoes were!
Anyone interested in learning more about pre-development days on Manhattan Island should turn to Mannahatta, by Eric Sanderson.
I wonder if the exhibit mentioned and illustrated the story of Collect Pond, a truly remarkable natural feature centered around a huge spring producing enormous amounts of pure fresh water. Sadly, the land around it became so heavily urbanized in the worst possible way that the this water supply became grossly polluted. Not knowing how to reverse that situation, officials decided to fill it in, piping the water to the river, where it continues to flow today. Ironically, the city that polluted and erased this wonderful natural feature spent very large sums creating artificial ponds and lakes in Central Park just three decades later.
A short history of Collect Pond can be found on wikipedia, and current efforts to partially restore a fragment of the pond are described on the forgotten-ny.com website. Fortunately, today's environmental laws generally prevent such pollution and losses from happening again, and many urbanists look for ways to sentitively design around such natural features, incorporating them into parklands and greenways that add value to the surrounding new development, rather then building over them (as was done at Las Ramblas in Barcelona, a great street that could have been created anywhere and which did not require the filling in of a major ravine to give it its memorable serpentine alignment).
,
Margaret, I understand your point about alleys not being so necessary in a residential neighborhood. But I think alleys would have been very helpful to have in the business and high-density sections of Manhattan, where there are mounds of trash to be collected and where deliveries by trucks often obstruct the streets.
Yes, I grew up in a part of Brooklyn that also had a grid plan. it wasn't monotonous at all. I would much rather walk on any street in New York that in some boring suburb. What's on the street is more impotant than how the street is shaped. Besides, it's much easier to navigate.
As for alleys, I think they're overated. Not having an alley is what enabled our row house to have a back yard. Even though I was a city rat, I've grown tomatoes and grapes and roses. To me, that's much more necessary than having the convenience of keeping the garbage cans in an alley. You only have to take out the garbage once a week. So what?
I think this is a shining case of grid luck.
I thought to recommend this article on my blogspot, but when I saw the cold modernistic design of the proposed houses, I understood this guy had only got the half of the point, not understanding how the lack of natural geometry in the buildings itself impacts on our health: Why Monotonous Repetition is Unsatisfying, by N. Salingaros
Dan Parolek, good question, and thanks for the encouragement! The Code Study tracks municipal form-based codes, and generally not those that act as PUDs (Planned Unit Developments, for the non code geeks). Otherwise, the study would track a few hundred more than it does, for many TNDs and TODs that have been built. However, some FBCs that were initially instigated by a developer, but are available and incentivized elsewhere within the jurisdiction are included. I'll email you the full study -- it'll be online at www.smartcodecomplete.com in the next few weeks.
Dan Frazier, interesting perspective, which may be true in some places. Particularly the places which don't take the time to develop a strong collective local vision before implementing it with a form-based code. If that's the case, they may not last an upturn. We often see governments on the pendulum swing between pro and anti-development, which can go either way about whether they support a FBC or not.
That being said, a few interesting things are happening. Since the majority of the FBCs have been just before or shortly after the recession hit, it's easy to see how the recessionary performance has been. Planning Directors with optional overlay FBCs in place for a portion of their jurisdiction (and perhaps mapped replacement codes elsewhere) are telling me they're seeing a majority of development applications under the optional code. Take Montgomery, Alabama, for instance. Since January 2007, approximately 1,000 acres have been permitted for construction under the SmartCode, equating to $100 million in new development over 5 years. That's significant compared to sluggish local development in the previous decade.
Places are adopting FBCs for all sorts of reasons -- econ dev, jobs, environment, character, walkability, historic preservation, redevelopment, etc. Just like every code is different, so are the reasons behind them.
~Hazel
The 41% difference in property value between the traditional block and the auto-oriented block is the underlying value. So that would be after the project. The tax break would be applied to the increment of gain from before the project. This would make the difference in the effective rate of taxation greater than 41%.
This city has a 1/2 cent sales tax dedicated to wastewater improvements. The new establishment was merely moved up the street four blocks so it is not clear how much new tax revenue there is. I'm not aware of a way to obtain sales tax data for individual businesses.
There is no other sales tax.
I had found that too, but going to Google Earth and measuring you’ll find there is actually a large variety of block sizes. Downtown is around 380×400, north of the river is around 220×320, west of the river is around 280×380. So maybe the 330x660 size just didn't pan out?
Saw somone else inquire about sales tax both as a percent of government revenue ovrall and as a percent of government revenue from these properties and I would like to see that followed up on. As often there is a bed-board-beverage tax associated with promoting tourism or community enhancement it may be worthwhile to know how the community prioritized that. Finally, the author reports on a 41% differential in property tax returns. Is that before or after the TIF is applied and are both properties included in the TIF? Also, what is the value of the TIF improvements to both those properties.
Thanks to kenf for the additional information. The blog posting that he refers to, "Lenny Greenberg, dreaming of Wheaton beyond the strip mall," shows a huge range in the character of work that developer Leonard Greenberg has done in Wheaton and Bethesda—from a one-story strip shopping center with parking lot in the front (in Wheaton) to a handsome, 10-story residential building that meets the street in a traditional urban manner (in Bethesda).
The blog points out that two decades ago there was an effort by the county to protect small businesses in Wheaton, but according to some, it hindered development. The blog says:
In 1990, the county passed a plan for downtown Wheaton that instituted a "Retail Overlay Preservation District." (See a map of it here.) The district was supposed to protect small businesses while ensuring that new construction was of high quality. However, by limiting the density of new development and requiring that all new buildings be reviewed by the Planning Board, even ones that complied with the zoning code, it actually repelled investment.
Personally I think it's impossible to come up with a grid if one uses computations in the layout: URBANISM AS COMPUTATION
Paul, are the bulb-outs you speak of been built out far enough to have replaced bicycle lanes?
New York City, and many others, have strategically built bulb-outs on residential and commercial streets with the highest crash rates. They don't get in the way of cycling. Indeed, they've improved the site lines between people driving, walking and bicycling--as a daily cyclist I appreciate seeing people at intersections and have them see me more clearly. A well-designed bulb-out does not interfere with the a bike lane or shared use lanes (marked with "sharrows").
While some urbanists deride these traffic-calming treatments, they are a great tool within a built condition needing a safety retrofit--they're proven to help slow people driving, which facilitates a safer environment for all.
When cycling I feel like bulbouts are dangerous, but when walking are good.
The solution for cycle-friendly bulbouts are to push them out a bit more, and make a bike lane-width gap between the bulbout and sidewalk. Europe's got lots of examples of these. That way, bike lanes are more continuous and keep drivers away from cyclists.
Paul, I can understand that bulb-outs may push cyclists farther into the path of motor vehicles, a potentially dangerous situation. But as an everyday cyclist myself on the streets of New Haven, where there are a few bulb-outs, I haven't found them to be much of a problem. The bulb-outs that I encounter most frequently are in the downtown, where traffic moves fairly slowly, and motorists and cyclists can notice what everyone on the street is doing.
Perhaps the problem is more acute in higher-speed areas. I'd be interested in whether other cyclists also view bulb-outs as hazards.
Charles Siegel's book Unplanning deals with these quistons too: http://www.preservenet.com/unplanning/index.html
I cannot imagine a case where a City would "shut down" a major development project for generating too much traffic. Can you imagine the economic and political firestorm, especially if we are talking about a major employment center or retail sales tax generator?
Plus...most cities are cutting staff and services, it is too easy to say "monitor traffic levels" but such monitoring requires substantial staff time or an (expensive) consultant contract.
In the San Joaquin Valley, we don't have quite the same political climate as Patrick's Bay Area situation.
What we do have in common is the California Environmental Quality Act: CEQA. CEQA is little more than a public disclosure process with teeth. If your traffic modeler fudges the numbers, the study can be successfully challenged in a costly court battle, and the city has to foot the bill. Then do it over to the court's satisfaction.
There is little incentive to fudge.
Our city reduced traffic room at intersections. The result is that the streets are harder for bicycles to navigate. Someone is going to get injured someday.
Calming traffic on the backs of the bicyclists (literally!) is indefensible.
Perhaps it is time to reevaluate the onerous zoning which causes people to drive to downtown areas from suburban residential areas to get to needed services. If we could loosen the spot zoning up a bit, and allow for local small community stores, banks, etc. dotted within residential areas, wouldn't that make more sense than to force a body of suburban area citizens to get in their car and drive a few miles to condensed city centers every time they needed a bottle of milk?
I think this type of zoning would increase walkers and decrease traffic problems.
I think this was what we had before someone came up with the idea to concentrate all services inside a city center rather than dotting certain needed services within walking distance from local residential districts. It is the GMA that is causing our traffic, pollution and road problems by onerous zoning.
Nit-pick: the block sizes in most of Chicago are not 400 feet long. They are 330 feet (1/16 mile) by 660 feet (1/8 mile). Downtown Chicago is a little different though and some may be about 400 feet.
I want to see your video exchange between a reporter and an ECB official regarding Ireland and it's obligations to pay back bondholders.It's very important article.Thanks.
taxi uster
The streets don't necessarily have to be narrow. Take Bungalow Heaven, Pasadena, CA as an example: http://g.co/maps/gsxxh On one side of the block you have high commercial traffic that gets bogged down. On the other side of the block you have low residential traffic. Why doesn't everyone just cut through the residential street? Because there is a stop sign at every intersection.
Mike--precisely.
Block shapes do come into play when the conventions of construction are important. The squareness of the grid lends itself perfectly well to almost everything in our lives: from rectangular desks to rectangular rooms to rectangular houses, etc. While an Olmstedian grid is fine in terms of connectivity it sure is difficult to get a continuous street wall on a curving street.
Keep in mind that the "number of intersections" is merely the byproduct of the fundamental unit of urbanism (the block). You cannot regulate street connectivity with intersection density; it simply does not work. I presented a paper on this topic at CNU19 titled "Chicago is Rural: the Inconsistencies and Absurdities of Street Connectivity Indices". You can find it here: http://www.cnu.org/nuresearch
As Daniel Burnham said in his Plan of Chicago: "The rectilinear system certainly accords with the idea of rightness inherent in the human mind; and also it involves a minimum waste of ground space... It is only when and as the city increases in population that diagonals become necessary in order to save considerable amounts of time and to prevent congestion by dividing and segregating the traffic. Thus it happens that no rectilinear city is perfect without the diagonal streets; and conversely, having the rectilinear system, the Cretan of diagonals produces the greatest convenience."
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
wow great i have read many articles about this topic and everytime i learn something new i dont think it will ever stop always new info , Thanks for all of your hard work!
I can also recommend this movie: Burgos, Spain: A Virtual Day in the Pedestrian Precint
Here's a place I love, and I'm not embarassed to say so. In fact, Christopher Alexander's 15 properties of life are abundant here.
In gengeral, I agree that the grid is what you make of it. Within America, when preparing to visit or move to a city, I look for the tight part of the street network to check out first -- thinking that will be the most walkable, diverse, and interesting part of town. Here in the U.S. the tight part tends to be a grid. But I have visited Europe and have enjoyed the dense, non-rectangular networks as well. (Speaking of Europe... square shapes don't always help with navigation: I was lost in Vienna for a little while because the square opera house looks the same on every side, without close observation.)
Straight streets can include elements to block the view to infinity -- for instance, the Squares in Savannah. (Those squares, being symetrically designed in most cases, can cause visitors to get lost just like the opera house in Vienna. But getting lost is not always a bad thing -- the Vienna incident is one of the most memorable parts of my trip 20 years ago.)
So, I am not picky about block shapes -- just give me lots of intersections.
Higher densities and tighter regulations show benifits only when used properly, otherwise they seem to benifit the quick profits of a few.
Walkable communities are wonderful as long as it's coupled with adequate public transportation and buisness centers.
Ecologically, high density usualy ignores impact and sustainability, claiming a smaller foot print is good for the earth and people. In some respects this may hold true, in most the opposite is so, placing concentrations of people in a dependency on what are tedious and cumbersome systems to supply the basics of life ie... energies, food and water.
Coupled with the social problems associated with over crowding, high density "smart growth" in my opinion is anything but "smart".
The higher property values of "smart growth" results in the lower income population who are usualy the "service" personel being pushed to the fringes with the added transportaition burden placed on those who can afford it the least.
There are so many factors that need be considered in true "affordbility"?
I think this say it all:
"For a city, N roughly equals the number of people. Setting N = 200,000 gives us the following estimates for the relative number of connective paths. A modernist city of this size has 105 paths, whereas the randomly-connected city has 1.2x106 paths, or 12 TIMES those in the modernist city. Furthermore, a completely-connected city has 2x1010 paths, or 200,000 TIMES those in the modernist city. The mediaeval city was completely connected via direct pedestrian paths. We built such cities precisely so as to allow direct connections among all nodes, and our collective memory has never forgotten the personal freedom of movement and interaction that this gave us." - Nikos A. Salingaros
It's strange, but in the "dark ages" people were 200.000 times more connected than what we are today, with all our technology. And we look upon ourselves as an advanced civilisation?!?
How to attain an organic environment is described from page 63 in this paper by Christopher Alexander: Harmony-Seeking Computations: a Science of Non-Classical Dynamics based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole
This is all about applying the technologies of life, which Alexander has given to us. The big problem is that our modern societies are bound to modernistic liberalism, not classical liberalism, as Charles Siegel shows in his new book Classical Liberalism. Modernistic liberalism is in its very core bound to the "technologies of death", as it applies negative freedom, not positive freedom, as in classical liberalism.
I was referring to the efficencies gained with a grid network (greater connectivity)vs a hierarchical network where all traffic is funneled to a few main roads with multiple lanes and in general consists of a disconnected network.
A grid network allows local traffic to stay on local streets for local trips. Thus the same amount of traffic is distributed over a larger network.
Page 10 of the following PDF has a good graphic showing the difference
http://www.charlier.org/download.php?8cd97e4e3740e0b170d48acc0ab5190e
Is the grid boring though because of bad urban design or its uniformity? There are many great cities laid out on a grid that are anything but boring because the urban design is great. Just as there are plenty of "organic" curvilinear subdivisions where you would choose to do anything but walk because of a complete lack of public realm.
Because grids make every diagonal journey up to 41% longer than a straight-line distance, they are inefficient for transport. They are also boring for orthagonal journeys, because you can see just how far you have to travel on foot. A gently winding street gives you many more waypoints (vide Kevin Lynch).
And a truly transport-efficient city would be based around triangles, because then distances would tend to be shorter. Of course nobody builds triangular houses, so a blend of grids at micro scale and triangles at macro scale works best (vide Paris, London, etc).
Paul Murrain pointed out in a lecture to my students that the traditional layout of country roads in the UK is always in a series of triangles at all scales. You can see it illustrated here: http://binged.it/yrsuOr
Here is a picture of the street pattern of a Village Town.
Also, Christopher Alexander states that the roads must be layd out after the houses are built, not before: Integrated Design.
When you build the buildings first and the streets after, of course, the result will be organic.
Christopher Alexander states:
The following examples are all harmful:
These practices do not support the creation of living neighborhoods!
To obtain an organic street pattern is very simple, it's just to build the buildings first and the roads after. Why don't we do so? Because our minds are blocked by the "technologies of deadth"!
Its my SWAG that cul-de-sacs are popular because they are a refuge from high volumes and speeds. The high speeds are the result of excessively wide streets. The high volumes because all traffic is forced onto a few streets. To avoid this people are drawn to houses on a cul-de-sac where its impossibe for high volumes or speeds. But a GRID with narrow streets will prevent cut-though because non-local traffic won't cut through if they are forced to drive 20-25mph and the grid is highly efficient by distributing traffic over a much larger number of road segments.
I also think the sprawling cookie cutter neighborhoods who happen to be laid out on a grid can also lead to the preception of gridded streets being boring. People wrongly precieve the straight "boring" streets as the cause of a placeless neighborhood when in reality its the garage dominated streetscape, cheap architecture, poor spatial enclosure, auto-centric street design, single-use zoning, lack of urban design are all the culprits, not the grid.
In the late 70's, I witnessed other forces at play. In the relentless South Florida east coast sprawl, one city, Boca Raton, through visionary leadership, decided to enact tough sign and landscape ordinances. As new construction and sunsetting signage met these new guidelines, Boca began to become much more appealing than the adjacent sprawl, which then drew demand, developers and homeowners that placed aesthetics over cheap and easy. Not surprisingly, those that prefered higher quality in the built environment had more money, and spent more money on nicer housing, landscaping, etc.
So, what I saw was that tighter regulations attracted wealth, which of course, resulted in higher property values.
This is a debate that has never quite been resolved in the urban economics or planning literature. The crux of the problem is that there are two reasons why prices could go up in a housing market in response to regulations: supply or demand. Demand-driven price increases within a jurisdiction represent a good thing: they mean that municipal regulations have created positive amenities that people are willing to pay extra for. An indicator of this is when prices go up just in a jurisdiction (or cluster of jurisdictions with the same policy) and not in neighboring jurisdictions. Then there is supply-driven price increases: this happens when there's regionwide constraints on building that cause prices in the entire regional housing market to go up. The most common culprit in this case is large lot zoning; one town tries it, sees that it saves them money on service costs, and then many of the neighboring jurisdictions want to try it too--in essence a "copy cat" syndrome. Pretty soon enough jurisdictions are doing it that regional supply is constrained and everyone's prices go up. We tend to see this happen a lot in metropolitan areas that have strong growth pressures but are of an age where many of the suburban jurisdictions are beginning to reach a congestion point in their provision of services--and hence want to regulate growth with large lot zoning.