Transport Nexus

Urban Street Transformation – Loop Link

On December 21, 2015

Washington Street. Loop Link station. Source: Metropolitan Planning Council

Washington Street at LaSalle Street. Loop Link station. Source: Metropolitan Planning Council

Loop Link, the new bus service with some bus rapid transit amenities, is already having a large impact on the urban streetscape in downtown Chicago in advance of its opening this past Sunday. Even if you don’t ultimately use the transit system part of Loop Link, as a cyclist and/or pedestrian, Loop Link already has a lot to offer.

For instance, the narrowing of the road has already been having an effect, making street crossing on foot easier with the narrower crossing and slowing down drivers on traditional one-way streets.

Another major transformation of downtown is the protected bike lane on Washington Street (picture at left) and the two-way bike lanes on Clinton Street (below). This is a simple reallocation of existing road space from cars to buses and bikes, which carry more than 30,000 passengers per day. The two-way bicycle lanes on Clinton do double duty. They provide a crucial north-south connection to two major commuter rail stations, Union Station and Ogilvie Transportation Center and connect with the CTA Blue Line at Clinton Street. Along the way are Divvy bike share stations at each of the stations, enabling commuters from the train to travel safely north and south and connecting to the east artery on Washington Street to get into the heart of the Loop. As the protected bike lane on Randolph is completed, it will be very safe and easy to get through the Loop from the train stations all the way to the lakefront.

Washington Street. Looking west from LaSalle Street. Source: Metropolitan Planning Council.

Loop Link has resulted in a major urban street transformation because it’s costs ($41 million) represent a relatively cheap infrastructure investment that can pay dividends for its users – the bus riders and pedestrians and bicyclists that make up the majority of traffic movement downtown.

Clinton Street 2-way bike lanes. Near Union Station. Source: Streetsblog Chicago.

Complete Streets?

By Ryan Richter

On October 26, 2015

In Complete Streets

Complete Streets is a great thing – a real sea change in designing our streets for people rather than cars. But, unfortunately, sometimes we still get the engineering mindset when it comes to deploying complete streets policy:

In West Allis, a working-class Milwaukee suburb, the state proposed adding bike lanes to a six-lane highway that is one of the biggest commercial corridors in town. Many of the stores, fast-food restaurants and hotels either run right up to the street or rely on a single row of parking there. To accommodate the new bike lanes, the state would have had to widen the road by 10 feet. Some designs called for even more land to be taken. The city estimated the expansions would require the conversion of $10 million to $30 million of real estate into the highway right of way. “When we saw this, we were horrified,” says Peter Daniels, the city’s principal design engineer.

A couple of thoughts on this. There is no way that a six-lane stroad is hospitable to anyone other than cars. Putting a bike lane on this road is a dereliction of public safety. That said, if you’re going to put bike lanes on a six-lane highway, why don’t you put it on a road diet? Take a lane out on each side, or narrow the widths of the existing lanes, create a boulevard and slow traffic down through smart design. Design the road from the perspective of a person trying to cross the street on foot.

Planning for People: Land Use

By Ryan Richter

On April 21, 2015

In Uncategorized, Zoning

The Simplified Residential Zoning Map – Daniel Kay Hertz

In Chicago, where I live, land use planning is largely the domain of the zoning code. The Alderman has control over granting variances to the zoning code (Aldermanic prerogative). Thus, the Alderman’s office has tremendous control over whether anything gets built because, despite the fact that Chicago’s zoning ordinance was re-written only 10 years ago, much of the city is zoned for single family homes.

Now you might ask, how can this be? There are plenty of apartments on my block. Whether they are courtyard, two and three flats, or mid and high-rise, they are sprinkled all over the city. And my response to this is that those properties are grandfathered in as a “non-conforming use” – which is a land use that is permitted but does not conform to current zoning law. God help you if you want to rebuild or substantially alter your property; that triggers a need for a zoning variance. And this is the problem. Because as you can see from the map above, virtually the entire city is zoned for single family homes.

Daniel Kay Hertz developed the Simplified Residential Zoning Map to simplify the zoning code as it concerns residential land uses. Because when most people think of zoning, they think of density. And density is one of those bogeyman words, short for “not in my backyard” in many cases. I’ll let Daniel explain the implications:

One of the most under-appreciated aspects of Chicago’s housing system – although, thankfully, it’s becoming more well-known – is how radically the city restricts the kinds of housing that can be built in the neighborhoods. Forms of housing that are traditional all over the city, and that provide subsidy-free affordable housing for working class people, are illegal nearly everywhere outside of downtown and the lakefront. In fact, the vast majority of Chicago neighborhoods are zoned so that the only legal form of new housing is the single-family home – which in many places will necessarily be out of reach for moderate-income people. This is true even in neighborhoods, and on streets, where two-flats, three-flats, and other apartment buildings already exist. Essentially, we’ve imposed classic suburban exclusionary zoning in North Center, West Town, and elsewhere.

This is frustrating for urbanists like myself – seeing that virtually the entire city is non-conforming and that much of what I love about the city cannot be legally built today. We are essentially planning to slowly separate land uses – to essentially turn the city into the suburbs.

Fortunately, as my colleague Steven Vance points out, the City’s transit development ordinance has made it easier for multi-use and multi-family housing to be built. The catch: it can only be built within 600-1200 feet of a transit station (roughly 1-2 blocks).

I think it is vitally important that if we are planning for people, we are planning for various housing and accommodation types. Not everyone can afford or would want to live in a single family home. A city needs a variety of housing types for a variety of needs. And monotonous cities with separated land uses inevitably leads to more driving, as destinations are farther away. This then becomes, essentially, planning for cars.

Planning for People: A Step Back in History

By Ryan Richter

On March 9, 2015

In Cities, The Suburban Experiment, Urban Design

I would like to follow-up on my Planning for People in Jefferson Park post and expand a bit on what it means to “plan for people”.

For at least the past 60 years, the architecture, planning and engineering professions have fundamentally changed the way they designed cities. Cities, a creation of the human race for over 8,000 years have grown organically – they tended to pop up in places of favorable geography, say a deep harbor, up river at a narrow crossing point, at the nexus of trade routes. Cities expanded organically, one or a few buildings at a time. Streets were footpaths and market lanes. As we’ve moved through the millenia, cities have spread based on transportation technology. Whereas, before 1850 and the advent of the omnibus streetcar, cities were of a walkable size, the technology of the streetcar powered by horse, later by electricity and then the automobile has enabled cities to expand far beyond their initial settlements.

The way cities were designed before cars. Florence, Italy. Source: Imulej @Pixabay.

Chandler, Arizona. Source: By Chris J [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Why the brief history lesson?

My point is to emphasize that cities were built for people up to and until the time that the automobile became a mass-produced commodity that the middle class could afford. In America, this was shortly after World War II. Something radical happened around that time. To make up for severe housing shortages caused by decades of depression followed by war, we found a way to mass produce housing and to tailor it towards the convenience of the car. These design decisions became codified into our zoning codes, our engineering standards and our architecture practices to produce an endless arrangement of Chandler, Arizonas.

An Ending and a New Beginning

We have reached a point where that phase of city building is over. As Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns and others have documented (myself here), the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme has come to an end. And it has come to an end here in Jefferson Park as the first cycle of the suburban development pattern, consisting of structures built-in the 1940s – 1960s has largely passed its useful life. You see this crumbling along Milwaukee Avenue in Gladstone Park in particular. The five lane stroad serving only 20,000 cars per day, empty businesses and listless place. It is an area lacking in pedestrian and transit-oriented design, in placemaking.

A new beginning for planning for people in Jefferson Park means returning to the tools of city planning for designing places for people. It means taking advantage of the design features that will bring people to places. These design features include things like medium to high residential densities, mix of land uses, safe street crossings, 2-4 travel lanes, transit, street-oriented buildings and comfortable outdoor spaces. In the next series of posts, I intend to highlight how Jefferson Park can plan for people utilizing these design strategies.

A reboot is needed. One in which we get back to the ancient art of building places…for people.

Geography is Fun

By Ryan Richter

On March 5, 2015

In Maps

Geography is fun.

I’ve been playing around in Google Maps. Here are two maps made locally for my Chicago neighborhood of Jefferson Park.

The first, a map of all parking lots in downtown Jefferson Park:

The second, a map of election results from the February 24, 2015 municipal election in Chicago. I’ve mapped the results of the 45th Ward, where I live, by precinct.

The purpose of these maps is to illustrate and illuminate discussion amongst my neighbors. I find data visualization to be helpful in that regard. In my neighborhood, we often talk about a parking problem, but as you can see in the first map, clearly there is no shortage of land devoted to the storage of automobiles.

The election map is not surprising to residents of the 45th Ward that follow politics. The Alderman, John Arena, has his base of support in the southwest, near the Six Corners intersection of Milwaukee, Cicero and Irving Park Roads. His challenger, John Garrido, lives in the northwest part of the ward and has a base there. I’ve found potential precincts that might be in play and those precincts are notable for the issues that have occurred locally there. This map does a decent job of highlighting all of that.

Cross-posted at ryanjrichter.com.