Single-occupancy vehicle norms
Jan Chipchase discusses single-occupancy vehicles in two (increasingly convergent?) contexts. In Los Angeles, single-occupancy is the norm; you won’t get any weird looks from fellow commuters. In Kabul, Afghanistan—where the occasional suicide bomber prefers to drive alone—security-minded drivers are more likely to give you both weirder looks and a wider berth.
If you're new to Tightgrid, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Amsterdam uses freight trams to eliminate delivery trucks.
Amsterdam startup CityCargo has developed a freight tram system that distributes goods throughout the city on the existing light rail infrastructure.
Specially designed trams move freight from outlying distribution centers to hub stations in the central city. The freight is then offloaded from the trams onto electric trucks, which complete the delivery.
The entire system is designed to circumvent congestion restrictions, eliminate delivery-truck traffic, and cut down on pollution within central Amsterdam.
[via]
photo credit: Nieuws uit Amsterdam
An interview with Curitiba’s Jamie Lerner
CNN recently interviewed Jamie Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. Because it’s a one-page interview, it lacks depth. Still, it does a decent job of introducing to CNN readers Lerner’s fresh ideas for changing communities.
Everything (in Curitiba) started with the children. We started to teach the children in every school over six months, how to separate the garbage and the children teach their parents. So that’s why the city of Curitiba since 1989, for almost 20 years, has had the highest rate of separation of garbage in the world, at 70 percent. Everything starts with the children. I’m obsessed with the idea of how to make the children understand their own city, because if they understand their city, they will respect it better.
Medellín is the new Bogota
It seems that common sense solutions are usually completely ignored by governments in Latin American cities, and it is refreshing to see that this isn´t the case with Medellín. The government is rebuilding its city for the inhabitants: they have discovered that when people have public spaces they can enjoy and where they can relax, breathe in clean air, and stretch their legs, they work harder, better, and are generally happier. The poorer inhabitants of the city don’t have time or money to take vacations to the rural areas; they don’t have the means to visit beaches and certainly don’t have membership to country clubs…so the city decided to give them spaces where they could take their families, where they could lay on the grass, sit on a bench and kick back on a Sunday.
Today’s Where blog post on Medellín reminds me of similar successes enjoyed by Bogota a few years back (and still enjoyed, as far as I know):
“Every Sunday, we close 120 kilometers of main arteries to motor vehicles for seven hours,” [former Bogota mayor] Penalosa explained. “A million and a half people of all ages and conditions come out to ride bicycles, jog, see others, to appropriate their city. During Christmas, we close those streets one night and more than 3 million people come out just to see the Christmas lights, to be with the others as a community.”
Better than a Segway?
The Movement Design Bureau’s blog recently introduced me to the Easy Glider:
It’s basically a scooter-segway-bike-hybrid sort of thing, with an electric powered front wheel, and a long handle which has a motorbike-like control for acceleration and braking. You can either hold onto the device and let it ‘tow’ you along on your roller-blades or skateboard, or there’s a scooter-type platform which is part of the glider itself on which you can just stand.
Speed is controlled via a series of three keys - which, like the Segway - controls the maximum speed of the device - those top speeds being 6, 12, or 20 km/h, which is comparable to a pedal cycle in most people’s hands.
Seattle cyclist shot in the lung by motorist
As Seattle grows and gas prices escalate, the city’s residents look for alternative ways to commute. Unfortunately for those who’ve discovered biking, the drivers are fighting back; one cyclist was recently shot in the lung with a BB gun. Now things are beginning to swing the cyclists’ way:
An expected City Council vote Monday on a bicycle master plan would add millions of dollars in improvements, including 19 miles of cycling trails and a 230-mile system of marked routes for riders.
“I think it will cut down on accidents,” said Councilwoman Jan Drago, the plan sponsor. “When we have more bike lanes and trails, it will help.”
Tensions between mass transit and mixed-use
…there is a contradiction in the planning approaches of many jurisdictions that are developing mass transit, in that promotion of mixed-use urban areas actually weakens the strong nodes that are the lifeblood of mass transit.
To be fair, the concept of mixed-use areas is intended to support short walking trips rather than public transport; but the application of mixed uses, increased densities, parking requirements and public transport are not always thought through in a coherent way at the metropolitan scale.
This presents a serious risk to the attainment of green transport. The greater risk, though, may be the inability of metropolitan authorities to exercise adequate control over all the factors that need to be brought together for a green transport strategy. Even in the context of strong policy, planning is often fragmented and stymied by political interference, uncooperative developers and unreliable funding.
This tension is not clearly evident in Atlanta but, then again, the city’s largest mixed-use development doesn’t seem to encourage any form of transportation that isn’t via automobile.
Why is Portland so hot?
The media is obsessed with Portland. Why? The city’s own Willamette Week is on it:
Yeah, we know Portland’s hot shit. But we wanted to prove it to the world. So we did a search of all things Portland on LexisNexis, a really powerful search engine that looks for content from newspapers, magazines, and anything news-related. Our intuition was correct—Portland is in the news a hell of a lot. In fact, when we tried to search for how many times “Portland, Oregon” appeared in the news over the past year, we broke LexisNexis (well we didn’t exactly break it, it just stopped working due to information overload). But we were able to think up a few things Portland may be known for and find out how many times those words have shown up in the news in conjunction with Portland since September 2006…(hint: beer, sustainable, and gays top the list).
Add bicycles to that list: today the New York Times’ obsession with the city manifested itself as a story about Portland’s bicycle culture.
Photograph by samgrover.
Car, bus, bicycle: how much space for each?
This series of photographs illustrates the amount of space required to transport the same number of people via car, bus, and bicycle.
Photograph: Münster, Germany, Press Office
WTF is platform building?
What is platform building? It’s when you put buildings over railroads and highways. On platforms:
Earlier this century, urban planner Robert Moses did what he thought necessary for New York City’s growth, including building highways that displaced homes and ripped apart neighborhoods.
Now, as a space-starved city looks for places to put more housing, a construction concept called “platform building” may be gluing the city back together.
A major part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to make room for some 1 million new city residents in the next two decades, for example, is to develop air space by building on gigantic platforms constructed over the city’s highways and rail yards.
Cabspotting time-lapse visualizations
The Cabspotting project has some great time-lapse maps of routes taken by Bay Area cabs.
Cabspotting is designed as a living framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues that are revealed by the cab traces. Where do cabs go the most? Where do they never turn up?
The democracy of traffic
Traffic democratizes; commuting equalizes. Hell, the very word commute comes from the Latin for to change.
It’s rush hour in Atlanta; if you’re on the road in a car, you’ll have to wait. The commute doesn’t care about your income level or what kind of car you drive. Twice daily, Interstates 75 and 85 are the most mixed of mixed-income experiments in the region. The trouble is, we’re all locked inside our cars.
The trouble could be worse. The rich could skip the traffic ritual in favor of a helicopter ride.
They already do it in Sao Paulo:
Like a fleet of airborne limousines, the helicopters are increasingly used by privileged Paulistanos to commute, attend meetings, even run errands and go to church. Helicopter landing pads are now standard features of many of Sao Paulo’s guarded residential compounds and high-rise roofs.
Illustrating what may be a Blade Runner-esque glimpse of the future in metropolises where rich and poor are crammed together, helicopters are the vehicle of choice for more than just their convenience. Many of the roads here are hopelessly clogged with traffic. Carjackings, kidnappings of executives and roadside robberies have become a part of the risks of daily life for anyone perceived to have money.
At 400 and growing, the total fleet of private helicopters in Sao Paulo is the biggest of any city in the developing world. Although the fleets in New York and Tokyo are larger, the helicopters in those cities are owned mostly by corporations, not rich individuals.
The future of commuting looks a lot less democratic. I’ll miss the Jaguars next to me in traffic when they’re gone.
Metro systems by annual passenger rides; Osaka surprises.
Three lists:
- Metro systems by annual passenger rides.
- Metro systems by number of stations.
- Urban rail systems by length.
Based solely on these lists, I’m prepared to declare Osaka’s the most underrated metro system in the world.
Photograph of Nipponbashi Station in Osaka, Japan, by Lynt.
Countdown signals work
Newly installed countdown pedestrian signals have been given much of the credit for saving the lives of Toronto pedestrians this year. Stamping out the unnecessarily ambiguous is not only good design, it’s good urban policy.
The hidden costs of parking
Salon neatly summarizes the inefficiencies of most urban parking systems:
“Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else,” explains Shoup. “Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else’s expense, and we all enjoy our free parking, but our cars are choking our cities.”
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. As parking lots proliferate, they decrease density and increase sprawl. In 1961, when the city of Oakland, Calif., started requiring apartments to have one parking space per apartment, housing costs per apartment increased by 18 percent, and urban density declined by 30 percent. It’s a pattern that’s spread across the country.
Any plan to decrease traffic congestion in city centers, at least in the United States (à la Bloomberg’s recent proposal for NYC), will also need to address parking congestion.