Good morning from rainy New Hampshire.
It’s been raining all morning, but apparently there is an ocean hidden in the above picture. We also got in after dark and so all I really saw was what I could see on the drive from the airport.
Whenever I am reminded that the vast majority of built form in North America is car-oriented in nature, I can’t help but think of how sticky all of this is going to be.
Witold Rybczynski put it accurately when he said, “urbanism and architecture observe different time lines.” Buildings may take forever to build, but relative to urban form, they actually change pretty quickly.
New materials and styles emerge, and so do new buildings. But the streets that surround them change so slowly, that for all intents and purposes, they mostly don’t change.
What that means is that, for better or for worse, most of what we see is likely to persist. No wonder there is an arms race going on with autonomous vehicles.
Oftentimes when I think about Los Angeles, I think about the fact that you generally have to drive everywhere. And since I have a personal preference for dense and walkable cities, this thought helps me feel slightly less envious about their perfect weather.
Los Angeles is probably the original car city. Here is an excerpt from this excellent post by Brian Potter, where he summarizes a 1987 book by Scott Bottles called, "Los Angeles and the Automobile":
Los Angeles was especially quick to adopt the car. By 1920 Los Angeles had the highest per-capita rate of car ownership in the US, four times more automobiles per capita than the US average, and eight times more than the much-denser Chicago. In 1920, 9 times as many people entered downtown LA via streetcar as via automobile. By 1924, that had nearly equaled.
And interestingly enough, people started using them, almost immediately, to create Uber-like services:
A popular early use of the car for public transit was the jitney. Car owners would pick up passengers (often waiting at streetcar stops) and drive them to their destination for the same price as a streetcar ride (5 cents). Car owners would often simply put their destination in their windshields, and pick up anyone along the way who was headed in the same direction. Because jitney travel was much faster than streetcars, and wasn’t limited to the fixed streetcar routes, jitneys often had better service than streetcars.
Jitney travel first appeared in Los Angeles in 1914, and by November of that year was being used for thousands of trips per day. The jitney quickly spread to other cities. By early 1915, an estimated 62,000 jitneys operated around the country in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Birmingham. As jitney travel became more popular, electric rail companies found that they were losing significant ridership
What this again underscores is just how disruptive the car was -- right from the outset. It was quickly seen as being more convenient, especially in a city like Los Angeles, which wasn't as dense as its counterparts on the east coast.
Sadly, and as Potter suggests in his post, it is not clear that the headwinds facing public transit have changed all that much since the first jitneys started appearing on the streets of Los Angeles a century ago.
Toronto's elevated Gardiner Expressway is a topic that pops up periodically on this blog. We have talked about taking down a portion, realigning a portion, adding a congestion charge, lighting it like they have done in Shanghai, and of course we have talked about the good work that The Bentway team is doing.
Their most recent project is something called Standing Grounds. It's a collaboration with New York-based Tei Carpenter (Agency--Agency, NYC) and Toronto-based architect Reza Nik (SHEEEP, Toronto), and I think it's really clever.
If you look closely at the underside of the Gardiner Expressway, you'll see that there are existing downspouts in place that take rainwater, snowmelt, and whatever else from the highway above, down to the ground. What Standing Grounds is going to do (by next month) is take this existing infrastructure and add natural filtration chambers that can remediate this excess water.
I learned today that plants like milkweed, agastache, and yarrow are actually able to absorb road salts and heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and hydrocarbons. So instead of this dirty water flowing from the highway and into the ground, it will soon be filtered by a seemingly simple garden system that looks like this:
This is an obviously positive thing for the city and I love that it is leveraging infrastructure that already exists. As I said: really clever.
Renderings: SHEEEP