Most of the major streets in the older parts of Toronto look something like this:
Most of the major streets in the older parts of Toronto look something like this:
That is, the right-of-way width is 20 meters. The built form lining the street is retrograde. There are 4 lanes for driving cars (sometimes streetcars run in the two inner-most lanes). And 50% of the entire road is allocated to on-street parking. Now to be fair, on-street parking is usually prohibited during "rush hour." So no stopping and parking during periods like 7-9am and 4-6pm.
But I think this approach to traffic management has become far less relevant today. It made more sense when everyone was driving to an office for 9am and then leaving for the suburbs at 5pm. But today, people want to work from home so they can go to the gym at 11am, go grocery shopping at 1pm, and then get a perm at 3pm.
What I find curious about these decisions is that bike lanes seem to get most of the blame for traffic congestion. We say things like, "nobody really bikes in Toronto except for the 2 weeks of the year when it's nice. So we shouldn't allocate valuable road space to them!" But very rarely do people seem to direct their frustrations toward the parked cars that sit on our roads for, what, ~83% of every day?
One approach allows people to go places and the other is dedicated to storage and immobility. This also says nothing about the relative benefits of people biking: it's objectively a more efficient way to move people, it can improve overall traffic flows by taking people out of cars, and it improves health outcomes (saving taxpayers money).
This is not to say that bike lanes don't also impact vehicle road capacity. But it's a question of what's most optimal for moving the greatest number of people. And I would bet you that on-street parking is far more disruptive to overall traffic flows than bike lanes. Parked cars, it turns out, aren't very good at moving people across a city.
As you know, Northern Virginia is now referred to as "data center alley." It has, by far, the largest agglomeration of data centers in the world. The latest figures are somewhere around 200 completed facilities and some 49 million square feet, with a lot more in the pipeline.
Here's the global top 10 list via Bloomberg:
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article called, "Atlanta's Growth Streak Has Come to an End." It's behind a paywall, though, so I don't actually know what it says. But Paul Krugman did write about it, here, and I do know that one of the key statistics that you should know is this: For the first time since the data was collected, net domestic migration to Atlanta has turned slightly negative.
Overall, the metro area is still growing because of natural births and international migration, but it's still noteworthy that more Americans are leaving Atlanta than moving there. Because up until recently, Atlanta was a high-growth metro region. It's an important logistics hub and it has had an elastic housing supply model. That is, it used suburban sprawl to keep home prices in check.
But that is starting to change. Housing supply is dropping and traffic congestion has become one of the worst in the US. Paul Krugman hypothesizes that this is an example of "the limits of sprawl." And I would agree with this. Sprawling cities have the advantage of being able to grow quickly when they're relatively small. But eventually, they reach a population and geographic limit where the model starts to fail.
The Atlanta urban region is massive. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is 6,612.4 km2. The only urban region that is bigger is the one around New York City. Los Angeles — which might come to mind as another large car-oriented metro region — is smaller. It's about 4,239.4 km2, but with ~2.4x the population of Atlanta.
It may also surprise you to learn that Los Angeles is remarkably dense. When looking at the entire built-up urban area, it's the densest in the US at 2,886.6 people per km2; whereas Atlanta is one of the least dense big city regions at 771.3 people per km2. This figure really stands out when you compare it to its peers, which means it's going to be that much harder for it to overcome the limits of sprawl.
And here's a map of existing (blue) and proposed (purple) data centers via Loudoun County, Virginia:
This has been an economic boon for Virginia. It's estimated that the data center industry contributes up to 74,000 jobs and $9.1 billion in GDP to the state each year. But along with these benefits come some trade-offs, one of which has to do with the region's built environment.
Here are two zoom-ins of an area to the west of Dulles International Airport:
These maps raise a question that is only going to become more important as time goes on: What's the best way to insert large insular boxes into the fabric of a city or suburb? Of course, in some ways, this is not a new phenomenon. The suburbs are no stranger to this kind of built form.
But it's unique in that these boxes are not meant to be experienced in real life. They're a physical manifestation of our online activities, juxtaposed against our offline lives. It's two different worlds colliding. And already, it may be more appropriate to ask our question in the opposite direction: What's the best way to plan a city or suburb around data centers?
Density is the unlock that allows you to get people onto trains.
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