Tag: planning

• The public life data protocol

  

  The Gehl Institute has just launched (in beta) something called the Public Life Data Protocol. It was developed by the Institute, as well as by Gehl (the practice), the Municipality of Copenhagen, the City of San Francisco, and Seattle’s Department of Transportation.

  The goal of the protocol is to improve the way in which we collect, share, and compare public space information. It is about improving public life in public spaces.

  To do this, they have proposed a series of metrics that measure everything from “posture within the space” to “objects brought into the space.” They also propose spatial metrics that help to analyze public life in relation to its physical context.

  Gehl is a real leader in this space. I commend them on opening up their methodology and working to create “a common language for people data.” Great data will only help us to build more human-centered cities.

  To download a full PDF of the protocol, click here. 

  Photo by Thaddaeus Lim on Unsplash

  2017.09.29

• My old Philly apartment

  I’m in Philly right now for a good friend’s wedding. 

  I always feel nostalgic when I come back to this city. Some of my most memorable years were spent here. I grew a lot in those 3 years. I also think that Philly is a highly underrated city – such an intimate urban scale.

  I’m staying at the newly renovated Warwick Hotel in Rittenhouse Square. The lobby is beautiful, as are the corridors, but the rooms already feel a bit a dated to me. However the Barcelona Chair in my room is a welcome addition. That thing will never go out of style.

  My hotel happens to be two blocks away from my old apartment at 17th and Spruce. So I decided to do a walk-by while I waited for my room to be ready. My roommate and I had the entire second floor of this building:

  

  It was palatial, especially given the bargain price and its location in Rittenhouse Square. 

  The graffiti you see above is located on the north wall of the kitchen. I think that’s a recent addition. The fire stair you see provided access to the roof of the building (as well as the street, I hope). I’m not sure we were supposed to go up there, but we obviously used it for parties.

  Grillmaster Deli is still next door. They kept me fed when I was studying at home and too busy to cook. That was often. And across the street is the Italian restaurant with its sidewalk patio that I used to look out onto from my bedroom.

  This walk-up apartment was by no means fancy. Though it did have ensuite laundry, which was a nice improvement from my previous place. But it was unabashedly urban. My kind of place.

  2017.09.17

• Thickets of haphazardly planned condo towers

  I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got up and pulled out an old issue of Monocle magazine from my nightstand. I then stumbled upon the following article by Taras Grescoe.

  

  What really stood out for me was this line:

  “Thickets of haphazardly planned condo towers, compacted amid neighbourhoods of single-family houses, have led to congestion nightmares in Toronto and notoriously out-of-hand housing costs in Vancouver.”

  It bothered me for a few reasons:

  – The frame of reference is the single-family house. It perpetuates the cultural bias that what matters most in cities, like Toronto and Vancouver, is low-rise housing.

  – I don’t get the “haphazardly planned” comment. New tower development has been heavily concentrated in the downtown core, growth centers, along the Yonge subway corridor, and so on. Their built form is also significantly influenced by their relationship to these low-rise “Neighbourhoods.”

  – I believe that building up, as opposed to out, is the way to address congestion nightmares. Though I will concede that our ability to plan and execute on transit in this city is positively deplorable. 

  – How did thickets of condos create an affordability problem in Vancouver? Many factors at play in this city, including a powerful geographic supply constraint.

  Those are just a few of my thoughts from early this morning. What are yours?

  2017.04.10

• 3 pilot options for Toronto’s King Street corridor

  Anyone who has ridden Toronto’s King streetcar during rush hour can tell you that the service is broken. It’s unreliable. It’s overcrowded. And during peak times it can be faster to walk. Chart below.

  

  Part of the problem is a misallocation of resources. Only 16% of the people who use the corridor are in cars. And yet 64% of the physical space is allocated to drivers.

  Not surprisingly, this creates a bottleneck for the ~65,000 transit riders who use the service daily. (Busiest surface route in the region.) We are not optimizing for the right variable.

  It’s for this reason that the city is working on a rethink of the corridor. I wrote about this initiative last year, but earlier this week it got a bit more real with the release of the following 3 pilot block options.

  

  The plan is to launch a pilot sometime this fall (2017). This is good news. 

  If you’d like to go through the full King Street Pilot Study Public Meeting presentation, you can do that by clicking here. The above images were taken from that presentation.

  2017.02.15

• Form follows parking

  

  “Form follows function” is a famous axiom of 20th century Modern architecture. It is based on the rational notion that architecture and its associated shapes, geometries, and spaces should be a direct result of their function. 

  It was a way of trying to eliminate the arbitrary ornament that had adorned previous architectural movements. In this case, if it had no function, then it should be stripped away.

  There have been many bastardizations of this pithy statement over time, but one of my favorites is: “form follows parking.” Obviously derogatory, it is this idea that much of the built environment is a result of parking requirements, rather than of more human factors.

  We see this in suburban building typologies (large surface parking lots), but also in urban infill projects where the below grade parking begins to dictate the structural grid and layout of the upper floors. It is, of course, necessary in many cases, but there’s also something subversive about parking having such a lasting impact on the spaces we occupy.

  That said, we know where the trend line is headed when it comes to parking. Streetblogs recently posted an article about the scarcity of parking in Manhattan and cited number of interesting stats.

  Because of the city’s bike-share program (introduced in 2013) and because of all of the bike lanes that have been added in recent years, the city has (rightly) removed approximately 2,330 on-street parking spaces in Manhattan south of 125th Street.

  Here’s another set of stats: 

  In 1998, New York City had about 810 parking lots and garages south of 60th street. Together, they accounted for approximately 112,826 parking spaces. As of last year (2016), the number of lots and garages had dropped to about 643 and the number of parking spaces to approximately 95,000. That’s a decline of about 16%, during a period of when the population of Manhattan grew by more than 100,000 people.

  I would also imagine that these pressures are increasing. So it is quite possible that “form follows parking” could be on its way toward obsolescence. I certainly feel it waning.

  2017.02.03

• Driving in the HOT lane

  

  Joe Cortright of City Observatory recently published an interesting post on HOT lanes (high-occupancy toll lanes) and cited a research paper by Austin Gross (University of Washington) and Daniel Brent (Louisiana State University). The paper looked at the behavioral response of drivers to dynamic HOT lane pricing. 

  They way HOT lanes work is simple: when traffic is light, the price dynamically decreases; when traffic is heavy, the price dynamically increases to ensure a minimum level of service. That is, the price increases until enough cars leave the lane and driving speeds increase to some minimum threshold. In this case, it’s 45 mph.

  The key takeaway from the report is that “value of reliability” appears significantly more important to drivers than “value of time”. Put differently: it’s less about the time I’m wasting in traffic and more about the uncertainty of not knowing when I’m going to arrive at my destination.

  It’s for this reason that HOT lanes are used more frequently in the morning (when you’re running late for that meeting) than in evening (when you’re just on your way home from work). 

  Gross and Brent estimate that the spread is about 7.5x. The typical driver values saving time at about $3 per hour and reliability improvements at about $23 per hour! This is fascinating because we tend to focus a lot on time. But arguably what people really want to buy is greater certainty.

  I can tell you that it’s definitely one of the things that I love about walking to work, or for that matter cycling somewhere. I always know how long it’s going to take.

  2017.01.31

• The suburban Ponzi scheme

  The following image is a geographic representation of Lafayette, Louisiana’s finances. It is from this excellent article by Charles Marohn.

  

  What this 3D map shows is the city’s revenues and expenses by land parcel. The green areas are where the city is making a profit (revenues exceed expenses) and the red areas are where the city is operating at a loss (expenses exceed revenues). The height of each extrusion indicates just how much profit is being made and how much loss is being incurred.

  The glaring takeaway from this study is this: not only are post-war land use patterns environmentally unsustainable, but they are also fiscally unsustainable. The tax base is simply not there to pay for the infrastructure that gets built alongside it.

  They – the authors of this study – estimate that the infrastructure revenue gap for the median home in Lafayette is about $8,000 per year (median household income is $41,000). And yet despite this shortfall, it is common to look at infrastructure spending as a desirable economic stimulus.

  The following paragraph really brings this point home:

  “All of the programs and incentives put in place by the federal and state governments to induce higher levels of growth by building more infrastructure has made the city of Lafayette functionally insolvent. Lafayette has collectively made more promises than [it can] keep and it’s not even close. If they operated on accrual accounting – where you account for your long term liabilities – instead of a cash basis – where you don’t – they would have been bankrupt decades ago. This is a pattern we see in every city we’ve examined. It is a byproduct of the American pattern of development we adopted everywhere after World War II.”

  Thank you Daniel for sharing this article with me. 

  If you only read one other thing today (besides my blog), I recommend you read Charles’ article. It’s called: The real reason your city has no money.

  2017.01.12

• Kanju (and the future of cities)

  There is so much interest in cities right now and I think that is absolutely wonderful. Earlier today my friend Derek shared a video with me on Twitter called, The Future of Cities. It’s by YouTuber Oscar Boyson, who I recognize from some of Casey Neistat’s videos, but whose own videos I have never watched before.

  I highly recommend you watch this video. It’s just over 18 minutes. If you can’t see the video below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOOWk5yCMMs?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  It’s well-executed, a joy to watch, and packed full of information and ideas. There are soundbites from lots of well known urbanists (both living and dead). And I also love how Oscar crowdsourced ideas and content from cities all around the world.

  The title of this blog post will make sense once you’ve watched the video.

  2016.12.15

• The yellowbelt

  We talk a lot about the greenbelt here in Toronto. Some argue that it’s squeezing the housing market and driving up prices.

  But what about the yellowbelt? (Credit to Gil Meslin for the term.)

  Here is a land use map of Toronto:

  

  The yellow areas are “neighborhoods.” They, along with parks, ravines, watercourses, and valleys, make up ¾ of the city’s land area. The Official Plan describes these areas as being “stable” – meaning they will see little physical change. Supply cannot adjust to demand.

  I get why this is the way it is and I understand how difficult it would be change something like this. But let’s not ignore the impact that this land use constraint has and will continue to have on the housing market. 

  It’s the yellowbelt. Thank you Gil for letting me to steal the name.

  2016.11.01

• Building crap

  Last night I participated in an excellent dinner discussion with a group of planners, architects, city officials, and politicians from Amsterdam. They were visiting Toronto to see first hand what rapid intensification has done to this city. And I very much appreciated the invite. Thank you.

  My message was that intensification has created a far more vibrant and exciting city compared to 15 or so years ago. It’s hard to know what exactly could be correlated with intensification, but we have certainly seen an explosion of culture, innovation, and pride in this city – among many other things. (It could be all Drake’s doing.)

  However, the counter argument at the dinner table was that Toronto is letting unfettered development produce unremarkable architecture. We are simply building glass tower after glass tower. And I know that, for many of you, this will ring true. I hear it all the time, including in the comments of this blog.

  Now, I will be the first to admit that there has been a lot of shit built in this city. No argument there. Some people have no taste. But at the same time, I think it’s myopic to assume that it’s strictly because of profit-motivated developers. 

  Oftentimes the perception is that development projects are awash in cash. There’s tons of money in which to do the right thing. Developers just need to stop being so greedy and start being more creative.

  The reality is that developers operate within a market. There are real limits to what people will pay for new space. And when, for instance, land prices go through the roof (an input), municipal fees jump (cost of doing business), and approvals drag (time value of money), guess where everyone starts looking for savings? In the build.

  I say this not to justify building crap. If I had it my way, everything would be beautiful. I champion design whenever possible. I say it simply to shed light on the process. Because when we all understand the factors at a play, I believe we all become more effective at finding solutions.

  2016.09.21