Adding Value Through Better Street Designs
A recent post on the Urbanophile brought up an interesting issue: the 2009 census estimates show that citizens are still fleeing the core city and urban areas and moving to suburban areas. In the article, the Urbanophile says this “voting with feet” is evidence that suburbs are out-competing cities for residents. If you believe the data and his analysis, which I do, it is clear that American suburbs are better than the American cityscape at attracting and retaining people.
It is important that people have options about where they live. The American Dream is not about providing everyone with four walls and a front yard, it is about providing everyone with the freedom to make their own choice. We should welcome the challenge that the suburbs have presented to urban areas, because competition makes us all stronger.
Urban areas are not winning the competition for residents because they are not offering the right product at the right price. Our urban areas have failed because citizens have only two options:
- Suburbs: Large homes with a transportation and infrastructure system optimized for automobiles
- City: Smaller, more expensive homes in a landscape full of suburban features and urban legacy costs
The city cannot successfully compete by lowering its costs. Instead, the city must increase the value of its offering. This value comes from alternative transportation options, walkability, public places, commercial districts, and diverse communities. This means that urban areas must embrace multi-use areas with higher density or face obsolescence.
Suburban homes (in the suburbs) should continue to be an option for anyone who wants to live in that setting. Personally, I don’t mind if suburban development doesn’t responsibly bear the costs of the development, or if urban taxes subsidize rural populations. Yes, we do need to fix those problems in the long-term, but that won’t improve the quality of life in the urban realm.
Before we can rebuild our urban areas, we must first admit we have a problem. Our streetscapes are shockingly deficient. Other than a few interesting places and neighborhoods, the truth is that people would rather live elsewhere.
We can’t fix our urban areas by limiting choice, only by expanding it. We must focus on improving urban areas by reforming urban policies rather than criticizing suburban policy. Our zoning and development codes, not to mention our urban transportation standards, are based on bad assumptions from 60 years ago. They need to be ripped from the shelves and scrapped if they don’t actively encourage streetscapes like the examples below:
Gainesville, Florida
Charleston, SC
Beverly Hills, California
Portland, Maine
The key features of all of these special places are narrow lanes or unmarked lanes, trees and landscaping instead of a clear zone, on-street parking, limited setbacks, and sidewalks (photo credit). Without these features we don’t have sidewalks in walkable communities, instead we have an expensive concrete border for an urban highway.
The typical response from local citizens and designers is to claim that cities like Indianapolis do things their own way (i.e., in cars), because that is safer and accommodates “the way we really live.” This is both false and wrong. Bad urban planning doesn’t mean that we are unique, it means that our cities don’t work. Traffic flow is not more important than neighborhoods.
On the other hand, well designed streetscapes have been shown to both increase traffic safety and produce dynamic economies, while keeping traffic flow acceptable. There is not a single argument for the status quo that has stood up to a rigorous study by researchers. The time for change is now. The USDOT says that we need to consider all users of the road, and this requires a fundamental shift in policy and priorities.
Indianapolis planners have taken some great steps to fix the planning and development process within certain areas of the city (see the Regional Center urban design guidelines, for example). The downtown plan is already achieving some great results, including Mass Ave, the Cultural Trail, increased development, and plenty of tourism. However, the urban planning guidelines should be used in many areas, rather than just 1 square mile in the entire state. All of Indianapolis can benefit from these recommendations, and people who want to live in an urban area would finally have that choice.
This is not just an academic issue, Indianapolis could be making inexpensive changes that would radically improve livability right now. A great example of the city’s response to these concerns is illustrated by the Michigan and New York Street bike lanes installed last year. The bike lanes themselves are great, and I ride downtown at least once per month (Read here for the back-story on the bike lanes). The city’s flyer for the project is shown below.
The Near Eastside Community Organization, in line with their published Quality of Life Plan sponsored by the city, submitted a new plan whereby the Michigan and New York Streets would be converted to narrow lane two-way traffic with on-street parking and a separated bike path. This would have benefited both automotive and bicycling commuters by providing a better commuting experiences, and it would have greatly benefited the local neighborhood. In short, NESCO’s proposal would have transformed these streets into models of good design:
(photo credit Idyllic Indy)
Instead of accommodating the requests of the citizens, the city chose to keep its current policies in place. The extremely marginal benefits of the one-way streets for downtown commuters were judged as more important than the livability of several miles of inner city neighborhoods. The city missed another opportunity to add value on the near east side.
It’s time to leverage the current attention on urban issues from the federal, state, and local level to address what is really wrong with our urban areas. Outdated design standards and poorly conceived transportation plans should be our focus. Blaming the suburbs may be a convenient scapegoat, but it won’t make it any easier for city-dwellers to walk to the corner store.
I love the post Mr. Sharpe. it is indeed amazing and encouraging to see how much of a difference streetscaping makes. It is the loudest feature we have to offer and certainly is the one that makes the first impression to those visiting and passing through.
I found your blog via Aaron Renn. I look forward to reading more of your writing.
In Peace,
s
Thanks Sid. I hope that city planners start to design streets and neighborhoods that they would actually want to live in, not just drive through.
Woah, I didn’t know your blog moved.
Nice post. I’m all for 2 way streets in neighborhoods. I just found out that College was one-way northbound from downtown to Fairfield until the 1990′s. I’m sure the one-way street didn’t help that area, and it’s still struggling to find an identity today.
Sorry about the moving, I should have been more clever about leaving a forwarding address through the RSS feeds.
College as a one-way sounds like a tragedy, its amazing that anyone could have thought that was a good idea at the time. The things we have done to our city for automotive convenience never cease to amaze me.
College did have a single bus-only southbound lane from Fairfield to Mass Ave. when it was one-way for cars.
And it is the experience in that leg of College combined with that along Central, Delaware, and Penn between 16th and Fall Creek that has taught me the opposite lesson: changing streets back from one-way to two-way doesn’t affect redevelopment or neighborhood desirability. College still looks much as it did when the change was made: bad. It won’t really change until the Fall Creek Place redevelopment is finished along its route.
On the other hand, Fall Creek Place has come back from the dead, as have Herron Morton Place and the Old Northside, even with three one-way arterials as their spine.
If you look at the traffic count numbers on Mich/NY, most of the commuting along them is people who live in the more-dense areas of Center and Warren townships. Counts really pick up at Sherman Drive, which strongly implies that the pair is used mostly by Center Township commuters.
I’d offer the time/convenience and environmental argument: The one-ways make for fewer impediments in the commute, and thus make it shorter in duration because traffic flows better. For a close-in resident, a 10-15 minute commute is a benefit; changing it to 20 or 25 minutes would introduce an inefficiency and exact a price in more idling time, more aggravating stop-and-go, and more air pollution.
Regardless of whether we commute by car or bus, a slower commute is a waste of both energy and time and a contributor to worse urban air quality in the neighborhood. One-way pairs help to alleviate those conditions and make city life better in some ways that isn’t always accounted for by some arguments against them.
CDC – I think you have some valid points. You are obviously correct that converting one-way streets is not a panacea. And you are also correct that the presence of a one-way street is not enough, by itself, to blight an area.
But research shows that two-way streets do make a difference, they encourage economic activity and pedestrian livability. The overall result is that two-way streets provide a net benefit over one-way streets, especially when the issues of time/convenience and the environment are considered. People have the option of living closer to the city core, and driving less is always better than driving faster.
I didn’t make this point completely: “driving less” (fewer miles) is not necessarily better from a commuting time or environmental impact viewpoint when more accel/decel happens, as on a congested city street. (City fuel economy is lower than highway for that reason.)
For example, according to Bing maps, the commute from Mt. Comfort Airport to I-65 and North Meridian is about the same commuting time as from Irvington via Michigan and Meridian to the same point. Mt. Comfort is about 16 miles, or a half-gallon of gas at highway mileage. Irvington is about 6 miles and probably about 1/3 gallon of gas.
I mean to suggest this: adding more stop-and-go, making an urban commute even slower and more energy intensive (and more aggravating), takes away many of the incentives to live closer and to drive fewer miles. Plus it concentrates even more pollutants in a small area where lots of people live. This is the practical (and probably unintended) outcome of returing Mich/NY to two-way traffic.
Studies show that commute time, not distance, is the more important determining factor in most folks’ location decisions. Even allowing for a higher weight to environmental impact for those who are so concerned, when the environmental impact of the city commute is increased by slowing the route and increasing congestion, the time and environmental benefits of commuting into the city from closer in disappear. The rational and environmentally-sensitive person could become indifferent between Mt. Comfort and Irvington.
Do we really want to further justify sprawl by making it harder to live closer to downtown? See http://www.publicpurpose.com/ut-6995commute.htm and http://www.jstor.org/pss/1244712 (“Improvements in transportation that lower commuting time will increase nonmetropolitan populations.”) Presumably, commute-time improvements would help to increase Point X’s population no matter whether urban, suburban, or exurban.
Shouldn’t we make (or in this case, keep) improvements that lower commuting time inside 465 and re-populate and support living in the near-downtown neighborhoods?
I do not mean to suggest that Indy’s one-way pairs should move at near-expressway speeds, as the north-south pairs sometimes do. A synchronized and flowing 30-35mph street is relatively safe and comfortable for city commuting and for the neighborhoods the streets pass through.
FYI: The City of Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development recognizes that changes are needed in the code and are looking at applying form based code in more than a dozen areas around the metro area. The initial demonstration project will be in Broad Ripple Village. Over the course of two years, BRVA, in partnership with Green Broad Ripple, Broad RIpple Alliance for Progress and HARMONI, has held 18 public planning sessions to identify characteristics of the Village “look and feel” and City staff recommended FBC as the proper tool to achieve that goal. The community is in the early stages of crafting the plan and we’ll be happy to share details as they become available.
@cdc guy – Commute time is an important factor, all other things being equal. I propose that Indianapolis stop trying to make all other things equal, and instead they make the city neighborhoods so attractive that people are willing to put up with the higher costs and inconveniences of the city.
That’s what this whole post is about – adding value through better street design. Anyone who believes the incredibly complex decisions of where people choose to live can be reduced to a simple problem of traffic optimization is fooling themselves. I suggest that Indianapolis cede suburban style development to the suburbs, and start planning for an urban paradigm. Sure we’ll lose some of the time advantage, but we’ll gain much more both in terms of residents and quality of life.
In any case, switching to two-way streets with characteristics as described above is the best (and maybe the only) way to achieve your desired traffic speed of 30-35 mph (see here).
Finally, city residents only generate 1/4 the carbon output as suburbanites. Once again, driving less is better than driving faster, and always will be. Only a tortured interpretation of the data could show otherwise.
So my answer is no, I don’t think that Indianapolis should concentrate on traffic flow at the expense of neighborhood livability.
@appleseed – Thank you for sharing the information. I look forward to reviewing DMD’s efforts when the new program gets underway.
Ah, the age-old Michigan/New York streets debate. I would make just a few points. First, in their current configuration, for most of the stretch between Irvington and downtown there are only two through lanes. It isn’t a surface superhighway the way Delaware Street is. I wouldn’t ever draw a line in the sand and say that I am forever opposed to returning those streets to a two way configuration, but I agree with cdc that two-way traffic is no panacea. If it were, then East 10th Street, with its two way traffic, density, and commercial infrastructure, would be in great shape, but it’s probably even more blighted than Michigan or New York (10th has more commercial activity but most of the residential property is in really bad shape). I tend to think that the net effect of a present-day return to two way traffic would be to lengthen the Irvington/Emerson Hieghts commute without any corresponding benefit to the closer-in neighborhoods.
As for the proposed reconfiguration of New York Street, as a sometime bicycle commuter, I think it would be very dangerous. The sidewalk is 18 feet from the street. It would be very difficult for a car emerging from the many side streets and alleys onto New York Street to see oncoming traffic without creeping across and blocking the bike lane. Factor in two way bike traffic on the same side of the street…yikes. I realize that this is a Cultural Trail-inspired design, but I think the CT makes sense for downtown. The CT is more for sightseeing than commuting (although I use a few blocks of it for the latter) and no traffic moves particularly fast downtown. Riding that thing for four miles, with my head on a swivel, anticipating danger from six directions at every curb cut, would make a commute by bike very time-consuming. The current configuration is pretty good and pretty safe for cyclists.
I agree that we must make city neighborhoods so desirable that people will put up with the hassles of urban life. But I think that the Michigan/New York plan would do much more to hurt currently desirable neighborhoods than it would help the neighborhoods between Irvington and downtown.
I live in Holy Cross and walk most days on Michigan to get to the Y at the Athenaeum. It’s amazing to see how fast cars fly through the section just past Arsenal Tech, particularly now that the CSX folks smoothed out the pavement around the railroad tracks just before Midland.
It’s unfortunate that the gateway streets to/from our neighborhood into downtown (Michigan, Vermont, and New York) rally aren’t design for walkability in any way that makes it a desirable option. Sidewalks are incomplete or broken up where they exist, lighting at the underpasses is nonexistent, and speed of traffic on the one-ways psychologically makes you feel unsafe.
I’m less concerned about one-way vs. two-way and more interested in ways we can calm whatever traffic flow exists to accommodates the needs of walkers, bikers, and drivers in ways that are safe and with at least a modicum of aesthetic appeal. KIB is helping us out a lot with their recent plantings along Davidosn and Pine, but the city needs to rethink the roads and sidewalks.
Thanks for sharing everyone, it was great to hear your opinions on the matter.
I think that a results-based approach for street design would be a great concept for these streets. JC’s comments shows that local residents are interested in slowing traffic to a level consistent with residential areas. John M’s and CDC’s comments show that commuters are concerned about increased commute times.
There are several ways that street designers could meet both of these goals. The current situation only considers the needs of drivers, not the needs of people living in the area. We can do so much better.
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