Phoenix, Portland, and the Street Hierarchy

The latest edition of the High Country News just arrived in my inbox. They've published a nice piece on the experience and politics of walking in Phoenix compared to Portland. The piece is available online, but you have to subscribe to HCN to access the full text.


The major reason why people don't walk in Phoenix, according to the article, is a principle of urban design and land use known as "street hierarchy." Popularized in the U.S. in the 1960s, the idea was to segregate high-speed through traffic from residential areas by locating houses in a nest of meandering side streets while constructing fast throughways for nonlocal traffic. While this may sound rational, the effect is to increase the distance from residences to urban amenities, even when the houses and amenities are relatively closely located as the crow flies. The result: no one walks anywhere unless they absolutely have to.


Those who attended ECOS' last board meeting heard mayoral candidate Kevin Johnson say again that he sees Phoenix as a model of what Sacramento could become. To be fair, he wasn't citing Phoenix as a shining example of pedestrian-friendly planning. He seemed to be mostly enchanted with its successful downtown redevelopment. Still, when urban design so directly affects the transportation and lifestyle choices that a city's residents make, you have to why anyone would point to Phoenix as a successful model of anything!

Meta-blogging

I make a conscious effort not to put together too many posts that unreflectively link to other sites. In my humble opinion, any blog worth its salt must provide some original content, thought, or synthesis. Simply pointing people to other writers’ posts is journalistic parasitism, and it doesn’t usually make for good reading.

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth sending out some recognition to other sites that are of interest because of their perspective on transportation and/or the natural resource policies in the Sacramento region. Here are a few that I’ve found interesting.

The blog Walkable Neighborhoods just finished a monthlong photographic examination of the walkability of urban areas in the United States. Each day, Eric Fredericks posted photos and/or commentary highlighting pedestrian-friendly urban design around the country. Some of the choices were, to say the least, unexpected. (Sacramento’s K Street mall? Sure, it’s walkable. But give me a reason to want to walk there!) And the project might be faulted for its heavy reliance on university towns and incorporated enclaves of wealth, both of which are able to address growth and traffic issues in ways that can’t easily be exported to cities where the teeming masses work and play. Nevertheless, the project is provocative, and some of the material is both enlightening and inspiring.

Locally, Sacramento is blessed with a complementary set of blogs focused on Sacramento Regional Transit, the public transportation agency that is the object of both affection and frustration for many of us. RT Driver provides an employee’s perspective on both daily life in the Sacramento transit system and on policy issues affecting operations. RT Rider covers many of the same issues from the perspective of a passenger. Both blogs have had fascinating and passionate entries on the proposed cuts to transit service as a result of the Governor’s and Legislature’s cowardly budget proposals. Check those entries out here and here. (And make plans to appear at the RT Public Hearing at 6 PM on Aug. 13!)

Finally, SacBee editor Stuart Leavenworth is slowly establishing a blog covering global warming issues. He calls it the Hot House. I’m at best ambivalent about the Sacramento Bee’s journalistic and editorial coverage of transportation and air quality issues in the region. Still, a global warming blog is a great idea, and I’m hoping that providing a forum focused on the issue has impacts on the rest of their editorial policy. Leavenworth recently has had a couple of provocative posts about the Attorney General’s strategy of forcing local planning agencies to include greenhouse gas emissions in their CEQA analysis. Read those posts here and here.

Private Sector Approaches

As an advocacy organization, ECOS naturally is especially concerned with public policy issues that affect transportation and natural resources. But it's worth noting that there are private sector enterprises that see opportunity in providing people with alternatives to the individually owned automobile as a way of getting around. Here are two examples.

Notwithstanding the French love of the Tour de France and the hackneyed image of the baguette-bearing cycliste, France's capital city isn't famous for being bicycle friendly. (Maybe that's a consequence of the populace having smoked a few too many Gauloises.) Nevertheless, a recent venture is attempting to convince Parisians to take advantage of the city's 230-mile network of bike lanes. Velib ("Velo liberte") is a city sponsored project financed by the advertising giant JC Decaux (better known to Californians as the developers of San Francisco's pay toilets/advertising kiosks). Velib has established a citywide network of 750 bicycle stations where residents and tourists can rent one of 10,648 three-speed bicycles. Other European cities have attempted to provide free bicycles for the temporary use of anyone moving around the urban area, but people tend to undervalue (and therefore abuse) goods and services provided for free. The Velib strategy is to charge a small daily or monthly fee for bicycle use. Also, the bikes are equipped with alarms that go off if they're not returned on time. Other cities, even some in the United States, are watching closely to see if the project works.

In most places in the U.S., using an automobile to get around is at least an occasional necessity. But in urban areas, not everyone needs a car all the time. Many people wind up dumping lots of money and resources (purchase price, maintenance, insurance, parking) into cars that they don't need to use every day. For these people, car ownership is inefficient and needlessly expensive. What's more, once you own a car, you find reasons to use it.

One solution is car sharing. Car sharing is basically a form of car rental-- a service that makes cars quickly and cheaply available for rental by the hour. By making it easier for people to acquire a shared vehicle, car sharing services make it possible for people to forego individual car ownership, even if they need an automobile on a regular basis. Reducing the number of cars in circulation has direct impacts on parking demand and land use in densely populated areas. And by reducing the availability of vehicles, it can also reduce congestion by encouraging people to use alternative means (transit, bicycles, walking) to get around. For-profit car share enterprises exist in the East Bay and San Francisco, among other places.

Ontario gets it!

Courtesy of the Walkable Neighborhoods blog, here is a bit of encouraging news from our neighbors to the North.

In a surprise announcement before the fall provincial election, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty unveiled plans Friday to spend $11.5-billion over 12 years on a lengthy list of public-transit projects in what the government boasted was the largest such investment in Canadian history.

[snip...]

He said that work would start on the projects next year, and that the plan, called MoveOntario 2020, is proof his government is serious about taking on the economic and environmental effects of traffic congestion, which he said is "choking" the GTA.

Note to state and local officials: when Ontario completes its "MoveOntario 2020" transportation plan, SACOG will be less than halfway through the term of its decidedly more modest MTP 2035.