No on the experience of the UK. Weather is weather, I come from Ireland and I can even enjoy damp. Our signage is nothing in comparison to yours, I should send you a bit of our local Vegas. Just because part of a building needs fixing does not destroy its value. Have you been to Costco - at least poverty keeps the chavs slim, we're less ambitious because we're more realistic, actually NA journalism often seems to me better than the UK, gutter press is gutter and there's a lot of pointless hype. What rudeness, if there's one thing an englishman can do that is to really be unpleasant to you but very politely! Yes, under, labour rich -poor gap has widened its to be regretted but at least we still have streets with people walking on them and trains imperfect, but to date still running.
This will really entertain. I actually sat on a pedestrian charter committee for 2 years-I was trying to find out what was going
on that I could engage with? But cul-de-sacs and no sidewalks,
people get killed actually.
If you enjoy damp, come to the northwest... :) Vancouver, Seattle, Portland... They're all great cities, the rain is actually exaggerated IMHO... It's beautiful, temperate...
In 13 long years in Ireland I'm pretty sure I saw more linear feet of palisade fencing than there is of freeway in California, and all it was doing was keeping wet tarmac safe from wet grass.
Nice picture! I left Ireland though, because London seemed to want me and for years
construction standards were higher there, proabably not true anymore although I think planning is still better.
perhaps the crowning aesthetic achievement of North American planning is the Border Infrastructure System for the 1st Sector, Southern Frontier - otherwise known as la Linea or just The Wall - approximately 50 kilometers of pure dytopianism horror, from the mountains to the sea, bisecting San Diego and Tijuana... and completely pointless too, since it just stops in the foothills of the Coastal Range and one can just walk around it.
This triumphalist exercise in territorial architecture and utter futility, constructed by decree and under military supervision, at a cost of billions of dollars, under the TOTAL suspension of all environmental and safety laws and regulation, serves no point whatsoever since they ran out of money before it was complete and most of the residents of either city are already born with the legal right to be on either side of it, maknig the very idea of a wall at that point purposeless.
So it basically, this iconic form - our equivalent to the Parthenon or the Palace of the Soviets - exists solely to induce a sense of alienation among those whose neighborhoods got chopped up by it (separated families routinely meet at one point where it's possible shout through three layers of wall, instead of enduring the sometimes four or six hour weight at one of the two gates).
This is American design at its finest.. capturing, in a single architectural gesture, the ethos of our great continent. America prevails.
I respectfully submit for your consideration that you are making the mistake of comparing the better portions of Europe with the worst, or at least most middling, of North America.
I suspect you've landed in the Birmingham, nay, the Dundalk, of this continent and don't realize that it's NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver, SF Bay Area, Austin, Philadelphia, Denver etc (most of which have at least passable public transport, btw) against which you should be measuring your previous experiences.
I cannot believe what wonderful posts I am getting! Thank-you so much Urbanist for that photo, and I take the point about fences too. Its hard to take that image.
I also reply that I know exactly where I am, it is a location I tried to avoid for many years and as a location it is also particularly coloured by being in Canada, Ontario not the US. Not subscribing to public transportation has become a particular characteristic of North America as distinct from other cultures and surely it has to be possible in some ways to extrapolate from the parts to the whole?
kichener is def not as nice as london. i grew up not too far from where yall are at elisabeth but also moved to london and then tokyo, and when i go home i do feel things are a bit out of alignment and feel culturally quite lost. usually i get over it after a week or 2.
while we are all having fun with cultural generalizations....brits are def more rude in a casual way than north americans. london was in general nice enough but only truly livable if wealthy and lets face it it looks like a third world city in comparison to tokyo. so much filth on the streets in london it is amazing.
as for architecture, to me the best place in canada to be is in montreal. the rest of the country feels a tad like a shopping mall to me.
completely unrelated, but how do you find the process of transferring part III to canadian system? does it work fairly easily or is it difficult?
More, this a great way to spend time. Actually I was in Tokyo lately and I loved it, I spent a year there before, but the neighbourhoods seemed
much clearer, parks well distributed and of course clean. I visited Beijing and
Shanghai too, I'm very enthusiastic about Asia because they still seem to like
each other!
Actually I probably prefer Paris to London architecturally and I know KW
does not compare to London too, just trying to make decisions these days. Part III to canadian well there's no reciprocity or likely to be so you just got to queue up behind the graduates, no allowances, and for me, its annoying because a lot of the stuff just seems like rubbish - having to pretend to know certain structural things for example which is really down to engineers and I'm not insecure about acknowledging that. Trying to turn architecture into science because that was vogue in the 70s or something, but Canada has its own exam now EXAC at least.
Oh my god, I want to post show how brilliant I am by making claims with no backing, based purely in pathos, about the condition of America. You should worship how right I am! I even used exclamation marks!
Everyone, please regard this post as the foremost authority on the subject!
Now is the point to where I should be padding with post with awful similes and hyperbole.
Then insert a line about how people like it so that makes it okay. And how it really hasn't hurt anyone. Follow it up with a personal statement that reinforces the general grossly misappropriate stereotype of "simplicity" and "country living."
Insert some culturally pandering comment that insights solidarity of us versus them. Pad this further with some wildly racist and segregationist remarks!
Then talk about material wealth and food as if it had never, ever existed in the world!
Oh, my god! Look at that informative post. PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME AND MY BRILLIANCE.
Ha! Sorry, I just don't like when people criticize planning or make general assumptions about the complicated (and sometimes unintentional) nature of planning.
I'm going to cherry pick some inadequacies off first.
We invented the automobile and mass produced it.
Mass production, maybe. The first inventor of the automobile is a Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest who invented a steam-powered horseless buggy around 1672 in China.
If you really want to get down to specifics though, the first comfortable and working automobile was invented by Frenchman Gustave Trouvé and demonstrated in 1881. It was electrically powered.
Even so, German Karl Benz is the father of the modern internal combustion automobile. His design debuted in 1885.
We created an entirely new way of life centered around personal mobility.
Not true. The mobility argument boils down to the development and maintenance of publicly funded roads. In that regards, nothing has changed in transportation in over 2000 years.
Trains, Interstates and Airports are the obvious new additions. But people have had horse carriages for as just as long as we have had wheels and horses.
The obvious point there is "personal." The car just makes commuting more democratic as the investment of animal-based transportation is just far too high for 95% of society to afford.
And in the future we will make it cleaner and greener while other parts of the world are still playing with trains.
Just in terms of the scale of the economy, this is and will always be patently false. That is, however, if we magically create some nano machine grey goo that builds cars out of trash and sunlight.
But you might as well also try designing a fuel cell that runs off unicorn farts.
The car, as an object, and the car, as a way of travel, is never going to be friendly. We can except that and reserve its use for weekends and rainy days. Or we can violently defend it. The truth is... without the car... many places in the U.S. would revert to some pre-Enlightenment version of Europe.
"I just don't like when people criticize planning or make general assumptions about the complicated (and sometimes unintentional) nature of planning."
With the caveat that this is what I do and have been doing since the mid-nineties. I'd like to think that entitles me to have a view on the nature of Euclidean zoning - which has less to do with private cars (Euclid v Ambler predates the start of CIAM, and when the de jure principles of positivistic zoning in the US were laid out, nobody even knew what a highway was, much less had to deal with them as an urban condition).
It's essential to put these things in proper historical context: suburban American planning was "broken" and the desire of certain interests to safeguard pastoral suburban (and urban!) ideals against undesirable uses and, yes, undesirable people was well in place a whole generation before highway construction began and two generations before the creation of the FHWA and the current onset of the current model of suburban development in the aftermath of the second world war.
What we see in the landscape today is NOT the triumph of private car-based planning or even of the type of mass-housing finance and construction that triump helped enable. It was the result of the intersection of the new technology (and subsidy) of cars and road construction and a much earlier set of decisions on the nature of (and the designation of authority over) land use regulation. If the car alone dictated American urban form, as you appear to be suggesting, America would look like a very different place.. today. ... probably closer to some areas of the Ruhr/Westphania, perhaps with aspects of now urbanized areas of LA and Houston. The exurban and outer suburban spheres would have emerged in very different form, if at all.
On some threads you berate the fact that you are effectively powerless and cant change anything which leads to a poor built environemt, and then when someone discusses this in the general, she gets pounded and you get all offended.
I thought the built environment is shit everywhere - its just that sometimes the scenery compensates for it better. Even here in relative paradise, our buildings stink. But we also have beaches, volcanoes and good looking locals.
Urbanist, I totally agree with you on those points.
I meant to say criticize or refute without appropriate citation or context.
I think your examples are great and there's potential to go even deeper with them. But, I think the issue with this is in terms or understanding and comprehension.
I agree that American planning concepts were 'perverse' even before their application in "Modern" development. We can look towards the Reconstruction era, the Antebellum era or even as far back as colonialism. And while some of these theories are simply overreaching conjecture, there is absolutely numerous examples from everything including personal letters to novels to newspapers stating in a very polarized black-and-white (pun both intended and unintended) manners.
And while I don't think I was necessarily saying what you were saying about car-oriented development, I agree in some aspects. I was simply pointing out above that personal transportation has always existed and always has permeated development to some aspect.
I don't think the car is entirely to blame. In some regards, I'd say value engineering practices are to blame more than cars. I'd say the proof in this is that multi-storey parking garages showed up almost immediately after cars became more than just objects of curiosity. I believe the first parking structure was the Hotel La Salle parking garage in 1918?
But the issue of parking is a whole other issue in itself. I was just making the point that value engineering has played a massive part in enabling cheap, single-purpose properties to exist given that value engineering is primarily dependent on peak capacity along with as cheap as physically possible.
But either way, I'm annoyed by people making declarative statements like "suburbanism is what people want," "it is good for people and familes to live in [insert lifestyle choice here]," or "this is the life my great grandparents move to this country to have."
Really? Show me some data. Show me historical context. Show me something other than feelings.
If you want a sobering thought experiment, try imagining your city when petrol is at $20 a gallon. If you can still imagining it functioning, it's design is probably sufficiently resilient.
wait. what are we talking about here? i thought this was the "north america is or is not the *ugliest built environment*" thread... sorry, you want *data* that our continent is / or is not ugly??
not that i disagree with you on most of what you're saying, agree suburbia has problems, lowest common denominator disposable building sort of sucks... but...
i don't think there is a *moral right or wrong* here... imho personal experience is equally as valid as historic narrative... i think there is sometimes a danger in isolating historic narratives in an academic experience from the real livedin personal experiences and accounts from people... our histories are all written by somebody, all moralisms and fictional narrative to some extent... especially architectural history...
i think there are just different ways to look at things...
sorry... i meant *isolated historic narratives in an academic setting*... vs. people's life experiences... both are equally valid ways to talk about perspectives... feelings matter...
Planning likes to sit around and make the general population's dreams and ideals materialize. But dreams and ideals aren't always practical. More often than not is not only are they practical but irrational as well.
I like to think there's idealistic and dream-like approaches to both sides of the argument.
In reality... though... before we can 'fix' 'ugliness' or 'unsustainable practices,' we're going to have to increase mobility-- and mobility just isn't a form of modality (by foot, by car, by train or plane or horse).
But actual mobility from one place to another-- a lot of key economic areas lack either the actual infrastructure to handle transient residents or lack the incentive.
And the does boil down to government structure (taxes, programs, social welfare) and planning (altering what have been exploitative practices to exist for the benefit of both parties [i.e., single-occupancy rooms, short-term stay apartments, long-term stay lodging, 'bachelor' a.k.a. studio apartments-- and the plethora of issues that come with these]).
Even then, the practice of government bonding (a condition of the terms of length) dictates that people have to stay in a single place for a single period of time and continue what they keep continuing to do in order for that bond to be paid enough to move onto the next bond.
In this comparison, the general commercial property cycle of a usual ROI within 7 to 17 years after initial construction is about 1/3 to 1/2 of the length of a general government bond. By the time that bond is over to build the infrastructure for that given property, it could be an entirely new set of circumstances that needed infrastructure way before the bond even matured.
And this comes back full circle to ugliness, suburbia and North America.
I mean... highways have an operating life of 1/8th their bond time! How do you even make economic sense of building an expressway? By the time the first one is paid off... you've already had to rip it up, pull another bond and lay down again a whole brand new road.
Yeah seems like roads are an excuse for governments to spend money and ask for money... Although they are useful to people... They do also facilitate a kind of business... Get you from A to B... Let the fire department reach your building to stop it from burning to the ground, etc. And gain the stimulus impact of that money on the economy also... multiplier effect etc. I just don't see the government abandoning road construction which is a known quantity, their place for dumping money into the system which has been the simple thing to do for decades... Building roads, tearing up roads, rebuilding, and so on...
Although I think maybe if you can justify building something different, a different outlet for fiscal stimulus, maybe that light rail infrastructure, just inject money to stimulate the economy... a great street car system, or high speed rail, etc. (and not just "bridges to nowhere" excuses for spending) I think the demand for alternatives would be there... People would actually use it, adapt their lifestyles, at least some people who choose to do so... People would rather avoid traffic and headache and fuel costs and be more pedestrian if you made it efficient and a known quantity, people would love it and use it, and it would change the way they see their commutes... The only problem being, roads are bite sized spending... A new rail system is HUGE, a big up front investment to get it even working... Easier to simply repair a road...
but I think it's just basically doing it smart, and building it to service some existing need and then once demand takes over, it can grow and take over and have a life of its own? Market demand eventually needs to happen... Not sure... Create the infrasructure that services a market, lifestyle, and then that lifestyle develops more, and there is greater justification through simple market demand for more of that alternative transportation to happen... Market feeds back to demand for infrastructure at some point...?
But I think the market, and taxpayers don't respond well to the stick... Carrots are better... I don't mean just incentives, people wouldn't move downtown from a suburb just to have a tax cut... But they would want to live downtown if it was livable, had perks... Say... Downtown internet hotspots... Park systems, etc.
Generally, a standard highway and a light rail line have about the same given capacity of moving an amount of people over a period of time and distance.
Rail service, at current prices is between $7500 and $8500 dollars per linear foot-- $44,880,000 per linear mile. Almost all light rail lines are built in existing areas where all land has to be purchase and procured through litigation.
Highways, in developed areas, average between $35,000,000 to $45,000,000 a linear mile. In heavily developed areas... like Boston and New York City... highway construction routinely reaches between $180,000,000 to $330,000,000 a linear mile.
Subways, on the other hand, run between anywhere from $140,000,000 to $1,200,000,000 billion per mile. Mind you, subways not only have all of the problems of buying out land rights as with trains... their construction requires special machines (of which there are only a few in the world) and endangers the city above it.
However, this is where the tricky thing comes in...
Subways have a life cycle of about 40 years (if not more).
Light rails last about 25 years.
Highways generally last about 5-7 years for asphalt. More for concrete-- however, a concrete highway is in the hundreds of millions of dollars range.
That means a stretch of highway (a mile) over the course of a life of a subway will end up costing ~$225,000,000 a mile.
The cost per passenger per mile for bus passenger $0.95. Light rail is about $0.85 cents. Subway is like $1.20.
Cars on the other hand cost their drivers $0.55 a mile. I did a rough calculation and the cost of the road per person per mile per day was about $0.25 a linear mile. That's a grand total of $0.80.
If we count the road the bus operates on (if it does indeed operate in its own lane), we can throw on another nickel or dime in that cost.
This brings me to my other point!
If an "average room" is 20' wide (at a at-construction cost of 75$ per square foot) with an additional $115 a linear foot for "standard road", we could build a linear mile of "room" for ~$8,500,000. We'll just toss in an extra $5,000,000 to pad this figure.
Essentially, it is 2.8 times cheaper to build new walkable property (some 108,000 sqt ft of habitable space or 58 1800 sqft units) than new highways. I mean, 240,000 dollars for 1800sqft plus road isn't bad!
In reality, we should be giving HUD more money to build more things instead of the Army Corps of Engineers or the Department of Transportation to build huge single-use infrastructure projects that generally alleviate the problems that come with poor urban planning in the first place.
Although, this argument is a bit of a strawman anyways.
Interstates make up about 30% of the market share of all businesses while they make up less than 10% of all traffic. Not interstate roads (highways, expressways, city streets, rural roads) make up something like 60% of market share and close to 85% of all traffic.
So, specialty roads used primarily by residents and commuters are not exactly "bite-sized" spending. They are enormous money pits that allow non-city-citizen commuters access to the infrastructure of downtown by pillaging federal funds for projects that would be otherwise deemed "insane" by local governments.
The day gas goes to $20 gallon is the day a magical hydrogen fueled or battery powered car just happens to roll out of Flint, MI. and everyone will be extolling the genius of the American planning model - that is until 20 years later when the bateries need to be recycled then you will say how stupid we are, and the circle of self loathing will continue unabaited while everyone else happily lives out their lives.
Kitchener is a good example of what a blue collar, suburban fordist settlement looks like.
There are nice small, 19th C towns in an agricultural landscape in the surroundings.
If you are interested in saving architectural heritage, there is a campaign to save 41 heritage buildings in nearby Brantford. The local council wants to tear down the 19th C buildings for no reason.
Good afternoon! Too late already for Brantford, I hear.. and we are post-fordist no? Community trying to transition to a knowledge based/creative economy etc.? Many empty/soon to be empty factories downtown, although there are more functioning on the outskirts, jobs for many new Canadians., but how secure?Contributes enormously to my anxiety, and must be behind a lot of the 'holes' too.
My personal experience has taught me something about transient populations or mobility, Montagneux' blinding statistics on this are very interesting, I think employers obligations in this area will probably expand. The answer to the thread is probably all about where you happen to be, yes if you're here no if not?
This is the "North America -why?" forum, the ugliness/transportation is part of the conversation. NA used to thrill me but these days it frightens more than thrills, KW I always found scary. So systems that are not resilient are not good in times of change, turning around a supertanker etc..Isn't this a time of change? What about risk management? The scale of the change is the problem and for me sometimes extreme anxiety is the result.
You want to see something worse than Kitchener? Travel out to Red Deer, Alberta. It's like Midland Texas but cold.
I do believe that Canadians use more oil per capita than Americans, and I think Red Deer is the town that makes that stat.
For some really good urban design in N. America check out the older University campus areas. Usually they have a nice walkable density with fairly decent architecture, at least the pre-1950's stuff. It's probably the closest comparison to living in a large European city, i.e. many people don't have a personal auto and instead walk/public transport.
I think I can understand Elisabeth's point. It not about the ugliness of a country or a suburb or a neighborhood PER SE, but rather, the amount of work, bureaucracy, money and effort put in to generate absolute crap, as a relative measure.
For example with all the awesome licensing measures we have in place in the US, which might be more draconian than any other country in the world (except, perhaps, Japan), we still generate mile after mile of Costco warehouses and McMansion suburbs? What's exactly the net benefit of all that one has to go through to get anything done in the built environment?
As a very stark example, I can more ingenuity, human endeavor, and basic creativity in the first example than the second one:
Dharavi Slums, India
Lancaster, CA
(I am not talking about hygiene, health facilities etc, but just 'interest')
the only difference is, in Lancaster, half of those homes have been foreclosed and the former residents are now living in real shanties (or tent cities) at the edge of town, near the dump. In a word, Dharavi.
I've been thinking about your post regarding return on investment and durability of road work vs. rail vs. subway, etc. Thanks for posting that data by the way, it's interesting.
There are a couple other things I could see that would need to be taken into account, aside from ROI:
1. what is the capacity of each? it seems that our analysis of highway vs. rail is more appropriately analyzed for its usefulness based not just on square footage or ROI, but by how well it meets user demand... if you can prove that the rail meets the commuter demand needs in a much more cost-effective way, then it'll sell... it seems that talking about density of use between the highway and city roads is a bit of a false comparison: it's a little bit like comparing an elevator to circulation corridors on a particular floor, for a multilevel office building... the circulation corridors probably get the most use over the course of the day, but the elevator capacity is determined by the overall peak demand for service (at lunchtime, or in the mornings, after work, etc.) The highway (or alternatively the rail system) operates in a way where its capacity needs are dependent on the peak traffic hours, they handle a huge amount of traffic at certain parts of the day, and are largely empty at other times... So I think it really depends on each individual case...
2. re: "bite sized" construction: what i meant to say regarding "bite sized" is, not that the roads are cheaper, but that projects can be eaten in pieces more easily, as the road system is functioning already and already exists, and so the timing is such that you could fix a particular stretch of road this year or hold off for another while... one of the barriers to rail projects getting off the ground, even though it would be better in the long run, is that right now, up front, it is a significant effort to get it off the ground... once you take a bite, you have to eat the steak... the relief of commuter demand for example will happen, but it takes a significant chunk of time before the new rail system is in operation, and then it's use is perceived by local governments as less of a known quantity vs. roads which they can very easily determine how well it will be used... As you said in another thread, people have cultural preferences for how the consume things... Same goes for how they choose to travel, governments and public take a lot more convincing that something new will work, and not just be a "road to nowhere"... The durability of rail, and the long startup for rail projects I think sort of creates a problem (not that they wouldn't be a better solution), but governments are often motivated not by what is smartest but by the annual budgets, what they know, and how much they can spend *right now*... they care more about how they can stop the bleeding rather than cure the disease... And, it's really an excuse to get money from the federal govt... If we replaced road work with a much more durable and efficient rail system that doesn't need to be rebuilt every 5 to 7 years, what on earth would our local governments do to ask for more money??
Anyway, it does seem that light rail is happening, at least here in Seattle, light rail projects are under way and it is expanding... It doesn't quite replace the interstates but it will provide a nice alternative once we get it going well enough on its way... Hope these projects take off, I think once more cities adopt it, and as we have more and more cases of successful projects, it will catch on...
It depends. You can check probably the only source on the subject. That is the "Highway Capacity Manual." HCM2010 should be released this month.
But the issue with capacity is actual capacity versus utilization.
One figure here is out all road usage, about 70% of all traffic is generated from private car owners. About 27-29% is LT4 (otherwise known commercial vehicles). Taxis, rental cars, buses and the like make up less than 1% of traffic.
Out of that 70% of traffic, about 40% of that 70% is what is considered "urban high order traffic." To put it in other terms, about 1/3rd (~28% to 35%) of all traffic in the United States is on freeways, expressways and interstates.
There is also what is referred to as urban low order traffic (25% of the 70%) or 17.5% of all traffic occurs on none single-use type roads and at grade highways.
Coincidentally, 3% of all traffic in the United States is done by commercial (5 axle) vehicles on low order urban roads.
What we can draw on this is that urban congestion is more to blame on commuters than commercial vehicles (both semis and others). This is principally the reasoning as to why alternative transportation makes sense.
The reason I brought this up is because it helps to understand where traffic is at and how it moves.
If we take the most traveled highway, I-405 (not even one of the most expensive highways) has 390,000 vehicles travel on it a day.
The least is about 2000-- this is what usually defines a road to nowhere is a road where the usage is so small and limited, it doesn't make economic sense to building them. However, you could say that about the same regarding most interstates in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas.
The reason as to why those highways and interstates aren't branded as roads to nowhere is that the people and goods that travel along them of are economic importance.
This is essentially an argument here-- urban expressways usually never transport goods (in fact, many commercial vehicles are barred from using them). What the do transport is soft goods-- potential man hours worked. The issue here is that commuters have nothing of absolute real value in contrast to say an interstate in Wyoming which maybe used to haul billions of dollars of gold, uranium, gas and oil.
So, in a sense, we can consider commuter transportation modes as "idea pipelines" or "potential economic output paths."
So, anyways... the most traveled highway isn't even technically that large comparative to those in Houston or Atlanta being only 8-10 lanes comparative to 15 or 21 lanes found in Houston and Atlanta.
Anyways, the average interstate or expressway generally sees about 60,000 vehicles per day or about 2500 an hour. Assume there's about 1.5 people per every car, that's roughly ~4000 people per hour.
The average rapid transit line can handle about 36,000 people per hour.
The average light rail line handles between 12,000 and 20,000 people per hour.
Buses are just embarrassing-- they're about 8,000 people per hour at a realistic affordable rate. However, there is so much contention regarding rails versus buses. The Cato Institute and the Heartland Institute love to cream their pants almost monthly writing these articles.
(The argument here is essentially since buses have so little headway time-- the time between when one can stop and another can arrive-- that the actual capacity depends on the number of buses in service. This is in contrast to the concept of Rapid Transit and Light Rail where you have a specific amount of trains running in automation where as the capacity is relatively set.)
[RT and LR are frequently more reliable and have generally lower operating costs because of the sophistication in technology used compared to the particularly low tech approach of buses.]
{Of course, when you get into accessibility issues... wheelchairs and buses don't mix particularly well.}
{[Then you get gems like this article:
"He also challenges the notion of heavy rail systems being capable of running at one-minute headways. The shortest headways in U.S. rail systems are achieved by the San Francisco Bay Area’s BART, at 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco run trolleys at 60-second headways, but only at low speed."
Notice the phrase "heavy rail." Why on Earth would anyone try to compared heavy rail to bus? That's such an unfavorable comparison.
(It's is mildly amusing that there is no comparison in this article between bus service and Rapid Transit).]}
But this is where all of these get blown out of the water.
Four parallel city streets technically have the capacity of an 8-lane highway. Add in bicycles and pedestrians... basic well-designed two lane roads running in tandem can support hundreds of thousands of people per hour.
And, of course, it is purely about each individual local and tastes.
(I absolutely hate buses. I hate the smell of the exhaust. I hate the bumpy ride. I hate the small seats. I hate the awkward boards and boarding process. I'm just not a fan of the bus.)
BTW buses have their uses, try double deckers though because if its a longer journey sitting upstairs out of the bustle, its pleasant. They are low tech and dextrous, in London if you want to go fast you take the tube (and hope for the best), if not post congestion charging, a double decker is your only man (a lot comes down to design in the end, not numbers).
I wouldn't discount a well thought out idea for improving the environment that you may find yourself in. But keep in mind that talk is cheap. No matter how well spoken designers like to present themselves.
I would simply say do something about it. Become involved in your local community and educate others of what can or, in your opinion, should be.
I can understand what you're saying if you're living in a subdivision scaled to a car on the periphery but the originally pedestrian designed historical city center of any Southern Ontario, or North American town for that matter, is quite nice. Maybe not Kitchener, ?, that is a city i'm not familiar with, but what about Guelph next door? Guelph is lovely and likewise for all the little towns and villages around that region. And having travelled a lot around America I find cities in Ontario and Canada to be cleaner and safer and the difference between rich and poor not as apparent. I have also been to the UK and also find cities in Canada to be quieter and cleaner - in the UK i find, depending on where you are, there is a tension between immigrants and natives that doesn't exist in canada. Making Ontario to me an overall more pleasant and peaceful place. Though I agree that public transport and urban sprawl is definitely a problem here if you live on the periphery as everyone has to own a car because everything is spread out. BTW, ironically, wasn't Kitchener the first place in world (maybe it was just north america?) to have a public recycling program? It was progressive in this regard, at least? plus whatabout TVOnatrio? It's the best public tv station ever and CBC radio is more liberal then college radio.
North America -why?
No on the experience of the UK. Weather is weather, I come from Ireland and I can even enjoy damp. Our signage is nothing in comparison to yours, I should send you a bit of our local Vegas. Just because part of a building needs fixing does not destroy its value. Have you been to Costco - at least poverty keeps the chavs slim, we're less ambitious because we're more realistic, actually NA journalism often seems to me better than the UK, gutter press is gutter and there's a lot of pointless hype. What rudeness, if there's one thing an englishman can do that is to really be unpleasant to you but very politely! Yes, under, labour rich -poor gap has widened its to be regretted but at least we still have streets with people walking on them and trains imperfect, but to date still running.
This will really entertain. I actually sat on a pedestrian charter committee for 2 years-I was trying to find out what was going
on that I could engage with? But cul-de-sacs and no sidewalks,
people get killed actually.
If you enjoy damp, come to the northwest... :) Vancouver, Seattle, Portland... They're all great cities, the rain is actually exaggerated IMHO... It's beautiful, temperate...
and I thought americans were the ignorant popus assholes......
In 13 long years in Ireland I'm pretty sure I saw more linear feet of palisade fencing than there is of freeway in California, and all it was doing was keeping wet tarmac safe from wet grass.
Thank-you.. there is no shortage of nice cities to move to, but this is about the so-called mid-size city and is it viable or habitable?
Nice picture! I left Ireland though, because London seemed to want me and for years
construction standards were higher there, proabably not true anymore although I think planning is still better.
perhaps the crowning aesthetic achievement of North American planning is the Border Infrastructure System for the 1st Sector, Southern Frontier - otherwise known as la Linea or just The Wall - approximately 50 kilometers of pure dytopianism horror, from the mountains to the sea, bisecting San Diego and Tijuana... and completely pointless too, since it just stops in the foothills of the Coastal Range and one can just walk around it.
This triumphalist exercise in territorial architecture and utter futility, constructed by decree and under military supervision, at a cost of billions of dollars, under the TOTAL suspension of all environmental and safety laws and regulation, serves no point whatsoever since they ran out of money before it was complete and most of the residents of either city are already born with the legal right to be on either side of it, maknig the very idea of a wall at that point purposeless.
So it basically, this iconic form - our equivalent to the Parthenon or the Palace of the Soviets - exists solely to induce a sense of alienation among those whose neighborhoods got chopped up by it (separated families routinely meet at one point where it's possible shout through three layers of wall, instead of enduring the sometimes four or six hour weight at one of the two gates).
This is American design at its finest.. capturing, in a single architectural gesture, the ethos of our great continent. America prevails.
I respectfully submit for your consideration that you are making the mistake of comparing the better portions of Europe with the worst, or at least most middling, of North America.
I suspect you've landed in the Birmingham, nay, the Dundalk, of this continent and don't realize that it's NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver, SF Bay Area, Austin, Philadelphia, Denver etc (most of which have at least passable public transport, btw) against which you should be measuring your previous experiences.
I cannot believe what wonderful posts I am getting! Thank-you so much Urbanist for that photo, and I take the point about fences too. Its hard to take that image.
I also reply that I know exactly where I am, it is a location I tried to avoid for many years and as a location it is also particularly coloured by being in Canada, Ontario not the US. Not subscribing to public transportation has become a particular characteristic of North America as distinct from other cultures and surely it has to be possible in some ways to extrapolate from the parts to the whole?
kichener is def not as nice as london. i grew up not too far from where yall are at elisabeth but also moved to london and then tokyo, and when i go home i do feel things are a bit out of alignment and feel culturally quite lost. usually i get over it after a week or 2.
while we are all having fun with cultural generalizations....brits are def more rude in a casual way than north americans. london was in general nice enough but only truly livable if wealthy and lets face it it looks like a third world city in comparison to tokyo. so much filth on the streets in london it is amazing.
as for architecture, to me the best place in canada to be is in montreal. the rest of the country feels a tad like a shopping mall to me.
completely unrelated, but how do you find the process of transferring part III to canadian system? does it work fairly easily or is it difficult?
More, this a great way to spend time. Actually I was in Tokyo lately and I loved it, I spent a year there before, but the neighbourhoods seemed
much clearer, parks well distributed and of course clean. I visited Beijing and
Shanghai too, I'm very enthusiastic about Asia because they still seem to like
each other!
Actually I probably prefer Paris to London architecturally and I know KW
does not compare to London too, just trying to make decisions these days. Part III to canadian well there's no reciprocity or likely to be so you just got to queue up behind the graduates, no allowances, and for me, its annoying because a lot of the stuff just seems like rubbish - having to pretend to know certain structural things for example which is really down to engineers and I'm not insecure about acknowledging that. Trying to turn architecture into science because that was vogue in the 70s or something, but Canada has its own exam now EXAC at least.
Oh my god, I want to post show how brilliant I am by making claims with no backing, based purely in pathos, about the condition of America. You should worship how right I am! I even used exclamation marks!
Everyone, please regard this post as the foremost authority on the subject!
Now is the point to where I should be padding with post with awful similes and hyperbole.
Then insert a line about how people like it so that makes it okay. And how it really hasn't hurt anyone. Follow it up with a personal statement that reinforces the general grossly misappropriate stereotype of "simplicity" and "country living."
Insert some culturally pandering comment that insights solidarity of us versus them. Pad this further with some wildly racist and segregationist remarks!
Then talk about material wealth and food as if it had never, ever existed in the world!
Oh, my god! Look at that informative post. PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME AND MY BRILLIANCE.
actually, Montagneux, I was planning on loading the thread down with a petulent descent into sarcasm and cynicism ;-)
Ha! Sorry, I just don't like when people criticize planning or make general assumptions about the complicated (and sometimes unintentional) nature of planning.
I'm going to cherry pick some inadequacies off first.
We invented the automobile and mass produced it.
Mass production, maybe. The first inventor of the automobile is a Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest who invented a steam-powered horseless buggy around 1672 in China.
If you really want to get down to specifics though, the first comfortable and working automobile was invented by Frenchman Gustave Trouvé and demonstrated in 1881. It was electrically powered.
Even so, German Karl Benz is the father of the modern internal combustion automobile. His design debuted in 1885.
We created an entirely new way of life centered around personal mobility.
Not true. The mobility argument boils down to the development and maintenance of publicly funded roads. In that regards, nothing has changed in transportation in over 2000 years.
Trains, Interstates and Airports are the obvious new additions. But people have had horse carriages for as just as long as we have had wheels and horses.
The obvious point there is "personal." The car just makes commuting more democratic as the investment of animal-based transportation is just far too high for 95% of society to afford.
And in the future we will make it cleaner and greener while other parts of the world are still playing with trains.
Just in terms of the scale of the economy, this is and will always be patently false. That is, however, if we magically create some nano machine grey goo that builds cars out of trash and sunlight.
But you might as well also try designing a fuel cell that runs off unicorn farts.
The car, as an object, and the car, as a way of travel, is never going to be friendly. We can except that and reserve its use for weekends and rainy days. Or we can violently defend it. The truth is... without the car... many places in the U.S. would revert to some pre-Enlightenment version of Europe.
I never knew unemployed architects could be so patriotic
"I just don't like when people criticize planning or make general assumptions about the complicated (and sometimes unintentional) nature of planning."
With the caveat that this is what I do and have been doing since the mid-nineties. I'd like to think that entitles me to have a view on the nature of Euclidean zoning - which has less to do with private cars (Euclid v Ambler predates the start of CIAM, and when the de jure principles of positivistic zoning in the US were laid out, nobody even knew what a highway was, much less had to deal with them as an urban condition).
It's essential to put these things in proper historical context: suburban American planning was "broken" and the desire of certain interests to safeguard pastoral suburban (and urban!) ideals against undesirable uses and, yes, undesirable people was well in place a whole generation before highway construction began and two generations before the creation of the FHWA and the current onset of the current model of suburban development in the aftermath of the second world war.
What we see in the landscape today is NOT the triumph of private car-based planning or even of the type of mass-housing finance and construction that triump helped enable. It was the result of the intersection of the new technology (and subsidy) of cars and road construction and a much earlier set of decisions on the nature of (and the designation of authority over) land use regulation. If the car alone dictated American urban form, as you appear to be suggesting, America would look like a very different place.. today. ... probably closer to some areas of the Ruhr/Westphania, perhaps with aspects of now urbanized areas of LA and Houston. The exurban and outer suburban spheres would have emerged in very different form, if at all.
Westphalia. even
Man, you 'North Americans' are hyper sensitive.
On some threads you berate the fact that you are effectively powerless and cant change anything which leads to a poor built environemt, and then when someone discusses this in the general, she gets pounded and you get all offended.
I thought the built environment is shit everywhere - its just that sometimes the scenery compensates for it better. Even here in relative paradise, our buildings stink. But we also have beaches, volcanoes and good looking locals.
you are right, now we're just arguing about north america.
Urbanist, I totally agree with you on those points.
I meant to say criticize or refute without appropriate citation or context.
I think your examples are great and there's potential to go even deeper with them. But, I think the issue with this is in terms or understanding and comprehension.
I agree that American planning concepts were 'perverse' even before their application in "Modern" development. We can look towards the Reconstruction era, the Antebellum era or even as far back as colonialism. And while some of these theories are simply overreaching conjecture, there is absolutely numerous examples from everything including personal letters to novels to newspapers stating in a very polarized black-and-white (pun both intended and unintended) manners.
And while I don't think I was necessarily saying what you were saying about car-oriented development, I agree in some aspects. I was simply pointing out above that personal transportation has always existed and always has permeated development to some aspect.
I don't think the car is entirely to blame. In some regards, I'd say value engineering practices are to blame more than cars. I'd say the proof in this is that multi-storey parking garages showed up almost immediately after cars became more than just objects of curiosity. I believe the first parking structure was the Hotel La Salle parking garage in 1918?
But the issue of parking is a whole other issue in itself. I was just making the point that value engineering has played a massive part in enabling cheap, single-purpose properties to exist given that value engineering is primarily dependent on peak capacity along with as cheap as physically possible.
But either way, I'm annoyed by people making declarative statements like "suburbanism is what people want," "it is good for people and familes to live in [insert lifestyle choice here]," or "this is the life my great grandparents move to this country to have."
Really? Show me some data. Show me historical context. Show me something other than feelings.
build it...build it cheap....just so you can build something! That is my impression of U.S.
If you want a sobering thought experiment, try imagining your city when petrol is at $20 a gallon. If you can still imagining it functioning, it's design is probably sufficiently resilient.
montagneux...
wait. what are we talking about here? i thought this was the "north america is or is not the *ugliest built environment*" thread... sorry, you want *data* that our continent is / or is not ugly??
not that i disagree with you on most of what you're saying, agree suburbia has problems, lowest common denominator disposable building sort of sucks... but...
i don't think there is a *moral right or wrong* here... imho personal experience is equally as valid as historic narrative... i think there is sometimes a danger in isolating historic narratives in an academic experience from the real livedin personal experiences and accounts from people... our histories are all written by somebody, all moralisms and fictional narrative to some extent... especially architectural history...
i think there are just different ways to look at things...
sorry... i meant *isolated historic narratives in an academic setting*... vs. people's life experiences... both are equally valid ways to talk about perspectives... feelings matter...
also this is just a web forum after all... people shoot the shit all the time...
Actually montagneux, I would say North American planning was heavily influenced by emotion and a severe lack of facts and numbers (rationalism).
But to piss you off even more I am going to end my post.
Oh no, that was my point.
Planning likes to sit around and make the general population's dreams and ideals materialize. But dreams and ideals aren't always practical. More often than not is not only are they practical but irrational as well.
I like to think there's idealistic and dream-like approaches to both sides of the argument.
In reality... though... before we can 'fix' 'ugliness' or 'unsustainable practices,' we're going to have to increase mobility-- and mobility just isn't a form of modality (by foot, by car, by train or plane or horse).
But actual mobility from one place to another-- a lot of key economic areas lack either the actual infrastructure to handle transient residents or lack the incentive.
And the does boil down to government structure (taxes, programs, social welfare) and planning (altering what have been exploitative practices to exist for the benefit of both parties [i.e., single-occupancy rooms, short-term stay apartments, long-term stay lodging, 'bachelor' a.k.a. studio apartments-- and the plethora of issues that come with these]).
Even then, the practice of government bonding (a condition of the terms of length) dictates that people have to stay in a single place for a single period of time and continue what they keep continuing to do in order for that bond to be paid enough to move onto the next bond.
In this comparison, the general commercial property cycle of a usual ROI within 7 to 17 years after initial construction is about 1/3 to 1/2 of the length of a general government bond. By the time that bond is over to build the infrastructure for that given property, it could be an entirely new set of circumstances that needed infrastructure way before the bond even matured.
And this comes back full circle to ugliness, suburbia and North America.
I mean... highways have an operating life of 1/8th their bond time! How do you even make economic sense of building an expressway? By the time the first one is paid off... you've already had to rip it up, pull another bond and lay down again a whole brand new road.
Yeah seems like roads are an excuse for governments to spend money and ask for money... Although they are useful to people... They do also facilitate a kind of business... Get you from A to B... Let the fire department reach your building to stop it from burning to the ground, etc. And gain the stimulus impact of that money on the economy also... multiplier effect etc. I just don't see the government abandoning road construction which is a known quantity, their place for dumping money into the system which has been the simple thing to do for decades... Building roads, tearing up roads, rebuilding, and so on...
Although I think maybe if you can justify building something different, a different outlet for fiscal stimulus, maybe that light rail infrastructure, just inject money to stimulate the economy... a great street car system, or high speed rail, etc. (and not just "bridges to nowhere" excuses for spending) I think the demand for alternatives would be there... People would actually use it, adapt their lifestyles, at least some people who choose to do so... People would rather avoid traffic and headache and fuel costs and be more pedestrian if you made it efficient and a known quantity, people would love it and use it, and it would change the way they see their commutes... The only problem being, roads are bite sized spending... A new rail system is HUGE, a big up front investment to get it even working... Easier to simply repair a road...
but I think it's just basically doing it smart, and building it to service some existing need and then once demand takes over, it can grow and take over and have a life of its own? Market demand eventually needs to happen... Not sure... Create the infrasructure that services a market, lifestyle, and then that lifestyle develops more, and there is greater justification through simple market demand for more of that alternative transportation to happen... Market feeds back to demand for infrastructure at some point...?
But I think the market, and taxpayers don't respond well to the stick... Carrots are better... I don't mean just incentives, people wouldn't move downtown from a suburb just to have a tax cut... But they would want to live downtown if it was livable, had perks... Say... Downtown internet hotspots... Park systems, etc.
Generally, a standard highway and a light rail line have about the same given capacity of moving an amount of people over a period of time and distance.
Rail service, at current prices is between $7500 and $8500 dollars per linear foot-- $44,880,000 per linear mile. Almost all light rail lines are built in existing areas where all land has to be purchase and procured through litigation.
Highways, in developed areas, average between $35,000,000 to $45,000,000 a linear mile. In heavily developed areas... like Boston and New York City... highway construction routinely reaches between $180,000,000 to $330,000,000 a linear mile.
Subways, on the other hand, run between anywhere from $140,000,000 to $1,200,000,000 billion per mile. Mind you, subways not only have all of the problems of buying out land rights as with trains... their construction requires special machines (of which there are only a few in the world) and endangers the city above it.
However, this is where the tricky thing comes in...
Subways have a life cycle of about 40 years (if not more).
Light rails last about 25 years.
Highways generally last about 5-7 years for asphalt. More for concrete-- however, a concrete highway is in the hundreds of millions of dollars range.
That means a stretch of highway (a mile) over the course of a life of a subway will end up costing ~$225,000,000 a mile.
The cost per passenger per mile for bus passenger $0.95. Light rail is about $0.85 cents. Subway is like $1.20.
Cars on the other hand cost their drivers $0.55 a mile. I did a rough calculation and the cost of the road per person per mile per day was about $0.25 a linear mile. That's a grand total of $0.80.
If we count the road the bus operates on (if it does indeed operate in its own lane), we can throw on another nickel or dime in that cost.
This brings me to my other point!
If an "average room" is 20' wide (at a at-construction cost of 75$ per square foot) with an additional $115 a linear foot for "standard road", we could build a linear mile of "room" for ~$8,500,000. We'll just toss in an extra $5,000,000 to pad this figure.
Essentially, it is 2.8 times cheaper to build new walkable property (some 108,000 sqt ft of habitable space or 58 1800 sqft units) than new highways. I mean, 240,000 dollars for 1800sqft plus road isn't bad!
In reality, we should be giving HUD more money to build more things instead of the Army Corps of Engineers or the Department of Transportation to build huge single-use infrastructure projects that generally alleviate the problems that come with poor urban planning in the first place.
Although, this argument is a bit of a strawman anyways.
Interstates make up about 30% of the market share of all businesses while they make up less than 10% of all traffic. Not interstate roads (highways, expressways, city streets, rural roads) make up something like 60% of market share and close to 85% of all traffic.
So, specialty roads used primarily by residents and commuters are not exactly "bite-sized" spending. They are enormous money pits that allow non-city-citizen commuters access to the infrastructure of downtown by pillaging federal funds for projects that would be otherwise deemed "insane" by local governments.
The day gas goes to $20 gallon is the day a magical hydrogen fueled or battery powered car just happens to roll out of Flint, MI. and everyone will be extolling the genius of the American planning model - that is until 20 years later when the bateries need to be recycled then you will say how stupid we are, and the circle of self loathing will continue unabaited while everyone else happily lives out their lives.
They're all tiny cities made of ashes, anyways.
Kitchener is a good example of what a blue collar, suburban fordist settlement looks like.
There are nice small, 19th C towns in an agricultural landscape in the surroundings.
If you are interested in saving architectural heritage, there is a campaign to save 41 heritage buildings in nearby Brantford. The local council wants to tear down the 19th C buildings for no reason.
http://michaelcumming.com/2010/02/urban-destruction-in-the-heart-of-brantford-ontario/
http://urbantoronto.ca/content.php?60-Brantford-demolishing-entire-street-of-41-heritage-buildings!
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/savethesouthside/signatures?page=4
Good afternoon! Too late already for Brantford, I hear.. and we are post-fordist no? Community trying to transition to a knowledge based/creative economy etc.? Many empty/soon to be empty factories downtown, although there are more functioning on the outskirts, jobs for many new Canadians., but how secure?Contributes enormously to my anxiety, and must be behind a lot of the 'holes' too.
My personal experience has taught me something about transient populations or mobility, Montagneux' blinding statistics on this are very interesting, I think employers obligations in this area will probably expand. The answer to the thread is probably all about where you happen to be, yes if you're here no if not?
This is the "North America -why?" forum, the ugliness/transportation is part of the conversation. NA used to thrill me but these days it frightens more than thrills, KW I always found scary. So systems that are not resilient are not good in times of change, turning around a supertanker etc..Isn't this a time of change? What about risk management? The scale of the change is the problem and for me sometimes extreme anxiety is the result.
You want to see something worse than Kitchener? Travel out to Red Deer, Alberta. It's like Midland Texas but cold.
I do believe that Canadians use more oil per capita than Americans, and I think Red Deer is the town that makes that stat.
For some really good urban design in N. America check out the older University campus areas. Usually they have a nice walkable density with fairly decent architecture, at least the pre-1950's stuff. It's probably the closest comparison to living in a large European city, i.e. many people don't have a personal auto and instead walk/public transport.
Alberta is pretty bad... On the outskirts of Calgary, row after row of identical "big brick box" homes extending to the horizon...
I think I can understand Elisabeth's point. It not about the ugliness of a country or a suburb or a neighborhood PER SE, but rather, the amount of work, bureaucracy, money and effort put in to generate absolute crap, as a relative measure.
For example with all the awesome licensing measures we have in place in the US, which might be more draconian than any other country in the world (except, perhaps, Japan), we still generate mile after mile of Costco warehouses and McMansion suburbs? What's exactly the net benefit of all that one has to go through to get anything done in the built environment?
As a very stark example, I can more ingenuity, human endeavor, and basic creativity in the first example than the second one:
Dharavi Slums, India
Lancaster, CA
(I am not talking about hygiene, health facilities etc, but just 'interest')
the only difference is, in Lancaster, half of those homes have been foreclosed and the former residents are now living in real shanties (or tent cities) at the edge of town, near the dump. In a word, Dharavi.
Ha Urbanist, Dharavi is in the middle of town though....
montagneux:
I've been thinking about your post regarding return on investment and durability of road work vs. rail vs. subway, etc. Thanks for posting that data by the way, it's interesting.
There are a couple other things I could see that would need to be taken into account, aside from ROI:
1. what is the capacity of each? it seems that our analysis of highway vs. rail is more appropriately analyzed for its usefulness based not just on square footage or ROI, but by how well it meets user demand... if you can prove that the rail meets the commuter demand needs in a much more cost-effective way, then it'll sell... it seems that talking about density of use between the highway and city roads is a bit of a false comparison: it's a little bit like comparing an elevator to circulation corridors on a particular floor, for a multilevel office building... the circulation corridors probably get the most use over the course of the day, but the elevator capacity is determined by the overall peak demand for service (at lunchtime, or in the mornings, after work, etc.) The highway (or alternatively the rail system) operates in a way where its capacity needs are dependent on the peak traffic hours, they handle a huge amount of traffic at certain parts of the day, and are largely empty at other times... So I think it really depends on each individual case...
2. re: "bite sized" construction: what i meant to say regarding "bite sized" is, not that the roads are cheaper, but that projects can be eaten in pieces more easily, as the road system is functioning already and already exists, and so the timing is such that you could fix a particular stretch of road this year or hold off for another while... one of the barriers to rail projects getting off the ground, even though it would be better in the long run, is that right now, up front, it is a significant effort to get it off the ground... once you take a bite, you have to eat the steak... the relief of commuter demand for example will happen, but it takes a significant chunk of time before the new rail system is in operation, and then it's use is perceived by local governments as less of a known quantity vs. roads which they can very easily determine how well it will be used... As you said in another thread, people have cultural preferences for how the consume things... Same goes for how they choose to travel, governments and public take a lot more convincing that something new will work, and not just be a "road to nowhere"... The durability of rail, and the long startup for rail projects I think sort of creates a problem (not that they wouldn't be a better solution), but governments are often motivated not by what is smartest but by the annual budgets, what they know, and how much they can spend *right now*... they care more about how they can stop the bleeding rather than cure the disease... And, it's really an excuse to get money from the federal govt... If we replaced road work with a much more durable and efficient rail system that doesn't need to be rebuilt every 5 to 7 years, what on earth would our local governments do to ask for more money??
Anyway, it does seem that light rail is happening, at least here in Seattle, light rail projects are under way and it is expanding... It doesn't quite replace the interstates but it will provide a nice alternative once we get it going well enough on its way... Hope these projects take off, I think once more cities adopt it, and as we have more and more cases of successful projects, it will catch on...
what is the capacity of each?
It depends. You can check probably the only source on the subject. That is the "Highway Capacity Manual." HCM2010 should be released this month.
But the issue with capacity is actual capacity versus utilization.
One figure here is out all road usage, about 70% of all traffic is generated from private car owners. About 27-29% is LT4 (otherwise known commercial vehicles). Taxis, rental cars, buses and the like make up less than 1% of traffic.
Out of that 70% of traffic, about 40% of that 70% is what is considered "urban high order traffic." To put it in other terms, about 1/3rd (~28% to 35%) of all traffic in the United States is on freeways, expressways and interstates.
There is also what is referred to as urban low order traffic (25% of the 70%) or 17.5% of all traffic occurs on none single-use type roads and at grade highways.
Coincidentally, 3% of all traffic in the United States is done by commercial (5 axle) vehicles on low order urban roads.
What we can draw on this is that urban congestion is more to blame on commuters than commercial vehicles (both semis and others). This is principally the reasoning as to why alternative transportation makes sense.
The reason I brought this up is because it helps to understand where traffic is at and how it moves.
If we take the most traveled highway, I-405 (not even one of the most expensive highways) has 390,000 vehicles travel on it a day.
The least is about 2000-- this is what usually defines a road to nowhere is a road where the usage is so small and limited, it doesn't make economic sense to building them. However, you could say that about the same regarding most interstates in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas.
The reason as to why those highways and interstates aren't branded as roads to nowhere is that the people and goods that travel along them of are economic importance.
This is essentially an argument here-- urban expressways usually never transport goods (in fact, many commercial vehicles are barred from using them). What the do transport is soft goods-- potential man hours worked. The issue here is that commuters have nothing of absolute real value in contrast to say an interstate in Wyoming which maybe used to haul billions of dollars of gold, uranium, gas and oil.
So, in a sense, we can consider commuter transportation modes as "idea pipelines" or "potential economic output paths."
So, anyways... the most traveled highway isn't even technically that large comparative to those in Houston or Atlanta being only 8-10 lanes comparative to 15 or 21 lanes found in Houston and Atlanta.
Anyways, the average interstate or expressway generally sees about 60,000 vehicles per day or about 2500 an hour. Assume there's about 1.5 people per every car, that's roughly ~4000 people per hour.
The average rapid transit line can handle about 36,000 people per hour.
The average light rail line handles between 12,000 and 20,000 people per hour.
Buses are just embarrassing-- they're about 8,000 people per hour at a realistic affordable rate. However, there is so much contention regarding rails versus buses. The Cato Institute and the Heartland Institute love to cream their pants almost monthly writing these articles.
(The argument here is essentially since buses have so little headway time-- the time between when one can stop and another can arrive-- that the actual capacity depends on the number of buses in service. This is in contrast to the concept of Rapid Transit and Light Rail where you have a specific amount of trains running in automation where as the capacity is relatively set.)
[RT and LR are frequently more reliable and have generally lower operating costs because of the sophistication in technology used compared to the particularly low tech approach of buses.]
{Of course, when you get into accessibility issues... wheelchairs and buses don't mix particularly well.}
{[Then you get gems like this article:
"He also challenges the notion of heavy rail systems being capable of running at one-minute headways. The shortest headways in U.S. rail systems are achieved by the San Francisco Bay Area’s BART, at 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco run trolleys at 60-second headways, but only at low speed."
Notice the phrase "heavy rail." Why on Earth would anyone try to compared heavy rail to bus? That's such an unfavorable comparison.
(It's is mildly amusing that there is no comparison in this article between bus service and Rapid Transit).]}
But this is where all of these get blown out of the water.
Four parallel city streets technically have the capacity of an 8-lane highway. Add in bicycles and pedestrians... basic well-designed two lane roads running in tandem can support hundreds of thousands of people per hour.
And, of course, it is purely about each individual local and tastes.
(I absolutely hate buses. I hate the smell of the exhaust. I hate the bumpy ride. I hate the small seats. I hate the awkward boards and boarding process. I'm just not a fan of the bus.)
OAA gave a student award for this project last year!
http://issuu.com/glaciermedia/docs/cdadec09/45
BTW buses have their uses, try double deckers though because if its a longer journey sitting upstairs out of the bustle, its pleasant. They are low tech and dextrous, in London if you want to go fast you take the tube (and hope for the best), if not post congestion charging, a double decker is your only man (a lot comes down to design in the end, not numbers).
I wouldn't discount a well thought out idea for improving the environment that you may find yourself in. But keep in mind that talk is cheap. No matter how well spoken designers like to present themselves.
I would simply say do something about it. Become involved in your local community and educate others of what can or, in your opinion, should be.
Elisabeth,
I can understand what you're saying if you're living in a subdivision scaled to a car on the periphery but the originally pedestrian designed historical city center of any Southern Ontario, or North American town for that matter, is quite nice. Maybe not Kitchener, ?, that is a city i'm not familiar with, but what about Guelph next door? Guelph is lovely and likewise for all the little towns and villages around that region. And having travelled a lot around America I find cities in Ontario and Canada to be cleaner and safer and the difference between rich and poor not as apparent. I have also been to the UK and also find cities in Canada to be quieter and cleaner - in the UK i find, depending on where you are, there is a tension between immigrants and natives that doesn't exist in canada. Making Ontario to me an overall more pleasant and peaceful place. Though I agree that public transport and urban sprawl is definitely a problem here if you live on the periphery as everyone has to own a car because everything is spread out. BTW, ironically, wasn't Kitchener the first place in world (maybe it was just north america?) to have a public recycling program? It was progressive in this regard, at least? plus whatabout TVOnatrio? It's the best public tv station ever and CBC radio is more liberal then college radio.
I do believe we are so, so, so lucky to have TVOntario and CBC, CBC radio 2, CBC radio 3, great campus radio, etc.
suburbia just needs a facelift, enough with grandpa houses already... its 21st century goddamnit!
I wonder why wakeNbuild would think I am not already doing exactly as he suggests? I thought the idea of this forum was that we might TalkNbuild?
Ugly towns and cities in Ontario got that way following a process that is unfolding in Brantford:
http://brantfordexpositor.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2491256
I think regulations here make it harder to keep old buildings. Maybe that explains the 'holes' in KW.
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