Category Archives: Urbanism

Jobs Was A Child of The ’60s

Posted on by
Reply

As the Grateful Dead said in a song about the death in 1970 or so of their harmonica player and singer “Pig Pen,” who also died of liver disease, “Like a steel locomotive, going down the track, he’s gone, and nothing is going to bring him back.” Okay, maybe that was a bit maudlin. But also appropriate, because Steve Jobs was a child of the 1960s, whether or not he liked the Grateful Dead or not. He took LSD, and named it as one of the most significant events of his life. He famously said that Bill Gates would have made better software if he had taken a hit or two of that substance. Jobs named another creature of the 1960s, the Whole Earth Catalog, as one of the most significant products of the Silicon Valley, up there with the Silicon chip. (The Whole Earth Catalog was created by my man Steward Brand, who knew Jobs. Brand is still alive and well, although two decades older than Jobs. Just to close the circle, Brand was one of Ken Kesey’s acid-gobbling “Merry Pranksters.” You can read all about it in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Brand would get into computers, and then architecture and cities, big time. Kevin Kelley, one of Brand’s early editors, would go on to co-found Wired, the bible of high tech. But I digress.) I would say that Jobs, with the first Mac, with the Iphone, with the Ipad, brought a touch of the 60s culture into the mainstream, with his products’ emphasis on beauty, elegance and child-like fun. With their in-your-face openness, and directness, and hippie-like commitment to making it real. Okay, I’m going too far here. Now, 12 year olds in China make his Iphone, and one certainly can’t say that everything about Apple is good, true and beautiful. Jobs was a player in a hard-core, fight to the death industry. But it said something that he accomplished what he accomplished through good design, which when done right, go ways beyond cosmetics. In all, Jobs made the world a better place because he was here. Who could ask for more? We can thank him for giving his life to his products. He probably knew his time here on earth was limited, but he spent his last few years making insanely great tools, rather than lounging on Palm Beach. Thank you, Steve.

Infrastructure as Architecture

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve started teaching a class on infrastructure at the architecture school at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. See here for more info: NJIT Architecture School The two courses I teach, Elements of Infrastructure and History of Infrastructure, are a perfect fit for me. For whatever reason, I’ve gradually become obsessed with the pipes, rails, tubes and other stuff that lie generally beneath our feet. Everyone has got to believe in something; I believe in infrastructure.

Increasingly, the country is too. It and its new leader, President Barack Obama, are turning to infrastructure as the key to lifting ourselves out of bad times and paving the way for future ones. Might work. Here’s a recent column of mine on the subject. Infrastructure column.

Long Boats and Underground Vaults by the River Charles

Posted on by
Reply

By Alex Marshall
For The Powhatan Review
November 1999

Crewing is the ultimate wasp sport. It requires patience, diligence and years of work at the simple task of pulling oars through water, as you park your butt in the bottom of a tiny slivered almond of a boat. Crew is not flashy. There is no crew equivalent of passing the ball behind your back on your way to a slam dunk over the head of a surprised defender. No, crew is all about steady effort for the sake of some future reward that may never come.

To the uninitiated, crew is that sport where teams of two, four, six or eight people sit in skinny boats and haul themselves through the water like ancient teams of galley slaves. The boats are tiny, just a foot or so across, and bizarre looking. It is mostly practiced at or near elite colleges, I suspect, with Harvard being the epi-center.

The sport and its spectators were on display recently on a fall weekend on the Charles River here at Harvard in Cambridge. It was the annual Head of the Charles’ regatta, a crew tradition which involves hundreds of teams coming from all over the world. They came to race along the river and glide under the Parisian-style stone bridges, a classic moment in the sport, like playing tennis at Wimbledon. According to the newspapers, some two hundred thousand of us stood on the banks and the bridges watched the thin boats and their denizens.

In their motion, these boats in motion looked like water bugs jetting over the surface of the water. Their teams pulled themselves across in smooth yet jerky movements. They also reminded me of air hockey pucks, from that game you’d play for quarters where jets of air kept a thin plastic puck floating on top of a table as you whacked it about. The boats appeared to rest on top of the water, not in it.

But to the guys and gals hauling the boats, it probably did not feel so effortless. They were hauling themselves through the water with their thighs, backs and arms. The men were muscular but in a lean, mean way.

The women varied more physically. I watched their backs float underneath me, and noticed with pleasure rounded shoulders and lean arms jutting out of shapely T-shirts, with a pig- or pony-tail usually hanging somewhere. But some women had bulky, linebacker style bodies, with big butts and broad backs. I wonder if they made up for their weight with their strength, or whether their bulk slowed the ship down. I wonder if the other girls ever thought, Jeez, I’m tired of dragging Cheryl’s flab through the water.

Crewing is one of the classic Harvard traditions — one of the few I have bumped across. I arrived here for my year sabbatical expecting to be submerged in tweedy accents and various obscure customs. But although it’s a pretty place, the people and customs are more average looking and acting than in my imagination.

The students look like students elsewhere. Among the undergraduates at Harvard College, there are the standard cliques. The jocks, who walk around the campus in groups and have buzz haircuts on their bullet heads. The artsy students, with interesting haircuts and fashionable clothes. Then the mass of students, who wear conventional clothes on conventional bodies and look pretty non-descript. I suspect most of the undergraduates have been so busying studying in order to get here, that they have not had time to craft the elaborate personal identities as say a slacker, or a rapper, or one of the many other sub-cults of American youth.

Partly though, the student’s casual attire reflects the changing norm of personal dress. The 60s have made us all more casual. Even in the pampered, ultra-elite world of Harvard Business School, which lies across the Charles river on its own carefully maintained campus, the students, who are generally in their 20s and 30s, look like students everywhere. These men and women, who will become CEO’s of major corporations some day, wear jeans and casual shirts. They do not look corporate at all.

You can still find some classic Harvard sights and roles, however. One of my favorite things to do has been to dine at the Harvard Faculty Club. Because I am a fellow, I am rated on the same level as a faculty member and thus automatically a member of this club. This feels like a bit of a charade, but one I fully enjoy and exploit.

The Harvard Faculty club looks as you would expect. Its building is a conservative brick house. The rooms are furnished in dark wood with heavy carpeting and serious paintings on the wall. In the main drawing room, you can lounge on big leather sofas while a nearby fire crackles, helping yourself to one of the many newspapers and magazines placed there daily. The men’s bathroom has a supply of colognes out for use.

On the upstairs walls of the faculty club, there were hung framed photos of the interiors of Harvard dormitories in the 1880s. I saw rooms stuffed with furniture, paintings and knick-knacks. The students wore coats and ties, sat in deep leather chairs and puffed on pipes, probably with nearby servants ready to refill their tea cups. Evidently, class and privilege used to be much more obvious here.

Within the faculty club dining room there is an air of gentle care and attentiveness. The male waiters take my orders without fuss. There is no tipping. The head waiter, Pierre, remembers my name. The only unpleasantness intruding on my comfort is the irrational fear that someone will recognize me as an imposter and throw me out. So far, that hasn’t happened.

Harvard is one of the intellectual capitals of the world, so as well as crewing and leather chairs, you might expect more intellectual treasures and vistas to be found here. They are here, but they are also elusive. No one has yet ushered me into a room and said, Here, you have admittance to the secrets of the universe. There are a lot of smart people here, but I am struck that the professors here are often dealing with the same questions I am, even if they do so with perhaps more facts and skills at their disposal. This can be liberating.

One past fellow in my program said attending Harvard gave him the confidence to try new things in his job, because he realized that even Harvard professors were still trying to figure things out. Final answers are elusive. In all but the hard sciences, (and possibly not even there), accuracy or truth is more a matter of percentages, getting either the practice or a theory right enough to work in some situations some of the time, before events and time wear a model out and exhaust its utility.

Many of the tangible, physical secrets at Harvard are buried, literally, within their many libraries. The dozen libraries here are a vast, intimidating vault packed with records of human striving. Widener Library, the imposing, Greek-style main library with massive columns, has more floors below ground than above it. And these tunnels lead to subterranean chambers of adjacent libraries. I have only briefly explored these dark depths. And when I do so, I find myself quickly clamoring back up into the light, to get away from so many words packed into narrow corridors in low-ceilinged rooms. These subterranean chambers seem like some vast hidden machinery laboring away, below the genteel public face of Harvard’s green lawns and classic brick buildings.

I hope during my time here at Harvard, I discover a few of its secrets. I will try to bring them back, when I resume my more ordinary life in Norfolk.

The Future of Transportation, And Thus Our Cities

Posted on by
Reply

The Future of Transportation

Will the auto and airplane reign supreme?

 

By Alex Marshall

With the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, the political scientist Francis Fukiyama caused a sensation with an essay called “The End of History?” It postulated that, with the relative collapse of Communism, the struggle among rival political systems had ended with a permanent victory for liberal, democratic capitalism. All that was left to do was to refine it.

Is something similar happening with the way we get around? Have we reached “the End of History” with transportation? Will the current system of automobile and airplane travel reign supreme’for now and for centuries hence? Or will something new come along to remake our world, as it has in the past?

The context of such a question is this: Since about 1800, revolutionary changes in our transportation systems have created new types of cities, neighborhoods, and housing, while leaving old ones to wither away, or become antiques.

If history is any indication, we are due for another revolution soon. The car and the highway, and the airplane and airport, have been dominant for almost a century. By comparison, canals lasted about 50 years, streetcars about the same, and railroads about a century as dominant modes of travel.

Yet, some people say that the automobile and the highway are so imbedded in our landscape and lifestyles that nothing will ever challenge their dominance. In effect, they say we have reached the end of the historical road.

“It’s hard to imagine a fundamental change because the automobile system is so flexible,” says urban historian Robert Fishman, author of the 1989 history of suburbia, Bourgeois Utopias, and a professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “All I can imagine is a better balance with a revival of the train and transit connections that have been so shamefully neglected.”

But, if the past is any guide, we won’t see a new revolution until it is upon us. People, maybe even particularly experts, have difficulty envisioning a new transportation context from within the current one. Fishman, although himself skeptical of any coming big change, recalls the scholar who around 1900 predicted that the automobile would never go far because it couldn’t match the utility of the bicycle.

Hovering over this discussion is a single word: sprawl. Our low-density, car-clogged environment is the product of our transportation system. Highways and airports produce low-density sprawl. Old transportation revolutions, such as streetcars and subways, made cities denser because housing and businesses flocked to these transportation points. If we do have another transportation revolution ‘ the personal jet pack, high speed trains, the humble bicycle ‘ it could make sprawl even worse. Or, it could reconstitute our cities around new transportation hubs.

The Past As Prologue
Six words summarize transportation over the last two centuries: canals, railroads, streetcars, bicycles, automobile, and airplanes. Each mode remade the economy and the landscape. Each was generally adopted only after government got behind it financially and legally.

The canal era started in earnest in 1817, when New York State had the gumption to sell $7 million in bonds to pay thousands of laborers to dig a 350-mile trench from Albany to Buffalo. The Erie Canal, when it went into service in 1825, opened up the entire Midwest to shipping and made New York the commercial hub of the New World. Other states and cities frantically dug their own canals in an unsuccessful effort to catch up.

Spurred in part by these efforts, other cities and states began investing in a new technology’railroads’that gradually replaced canals. The railroad created railroad cities, like Atlanta, and converted canal cities, like Chicago, into railroad cities. With the railroads came streetcars, first horse-drawn and then electric.

Because the first railroad tracks were often laid alongside the first canals, the canal cities tended to prosper even as the canals declined in importance. Economists call this phenomenon “path dependence,” (even as they debate its significance), and it still occurs. New York City, for example, is no longer dependent on the Erie Canal, but its because of the canal that that the rail lines, highways and airports were located in and around the city.

From about 1875 to 1925, railroads were at their peak. Urban palaces like New York’s Grand Central Station and Pennsylvania Station were built and opened, so that millions of passengers could shuttle across thousands of miles of tracks that stretched to every corner of the country. Few riders could have imagined that within their lifetimes, weeds would grow along thousands of miles of abandoned tracks.

Although the automobile dates to the 1890s, drivers were scarce until cities, towns, and states began paving roads’which took awhile. Many of the first roads were built, ironically, at the urging of bicyclists, who needed better roads to use their two-wheel contraptions. The League of American Wheelmen convinced the Department of Agriculture to create the Bureau of Public Roads. This small agency would grow into the Federal Transportation Department.

But better roads did not happen overnight. In 1922, 80 percent of U.S. roads were dirt and gravel. At first, railroad companies lent their political muscle to the “good roads” effort. After all, their leaders reasoned, better highways would get rail passengers to the stations more easily.

After World War I, the automobile and later the airplane, served by publicly funded roads and airports, began to supplant the passenger rail system and its intimate companion, the streetcar.
World War I helped convince government and business that investing in roads was worthwhile. During the war, massive railroad congestion brought on by the war effort forced some inter-city industrial transportation onto roads via trucks. Surprisingly (for the time,) it worked. Soon, states and the federal government began investing more in roads and airports, and less in train service.

As urban historian Eric Monkkonen noted in his 1988 book, America Becomes Urban, governments and taxpayers were the fundamental builders of this country’s transportation systems. New York state built the Erie Canal. Federal and state governments gave away a fifth of the nation’s total land area to the railroads. Congress, at the urging of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, financed the Interstate Highway System. Cities and states built airports. Even the New York City subways, although operated by private companies at first, were built with taxpayer dollars.

Each of these transportation innovations’canals, railroads, streetcars, cars, highways, and airplanes ‘ created new ways to live and work, and thus new types of neighborhoods and cities. The banks of Schenectady, New York are still lined with the ornate buildings created during the heyday of the Erie Canal. The streetcar era, which lasted from the late 19th century to World War II, led to thousands of streetcar suburbs, densely populated communities at the fringes of 19th century cities. And of course, the highway and air travel system created the current pattern of low-density sprawl that defines our built environment.

The Next Big Thing
If history is any indication, we are overdue for another change that will change how we travel, and thus change the form of our cities and towns.

“Nothing really revolutionary has occurred since the Wright brothers and the combustion engine, and that’s now about 100 years old,” says Elliot Sander, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University. While some might say this is evidence of the longevity of car-use and air travel, it’s also evidence that we are overdue for a big change. After all, past transportation eras, such as canals to railroads, have lasted from about 50 to 100 years. Then, something new has come along, and created a new dominant transportation system.

What might the next big thing be? Among the possibilities is the nifty Segway, the “gyro-scooter” that enables someone standing on it to point and ride. Or it could be the Solotrek Helicopter Backpack. A user straps it on and rotating blades overhead carry him where he wants. So far only prototype versions exist. Another variation is the Airboard, which hovers four inches off the ground and costs a mere $15,000. Of all these, the Segway actually seems to have a chance to live up to some of its hype.

Maybe the revolution will come in the form of small airplanes. In his 2001 book, Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel, James Fallows, who is himself a pilot, foresees a future where people use small planes like taxis or rental cars for short flights between the thousands of small airports that now are underused.

Rail is another, more likely, option. High-speed rail networks are common in Europe and Japan, and in theory they hold great promise in more densely populated areas of the United States.

The situation now, as is typical in the United States, is a scattershot mix of aggressive policies by some states mixed with erratic federal actions. Various states and coalitions of states are aggressively lobbying to create or preserve high-speed rail corridors, under the assumptions that being in the high-speed loop will be as important as being on the Interstate in the 1950s. North Carolina are creating a ‘sealed corridor’ for high-speed rail across the state; California and Florida have both received Federal grants toward high-speed rail initiatives; The Wisconsin-based, Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, which is a coalition of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin, is pushing for a high-speed network with Chicago as the hub. And of course in the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is running what might be called its ‘almost-high-speed’ service, Acela Express. Meanwhile though, Congress perennially discusses killing or reorganizing Amtrak and has yet to really get behind any national rail policy, even while some members are quite passionate about it.

The Buck Rogers version of high-speed rail, a Magnetic Levitation train, has been around for a while, but working examples are still few. Demonstration versions exist in Germany, Japan and even Norfolk, Va. But the only real working version is in China. Shanghai has just finished a $30 billion Magnetic Levitation rail line between its airport and downtown. The train reaches 250 mph and travels the 19 miles between airport and downtown in eight minutes, compared to an hour by taxi. Theoretically, Maglev trains, which float above the tracks on magnets, could reach speeds up to 500 mph. Despite generally parsimonious funding, the Federal Railroad Administration is administering a national competition, the winner of which would get funds to build a working maglev line in the United States.

Whether it’s Maglev or a Segway, the challenge in predicting radical change is that by its very nature it tends to be unforeseen.

“We’re very bad at predicting those big discontinuities,” says Bruce Schaller of Schaller Consulting, a transportation consulting firm in New York. “It’s like the Internet. I remember in the early 1980s, I visited a friend at Stanford who had e-mail on the early ARPA network. I said, ‘That’s really cool.’ But I never thought about it as something I could do.” Schaller notes that for the last few years, mass transit use has increased faster than highway use. This hasn’t happened in a half-century.

In fact, most transportation planners are conservative in their predictions. “I would not be investing in jumbo helicopters, dirigibles, personal rapid transit systems, motorized scooters, powered roller skates, etc., although they sure would be fun,” says Elliot Sander of the Rudin Center.

Autophilia
To its defenders, the automobile is irreplaceable, no matter what the predictions. If we run out of oil, they say, we can switch to hydrogen fuel cells. If gas prices skyrocket, we can buy smaller cars. If global warming increases, we can reduce emissions. And if our roads become overwhelmingly congested, we will simply build more roads.

“I don’t think congestion will stop the automobile,” says Jose G’mez-Ib”ez, the Derek Bok professor of urban planning and a leading transportation planner at the Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School at Harvard University. “I think the solution to congestion is to spread out more. There’s no doubt that we will have more mass transit in the future, but as people get richer in places like China, are they going to want to drive, and be mobile, and maybe drive SUVs? The answer is ‘yes.'”

“The automobile will continue to be the dominant mode of getting around,” says Mark Kuliewicz, traffic engineer for the American Automobile Association in New York. “Cars may be powered by something other than gasoline, and hopefully soon, but they’ll still be there.”

End of the Road?
But auto travel is dependent on roads. And an increasing number of critics believe that the expanding universe of highways’what historian Kenneth Jackson has called “the Big Bang of decentralization that started in the 1920s’ — has about reached its limit.

Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association in New York (where I am a senior fellow), argued in a speech last year at the World Economic Forum in New York that for political, financial, and practical reasons, it is becoming increasingly difficult to build more highways. More and more citizens accept the fact that we cannot build our way out of congestion and sprawl, he said.

Yaro pointed out that highway construction has drastically slowed in the tri-state New York metropolitan area. From 1951 to 1974, the region’s highway system added some 54 miles a year. In the last decade, it has added only four miles per year.

The message is clear, said Yaro in an interview. “I strongly believe that we’ve used up the capacity of our 20th century infrastructure systems, and we’re going to need a heroic and visionary (and expensive) set of new investments to create capacity for growth in the 21st century.’

A key investment would be “new or significantly upgraded intercity rail systems in the half-dozen metropolitan corridors where high-speed rail makes sense.” Yaro is essentially endorsing some version of the high-speed or improved rail networks being pushed in Congress and by coalitions of cities and states.

Smart Roads
Most experts foresee increasing use of high-tech or “smart” technology to wrest more capacity from overloaded roads. In its more elaborate forms, smart technology includes things like imbedding highways with magnets, which would pull cars or trucks along at 100 mph and stop them when needed.

It also includes cars that brake themselves; GPS positioning systems that allow drivers (or their cars) to sort their ways around traffic jams; and computer chips and scanners that allow governments to price highways and charge drivers for using them, with different rates for different times.

The latter, usually called Congestion Pricing, is the Holy Grail of transportation specialists. Although once considered politically impossible, the idea of paying for using roads may now be acceptable to a public searching for a way out of congestion’even it means ending one of the last arenas of egalitarianism, the highway.

Highway space “is a scarce resource, and if it is scarce, we have to manage it. In a market economy, this means pricing,” says Sigurd Grava, professor of urban planning at Columbia University, and author of the new book, Urban Transportation Systems: Choices for Community.

“This will be the first time we will manage the use of the public right of way. In the past, anyone has been able to walk, ride a horse, or use a motor vehicle without restrictions except for traffic control. But this is changing,” says Grava.

By definition, congestion pricing would eliminate traffic jams on any highway or road in the country. But at what price? In recent years in a federal experiment on Interstate 15 in San Diego, drivers paid as much as $8 during peak periods for congestion-free traveling on an eight-mile stretch of highway. At less busy times, prices dropped to 50 cents.

In 2000, transportation planners with Portland’s Metro regional government modeled how congestion pricing would change the region if used on key highways. They found citizens would buy smaller cars, drive less, and live closer to where they work.

With evolving computer technology, drivers could be charged for using even a neighborhood street. This could work similar to Mayor Ken Livingstone’s successful attempt to charge drivers to enter center-city London. Automatic cameras photograph license plates and send drivers a bill. Instituted in March 2003, the plan has already reduced traffic in London by 20 percent and won over many of its initial opponents.

Managing traffic, whether through smarter internal guidance systems in the automobiles or some version of congestion pricing, has the potential to substantially add capacity and efficiency to our road network, say most experts. “We’ve doubled and tripled the number of planes in the skies in the last generation, even though very few new airports have been built,” notes one federal highway official who chose to remain anonymous. “We’ve done it through better air traffic control.” Reasoning by analogy, the official said the ground equivalent of air traffic control, such as automated guidance systems, better traffic information and more pervasive tolling, could wring substantially more capacity out of our current allotment of asphalt.
On The Ground
Whether the future brings simply better cars, or Star-Trek like transporters, cities and towns here and abroad will change as a result. As current transportation systems evolve, cities and towns are evolving with them.

In France, for example, the high-speed train network is producing new commuting patterns. For example, some people are living in Paris, yet commuting to jobs in Tours, a medium-sized city about 150 miles southwest from Paris. On the high-speed train, this journey takes 58 minutes. In New Jersey, suburban rail towns are reviving around improved transit connections to Manhattan. In Atlanta, the excessive highway building of the last few decades has produced both suburban sprawl, and, paradoxically, a revival of inner city neighborhoods as people flee congested freeways.

So what’s ahead for our communities? Yaro and several others see a future in which new transit lines make the suburbs more like the city. This future is not so imaginary. Around the New York region, classic commuter rail towns are reviving around substantial reinvestments in the rail system, like the new, $450 million rail transfer station in New Jersey’s Meadowlands.

Cities evolve in unexpected ways. The introduction of freeways decimated many downtowns in the 1950s, something unpredicted at the time. Houston’s downtown in 1960, for example, had become mostly surface parking lots. But today in Houston, tall parking garages have replaced much of the surface parking, and the downtown is substantially denser. Perhaps in the future, more office buildings will replace the parking garages, and people will take commuter rail service to work. In fact, the city is already building a light rail line downtown.

We could also go the other way. If auto use continues at the same level and personal jets take off as Fallows and some others predict, sprawl is likely to increase. New homes and businesses would spring up around small airports throughout the country.

An unstable mix of government subsidies, technological promise, and private profit will determine what comes next, and this will vary from place to place. Indicators like wealth will not always offer reliable clues as to what transportation systems particular societies will adopt.

Consider the humble bicycle. It’s used extensively in China, which has a very low per capita income, and in Scandinavia, which has a very high per capita income. In Copenhagen, more than a third of commuters use bicycles. The point is that wealth alone does not adequately predict transportation use. You might say that the Chinese use bicycles because they have to; the Danish because they want to.

What Planners Can Do
For the most part, U.S. urban planners work separately from transportation planners. The average state or city planning director tends to react to transportation decisions, rather than to make them. Planners have tended to focus on zoning and land-use regulation, which is often auxiliary to the real work being done by the transportation engineers.

In a better ordered world, land planners would have responsibility for transportation planning, (or supervise those who do it), and urban designers would be directly involved with state and federal highway planning.

We probably haven’t reached the end of history when it comes to transportation. But whatever the future, it would be a better one if we had a broader range of choices. As a country, we have tended to lurch from one extreme to another. In the 1890s, we had the most extensive rail system in the world’and one of the worst road systems. By the 1950s, we had abandoned our extensive streetcar system. Today, we lack a decent passenger rail system but have a great highway system. Like the fiber-optic cable industry and the Internet rage, transportation has proceeded in a boom-bust fashion.

When the next big thing does comes along, let’s not be too quick to abandon proven modes. The past teaches not only that change comes, but that the best societies offer a range of transportation choices, including using one’s own two feet.
END

–Published in Planning Magazine, May 2003

Resources
–Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition. www.midwesthsr.org
–High Speed Ground Transportation Association. www.hsgta.org.
–National Association of Railroad Passengers. www.narprail.org.
–American Highways Users Alliance. www.highways.org
–Transportation Alternatives. www.transalt.org
–Surface Transportation Policy Project. www.transact.org

 

Moving Hampton Roads

Posted on by
Reply

“The Joseph Papers”, Summer 2000. This paper was commissioned by The Joseph Center at Christopher Newport University for the study of local, state and regional government. It was the inaugural edition of “The Joseph Papers,” which are meant to provide a forum for the discussion of regional cooperation in the Norfolk Metropolitan Area. The “Joseph Papers” are scheduled to be published biannually. This paper examined regional transportation.

By Alex Marshall

Three hundred and twenty years ago a surveyor pulled his boat up on the muddy bank of a river and laid out the rudiments of a street system; streets for a new town named Norfolk, carved out of what was then Lower Norfolk County.

Virginia didn’t need towns much in 1680. Plantation owners shipped tobacco directly to England from docks on the James and other rivers. But the King didn’t like this decentralized system, so he ordered the General Assembly to set up towns to facilitate trade; twenty new towns in all, including Norfolk, Elizabeth City and soon afterward Hampton — and what we now call Hampton Roads was born.

Transportation has always been central to Hampton Roads, as it has to most cities. If they didn’t sit on a huge body of water that opens onto the Atlantic Ocean, Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Hampton, and Virginia Beach would not exist. Things have changed a lot in the past 400 years, but access to principal transportation links is still crucial to a region’s economy.

Today, Hampton Roads is contemplating many transportation projects; from the 3rd Crossing and getting in on a high-speed rail line down the East Coast, to the everyday widening of boulevards and streets. How can we think about these projects and others in ways that maximize the wealth of the region and its quality of life?

I posit something here. That we in Hampton Roads have tended to think about transportation the wrong way, and that this wrong way of thinking is hurting our living standards, our potential as a region and our quality of life. Like most regions, we have tended to make transportation decisions reactively, in response to traffic jams or the loudest complaints. What we have seldom done is to use transportation ‘ the highways, train lines, airports and smaller pieces like streets, bike paths and sidewalks ‘ strategically, in order to build a better economy, and a better place to live.

Transportation is one of the core functions of government. Where and how we build roads, train lines and airports are wagers by society, bets placed on the best way to structure ourselves. But they should be seen as such. As with education decisions, transportation decisions build the future.

When one’s eye stretches across Hampton Roads, one sees a sprawling mass of subdivisions, shopping centers and office parks, stretching from Williamsburg to North Carolina, connected by thin reeds of superhighways across meandering bodies of water, and punctuated by isolated airports. How do we knit this assemblage into a more prosperous and cohesive whole?

We have two big problems in Hampton Roads: Our practical isolation from the rest of the country, and our over abundance of suburban sprawl. Thinking differently about transportation could solve both these problems.

Forty years ago, Lewis Mumford, the great urban planner and historian, asked forty years ago: “What is transportation for?” That’s still the key question. As Mumford answered, it is NOT about just moving cars from place to place. It is about understanding how highways, train lines and airports, ‘ the tools of transportation, ‘ interact with their environment, and build a community.

To Paris, New York, or Raleigh
Let’s say you leave your house in the morning to take a plane, train or private car to a meeting in Washington. How will that experience be? Not very nice. The train is slow and seldom. The plane is outrageously expensive. And the private car on the public highway is shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of other travelers. And unlike on a plane or a train, in a private car you cannot prepare for the meeting by reading or writing.

Let’s change the trip. Let’s say you are going to Raleigh, not very far away as the crow flies. How are the connections? Even worse. In fact, our connections are poor to just about anywhere outside Hampton Roads.

These linkages to other parts of a country and the globe are what I call external transportation. They are the building blocks of a region’s economy. They are our airports, sea ports, Interstates and train lines. To make it today, a region should have a great airport, great train links, great Interstate connections, and a great port’or as many of these as possible. Right now, Hampton Roads has only one ‘ a great port.

Hampton Roads has historically done a poor job of establishing major transportation links – air, rail and highways – that would complement the port and multiply its economic power. This is partly the fault of national transportation policy, but it’s also a product of poor local and state decisions.

In 1957 Congress passed The Defense and Interstate Highway Act. As the first part of its name suggests, the official rationale for the largest public works project in human history was to help move troops and supplies across the country. So it is odd, and unfair, that the Norfolk/Newport News/Virginia Beach metropolitan area was left with some of the poorest Interstate connections in the country. State legislators, part of the Byrd machine, paid little attention to Hampton Roads. They focused on Richmond, which ended up with I-95 and I-64.

The 1960s and 70s were a time of great airport expansions. Hampton Roads missed out once again. Around 1970, we had a chance to build a major regional airport. Sites in then rural Chesapeake and Suffolk ‘ now covered with subdivisions ‘ were examined. But unsure if air traffic would materialize, and unable to agree among ourselves, we expanded the isolated Norfolk and Newport News airports instead.

By comparison, let’s look at Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1970, the Charlotte and the Norfolk airports had about the same amount of traffic, a few million passengers a year. Now, the Charlotte airport handles about 25 million passengers a year. Norfolk International Airport, our region’s largest, handles only 3 million passengers a year. Norfolk, once the 43rd largest airport in the country, has slipped to 60th.

If Hampton Roads is to improve its economy, then beefing up those major transportation links should be a top priority. It will not be easy.

Building A Better Place to Live
Let’s step out of that house again, only this time you are driving to work, to the mall on a Saturday, or just walking across the street to a neighbor’s. With any of these tasks, you are linked by a public web of streets, highways, and sidewalks.

It’s these I call the internal system of transportation. This system not only gets us from here to there; it helps determine the form of the places where we live. It even determines the type of home we live in. It’s no accident that homes in Ghent, in Norfolk ,’ a neighborhood built around a streetcar line in 1890, ‘ are tall and statuesque, and packed closely together. Just as it is no accident that the homes in those new subdivisions around Williamsburg built around easy access to the Interstate, are low-slung and sprawling.

Just as we usually fail to use external transportation strategically, we fail in a similar way with internal transportation. We should be building transportation systems with an eye toward what type of environment they produce. Instead, on a day to day basis, our planners build roads to solve traffic jams ‘ which demonstrably does not work. In fact, in the last 50 years, we have built more roads than in all of human history, and traffic has gotten worse and worse.

One need only look at Atlanta to see the effects of trying to solve traffic problems by building roads. This central southern city has invested more in highways per capita than almost any city in the country. The result? Its residents now drive more miles per day than anyone, and spend more time stuck in traffic.

In 1982 the average American spent 16 hours sitting in traffic. In 1997 that number rose to 45. Atlanta’s numbers went from 16 to 68! In Hampton Roads, delays increased from nine hours in 1982 to 34 in 1997’that’s not as bad as Atlanta, but it’s still an increase of almost 400 percent in just 15 years!

With both internal and external transportation, a balanced system is best. We should build cities where people have alternatives to their cars. The roads might still be congested, but fewer people would depend on them if they could use a bicycle, a trolley, or their own two-feet. That’s why efforts to build light rail lines around Hampton Roads should continue. That’s why less publicized endeavors, like making areas more accessible by bike, should proceed.

Portland, Oregon is fashioning an American version of the European compact city. A regional growth boundary has helped shrink the area, and the transportation department is building fewer roads and highways. Meanwhile, the regional government encourages neighborhood and smaller city centers to develop in a way that allows people to drive, bicycle, or walk to them.

The result: Portlanders drive an average of 20 miles a day, compared to 32 miles in Atlanta.

What we don’t need more of in Hampton Roads is limited-access highways within the developed metropolitan area. These roads were designed for long-distance travel, not daily commuting and shopping. That’s why the Southeastern Expressway, proposed from Virginia Beach to Chesapeake, is a bad idea. It goes from one suburb to another, exactly the type of highway unsuited for short commuting. It would greatly exacerbate sprawl.

It bears repeating. To diminish sprawl, we should diminish highway building and widening within the developed area. We should put that money into improved bus service, light rail lines and redesigning streets to accommodate more bicyclists and walkers.

Not Doing The Job
In our region, the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission is the principal long-range planning body for transportation. In general, it has missed opportunities by oiling the squeaky wheels of traffic congestion, rather than building a long-term vision for the area.

In its 1999 report, The Future of Transportation in Hampton Roads, the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission examines and endorses seven major projects: the Hampton Roads Crossing ($2.4 billion), the I-64 improvements on the Peninsula ($1.3 billion), the CSX corridor light rail line ($600 million), the Route 460 expansion ($1 billion), the Norfolk/Virginia Beach light rail ($1 billion), the Midtown tunnel and Pinners Point connection ($650 million), and the Southeastern Expressway ($425 million.)

The weaknesses are not in these individual projects ‘ some of them are needed, some of them are useless ‘ but in the method the planners use for selecting and evaluating them. In general, the planners picked these transportation projects by looking at where congestion is heaviest ‘ and recommending expansion.

The HPRDC planners should be asking how a proposed project will affect land-use, and how it will affect economic development. Building highways in response to traffic jams usually makes congestion worse in the long run by increasing reliance on the automobile.

Art Collins, executive director of the Commission, said the Commission was hampered because it lacked the authority to combine land-use and transportation into a planning package. This is true. It would help Hampton Roads if land-use and transportation planning were combined under one regional entity. But absent that, it does not mean that the HRPDC cannot predict how its projects will affect land-use, or how major transportation projects can promote economic development.

Regional leaders are recognizing these problems: “It’s obvious we can’t continue to build more and more roads,” said Clyde Hoey, the head of the Chamber of Commerce on the Peninsula. “You reach the point of diminishing returns.”

Southbound ‘ An Opportunity
If we thought more strategically about transportation we might find our vision drifting southward.

Standing on the southern-most border of Hampton Roads ‘ in Virginia Beach on the North Carolina line ‘ you are almost as close to Raleigh as you are to Richmond. As the crow flies, you are only about 125 miles away from one of the richest and fastest growing areas in the nation.
The average income of Hampton Roads residents continues to decline relative to the rest of the nation. Just the opposite is true for Raleigh-Durham, due to its growing concentration of high-tech industry based around the Research Triangle and the universities. But we here in Hampton Roads are cut off from the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area. By car, the usual means, it takes a good four or five hours, half of which is non-interstate. Politically, culturally and economically, Raleigh seems a million miles away.
If Hampton Roads could connect itself better to Raleigh, we could end our status as a dead-end cul-de-sac on the East Coast. We would connect with several Interstates, as well as a new train line being built between Raleigh and Charlotte. And with our huge port, there are natural connections. Virginia International Terminals now gets 30 percent of its total volume in shipping through North Carolina. Direct highway linkage would improve the port’s competitive advantage.

Our planners have ignored this opportunity because they plan in response to existing traffic patterns. Thinking more strategically about transportation could cast the now light traffic between Hampton Roads and Raleigh in a new light.

High-Speed Rail ‘ the Next Interstate?
We are doing something correctly in the present. And that is the commitment regional leaders are showing to being part of the proposed high-speed rail system down the East Coast. Leaders understand that being left out of this line would be comparable to being left out of the Interstate highway system in the 20th century or the railroad system in the 19th century.

The decision by the General Assembly this year to award $25 million for initial planning of a high-speed line down the Route 460 corridor from Petersburg is wonderful news.

How can we ensure that this high-speed rail system does not pass us by?

I suggest playing the military card as strongly as possible. Navy and business leaders should argue as a team that a high-speed line must connect to the country’s largest naval base. After all, defense concerns justified the Interstate highway system. If a major war occurred, high-speed train connections could be vital for moving troops and supplies. Can the cooperation of Navy officials be gained now?

And Hampton Roads should be part of the main line’not a spur. That’s why the 460 path might be better than a route down the Peninsula, because it would be easier for the line to continue south to North Carolina.

The point with all these choices is that we can build better places to live if we think about transportation more consciously and understand its effects. It is the most important tool we have for shaping our environment. If we learn to use it more effectively, we’ll have a more livable and prosperous region.

ALEX MARSHALL, A FORMER STAFF WRITER FOR THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT, IS A LOEB FELLOW AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY’S GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN. HIS FIRST BOOK, HOW CITIES WORK: SUBURBS, SPRAWL AND THE ROADS NOT TAKEN, WILL BE PUBLISHED THIS YEAR. MARSHALL SPECIALIZES IN WRITING ABOUT URBAN PLANNING ISSUES. THIS ESSAY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AS THE INAUGURAL EDITION OF “THE JOSEPH PAPERS,” A PROJECT BY THE JOSEPH CENTER FOR THE STUDY OR LOCAL, STATE AND REGIONAL GOVERNMENT AT CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY IN NEWPORT NEWS.

 

Learning to Walk: Not Always So Easy in the Contemporary City

Posted on by
Reply

Driving along Route One in New Jersey last week, looking at the mammoth car dealerships and shopping centers lining the eight-lane highway, it was difficult to see how the words of noted Danish urbanist and architect Jan Gehl applied in such an environment. Where was there a public space to revive? Where was there a place to put a sidewalk cafe, a bicycle lane or a bench?

Gehl had spoken that same night before an audience of public officials and interested citizens in nearby Princeton, most of whom were participating in The Mayors’ Institute on Community Design for two days at Princeton, organized by Regional Plan Association and the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, Office of Smart Growth. Gehl spoke at McCosh Hall, inside one of the classic stone buildings at the university, as students made their way outside over a thin blanket of snow.

Gehl, Director of the Center for Public Space Research at the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, has been practicing his profession for four decades. Similar to William “Holly” Whyte in New York City, Gehl has spent his career examining and analyzing public spaces, studying how to keep them vibrant, or make them so. His books include New City Spaces; Life Between Buildings; and Public Spaces-Public Life. The distillation of his work centers around that most ordinary of activities: walking. “We are born to walk,” Gehl said, as he sauntered across the stage, demonstrating one version of that activity. “We are slow-moving animals. All our senses are designed to move at 5 kilometers an hour. Everything important is done on our feet, as we were meant to be.

Walking is more than walking. Walking is life.” He also praised related activities, including sitting, standing, watching and bicycling. His work is a study of urban pleasure, and the ways of producing more of it.

His ideals are classic historic cities like Barcelona, or revived newer ones like Portland in the United States. His native Copenhagen has been his workshop. There, thanks to several decades of what Gehl called “tweaking,” people stroll, bicycle and hang out as a matter of course. His statistics are amazing. Thirty-three percent of people in Copenhagen bicycle to work, Gehl said, while another third use public transit.

The key to generating great public spaces, of course, is taming that dominant master and mistress of most American cities, the car, and the devices created to handle it – the highway, the parking lot and the garage. Citizens must ask their leaders to place other priorities ahead of moving as many cars through a place as possible, or parking them once they get there.

This means removing parking spaces and lanes of traffic. In Copenhagen, the city’s traffic engineer has methodically removed parking spaces each year, while adding space for cycling and walking. “If you remove the parking,” Gehl said, “people won’t drive.” His portrayal of bicycling in Copenhagen would startle many Americans, who tend to view it as primarily a sport. “It’s a transportation system,” Gehl said of cycling.

“It’s not just for the freaks with the bicycle helmets and the padded elbows.” With regards to public spaces, Gehl said, there are four types of cities: the Traditional City, the Invaded City, the Abandoned City and the Reconquered City. Traditional cities are those like Venice, where people have never stopped walking. An invaded city is one like Naples, where leaders have allowed cars to take over squares and sidewalks. Abandoned cities are those like Houston, with ghost-like centers.

Reconquered cities are those like Portland, where citizens have reclaimed the public sector through wise policies.

Seeing the urban vitality Gehl described as a possibility, it was difficult not to endorse his prescriptions. But were they really valid for much of the contemporary American landscape? Suburban municipalities like Virginia Beach, which is actually the most populous city in Virginia, lack any center to reconquer, much less abandon. At times, Gehl seemed to assume the existence of a traditional city framework. He twice spoke about “starting at the railway station” when talking of how to revive public spaces, seemingly unaware that most American cities lacked them.

Still, his words clearly applied to traditional towns like Princeton, which has a centuriesold structure of streets and buildings to revive.

In these traditional towns and cities, attempts to squeeze in more parking garages and more lanes of traffic are viewed by some as eroding the community’s charm. Adding more bike lanes, buses and jitneys, and actually removing parking and traffic lanes in most towns in the tri-state area would be revolutionary here.

Change is possible. It was somewhat gratifying to learn that Copenhagen was not always a Mecca for bicyclists and boulevardiers. In the 1960s, Gehl said, Danish planners were actually discouraging cycling under the theory that this would reduce bicycle accidents with cars. It was not until the gas crisis of the 1970s that planners began to revive the practice. Over the coming years, planners encouraged strolling and walking as well, and pedestrianized more streets and plazas. Many people objected, Gehl said, because they thought it was not consistent with traditional Danish character that valued privacy and the home. The Danish were not Italians, they said, accustomed to dwelling in public places.

“Now, we are more Italian than the Italians,” he said. “We have developed a public-life culture that no one would have thought possible 40 years ago.” Particularly astute were his observations of how the needs of people have changed over the generations. Once, people hungered for open space; now, they hunger for each other.

“One hundred years ago on a Sunday, people would rush away from the crowded city into the woods,” Gehl said. “Today on a Sunday, people rush from the undercrowded suburbs into the overcrowded city.” Gehl’s philosophy was a possible challenge to the architects and designers of the World Trade Center site. He criticized what he called “dog-shit planning,” where each architect lays his piece, and the space left over is considered public space. According to LMDC’s Alex Garvin, the opposite will be true at Ground Zero, with the chosen designer focusing first on the public spaces. If so, Gehl would approve.

“The proper hierarchy of planning,” Gehl said, is “life, space and buildings, not buildings, space, life.”

–Alex Marshall, Senior Editor, RPA.First Published Feb. 6, 2003, in Spotlight on the Region, of Regional Plan Association in New York


Atlas Is Still Shrugging – And Riding the Subway

Posted on by
Reply

First published in The New York Observer
March 25, 2002
by Alex Marshall

When I take the subway, and enter into that labyrinth of tunnels and tracks that transport some five million of us daily, I think about Atlas Shrugged, that mad, 1,200-page homage to money and markets written by Ayn Rand, the late Russian ‘migr’ accustomed to wearing an embroidered silver dollar sign on her black cape, and one-time guru to Alan Greenspan and other important money men.

The first way they relate is obvious: The subway system, like the mythical Atlas, supports our world. It created the New York we know and usually love, of skyscrapers leaping out of the ground, filled with people. The built environment we think of as New York City grew out of the subway and its capacity to bring millions of people more or less at the same time to the same place. While Manhattan’s grid existed before the subway system, its skyscrapers did not-nor did its amazing employment density, which was based on moving millions into the city daily.

The late, great World Trade Center provides a good example. What if the Port Authority had built the towers without the No. 1 line and the PATH train beneath it and the ferry nearby? How much parking would you have needed so all those people could drive into Manhattan?

Well, using the standard suburban-developer’s formula of one parking space for every 250 square feet of office space, you would need 56,000 parking spaces for the World Trade Center’s 14 million square feet. Which means you would need 560 acres of parking, or basically all of lower Manhattan, because you can only fit 100 parking spaces per acre. So basically, you would’ve had to convert everything below Canal Street, from Tribeca to the Staten Island ferry, into a parking lot for one building complex. Or you could build parking garages. If you built the garages with the same expansive 50,000-square-foot plates as the twin towers, you’d need two 190-story parking garages to sit beside the 110-story World Trade Center towers. You would also need a 50-lane freeway to get the people there and back.

Most people don’t understand transportation. They think we have these places – like Times Square or, say, a shopping mall outside Atlanta – and we figure out how to move around within and between them. Actually, it works just the opposite: We create ways to move around, and that creates places. The subway and train lines created the New York we love, the same way the interstate highways created the Atlanta suburban sprawl we hate.

New York is so different in its physical form because a subway, unlike a highway, can move many people quickly to more or less the same place. A highway moves 1,800 vehicles per lane per hour. A good subway can move 60,000 to 80,000 people per track per hour!

So we are creations, in a sense, of New York’s transit system. But, like the hard-working capitalists in Rand’s novel, the subway gets no respect and little attention. The casual rider doesn’t appreciate it; the feds feed it last, after lavishing money on Georgia interstates and mining subsidies to Utah.

So that’s one way the subway relates to Atlas Shrugged. The second way the subway relates is less obvious, but more crucial. It’s that Ayn Rand was wrong! In Atlas Shrugged, she details her theory that capitalists, like her hero, John Galt-those out to make a buck-create all the value in the world, and the rest of us are just freeloaders. To Ayn Rand and all her libertarian, neoconservative soul brothers at the Cato and Manhattan institutes, the people who create value and prosperity in this world are the Mike Bloombergs and the Bill Gateses. Government is at best a necessary evil, there just to tidy up the manly work done by the capitalists.

Now this makes sense to sophomores in college and John Tierney on the Metro page of The Times, but it’s just flat wrong. The world we live in rests on a vast system of publicly funded (and usually publicly built) infrastructure. Sure, people start companies and do neat stuff. But they use workers who receive public education, and they get places on highways, planes and subways that government has either built or massively subsidized. The free market doesn’t create infrastructure, at least not very well. John Galt and the other capitalists in Atlas Shrugged depend on government to build a transportation infrastructure for them, educate their workers, and create a legal system that allows them to buy and sell. Government creates the infrastructure of capitalism: physical, intellectual and legal.

This is true in New York most of all. It’s no accident that New York, symbol of free-wheeling capitalism, has the most extensive and elaborate mass-transit system and social-welfare state. Compared to the rest of the country, New York is Sweden.

So who is this Atlas that’s carrying the world? It’s us, the taxpayers. And where does that leave us? In the hands of the politicians. The good news is that there are signs that Mayor Bloomberg gets it: He’s talked respectfully not only of the transit system, but of the parks, water mains and other systems that make our city work.

If we wanted to make this city even better, then the easiest way would be to pour money into the subway system first, and then the commuter rail, ferries and Amtrak. They are like blood lines to vital organs. A wish list would include the Second Avenue subway and bureaucratic changes like making the MetroCard common currency on all trains, ferries and buses, no matter what state they originate from.

But we shouldn’t just make the transit system more efficient; we should make it beautiful. It’s a sign of the hostility with which we regard public infrastructure that most of it looks like the underside of a kitchen sink. A few years back, I rode the new No. 14 subway line in Paris to the Biblioth’que Nationale, those giant glass bookends that sit over a cool subterranean complex. The subway fit right into this Schrager-like aesthetic. The platforms were separated from the open tracks by a wall of glass. When the train pulled in, its doors lined up with these glass walls, and the two opened together. It had other nice touches. The stations were actually works of architecture, both inside and out.

Our subways could be like that: marvels of both engineering and aesthetics. The Second Avenue subway line, which would take people from the Bronx all the way to lower Manhattan, could be a showcase of the best in design and architecture.

Even when factoring in the better economy and increasing population of New York, more people than expected have ridden the subways and buses in the last 15 years. Why? Probably because the subway cars are no longer covered with graffiti, the stations rarely smell of urine and the M.T.A. has spruced up the stations with new flooring, tiles and railings. That’s been wonderful, but it’s just a first step.

As we contemplate our post-9/11 future, we can choose to make our city a better place in ways that are both sensible and efficient. We don’t have to be like the late Ms. Rand; we can take the subway.

It’s Dangerous To Cycle in The City — That’s Too Bad

Posted on by
Reply

How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?

The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.

There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.

Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.

I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.

Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.

Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.

But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?

I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.

New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.

But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.

Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.

I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.

A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.

But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.

Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.

Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.

The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.

As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.

There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.

The city is not inactive on the cycling front.

The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.

‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.

Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.

Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.

So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.

–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.

How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?

The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.

There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.

Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.

I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.

Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.

Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.

But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?

I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.

New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.

But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.

Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.

I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.

A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.

But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.

Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.

Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.

The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.

As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.

There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.

The city is not inactive on the cycling front.

The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.

‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.

Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.

Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.

So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.

–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.