Rethinking Cities

Lately I’ve been thinking about the adverse impact of cars on our landscape.  Most familiar are of course oil use, pollution, noise and traffic.  Less commonly discussed are things like:

• fatalities, injuries and accidents compared to other forms of transportation
• miles of pavement in the form of parking lots and roads which contribute to stormwater issues
• the sprawl of suburbia enabled by widespread car ownership.

But beyond even these things, I’ve started thinking about:

• the primacy of cars and trucks over pedestrian and bike traffic (is it a natural condition to fear for your life walking across a road?)
• the space taken up by the industries supporting or necessitated by a car-ful society (dealers with oceans of parking lots for their unsold vehicles, mechanics and gas stations)
• the wasted time of police monitoring vehicle traffic.
• how people can feel stranded and isolated if they do not have a car to travel the ever-increasing distances from where they live to where they need to be to work, socialize and shop.

There are surely more.

This line of thought started early this spring when I found Car Free Cities via a comment on Colin Beavan’s blog.  It described a plan for urban life that eliminated the need for cars (and trucks and buses).  The stated goals of the car-free plan reclaiming urban space for people rather than vehicles, restoring social fabric and quality of urban life, with an eye to environmental benefits and energy efficiency.

I should note right away that this is only a  design for cities.  As the author JH Crawford states, there is no clear, desirable solution for eliminating cars and trucks in rural areas.

Design Metrics

There is an extensive list of design metrics that Crawford lists in his book to inform his design.  Some of the broader aspects of the results are:

• A reference design that comfortably supports 2 million people working and living.
• Walkable mixed-use districts connected by mass transit depots at the center of each. A topology of districts that maximizes public transportation efficiency.
• Streets limited to pedestrians, bikes, with permits for low-speed electric vehicles, and when necessary emergency and construction vehicles.
• Ample green space within a short walking distance from every front door.
• An average building height of 4 floors, of varying unique architectures.
• Freight and mass transit handled below-grade by separate subway lines

A Car Free Athens

The idea looks radical, but reasonable.  It tries not to make too many decisions about how we lead our lives aside from three: transportation, density, and green-space.  There are suggestions and implications within about energy generation, urban social life and more, but these are ideas rather than prescriptions.

I wondered what it would look like in the city I now live in.  A lot of the talk on the car free forum is about building districts or even whole cities from scratch, but I was more attracted to the idea of transitioning the existing areas of the city to the new design.

Athens has no subway (it has a growing bus system), a vibrant downtown and a lot of suburbs.  It’s major roads are actually already laid out radially which could be well suited to adapting it to the reference topology Crawford presents.  So I started delving into what I could find online for maps and reference data.  My goal was to hew closely to the plan advocated in the book, and so I wanted to understand what existing infrastructure and institutions could be accommodated, and which would have to go.

I mapped out the existing hospitals and schools, historic districts, bodies of water and took into account where metro stops could line up with existing roads, where they would be immediately useful even before the city went fully car free.
I found that I couldn’t quite get all the schools to fall within the urban districts using the reference topology, but those which did not make it in were few. I should also note that my current house would not fall within the diameter (just barely) of the carfree city design. Likewise the historic districts didn’t line up well with the plan for the car free districts, but in truth most if not all of these historic homes are single-family units of no more than two stories -– it is unlikely they would provide the necessary density as advocated by the car free plan.  Crawford advocates green space surrounding all the urban districts, and with good cause, but exceptions could be made for the sake of historic preservation.

One of the major stumbling blocks for building a subway system as advocated by Crawford is Athens’ topography.  If you’ve been to Athens you’ll know it’s fairly hilly in places.  As one example,  from the center of downtown to the river there’s an elevation change of 53 meters over a 700 meter distance. That 7.9% grade is far steeper than ideal grades for a railway which do not exceed 1%.

Grade separation (keeping different modes of transportation from interfering with each other) is paramount to an efficient mass transit system. Ideally (for issues of weather cover and train automation) the whole system would function best underground.  However, given the extreme changes in elevation around downtown there may need to be some compromises.  These would probably be done at either extreme; burying some of the highest elevation subway-stops deeper underground than would usually be done, and having the subway emerge onto an elevated track over some of the deepest valleys.

Stages of Development

Putting aside for the moment that Athens isn’t even currently considering a subway, what could the stages of development be to transition the city to the car free plan?

I think I would start with making downtown progressively car free.  It is already a heavily pedestrian environment, given that the UGA campus is just to the south of Broad Street.  It would help acclimate people to car free living.  The many parking lots could be turned instead into more shops with living spaces on the upper floors.

Ultimately I would look to make the north-south streets into pedestrian right-of-ways (bikes allowed but with caution), and the east-west streets as bike-ways (with ample room on the edges for pedestrians, of course).  I’d probably start by turning College Ave into a series of plazas, intersected by the east-west roads, as this is the heart of downtown.  Next the city could limit downtown delivery vehicles to blocks of time in the morning and night, similiar to Lisbon’s Bairro Alto area.

The other item that could be changed early on is to rezone the areas that would become car free districts to allow for mixed use and to allow a building height appropriate for the desired population density.

The biggest undertaking would be to begin building the subway.  Securing the rights of way for the trains (both passenger and freight) will probably be as big an issue as finding funding for the system as a whole.  That sort of work ought to begin immediately, as you do not want people investing in and building on space that will ultimately be reclaimed for the transit system.

The subway will have to be built in stages, if for no other reason than that Athens does not have the population to merit as extensive a system as laid out in the reference topology.  The city’s population is just over 110 thousand, a mere 5 percent of the suggested city in the book.  Whether it makes more sense to develop one of the 3 subway lines at a time, or start on them all from the middle out and extend them as the population merits it, I do not know.  In either case, while the ends of the line or lines are under construction, the subway can begin to operate on the finished sections by shuttling back and forth until a loop is complete.

The other subway question is when to introduce the “metro freight” concept, where all goods coming into and leaving the city are transferred by standardized shipping containers on a below-grade rail system.  Getting people out of their cars and into mass transit is only half the equation.  We will still be saddled with the noise, pollution and safety risks of surface vehicles if we do not have an efficient and desirable way to move goods around.  I would suggest that this won’t be viable until at least a few of the "utility districts" proposed in the car free plan are implemented, complete with a well developed intercity rail link for freight.

Intercity rail for passengers will need to be addressed as well. For the forseeable future there will still be a large number of commuters into metro-Atlanta, and it would be a shame if they had to take the subway out of the edge of the city only to have to get in their car and drive the rest of the way in.  A commuter rail link has been a long time coming, and it’s unclear when that will finally come to pass.

Other Considerations

While working through the car free idea I’ve gathered a number of ideas and considerations not mentioned in Crawford’s writings:

Passages for wildlife: each district is connected to its neighboring district by a boulevard for bike/ pedestrian/ emergency vehicle traffic.  Since the rest of the district borders on green space, it would probably be wise to engineer wildlife corridors under or over these roads.

Private outdoor space: something I am used to as a resident of suburbia is private outdoor space to cultivate as I choose.  Is this something that is inherently impossible in a city?  Is my gardening/landscaping hobby not compatible?  Would we need to be able to afford a "country home" to indulge in these hobbies?  Does that leave this activity only available to the wealthy?

Subway station designs: Having been an architecture student in a past life, I’d like to think that we could make subway stops that are bright and full of natural light, rather than feeling like caves.  Crawford’s plans puts the metro stops under the main boulevard running through each district.  This may be an efficient use of space, but limits the sort of architecture possible to make them inviting spaces.

Hospitals: Crawford mentions locating hospitals in the middle of the green space within each subway loop.  I would rather see that remain green space and instead see clinics built in each district.

Planning: It might be a useful planning tool to have a heat-map of the age of all buildings/locations in the existing city.  Both for historical preservation and for individual sentimental value, it may be hard to persuade citizens to raze older structures as part of the reorganization of the city.  It could bias districts to include these areas rather than leaving them in the designated green areas for reclamation.

 

Passenger Rail for Georgia

Attention to high-speed rail in the United States has picked up recently with the inclusion of funds for it in the newly signed stimulus bill. I’ve been exploring high speed rail plans in my corner of the country, and passenger rail in general, since reading JH Crawford’s book Carfree Cities.

As a form of passenger transport, rail can easily be the lowest energy per passenger-mile requirements.  The 2008 US Transportation Energy Data Book places rail third (after van pools and motorcycles), but this is due to dismal ridership rates.  It cites an average number of passengers per train at 24, which is less than even a bus can carry. Raising it to a mere 50 passenger average easily puts rail back at the top of the efficiency list (keep in mind that a typical train has capacity for 800 passengers).  Also consider that new technologies and lighter materials can make the trains more efficient as well.

Rail also takes up far less land as compared to the multilane highways we rely on now to move large numbers of people (which, incidentally, typically do not move as many people as quickly as a well run rail line).  And electrification of rail lines opens up the possibility of powering trains with renewable energy sources, compounding rail’s climate and pollution advantages.

To get a drastic reduction in car-dependence for urban dwellers, you have to consider alternatives that provide reasonable autonomy and efficiency in place of automobiles.  The good news is that in appropriately dense cities, and getting between them, rail provides a very good option.

appropriate modes of transportation for given distances

current high-speed corridor plans

In Georgia, there is very little passenger rail service.  Inner metro-Atlanta has MARTA, and there are all of two meager passenger rail lines run by Amtrak: one in the north, and one along the coast.  The passenger rail options only directly serve two of Georgia’s 10 most populous cities. Plans for extending MARTA to Atlanta’s outer suburbs have stalled time and again.  There are thousands of commuters into Atlanta, Augusta and Georgia’s other largest cities that have no viable alternative except to wade their way through traffic jams day in and day out.

There is a set of nationally designated high speed rail corridors proposed for Georgia. However, I feel that there are real problems with Georgia’s current rail plans:

• The high speed rail only serves three of the state’s top 10 most populous cities.  It seems to avoid Athens (Georgia’s 5th most populous city) on its way from Greenville, South Carolina to Atlanta for the sole reason of reusing the right-of-way already established by the current Amtrak route.

• It makes a stop in Jesup, with a population of 9k per the 2000 census.  Again, there’s existing infrastructure here (an Amtrak station), but high speed rail benefits from as few stops as possible, so you want to make those stops count.

Atlanta was founded as a rail-town.  Certainly Georgia ought to be able to reclaim some of its legacy by building a modern passenger rail system for its citizens.

better serving urban population centers

Part of the dilemma with providing effective rail service in Georgia is that the population is so spread out.  The term ‘exurb’, denoting the ever-expanding tracts of suburban living farther and farther from urban centers, could do with no better example than the metro-Atlanta region.  Per 2007 figures (via Wikipedia), the city-proper of Atlanta is home to 519 thousand people, while an additional 4.8 million reside in the metro area, an area 62 times larger than the urban core.  If where I live in Athens is any indication, even within the urban boundaries of most of Georgia’s largest cities, the living arrangements are much more suburban than urban, making car ownership a near-necessity and hurting the chance for effective, ubiquitous public transit.

Riddle me this: is it easier to convince more than 100 thousand people to relocate their city to be closer to existing rail structure, or to put down new rail lines that would better serve existing urban centers?  This is the question regarding the designated high-speed rail corridor currently proposed traveling from Greenville, South Carolina to Atlanta, bypassing Athens.  First, consider that high speed trains can’t use existing cargo rail; they will likely require upgraded or entirely new track to achieve the speeds desired, so the only real loss rerouting through Athens would be the existing right of way, not the actual infrastructure.

Next, consider that Athens is home to the University of Georgia, with a student body 34 thousand strong.  Student populations typically both have low car ownership numbers but are also highly mobile as they travel regularly between home and school.  I expect that a high speed rail link into the Atlanta Airport (and Atlanta nightlife), as well as to cities beyond Georgia, would be most welcome and heavily used by students.  This, paired with more ubiquitous public transport within Athens, would likely encourage more students to forego bringing cars to school; increasing safety, reducing pollution and the ever-expanding need for parking space.  It might also alleviate the immense floods of traffic that converge on Athens whenever the UGA football team has a home game.  Now also consider that all but one of Georgia’s most populous cities have significant student populations.

In order to maximize use of inter-city trains (high speed or otherwise) each destination city ought to prioritize improving their public transportation within the city.  In turn, public transportation benefits from denser city structure. Making it easy to walk or bike from home to a transit stop, or from a transit stop to a destination, increases the chances that people will choose transit over personal cars.  It is also an endorsement for mixed-use zoning, which brings destinations of all kinds closer to hand.

of population and density

If I had a free hand to reshape Georgia urban and transportation policy to get as many citizens car-free as possible, it would look something like this.  First, I am going to advocate that all designated cities follow something approximating the reference design from the Carfree Cities book.  To determine which cities ought to receive this treatment, we need to look at some population and labor numbers.

Of the 9.7 million people living in Georgia, over half of them live in the metro Atlanta area.  The reference design suggests a population of 1 to 3 million per city; Notice that in the top cities table above many of the designated cities are actually exurbs of Atlanta.  To fit the 5.3 million metro-area residents, we’ll designate 3 “sister-cities” linked by an intercity rail loop as Crawford advocates when dealing with populations larger than is practical for the reference design.  On a whim I’ve named the new sister cities after the counties where they reside, but you could also call them collectively “Atlanta” and consider each sister-city a borough, similar to how New York City is organized.

3 cities for Atlanta leaves some room for population growth.  We’ll look at the rest of Georgia in the same light.  I’ve chosen to designate 10 cities for the 9.7 million residents.  But not everyone will live in these cities.  Some will live in more rural environs, either by choice or as required by their vocation.

From the categories listed in the Georgia Department of Labor 2004 statistics I’ve gleaned that only 11.9% of jobs in Georgia do not work well in an urban environment (Agriculture and Mining; I’ve also lumped in Manufacture, to take into account that this may include heavy industry that you would not want in a human-scale city).  So, understanding that jobs and population count are not a 1:1 relationship, using a naive model we can start by mapping 12% of the population to the countryside, and count on 88% of Georgians to live in our 10 cities.

These numbers need some padding, though.  First, we need to consider that if Michael Pollan is right, we’re going to need a lot more hands on the land in order to produce our needed food crops.  There are also plenty of jobs that need to be filled in small towns to support non-urban workers.  I don’t have a good sense of this, but lets take a stab and say that 20% of Georgians will live outside of cities, leaving us with 7.8 million urban residents.  With 10 cities on my map, that gives us a lot of head-room -– anywhere from 2.2 million to a whopping 22.2 million new people.  Now, even considering that 2008 estimates of state population indicate Georgia gained 1.5 million new residents since 2000, this is probably excessive. But you will see that I chose to designate cities that are already well-established as major population centers, distributed across the state.   The Carfree Cities model speaks of 2 million as a comfortable size and 3 million as a practical upper bound for the reference design; cities can grow into the model by adding districts or transportation loops as merited by population count.

revised rail corridors

So, back to rail.  The map here identifies 8 cities across the state as major urban centers.  The Atlanta area gets split into three cities to handle the burgeoning population there, bringing the total number of car-free cities to 10.  The blue lines are what I feel are a better routing for the currently proposed high speed rail corridors.  I’ve eliminated Jesup as a stop on the coastal route, and included Athens in the Northern Route from Greenville, South Carolina to Atlanta. I’ve also suggested we extend the inland route up to Memphis, Tennessee, another major urban center and destination in it’s own right.

I’ve assumed that it would also be necessary to include a more local service along these same rights of way, though probably not using the same tracks.  Particularly while Georgia transitions away from suburban sprawl, and eventually to service towns that support rural vocations, a local service will be needed to make rail available to a larger number of stops than is practical with high speed rail.

Aside from the intercity ring between the three Atlanta sister-cities, the black rail lines represent rights of way and local passenger service between Georgia’s other urban centers.  Eventually it would be good to see high speed lines laid down along these routes as well.

The speed advantages of high speed rail over car travel for the distances here are significant.  200km/h represents the lower bound of typical high-speed train speeds around the world, and more countries are starting to run trains at 300km/h or greater.  I see no reason we should not have the ambition to operate the world’s most effective public transit systems in this country.

conclusions

Transportation is a major element of national infrastructure in any nation.  A good metric for setting national priorities is serving the broadest number of people.  Among the various transportation options, public transit clearly meets this criteria.  Road-building only provides transportation to those who have enough wealth to afford the large up-front costs of purchasing a vehicle, and the ongoing costs of fuel, maintenance and insurance.  As we’re seeing right now, easy credit isn’t an answer to closing that gap either.  And even could the economic hurdles be overcome, broadening the availability of car ownership to everyone runs up against environmental limits – air pollution, increased storm-water runoff from more and wider roads, and global warming.

A recurring complaint about passenger rail in this country is that it seems impossible for Amtrak to make a profit.  Consider, however, that the subsidies that go to rail programs are a pittance to the hidden subsidies propping up road and air use.  The airlines do not solely fund the construction and maintenance of airports; States and the federal government care for the roads as the public good that they are.  And yet somehow we expect rail to be self-sustaining.  It is good to see signs that this country is starting to take rail travel more seriously; it is yet to be seen whether this will turn into a sustained commitment, or merely a brief dalliance with sound transportation policy.