Great article in Salon. One of my most basic community design beliefs is that when you do commerce, you have to split it up into multiple parcels and sell them to different owners. A “town center” or “main street” that has a bunch of facades but one owner is always going to be a mall; only a hodgepodge of variously-owned properties is going to have a snowball’s chance in hell of evolving into something authentic.
So I was out in the Chi this month. Haven’t been there for, damn, has it been a decade? It has.
Anyway, all in all it was a good trip. At some point you just accept you’re a fracking tourist and you do the touristy things. The art institute. Deep dish pizza. REAL fucking hot dogs, not that fake-ass James Coney Island chow. And a boat tour of the architectural history of the downtown skyline, narrated by some guy who insisted on referring to Mies van der Rohe as “Mr. Rectangle” until the very end, then equated the boxes of Skidmore Owings and Merrill as basically equivalent to Mies. Now I spent several years maintaining a fake MySpace profile for Mies van der Rohe, and – um, no.
Equating SOM as aesthetically equivalent to Mies is sort of like saying the words of Paul the Apostle are functionally equivalent to Jesus Christ. I mean, I get that some people want to look at it that way. But where Christ shows up and basically goes all anarcho-leftist on everyone, kicks the merchants out of the temple, saves the hoes from being stoned, gets everyone drunk at a wedding, and basically fucks shit up, after he dies Paul goes out and is like “Don’t have sex. Don’t have fun. Be suburban.” The teachings of Paul is what leads to shit like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
And likewise it is with architecture. Where Mies shows up and is completely totalitarian about everything – exacting in proportions, interior accoutrements, even furniture – SOM is just like, well, we can make a lot of money selling glass boxes with steel beams to corporate clients. The Chapel at Armour/IIT is set off from the rest of the academic buildings because it has larger windows and the proportions are different as compared to Crown Hall or the other stuff. That’s a sort of nuance you don’t really see in SOM stuff. And they inflicted a lot of crap airport designs on us too.
But this was a post about expressways.
So what’s the whole Chicago-Kansas City thing about? I noticed signs for it while rolling I-88 out towards the Fox River Valley. Turns out it’s a new road! Except…
That’s sort of, shall we say, not a direct alignment. But maybe it still saves time? To test this out, I asked Google for directions from Chicago to KC, measuring from Gino’s East to the Stockyards. How’s it measure up?
- Via Springfield and Hannibal (55 to 72 to 36), 515 miles
- Via the Quad Cities and Des Moines (88 to 80 to 35), 528 miles
- Via St. Louis / New Chain of Rocks (55 to 270 to 70), 540 miles
- Via the Chicago-Kansas City Expressway (110), 541 miles
So the route fails its stated purpose, since there’s already substantially shorter routing available via other interstates. Now it’s possible to rejigger these results so that the C-KC comes out ahead of Saint Louis. Taking 370 through Saint Charles, MO – as most GPS units will suggest – adds half a mile. And if you pick a starting point west of the Spaghetti Bowl – United Center, let’s say – you get an automatic benefit from any route that shoots you straight out 88 instead of forcing you to get on 294. But Saint Louis is a low bar to beat. Any 3rd-grader with a roadmap can see that you swing south before heading west by ever-so-slightly northwest. And the boost that C-KC gets from trips originating in the Western Suburbs likewise applies to the Des Moines route. There is simply no trip from Chicagoland to Metro KC for which the C-KC is the shortest route. But it gets worse.
See, us traffic guys differentiate between the concept of a freeway, which has interchanges, and an expressway, which may have interchanges or it may have lights. San Jose provides a really good example of the difference. But colloquial Chicago usage applies the term “expressway” to all limited-access facilities. It’s on signs, and it’s on maps. Say “expressway” to someone in Downers Grove and they will think of a freeway. To a Chicagoan, it’s the same damn thing.
But the C-KC expressway is not an expressway in the Chicago sense of the word. It’s got at-grade intersections. It’s got stoplights. And at one point it goes through downtown Macon on an old-school zig-zaggy route, with 90-degree turns in an urban grid. Granted, some stubby ramps over on the west side suggest an eventual bypass. But the ribbon-cutting ceremony already happened. They already “opened” it. Calling a road with traffic lights an expressway isn’t technically a misnomer, but it’s still a misnomer. Moreover, when Texas puts in feeder roads ahead of a freeway, they don’t pat themselves on the back and say “There! All done!” Not only is the C-KC a longer route than either of its parallels, it’s a slower route as well.
Now I don’t mean to disparage the idea of roadway improvements in rural Illinois. Faster, safer roads are good. Stimulus, when the economy is in the crapper, is good. And as stimulus goes, divided highways are a lot more useful and long-lasting than bombs, jet engines no one wants, or digging holes in the Nevada desert and burying George Mason economists in them. So, road improvements, yay.
What makes the Chicago-Kansas City Expressway lame is the name. The lame is in the name. If you want to call it the “a bunch of really fucking small towns in Illinois that no one has ever heard of connector,” that would be cool. That would be accurate. But driving the C-KC is like walking into a strip club only to find that all the dancers are wearing bikinis (see: every Jerry Bruckheimer show ever). Bob’s Bodacious Bikini Beach Bar is fine, might even turn a profit. But it’s not a titty bar if there aren’t, at a minimum, tittays. And it’s not the Chicago-Kansas City Expressway if it’s not at least a contender for the fastest route between those two towns.
I read a lot of auto blogs (Jalopnik, TTAC, etc), and the received wisdom among auto bloggers is that the stick shift driving experience is the “true” driving experience, that to be consigned to a “slushbox” (a typical auto trans) is a lesser experience.
Now, the most common response to this conventional wisdom (such that it is now, itself, also conventional wisdom) is a paean to the open road, to effortless cruising in the classic American sedan, eight cylinders, arctic A/C, auto-flite-o-matic transmission. I should know, I own a Panther.
But I got a simpler reason to dispute them. Stick shift drivers suck.
Now, if you’ve got a stick shift car that you own for fun, that you cart around on a trailer behind a Ram or a Grand Wagoneer, then I’m not talking to you. Who hasn’t wanted a race car at some point in their lives? Keep livin’ the dream. No, it’s the guys who commute in sticks that annoy.
The reason is simple. As humans, we’re lazy. We seek to minimize work. (This is, after all, why we invented cars to begin with.) And lazy stick shifters fag it up for everyone.
On my morning commute, there’s a traffic light, and about 1/4 mile past that light there’s a channelized right turn onto a smaller road that lots of us use as a sort of cutoff. Now, the accepted driving behavior among all automatics – me in the Crown Vic, you in the Jimmy, granny in the Camry – is to accelerate to about 40-45, maybe 50, then slow down to 30 or so for the right turn.
But not the stick shifters. See, the stick shifters don’t want to bother with third gear. Since they’re going have to downshift anyway, they just drone forward in second. And while it’s certainly possible to do 45 in 2nd, lazy guys on their way to work aren’t driving like they’re on Xbox live. So they do 30, the rest of us stack up, and maybe one or two of us get over into the left lane to blow past before the turnoff. That’s not exactly super safe. The stick-shifter, rolling traffic obstacle, is reducing traffic safety for everyone.
But it’s not just on the far side of lights where stick shifters muck it up for everyone. The local road agencies around these parts like to cheap out and put a single set of loops at most intersections. Now, most every traffic signal has a “mingreen” time, so if it goes green, it’s going to stay that way for 10 or 12 seconds. But after that, the signal really wants to turn red again, and the only thing keeping it from doing so is the presence of cars rolling over the loops.
This isn’t an issue with automatics; most drivers stack up at the light, then take off, and by the third or fourth card it’s a pretty steady stream. Maybe some guy turning left holds everyone up for a moment, whatever.
But the stick guy isn’t content to move with the pack. He might shift into second, only to have to slow down again – those left turners again – and that would take a lot of extra effort. So he lets a big space clear out in front of him, where he accelerate without fear of an extra set of down- and up-shifts.
Except, a funny thing about that. As he lets that space open up, the traffic signal controller says “hey! no one’s there anymore! I can turn red!” Eventually our stick-shifting samurai gets to the loops, but by then the controller has made up its mind, it’s going yellow dammit, and there’s maybe room for one or two automatics to slide in behind our intrepid stick-shifter before the solid red holds up everyone else for another cycle.
For the vast majority of us who drive automatics, stick-shifters are a rolling obstacle. They get us stuck at lights, and stuck in slow-moving packs. Thankfully my commute has mostly four-lanes, providing ample opportunity to pass these idiots. But many are not so lucky. Stick-shifters are a menace.
Is there any urban design thing more played, pointless, or bland?
This isn’t an East Coast – West Coast thing, although after Coachella I’m definitely looking forward to Mad Decent or someone giving us holographic Biggie. No, this is pretty much universal.
The effect is really poopifying. Pretty much the distinguishing factor between an authentic urban place and a shopping center is whether or not one entity has total control over the feel and the branding. I can recreate the exact building massing and aesthetics of pretty much any urban place with a camera and a CAD program. But if I’m a single property owner, the end result isn’t an actual place, it’s a “Lifestyle Center.” When you do a Lifestyle Center as infill instead of greenfield, it becomes a “Festival Marketplace.” But it’s still the same shopping-and-entertainment-complex, operating under a unified brand.
Now, you wanna do a Lifestyle Center or a Festival Marketplace, well, good for you. No one is going to mistake Market Center The Woodlands as an authentic small Texas town, and everyone in Murder City knows the Inner Harbor is a place for tourists. But what makes placemaking banners a uniquely insidious evil is that they crap on real, authentic places.
I mean, what city is that? To my eye it looks like a Will Wright creation, an intentionally generic manifestation of what cities do. An advance screenshot for Sim City Over 9000, perhaps?
Imagine now you’ve got two shopping locales. Out on the fringe you’ve got Weston Village at Southlands North; proper urban scaling, but single property manager and totally sanitized experience. Close to the core you’ve got Duncan’s Row, which is your basic working-class-partially-gentrified-then-sort-of-degentrified-now-it’s-just-a-mishmash kind of district. Ten years ago it had four record stores but now there’s only one left since everyone just downloads. That kinda place.
Anyway, these places serve two different clienteles, even if the building massing is identical. But now suppose the City puts up a bunch of banners on every damn streetlight that say HISTORIC DUNCAN’S ROW – WORK EAT PLAY LIVE. What this amounts to is vandalism. It’s taking the branded, sanitized experience of Weston Village at Southlands North and trying to retrofit it onto the at-least-still-somewhat-authentic Duncan’s Row experience.
It’s really no different than if some native Duncan’s Row graff artists took the 735X out to Southlands North and spraybombed Weston Village with the same tags they drop on their home turf. It’s no different at all. Both acts amount to defacing one environment with stuff that rightly belongs in the other.
Except whereas the graff is (i) illegal, (ii) nonsanctioned, and (iii) will probably be cleaned up by the property owner, the placemaking flags are (i) legal, (ii) officially implemented, by the city or a well-meaning-but-idiotic business association, and (iii) will probably be put back up if you vandalize them.
It’s crap.
And you can’t even parody this shit, because these banners so regularly cross the line into self-parody and back that the entire genre circulates continuously, like traffic in a big-ass roundabout.
What’s that? A fork, a martini glass, and a musical note? You mean to tell me that this is a place where I can eat, drink, and hear live music? I HAD NO FUCKING CLUE I WAS IN SUCH A PLACE UNTIL NOW. THANKS, PLACEMAKING BANNER!
These things primarily come into existence through two vectors. The first is civic-minded people with no imagination, none, zero, zip. The second is lazy design consultants who just copy-paste the text out of the last job and do a find-and-replace so they can bill you for hours they actually spent downloading Albanian femdom videos. Note that these may in fact be the same people. Find them, and give them a stern talking-to. Only then can we eliminate the scourge of placemaking banners.
Does anyone actually believe this stuff? I mean, really?
Still blows my mind how nakedly two-faced establishment libertarianism is. That’s Reason Magazine touting the Chinese road network, positing that we could “learn a thing or two” from China’s massive highway-building boom. Certainly, I find Shanghai’s stacks impressive. But these are the same guys who constantly diss high speed rail, over and over and over again. Touting China’s highway infrastructure without mentioning their commitment to HSR is crazy cherry-picking.
I wonder if Siemens agreed to a 2:1 match for every Koch/oil industry dollar these guys get, if they’d publish more shit like this…
It’s hard to figure out what doesn’t qualify as a phallus in Jarret’s world. The venerable Gillig Phantom, perhaps?
The human penis does not hold a monopoly on curvature. For starters, there’s the balls, conveniently located nearby. Toes are rounded. Fingers are long and slender, with a rounded, streamlined end – quite trainlike, actually. Buttcheeks too. And of course, female breasts. It’s generally agreed that the Tacoma Dome looks like a breast, but Jarret would probably see the tip of a penis poking out of the ground. Kinky.
But let’s run with this breast thing for a minute. Head south of the Tacoma Dome a bit and you’ll find this suggestive pair of loop ramps where the SR-7 freeway ends. But what’s even more is this interchange takes the place of what would otherwise be the corner of 38th and D. Yes, 38D. SR-7 is quite well-endowed. But ramps aren’t the only things that are rounded and mounded. There’s also roundabouts! And at an increasing number of interchanges, pairs of roundabouts! Clearly the designers of Indiana’s Keystone Parkway intended for their facility to look… chest-tacular.
So what I could do from now on is point out in future posts how everything highway engineers do actually looks like breasts. Or we could all get some perspective.
So the LA Times has this article up on two different visions for California, where they quote some HSR backers who say it’s all about “reducing the suburbanization of California” and “communities of dense apartments around stations,” and then they quote some teabaggers who say “YOU GONNA FORCE US INTO SOVIET APARTMENT BLOCKS, WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA.”
This is all so much poppycock.
HIGH SPEED RAIL IS GOOD FOR SPRAWL.
Say that to yourself five times.
Here’s the thing. You don’t need trains to have communities of dense apartments near urban centers. You don’t need cars, and you don’t even need streetcars. That’s… pretty much the natural order of things. The whole purpose of commuter transportation is and has been, historically, so we don’t have to live at high density.
Subways allowed easterners to move from tenements to rowhouses. Streetcars allowed westerners to switch from apartments to single-family detached. Interurbans let you move to the next city over. Commuter trains let you move fifteen, twenty miles out into the country, and freeways simply expanded that range. With a trolley, you could live on 50th and Hawthorne and have an easy ride into Downtown PDX. Trains let you live in Riverside, Illinois and hop an express into the City of Chi. Entire suburbs of low-density housing were built around train lines. Trains allowed Joe Biden to live in Delaware and work in Washington DC.
Trains will allow Cali to sprawl even more.
Suppose you’ve got a business with a client base in LA. Right now, your option is… to have an office in LA. And live in LA. Sure, you might be in Redondo, or Whittier, or Compton, but you’re pretty much stuck in the basin, because the customers dictate the office location and the office dictates the house location.
But now suppose you’ve got a bullet train. All of a sudden, Bakersfield is less than an hour away. You can stick your office in East LA, and you’ve got an hour commute counting the transfer to the Yellow Line. Or you can stick your office up in Bakersfield, and just make a bunch of client visits on the train. Maybe you stash a car in a garage near LAUPT so you don’t even need to use transit to get around at the other end.
So now you’ve got an office in Bakersfield. Your work commute just switched from bumper-to-bumper on the 405 to stunning mountain roads. You buy a Harley, or a Hayabusa, depending on how old you are. Life is sweeet.
Think 10,000 people wouldn’t make the same choice?
Want a compact city? Under-develop your transport network. Like Baghdad. The place is scarcely 12 miles across, before it fades to desert on all sides. Yet it holds seven million people.
Want a sprawling city? Build lots of trains. Like Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe, which sprawls for 100 miles. The three cities combined hold only 5.5 million people, but the extended metropolitan region holds three times as many. How do you get such a widely dispersed, sprawling population? Trains.
Of course, you can do it with roads too. Barker-Cypress to Baytown is about 45 minutes in the off-peak, thanks to Houston’s massive freeway capacity. This might not be the ideal a lot of the eco-boosters have in mind, but that’s the thing – transportation’s pretty agnostic.
And there’s an outer limit to highway sprawl. People get pissy when their one-way commutes start to tick above 45 minutes. Pretty much every urban center, then, can support an initial 45-minute radius of people who can commute to Downtown, and then another, lighter 45-minute radius of people who can commute to various suburban job centers. Since those centers are rarely on the outer edge of the first 45-minute circle, your total radius is about 75 minutes, which is typically about 30-40 miles. All of your fringe suburbs are in this range. Marysville to Seattle is 35 miles. Rosenberg to Downtown Houston is 36. Aurora to the Chicago Loop is 41. With an autocentric transport policy, this is as far as cities go.
But high speed rail expands this range by powering through those first 40 miles of auto-sprawl at neck-snapping speeds, then making periodic stops out in the hinterlands. Those hinterlands are then free to sprawl themselves. Hence, Wilmington.
So, by all means, build high speed rail. Fast trains are awesome. But understand that those trains will in fact promote more development even further out. EVERYTHING – whether we’re talking about the Katy Freeway or the TGV – is going to be used to carry out life at a lower density, to spread out, to sprawl. That’s how humanity works.
Why doesn’t anyone, anywhere in the US run express light rail?
No, seriously.
There’s nothing inherent about US LRT technology which says every train has to run the same boring route all the time. Sidings and pullouts and overtake points are entirely possible. Actually, US LRT has about the same approximate loading gauge as the Japanese 1067mm network. And those guys are the masters of this shizzle. Check it:
That’s a Keihan 7000-series overtaking what looks like a refurb 2400 series on the far side of the platform. Local shows up, express shows up a minute later, express takes off, local follows. I’ve actually seen a video of a four-train meet at this stop – NB and SB locals arrive within 30 seconds of each other, NB and SB expresses show up simultaneously, expresses depart, locals follow.
I don’t expect North American operators to have the ability to run the tight, exact headways of a suburban Japanese railway, but the basic principle is quite possible. The local just has to chill for maybe 5 minutes instead of 2.
Where would this work? Well, lots of places, but for a system that particularly cries out for express LRT, look no further than this proposal for Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. Yonah has a very nice diagrammatic map up detailing their proposed LRT and commuter rail lines.
The thing has MASSIVE REDUNDANCY.
The Raleigh-Cary side is 18 miles, and a full 10 miles of those directly parallel the commuter rail, from West Morgan to Cary Parkway. Likewise, the Durham-Chapel Hill side is 17 miles, and 4 of those are parallel to the commuter rail. The distance between endpoints for the LRT is 15 miles.
So: 14 miles of redundant commuter rail to connect to a 15-mile “core” section.
But why not just build a single-track LRT track in between cities? Run LRVs on commuter rail frequencies in between the cities, run them on typical LRT frequencies within. Same service plan, but a single technology. They could save themselves from building a bunch of redundant systems. Not only that, but most transit agencies own their own LRT, fee simple, where the freight railroads keep the tracks. Transit agencies paying to improve freight railroads for commuter trains essentially amounts to giving some dude money to buy himself a house, in exchange for him agreeing to let you sleep there.
Suppose Raleigh and Durham were connected by continuous LRT. There might be a case for the Greenfield-Parkway-to-Downtown-Raleigh segment as a standalone DMU line. You know, grab some RDC’s from somewhere, or something. But there’s no way the single station in “West Durham” would justify its own commuter rail spur if LRT was continuous. There is, then, eight miles of proposed commuter rail on the Durham side which is duplicative, which brings us to 18 miles of redundant commuter rail to bridge a 14-mile gap.
The stupid, idiotic, dumb move would be to say, “well let’s just build one rail system, durrr,” construct LRT between the cities using the same doubletrack cross section as within them, and add in a bunch of extra stations in the RTP area because hey, that powerpoint handout you got says that “light rail” stops every 1/2 mile to a mile, as opposed to “commuter rail” which stops every 3-5 miles. Congratulations, you have now created a slow loris rail that takes two hours to go from end to end.
No, the planners have got it figured right that the demand within Durham and Raleigh is different than the demand between the cities, it’s got different req’d peak frequencies, different baseline service levels. But there’s no reason not to operate it over a single track network using a single contiguous technology. Like this:
Midday operations might work like so. Trains originate at Northeast Center every 15 minutes. Every other train becomes an express from Downtown Raleigh to Cary Parkway, stopping only at NCSU and Downtown Cary. Meanwhile a “shorty” local train originates in Raleigh one minute after the express leaves and runs the rest of the way to Downtown Cary. This keeps 15-minute service at all local stops while allowing a single-seat ride from Raleigh and points Northeast to Durham-Chapel Hill.
All the locals turn back at Cary Parkway, but the expresses continue on, through RTP, all the way to Durham/Alston where they revert to locals and run to UNC. Locals originate at Alston on a staggered 30-minute frequency so that there’s 15-minute coverage over the Durham-Chapel Hill line.
This gives you 15-minute service over the LRT segments and 30-minute service over the “commuter rail” segments, but Northeast Center to UNC is now a single-seat ride of about 75-80 minutes in length. Not at all bad, for a trip that’s 35 miles even via the most direct auto route.
Once you define UNC-Durham-Raleigh as a single continuous line, you realize that it’s crazy indirect for endpoint to endpoint trips – most notably the large swing to the north from Chapel Hill to Durham and back. For a starter line, that’s great… but with a single-technology system, you can add shortcuts and expansions later.
Yep, that’s bee-line UNC-NCSU service plus a direct airport connection. It’s really not any different than a big train set. Buy the basic kit with oval of track and sleek locomotive! Then add variations for an even more fun setup!
But you can’t do this if you’re starting out with some balkanized, Philadelphia-type system where everything is a different and incompatible mode. Nope. You need Express Light Rail. But… no one’s done it. Anywhere, in the entire US – at least in modern times.
Was cleaning out my desk/workspace stuff when I came across a variant of this post in the UC Berkeley’s Transportation magazine, Access.
It’s the usual “higher speeds kill” argument. Like all these arguments, they look at rural interstates, conclude that accidents went up a bit when the speed limit was raised, and say – voila! – higher speeds ees more deaths.
I get tired of this simplicity. When it comes from shills like the IIHS I can at least understand it as a matter of self-interest. Richard Retting wants the speed limits to be lower, because then you’ll get pulled over more and his employers can jack up your premiums. But the study in question comes from a bunch of OSHA and Public Health types. I expect them to be more rigorous.
So here’s the deal. Higher freeway speeds only increase injury when you define the bounds of your study at the edge of said freeway. As soon as you open it up to the network as a whole, there’s no effect, or – in many studies – higher speeds reduce injury. I’m not the first, or the third, or even the four-hundreth person to explain this. But as far as I know, it’s never been put graphically. Here then, a graphical explanation of the reason why higher speeds reduce injury.
Our story takes place somewhere deep in Pennsylvania:
It’s Friday, and after a long day of work Tony is ready for an evening of drinking and cornholing with his bar buddies. He leaves his house headed for the tavern in West Deliverance. A nationwide speed limit of 55mph is in full force, and Tony takes the shortest route available:
The roads are treacherous. In fact, statistically, rural two-lane highways are the most dangerous road imaginable. Combine high speeds, slow-moving farm equipment, lots of cross traffic, and often crappy geometry, and something like this is liable to happen:
Nevertheless, Tony makes it to the bar. After a rowdy night breaking bottles and sodomizing out-of-towners, he wakes up in the back of his pickup to realize: He’s going to be late for Mass. He needs to get back to the church, STAT. However, overnight, the traffic engineers have upped the speed limit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to 75 miles per hour. It’s a bit out of the way, but Tony figures with luck, he can floor it and be back at the parish in the nick of time.
Tony’s a lot less likely to get into an accident this way. In fact, statistically, the PA Turnpike is one of the safest roads in the entire country, and easily bests anything else in PA, NJ, or MD. This in spite of being quite fast. Left-lane Turnpike speeds are often 80 on the PA side, 85 in the dualled parts of NJ.
Sure, the Pike is going to see more horrifyingly debilitating crashes at 80 than it would at 55. But we don’t care how many crashes some stupid road has, we care how many crashes Tony has – and Peggy, and Debbie, and Jim, and the rest of Tony’s friendly, upstanding neighbors. And the best way to keep them out of crashes is to entice them off the dangerous roads (rural two-laners) and onto the safe ones (freeways), by allowing high-enough speeds to justify going a little out of your way to use the safer facility.
keephoustonhouston
