It’s your basic five-lane commercial strip through a residential grid, only it outgrew itself and now there’s a three-lane one way on each side, for a total of five lanes in each direction. And there’s bike lanes. Sensibly, they’re on the one-ways – all these houses have alley-fed garages, which minimizes bike-vehicle conflicts.

This is about the lower-density bound of what I call “goldilocks urbanism.” A grid of flat, residential streets is bike- and bus-friendly, although the development isn’t really compact enough for walking, at least not without a connection to some form of wheeled transport. Streets aren’t particularly zoomy – these are posted at 35 – but they’re relatively uncongested, and there’s plenty of places to park. Basically, it’s comfortable.

You know what else? ELEVATED BIKEWAYS. There’s a decent network of rail-trails here, and wherever they hit a major arterial they just soar right over that thing. Why wait to push a stupid button? Why risk getting run over by an inattentive soccer moo? Down here, major bike routes get the same easy, nonstop ride that freeway drivers have been enjoying for half a century.

But I’d go further. Unless your vocation is of the “guys who drive vans” variety (plumbing, electrical, etc), you need a storefront. And even cities that are good about allowing new residential construction aren’t always so with regards to commerce. The impetus is pretty simple. People want places that look “nice” and most people think reverse-frontage residential looks “nicer” than strip commercial, so the zoning allows essentially the bare minimum commerce for people to get their food, dry cleaning, work out, etc. This also has the side-effect of making commerce much more homogenous, since owners get to be choosier about their tenants, and owners tend to prefer established chains because there’s less financial risk involved. Basically, a lot of the complaints that suburbs are “all the same” has to do with suburbs being underdeveloped commercially.

If you want a place to be friendly to marginal service industries, you need to overbuild retail/office/light industrial spaces. Houston’s lack of zoning enables this to an extent rarely reached in other cities. Every midrise office you pass on a radial freeway with a gigantic SUITES FOR LEASE CALL 832-555-5555 banner on it is part of this, as is every partially vacant strip center. Cheap commercial rents enable a freer market in everything from christian bookstores to head shops.

If you follow Yglesias, one of the things he periodically hits on is the idiocy of having relatively short building height restrictions in the interstitial portions of Manhattan, between Wall Street and Midtown. One of the rejoinders you constantly get to this is that, supposedly, the bedrock underlying Manhattan doesn’t support skyscrapers between Houston and the low 30′s. It’s all over the comments on this Slate piece, for instance. Yglesias himself has tried to dispel the myth, linking to a paper that finds that “bedrock depths had very little influence on the skyline,” that it was mostly about trains and other things.

But I think there’s a much, much simpler response to this argument.

THE WORLD’S TALLEST BUILDING IS BUILT ON SAND

I think it’s a given, then, that someone would stick an 80-story building on Union Square, especially if it was an “as of right” structure that didn’t require variances. The latter makes it safer for the developer to buy parcels quietly, using multiple single-purpose entities to avoid the speculative land value jump that comes from being in the path of a proposed megaproject. (This is the method used by Disney to assemble the land for what would become Disney World / Epcot.)

Anyway, check this out:

Two things stand out in this photo. Tram terminus, 50mph speed limit. Not bad eh?

I like pics like this because they’re a nice rejoinder to George Will-esque libertarian/republican arguments that trains are just there to brainwash you into not driving, like a true individual. Nope. The two can, and should, exist side by side.

Melbourne has a crazy extensive tram network. That map shows lines as well as frequencies; note the preponderance of 9- and 12- minute headways throughout the system. And Melbourne seems to share a lot of the core values of most North American cities. Globally, a lot of places have extensive tram networks. Several exceed Melbourne. But to a certain extent there’s a feeling like “well, they’re Europeans, you expect them to have good trams.” The urban vibe is completely different.

But Melbourne is a sprawling, suburban city, with low-density suburbs and a downtown defined by large office towers. When the Wachowski brothers needed a “generic North American city” for The Matrix movies, they shot in Melbourne. Here’s a couple more spots on that same tram line:

As you get closer in, the tracks switch from LRT-style separated running to mixed traffic, and low-density single-family gives way to your basic “Goldilocks urbanism” with a mixture of detached houses and apartment blocks, walkable commercial streets and parkable strip centers.

Not bad at all.

And while the highway system doesn’t really come close to Florida-Texas-Californian levels of buildout, it is pretty new. 15 years ago Melbourne was following the eastern European model, where radial freeways all slow out into surface streets. But with CityLink they brought motorways into the core and created a proper crosstown expressway network. Check the 1960′s World’s Fair architecture on that “sound tube”, which supposedly reduces traffic noise for the benefit of some nearby housing projects. I’m not sure I buy the stated rationale, but then, I think it’s worth it to make freeways look cool for the sake of it. Like this column detailing on Moses’s BQE – straight outta Popular Mechanics – or this incredibly cool sign arch on Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct.

I mean, look at it.

So, now that scientists have proven that it is in fact possible to have more than two bikes on one bus, why stop at three? Why not… SIX BIKE BUS RACK

Now if you ask me why I might give you any of a thousand answers. I could talk about the lack of good tex-mex. But this is not intrinsic to the region. If Tapatia, Gringo’s, Arandas, Cha-Cho’s, and Ninfa’s/Navigation each decided to open up a franchise within 50 miles of me, this would solve the tex-mex problem… permanently. But there are other things that can’t be solved because they’re a part of the region. Herewith, two of the biggies:

You can’t get away

Seriously, you’re stuck. In an ENDLESS IN-BETWEEN. There are a few truly urban places in the Northeast. NYC. Philly. Murder City Maryland, and that District place to the south. Everything else is an incessant parade of small towns, villages, boroughs, townships, what have you, shitloads upon shitloads of cape cod houses and some random historic preserved 18th-century barn or tavern or something, that fades out into some semi-rural area with some trailers and a junkyard, which then fades into the next set of haphazard postwar residential mixed with “historic” crap.

When I lived in Houston, I could drive 90 minutes and be on the beach, and not just any beach, but a desolate beach, a beach where I was the only guy for a 1/4 mile in any direction. Most other directions you can go from H-town are even less populated, whether we’re talking about the Piney Woods or that endless flat stuff that lies out past Brookshire. And the other places I’ve lived have been similar. Three directions from Portland, you can drive 45 minutes and it’s all timber company land, just forest after forest after forest. A couple hours west of Tacoma and you’ve got the entire Olympic Peninsula; 90 minutes east and you’re at the top of the Cascade range. It’s easy to get away, commune with nature.

You CAN’T. DO THAT. HERE. And it’s maddening.

The scale is messed up

The second thing is that the urban scale all wrong. It goes from too dense, to too sprawly, with none of that proper in-between. For instance, this is South Philly, a few blocks from Pat’s King of Steaks. This is a genuinely shitty place to live. Forget about what the transit system looks like – you have no front yard, no back yard, not a lot of parks. There isn’t enough parking. The stuff that’s there is subject to such crazy enforcement that they made an entire show out of it. Now I happen to like Philly, at least the quirky abandoned industrial stuff, it’s full of daft locations to shoot art nudes. But I could never, ever live there, because I couldn’t deal with living in the city, and I’d therefore be forced out into…

This, which is the next ring around the big Eastern cities. This is where they take the exact same rowhouses and then set them way back on gigantic boulevards with lots of grass everywhere. Planners thought this was a good idea. Call it proto-projects. Except, it still sucks. None of the green space is yours. You can’t really do anything with it. And where South Philly, which was mostly built out before planners figured out how to screw up development through zoning codes, has tons of retail within walking distance, these were all residential from the start, and local business is few and far between. DC is notorious for this, the District is full of tiny attached homes that are a mile from the nearest corner store. So you’ve got all the urban annoyance of being squished up against your neighbors and not having any space of your own, with all the suburban annoyance of having to drive long distances for every trip. Which means you might as well just move out…

Here. Ye olde two-story garden apartment complex, conveniently located next to major arterial. Spacious. Comfortable. You don’t have to fight your neighbors over a parking spot. Maybe it’s even got updated appliances. Every city in the US has these. Houston has ‘em. I’d argue they’re even more uniquely American than the single-family house. But what do you do when you leave the house?

You spend your entire life in highway sprawl, because those zoned inner-ring ‘burbs have absolutely nothing to offer, and because unless you actually live close to one of these few big cities that have actual “city” parts, it’s a really long drive just to eat dinner. And it’s not just any highway sprawl. It’s bland as hell highway sprawl.

Los Angeles, San Antonio, Houston highway sprawl is interesting. For one thing, there’s a lot of it. There’s so much retail in those sprawly places that it becomes impossible to fill it with chain bullshit, so there’s a lot of independent businesses all over the ‘burban areas. You’re eating Mediterranean cuisine at this hole-in-the-wall on Dairy Ashford, or you’re having kebob in a stripmall that also houses a smokeshop, a lingerie place, and a swimming pool installation biz. Funky. And it comes right up to the highway, buildings and signs and dudes wearing sandwich boards are all right there. Driving Westheimer isn’t the same sort of urban experience as, say, walking 42nd Street in Manhattan, but it still feels urban.

In the East, though, all the highway sprawl went in under strict WASPy development codes, so there’s big setbacks, there’s all this wasted space that kills any visual interest which might previously have existed, and because the commerce is zoning-limited there are proportionally much more chains. You go out for a drive and it looks like this. HOW BORING IS THAT?

What’s missing here is that magical elixir of walkable low-rise.

Like Tacoma’s 6th Avenue. Most of the buildings are one or two stories. Some are built to the street, some are set back aways – there’s a ton of variance in the massing, it creates visual interest. Parking is less than new suburban development, more than old-growth urban cores – it’s fairly easy to find a place, but once you do, it’s easier to just walk from place to place. “Suburban” uses mix with urban ones. From the vantage point in the link above, you’re looking at mostly storefronts that engage the sidewalk, but if you turn it around 180 degrees you’ll see a convenience store with a parking lot. Again, neither here nor there. It’s urban and suburban at the same time.

Here’s Seattle, right around where Compound Records used to be. Now in this shot you’ve got two to four story buildings, all zero-lot line, it could very well be the east coast. But if you pan to the left you’ll see that the starbucks and the dry cleaners are basically suburban, they’re set back a little, with parking lots. It opens up the street, makes things feel more airy. Whereas if you had the same tall buildings on both sides (like it is in East Coast cities), it’d feel much more closed in. Less sunlight. Less places to go if it looks like a pack of teenagers is about to start something.

Albuquerque. You’ve got this awesome adobe architecture, single-family homes mixed with apartments. Walk a block and you’re out on Central, classic midcentury highway strip – it was once Route 66! – some buildings right up on the sidewalk and “engaging the street,” others (turn the camera 180 degrees) like the Walgreens with its big-ol suburbany parking lot.

And I don’t even need to post streetviews of Houston because pretty much the entire inner loop looks exactly like what I’ve just been describing.

It’s not even just a US thing. Japan is full of this stuff. Check out the street in the photo, see the variety of building massing, note how most of the lots are walled off with fences but how the buildings are set back, with landscaping; almost nothing comes up to the sidewalk line. Every dwelling has private, outdoor space. The lots might be 30′ deep but it’s still there. And that’s INSIDE THE YAMANOTE LINE – one of the densest urban areas known to man. Whereas on the East Coast, you can have a 100′ deep lot and still have no place to chill outside.

Why I hate living in the East.

TL;DR – You’ve got a complete lack of Goldilocks urbanity (everything is either claustrophobically boxed-in, or blandly sprawling), and absolutely no way to escape into unspoiled nature. You’re perpetually trapped in shit.

But can there really be such thing as too many bike lanes? Probably not, but she’s going to test the theorem.

You may have heard of NYC’s crazy Dane traffic czar in reference to the Broadway closures. You can now sit down and enjoy a halal lamb sandwich smack dab in the middle of Times Square. (If you have not done this yet, please do – it is divine.) But more than these big-name projects, she’s been busy putting in some of the swankest bike infrastructure in North America. Like the Prospect Park West cycle track. Two lanes, two ways, well outside the door zone. It’s the same template used for the Kent Avenue setup which slightly annoyed my attempts at finding a parking spot to ring in 2012 with. And check out these left-side median lanes on Allen Street with a big ol’ striped buffer, plastic bollards (the same kind used to separate H-town’s Katy Tollway or Dallas’s Central Expressway HOV), green paint, and special stripes to guide you through the intersection. Not bad, not bad at all.

Actually, if there’s any criticism to be leveled here it’s that the lanes are (i) too narrow and (ii) not being built fast enough. After the Prospect Park West lanes went in, a few douchey rich people filed a lolsuit and lost. Not too long later, the original plans to install Prospect Park West-style cycle tracks around the outer ring of the Grand Army Plaza were shelved, and the project went forward with only new crosswalks and traffic islands.

And 8′ for two-way cycle tracks is narrow as hell. When I was in high school, a friend of mine and I set out to “field test” various cycle track lane widths by striping them out on a newly-constructed subdivision street using sidewalk chalk, then riding past each other at speed. I tested 5′, 6′ and 2m (about 6’7″) lanes – the idea of making them as narrow as 4′ wasn’t even a consideration. Prospect Park West is a 50′ section from curb to curb. You only need 36′ for two traffic lanes and two rows of parked cars. So the cross-section could be 36′ auto, 3′ striped buffer, 11′ cycle track.

Still, we’re in the very infancy of building proper bike infrastructure like this, stuff that recognizes bikes as a serious transportation medium and not just a fun way to get in shape! In terms of institutional knowledge we’re in basically the same predicament as Moses and his engineers were in the 1940′s when they built New York’s expressways from scratch. We can look back now and note “substandard” lane widths, geometry, merges, what have you, but those guys were writing the standards as they went. And so we are now. A whole ton of the research is 3, 4, 5 years old.

So here’s hoping Janette gets a whole crapton of bike stuff built before the haters eventually force her out. Let’s hope it’s built to last, it’s still there 50, 60, 70 years from now. And let’s hope the rest of the country eventually passes it, standards-wise, so that those accustomed to later facilities look back on the early NYC stuff and can’t help but marvel at how goddam well it functions given such substandard geometry. In other words, let’s hope Khan is the bike Robert Moses.

Speaking of the Master Builder himself, this Observer Article quotes one guy saying “Almost everything Janette has done is good for drivers,” and another saying Khan has “done more for drivers than anyone since Robert Moses.” Drivers, you ask? Yep. Turns out she’s just as skilled at getting potholes and bridges fixed. In fact, all the bike infrastructure combined has represented less than 1% of the NYC DOT’s budget over the past four years. Imagine what it would look like with two percent, or three.

And in the meantime, I really hope the Post or “Seniors for Safety” or some other haterz pick up my “Janette Sadistic-Khan” remark and run with it. I certainly have no productive use for it.

I’ve driven this section a couple times. Beautiful views. One of the great things about mountainous areas like this is they’re like a time capsule of highway construction. Off to the east, you’ve got your original two-lane highway. Switchbacks everywhere. This is from an era where there was really no idea of “design speed,” it was more about just being able to get there in the first place. This meant (i) hard surfaces and (ii) managable grades – engines were tiny, and they overheated easily. I don’t have any history on this section of highway. The original Ridge Route (over California’s Tejon Pass) had a continuous 15mph speed limit in the 20′s; it wouldn’t surprise me if this highway was originally posted similarly. Extra credit goes out to the Streetview guys for capturing this run at sunset.

Off to the west, you’ve got your midcentury four-lane. Very clearly pre-interstate engineering, but good pre-interstate engineering. There are design standards, in this case the criteria appears to have been “no more than 10 degrees of curvature” (a 573′ radius corner). This leads to a fair number of cuts and fills, although the alignment still hugs the land.

It’s pretty curvy by modern freeway standards, but trucks labor up this hill, and they represent a big enough chunk of the traffic to justify repurposing the midcentury US-30 alignment as the uphill I-84 alignment. Four pre-interstate lanes give enough space for a three-lane section with standard-spec shoulders; the usual smattering of advisory signs tell leadfoot passenger cars to slow the F down.

Finally, threading through the middle is the downhill section – the last piece to be built, repping interstate-era engineering. Curvature is halved to 5 degrees (1146′ radius), which neccessitates extensive blasting and filling. In some places the highway just cuts straight through hills. Driving a road like this is like a free geology lesson.

This is also about the limit of what you can do with cuts and retained fill, at least in this type of topography. 5 degrees with moderate banking is good for about 55mph from trucks, 65mph from an average car driver. Maybe 80, in a Turbo Regal with a Dieselboy CD. If you need something considerably faster – like, say, tracks for high speed rail – at some point it becomes easier to just tunnel into the base of the hill and pop out a few miles later. You can get a head-start on your hillclimb tunnel with a viaduct that gets you 100-150′ above the valley floor before the portal entrance. This sort of viaduct-tunnel combo, by the way, is why the California high-speed rail is so expensive. Bullet trains in Texas would be considerably cheaper on account of the relatively low-lying topography of the Houston-DFW-Austin-SA isocoles. Other parts of Texas may have mountains and mesas that dwarf the Grapevine, but no one’s seriously proposing 220mph train service to Terlingua. Although it would be cool.

Anyway, Induced Demand (which I’ve also heard referred to as “Triple Convergence”) is the phenomenon whereby traffic rapidly expands to fill newly-created highway lanes.

From where I sit the arguments look a lot like those on global warming. There’s broad consensus across disciplines that it exists, although a few right-wingers would claim otherwise. And it often gets used to justify really, really crappy policies. Like not building highways, or even tearing them down.

So here’s a few problems I see with the arguments.

1: You’re still carrying more people.

One of the more common arguments against widening goes like “such and such a highway averaged just 28mph at rush hour in [year]. Five years after they finished widening it, it was still clogged, averaging just 31mph in [later year]. Clearly, building more highways won’t fix congestion.”

The problem here lies in defining congestion as speed irrespective of capacity. If you have a four-lane highway moving at 30mph, you’re maybe carrying 80,000 cars a day. Going to a ten-lane highway while retaining the 30mph jam-up means you’re carrying north of 200,000 cars a day. That’s, at a minimum, 120,000 people who get to benefit from that capacity, even if it’s not moving super-fast. 120,000 people who got to move closer to where they want to live, got to take a different, better job, or just eat dinner somewhere on the far side of town.

2: You can narrow the rush hour

There’s this post over on Greater Greater Washington about “Myths about highways”, and under one of them the writer says “Neither Atlanta nor Houston’s multiple Beltways have erased congestion.” Well, duh. Beltway 8 doesn’t have magical powers. But what Houston’s capacity increases have done is narrow the rush hour. Think about it.

Everywhere in the US (except, perhaps, Toledo) is jammed at 4:45 in the afternoon. But what’s it like at 6? 7? 8? In Portland you can leave downtown at 7:30, head north, and still hit a slowdown when you get to the Interstate Bridge. The Schuylkill Expressway in Philadelphia has one of the widest rush hours I’ve ever seen; that road jams up on Sundays. Everywhere, always. But in a city with massive capacity like Houston, the rush hour starts and ends quickly. I’m accustomed to doing 75mph on IH 10 into the mid-afternoon, and I’m likewise accustomed to doing 75 on US 59 as early as 6:00, 6:30pm. Congestion shows up, and then it leaves. It doesn’t linger.

Looking at “rush hour” conditions creates a blinkered view. It’s almost impossible to build a non-toll highway system which will operate at LOS A at 4:30pm. But it’s quite possible to build one that will clear up within the hour. And it’s the difference between that highway and the one that stays clogged until 9pm that controls whether people eat dinner across town, how much they socialize with people in other places, whether a given metro area or region is truly connected.

3: You enabled the decisions which led to the induced demand

On that same “myths about highways” post, the author argues that, rather than take traffic off Lee Highway or Arlington Boulevard, a wider I-66 would have lead to “More people … living west of Manassas and working in downtown DC.” And what, exactly, is wrong with that? Given that some people want to live in the ‘burbs regardless, would you rather have them commuting to soul-sucking suburban office parks?

I recall reading in a book somewhere that San Jose’s West Valley Freeway, originally intended to provide a smooth bypass around downtown, instead attracted so much new housing development around it that it was congested within a year or two. But I don’t really see that as a negative.

Transportation networks enable long-term land use decisions. That’s why cities like Portland are so gung-ho on Streetcars, the permanance of the rails leads developers to build big mixed-use condoblocks. Freeways work the same way with lower-density uses, like single-family detached homes. 85 opened up the southwest flank of San Jose to development. Certainly if I was one of the developers building those neighborhoods, I’d be very happy that they filled up so fast that the freeway was jammed within a year.

Now, let’s say you don’t like the very idea of single-family housing, you think we should live in high-density apartment blocks, preserve open space, etc. OK, I’m receptive to that. I’ve read a bunch of stuff that says Dutch kids are happier than American kids, score lower on measures of dysfunction (teenage pregnancy, drug use, whathaveyou) and they certainly live denser than we do. But that’s not an argument against the freeway’s effectiveness. You’re not saying “The freeway doesn’t work,” you’re saying “the freeway isn’t conducive to the kind of development I prefer.”

Rhetorical Gimmicks

That list bit is, let’s be honest, a rhetorical gimmick. At the urban-suburban level, freeways promote low-density housing development. Most of the people arguing against freeways don’t really like low-density housing development. But if you make a facial argument that “low density development is bad,” you’ll get a lot of responses like “I like my backyard” or “what do you have against being able to find a parking space,” maybe even a backlash group or two.

On the other hand, if you can argue “freeways don’t work, they’re always jammed up,” you might very well get that same person who likes her yard, her two car garage, to say “well, I get stuck in traffic a lot, you might be right.” Might even get them to sign on to the idea that we shouldn’t build any more freeways, because traffic.

But it’s still a gimmick.

What happened on the 21st? That was the day my post on Street Jogs was crossposted to both the r/Portland and r/UrbanPlanning subreddits.

In the latter, someone asked “I wonder if Michael Southworth has seen this”? I don’t know, but Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities is always in the short box of books that goes whenever I move. When I talk about 30s-era planning preferences for Greenbelt-style curvilinear streets spreading via federal mortgage standards, that’s all stuff I learned from that book.