Money for roads and transit

The Baltimore Sun has a front page story on the impact of reduced gasoline excise taxes on Maryland specifically, both in terms of reduced state revenues from the state tax, as well as reduced revenues from the federal tax--because the number of vehicle miles traveled is decreasing, and people are driving smaller cars that get better gas mileage, therefore buying less gas overall. See "Road block?."

State Transportation Secretary Porcari pointed out that smaller cars also pay less in terms of titling and registration fees (which also support the Department of Motor Vehicles infrastructure) and that just like increase in energy costs is impacting transit systems negatively--because they spend a lot of money on fuel for buses--it is also increasing the cost of asphalt, especially because improvements in refining technology mean that less heavy oil is available for conversion. The cost for asphalt has doubled. (Belgian Block...)

This makes the impasse in the State of Virginia on raising funds for transportation infrastructure all the more telling.

Getting around without a car

my gf likes to tease me over how I say the word "can't" with my midwestern accent. Lots of people write about how for whatever reason--work, family, etc.--that they can't give up driving. You see this on all the blogs, and even in the latest issue of DC Watch, and I have been arguing about this on the Envision Baltimore googlegroup.

You can. See this 3 year old article from the Post, "More Area Car Owners Shift to Hourly Rentals." But no one said it was easy.

Image by MIT student Stefan Marti.

Go (Paris) Greens!

I rail about absolute vs. relative improvement from time to time. E.g., is a Prius really better than a car if it's still a car... The Greens in Paris are opposing the Autolib carsharing program, using electric cars, proposed by Mayor Delanoe for launch because they say it promotes car use, which should not be promoted. See "Green Party wants auto use reduced. Period," from the AP via the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Image from Le Monde, in the Paris Banlieue blog, "Tramway des gares, Autolib’ et murets de couloirs de bus, ou pas de programme municipal sans chapitre transports, même à Paris."

Speaking of parking (transportation demand management)

Christopher calls our attention to a brilliant proposal from the City of San Francisco for reducing driving demand by mandating equal support of non-driving options. See "PLAN AFOOT TO GET S.F. WORKERS OUT OF CARS: BUSINESS' OBLIGATION: Firms would have to provide transit passes or shuttle service or help employees set up pretax accounts," from the San Francisco Chronicle. From the article:

Businesses with more than 20 employees working in San Francisco would be required to help their workers ditch their cars and commute to work on transit or in vanpools under a proposal being considered by city officials. The goal of the plan, which would be the first in the nation, is to cut greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality by getting more people out of polluting cars. ...

[Under] Pretax wages for passes. Set up a deduction program under existing federal guidelines, which would allow employees to use up to $110 a month in pretax wages to purchase transit passes or vanpool rides. The program provides financial incentives. Employers would save 9 percent on payroll taxes. Employees would save 40 percent on their transit costs.

It still bugs me that by comparison, similar initiatives in DC, be they Zoning, planning, City Council passed legislation, or the Department of Transportation, are very disjointed.

Zoning's parking regulations

I still haven't decided if I will bother testifying at tonight's Zoning Commission hearing about revising parking regulations.

Greater Greater Washington has been running a series on the issue. See for example, "Parking countdown #2: This is what a neighborhood without minimums looks like," which includes links to earlier entries.

The most important supportive points are that:

1. Neighborhoods within the L'Enfant City, especially designated historic districts such as Capitol Hill, already function along the lines laid out in the revised Draft Parking Recommendations submitted to the Zoning Commission by the Office of Planning.

2. It costs more to build housing with mandated parking.

3. Creating an amenity-rich livable community is not possible with a mobility focus on automobiles.

I have written plenty about this over the years so the story seems old to me.

However, I think that the proposals are likely to fail, at least at this juncture. For one, Chairman Hood lives in an automobile-centric part of Ward 5 and he drives. Automobility is central to his world-view about city livability and how to get around. (See the discussion around removing parking at the Rhode Island Metro Station in favor of a mixed use development on said parking lot in the relevant zoning hearing for confirmation. But I've experienced this over the years with regard to other testimonies, including the H Street Commercial District overlay.)

2. At this time, the car people are far more motivated to get out and testify against than the walker-bicyclist-transit types. Plus neighborhood associations and civic groups tend to be dominated by those of an automobile-centric paradigm.

This is why DDOT proposals to change residential parking regulations to charge more for residential parking permits, for additional permits, and for larger cars, as well as proposals to reign in Sunday church parking failures have always gone down in flames.

3. Plus, it's not like the Zoning Commission is truly focused on enhancing the city's livability and competitive advantage through land use decisions. They don't really focus on it. And so they don't really pay much attention to urban design, transportation demand management, linking land use decisions to transportation questions, etc. Why should they all of a sudden see the light with parking regulations?

4. I think that the Office of Planning made a serious strategic error by choosing to lead the three year process of zoning review mandated by the revision of the Comprehensive Plan with parking, which is the "third rail" of local politics, just as changing Social Security is the "third rail" of national political discourse.

I hope I am wrong... then again, the Zoning Commission can have this action "continued" for further study and bring it back for review later.

Right now, all the regulations favor parking and automobiles. The only exception is for historic districts. Which tend to be the most thriving residential and commercial neighborhoods in the core of the city...

----------------------
Excerpt from a blog entry from 10/2006

The City of San Francisco adopted a "transit first" development policy decades ago. For the most part this means that new development in the downtown core has been built without parking, but with access to efficient transit.

Moving to a "transit first" land use and development paradigm

Most citizens and government agencies are imprinted with an approach to land use that is automobile-centric and oriented towards segregated, relatively undense uses. This is commonly referred to as a suburban-oriented land use and development paradigm. Stakeholders have an unconscious and systematic bias towards "automobility" and improving the transportation system for automobiles, at the expense of transit and pedestrian capacity, and urban design.

The suburban land use approach is particularly inappropriate for center cities generally, and Washington specifically, especially because the city is so well connected by transit, in particular the subway, and relatively efficient bus service throughout most of the city, and because of the importance of leveraging the tremendous public investments that have been made in building and maintaining this system. (Note that the polycentric design of the WMATA subway system is criticized because it promotes sprawl even more than it improves access to and within the center city.)

A "transit-first" policy would establish and emphasize that the basic framework of how the City of Washington should grow is through the linkage-articulation of land use and transit. Intra-city and regional mobility can be improved and congestion reduced by investing in the capacity of our transit system, and by linking land use policies to these investments.

Furthermore, every parking space is an automobile trip generator. We cannot simultaneously expand parking and reduce congestion. The concept of induced demand presented both by parking spaces and roads is well understood throughout the transportation planning profession....

An illustration of how San Francisco's "transit first" development policies work in practice

According to the article "If you build it, will they take the bus? San Francisco builds an epic mall, with no parking," published in the Austin American-Statesman on Sunday, October 22, 2006, San Francisco's downtown growth management policy, adopted in 1985, for the most part, forbids the creation of parking spots when new development is constructed.

The article discusses the Westfield San Francisco Centre, which was just expanded, tripling the square footage to 1.5 million.

According to the article:

San Francisco's Westfield mall doesn't even have a parking lot. The nearest parking is across the street at a city-owned lot that also serves the Moscone convention center and other attractions. It can hold about 2,600 cars. Officials expect about 68,500 people a day on average, or about 25 million a year, will visit the mall. That works out to one parking spot for every 26 mall shoppers....

The mall also is in the middle of one of the biggest hubs for public transportation outside New York City. More than 30 different public transit sources are within a few blocks of the mall, including the Powell Street terminus of the city's famed cable car line, several stops for the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system, and stops for municipal trains and buses.

Missisauga (Ontario) urban design awards

From "27th Annual Mississauga Urban Design Awards Call for Nominations":

Nominations are now open for the Mississauga Urban Design (MUD) Awards -- the longest running awards program of its kind in Ontario. Nominees will be judged on their contribution towards making Mississauga a vibrant and liveable city. ...

New this year:
This year, the scope of the Urban Design Awards will be enhanced through a new initiative called, My Favourite Mississauga Space; a contest which promotes the importance of great public spaces and the vital role they play in the health, well being and vibrancy of the City. The public and members of Council, through their constituents will be invited to help identify examples of great spaces in the City, which they consider important, meaningful and have a particular affection for.

Urban agriculture in Pittsburgh

Lake Fong, Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Anysa Jordan, 15, of Braddock, waters flowers and vegetables at Braddock Farms, operated by Grow Pittsburgh.

Is discussed in "In a steel mill's shadow, sustainable agriculture blooms in Braddock," from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

-- Grow Pittsburgh

Speaking of the Examiner

Don't you like their new design? I do. Clearly, it's modeled after other free dailies like the Metro papers distributed in NYC and other places.

Now if we could get the newspaper to improve the people they have as local columnists.

Still, I won't talk about the editorial page... but they do run letters.

It's important to have another editorial voice in the city, especially as the Washington Times has drastically reduced its coverage of local issues, turning to wire services (Associated Press) and reprinting stories from regional newspapers outside of Washington for the bulk of their "local" coverage.

At the same time, the Express has repositioned its website to focus on entertainment only. It used to have good blogging coverage on local issues. I thought that was necessary since the Express has little in the way of original content on local issues, and no real columnists of import on local issues. Because the Express is distributed more widely this is an issue.

But the papers are truly positioned differently. The Express is about reaching a younger demographic presumed not to read newspapers, while the Examiner is trying to meet some of the traditional functions that we have grown up to associate with a _local_ newspaper.

The National Mall

Today's Examiner has a cover story (two inside full pages) on the National Mall and the constant squeezing in of new monuments, sales kiosks, etc. See "Mall sprawl."

Judy Scott Feldman of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall has been relentless on bringing out new ideas for the National Mall in the third century, including extending the Mall to the South, as well as adding an infill yellow line subway station to the area around the Jefferson Memorial.

The article quotes me including the last paragraph of the story. Now it's a good quote, referring to the ongoing "mall sprawl" that Michael Neibauer writes about. But often with interviews with journalists, your best quote is the one you come up with after the interview is over.

I said this:

But preservationists are skeptical that Congress will ever have the will to say no to organized, voting activists seeking their place on the national common.

“Congress is not in the business of saying no,” Layman said. “It’s not what they do.”

What I should have said is:

"Congress is not in the business of saying no to special interests. It's not what they do. But they have no problem saying no to federal agencies looking for adequate political and financial support to maintain current programs as well as deal with imposed expansion."

The other was more pithy though...

What we need is another Senator McMillan, someone willing to lay out a grand vision that Congress can support (I know that the McMillan Commission didn't have full support, and then he died besides, circumscribing the implementation of the grand plan).

Congress doesn't respect the National Park Service. It doesn't respect and pay attention to the National Capital Planning Commission. The Smithsonian gets (somewhat deserved) oversight but not enough funding to maintain its buildings that bracket the Mall and define the cultural patrimony of the United States of America.

These are our National Museums, a mandate that the various individual museums sometimes don't take seriously enough.

And Congress certainly doesn't pay much attention to the quality of the local experience and the efforts (for good or bad) by various local agencies that deal with this (DC Office of Planning, DC Department of Transportation, and tourism and history related organizations including the Washington Convention and Tourism Corporation).

And the National Park Service in turn doesn't pay much attention to the quality of the experience they provide, and the various local entities that try to shape and improve this experience.

And Judy Scott Feldman got dissed by the National Park Service, who went and created a public-private partnership headed up by a leader of DC's Growth Machine, John Akridge, a big developer and member of the Federal City Council. (See the Trust for the National Mall.)

Granted, if DC Parks and Recreation ran some of these installations, it would likely be even worse. But because of history, many of the city's parks are run by the federal government, and we have little input into how they are run. Benign neglect is one thing. Improvement is quite another.

In the meantime, we're screwed.

I don't deal a lot with parks issues. (It's hard enough dealing with the schleroticism of the DC government, taking on some issues of regional import, the tyranny of neighborhood parochialism without also trying to fix the National Park Service).

Some resources include:

-- the briefing papers for the American Planning Association's City Parks Forum effort of a few years back
-- reports and the Center for City Park Excellence from the Trust for Public Land
-- the Parks issue of Places Journal

-- which was produced in part with the Project for Public Spaces, which has a great Parks, Plazas and Squares initiative/division of the organization and this great article "Ten Principles for Creating Successful Squares"
-- PPS is known throughout the field for their revival of public spaces such as at Rockefeller Plaza and Bryant Park in New York City
-- this article from the New York Times, "Splendor in the Grass" discusses Bryant Park's revitalization and ongoing management and how the presence of women is an indicator of comfort and safety.

People like Cy Paumier, author of Creating a Vibrant City Center, and the Downtown DC BID have been trying to engage the National Park Service for a number of years on these kinds of issues.

I argue for the creation of a master destination management plan (it goes beyond tourism, cultural tourism, or wayfinding) that brings all the various stakeholders together, but including the critics (people like me and Judy Scott Feldman) who attempt to go beyond the tried and true.

I mean have you seen DC's entry sign posted at various entry points into the city? Can you think of a more pathetic sign?

They now have brick surrounds, I just haven't uploaded specific photos.

I like Chicago's better...

Photo from AA Roads.

Neighborhood planning

As I write from time to time, we don't really have neighborhood plans in DC. There were Ward Plans in the old Comprehensive Plan. Now there are geographically larger districts called Area Elements in the new Comprehensive Plan.

While receiving great press in the trade, the Strategic Neighborhood Action Plans (SNAPs) weren't really comprehensive neighborhood plans, if you consider a plan to be an evaluation and setting of priorities in a rigorous way. The way SNAP plans worked, if people mentioned stuff in your neighborhood then it might make it into the report, if they didn't it definitely wouldn't end up in the report. And there was no substantive evaluation of quality of life factors, public assets present or desired, and a process for setting priorities and a way to achieve at least some of them.

Another problem that I have with "neighborhood" planning is that broader objectives aren't usually considered simultaneously, and assessed.

Yet another problem is that people expect every property to accomplish every wish that they might have. For example, every neighborhood planning process seems to bring people out of the woodwork to advocate for open space on the property, even though an objective and synthetic analysis wouldn't necessarily make that case.

Anyway, the Foggy Bottom/West End neighborhood is involved in a planning process involving the deaccessioning and/or reuse and adaptation of a number of public assets in their community. This process was touched off by a late night sale of some of the property to the Eastbanc development group, which was later rescinded.

I helped "facilitate" a planning process that focused on looking at the various public assets in the neighborhood in a more comprehensive fashion, producing a report along with the conveners of the process, representing both the Foggy Bottom Association and the Dupont Circle Citizens Association (Dupont Circle residents make up a large portion of the patronage of the West End Library, which was the site of the original focus/protest). (The local ANCs were also supportive of and sponsors of that planning exercise.)


It's being used to shape the current planning process there with regard to the future of the West End Library site as well as other public assets in the West End.

While I wouldn't call this a full-fledged neighborhood plan, it does raise important points, of both a "macro" and a "micro" nature, although not necessarily considering broader "city-wide" concerns. It certainly lays out a comprehensive framework, and most neighborhoods lack such frameworks when considering broader development/zoning matters as well as community benefits and public assets issues.

(There is a meeting tonight at 6:30pm at the St. Stevens Church at 25th and Pennsylvania Ave. NW)

Speaking of transit

1. Don't forget that Maryland is committed to spending a lot more money to more than triple the capacity of the Maryland Railroad Commuter line. See "Fixes to MARC service to cost state $369 million" from the Gazette.

2. From today's Baltimore Sun comes the news, in "Top officials directing $340 million toward mass transit," that the Baltimore regional transportation board is directing more money to transit projects, reducing somewhat the heavily highway orientation that they had espoused previously.

See the B'More Mobile campaign for more.

3. Plus (and I haven't yet uploaded photos), it was exciting to see that the City of Baltimore/Mayor's Office had a booth at Artscape devoted to light rail/streetcar expansion within Baltimore, on the red line planning project there.

4. I haven't written about the "No train on Wayne " campaign regarding the Purple Line, because I haven't gotten around to uploading photos post-move. (But I have a bunch.) See "Wayne Ave. residents sign-on to Purple Line opposition" from the Gazette. Dr. Gridlock also did a very nice feature on the Purple Line in the Post, "Going Purple," and this followup, "Light Rail Trumps Bus Rapid Transit."

Plus there has been coverage of the anti-Purple Line campaign by the Columbia Country Club, in "Purple Line foes offer no ideas, and no names," from the Post.

Laurie DeWitt⁄The Gazette. Signs like this one are posted on lawns throughout the Seven Oaks-Evanswood neighborhood near downtown Silver Spring in protest of a Purple Line route along Wayne Avenue, the main road running through the residential community.

I really like Washcycle's take on the conversion of public land by the Columbia Country Club. He suggests, "Mr. Leggett, Tear Down This Fence," and take back from the Country Club the 88 feet of property that they are converting to their private use.

I hate to admit that I am starting to not like "rails to trails" programs because it ends up creating the opportunity for conflict to fight future revival of rail. Or if the national organization would change their name to "Rails & Trails" or "Rails to Trails to Rails" maybe I'd feel better about it.

Why is it so damn hard to raise the gasoline excise tax?

See "Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund; Loan From Mass Transit [Account] Is Urged," from the New York Times. From the article:

Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.

The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases. Both trends are being driven by the high price of gasoline and diesel fuel. ...

That dampens proceeds from the federal tax on motor fuel: 18.4 cents a gallon on gasoline, 24.4 cents a gallon on diesel. Revenue from the tax goes to the Highway Trust Fund, with most of it designated to the highway account, which finances construction and repair of roads, and a much smaller share to the mass transit account.

Also see "The Changing Commute - Demand for Rides Soars" from the New York Times, "Riders flock to T in record numbers" from the Boston Globe, and remember these four press releases from July from the DC region's transit authority:

• Metrorail records third high ridership day of the week
• Metrorail sets back-to-back high ridership days
• Metrorail sets ninth highest ridership day
• Metrorail sets new record for highest ridership day of all time

Note that while the typical driver believes that gasoline excise taxes (state, federal, local + registration fees) fund roads to the tune of 100%, the actual amount is closer to 50%. The rest comes from general funds and other sources.

The real "common sense" about traffic

According to author Tom Vanderbilt, in "'Traffic' writer reads the road signals to explain drivers' behavior," in today's USA Today:

Much of what he learned was counterintuitive, he says. Consider, for example, the feared roundabout. It starred in National Lampoon's European Vacation when an American family, having driven into a London traffic circle, finds they cannot leave, orbiting endlessly. In real life, studies show well-designed roundabouts are safe and reduce traffic delays.

"The system that many of us would feel is more dangerous is actually safer, while the system we think is safer is actually more dangerous," he says. That is because intersections are what he calls "crash magnets," the site of half of all traffic collisions.

Engineers calculate that a four-way intersection has 56 potential points of what they call "conflict," or as Vanderbilt says, "the chance for you to run into someone" — 33 places to hit a car and 24 spots to hit a pedestrian.

Roundabouts, on the other hand, reduce the number of potential conflicts to 16. They reduce speeds and prompt drivers to pay more attention to what they're doing, rather than simply sailing through a green light. Or "the system that makes us more aware of the potential danger is actually the safer one."

But don't roundabouts slow traffic? That, Vanderbilt says, depends on how you look at it. A driver with a green light makes better time than a driver who has to slow for a roundabout. But "roughly half the time, the light will not be green."

"Slower is faster," Vanderbilt likes to say, noting how traffic lights can be timed to enable drivers going at a certain speed to hit a line of "constant greens."

Still having Internet connection issues

so don't expect a profuse number of blog entries for awhile. (The DSL is fixed but now I need a new Ethernet card.)

The federal government and cities

Professor Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University has an op-ed in the New York Times, about the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, entitled "To Fight Poverty, Tear Down HUD." He says that HUD is focused on cities, and that metropolitan regions and connections between cities are more important.

I would say that HUD has two missions that aren't necessarily congruent. One focuses on developing housing for poor people. The other is on urban development and revitalization.

The belief in the field is that these missions are in one and the same. But I think it's fair to say that improving housing for poor people didn't improve cities.

I have the same reaction in reading Barack Obama's platform on city issues, partly a response to Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter's call for a debate between Democratic presidential candidates on urban issues. (See Urban Policy.)

The Obama platform focuses on poverty issues. I understand that. He was a community organizer. But cities and metropolitan regions are also about economic development and growth. It's the basis of how and why and where cities and regions develop. It's the heart of the field of urban economics. And it's the heart of arguments in Jane Jacobs two books after Death and Life of the Great American City, The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

At the library today I happened onto a monograph series from the Society of Economic Anthropology. One of the collections is entitled "Economic Analysis Beyond the Local System."

I thought about the aptness of that title in terms of what I think about and discuss in terms of thinking and addressing local issues on the different scales of local-neighborhood, local-city, and even local-region, although for the most part I think about this within the city, so that I think about this mostly in terms of how neighborhood planning processes fail to engage with and acknowledge citywide needs and concerns simultaneously.

But this idea of analysis beyond the local system is key to understanding urban issues and urban poverty and urban growth, as well as the relationship between municipalities and other levels of government be they local such as with counties, regional such as with metropolitan planning organizations, states, or the federal government.

A very practical guide to dealing with local economic development engaging improving the lives of people rather than focusing on jobs more theoretically is Temali's Community Economic Development Handbook.

Getting back to Prof. Venkatesh's article, cities need to be innovative and energetic (see the writings of Richard Florida, Charles Landry, even Edward Glaeser, among others) and the last thing a government agency, especially at the federal level, is concerned with is innovation.

In short, looking to government for the answer is likely a failing strategy.

As aggravating as it is, working on urban revitalization from the ground up level is exciting, challenging, and worthwhile. But dealing with it from the aspect of dealing with government regulation, electoral politics, and working with appointed government officials, it can be terrible, difficult, and seemingly intractable.

One of the ways that HUD could be better is if it too focused on "indicative planning" or building the capacity for vision. The UK planning agencies produce memos and reports, ranging from "Planning Policy Guidance" memos, to incredible reports such as Living Places: Cleaner, Safer, Greener, as well as the work done by organizations such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and English Partnerships.

I don't really feel as if we have an equivalent set of planning guidance and stretching and pushing and striving in a similar fashion here in the United States.

If HUD published PPG memos on linking land use and transportation planning, shifting from an automobility planning paradigm, the link between density and livability as well as transit success, building a local economy, foodways and urban agriculture, eliminating free parking, accessiblity planning linking land use and transportation infrastructure in land use decisionmaking, rebuilding a system of railroad-based transportation, etc., we would be far better ahead than we are now.

Anniversary of the Model T

Ford Model T cars parked on a street in in Richmond, Indiana as they participate in a record breaking parade where, according Ford Motors, they broke the Guinness World Records' longest parade of a single make of vehicle, July 24, 2008. Some 1000 Model T owners are taking part in a week-long Ford Model T 100 year anniversary. It is the largest gathering of Ford Model Ts since the cars began rolling out of Ford's Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, Michigan in 1908. REUTERS/Sam VarnHagen/Ford Motor Co./Handout (UNITED STATES).

"Psychologically, the Model T turned people outwards from cities" spawning highways, suburbs, and shopping malls.

-- From "US bids farewell to the era of the Model T" in the Financial Times, quoting and extending Douglas Brinkley's (professor at Rice University) writings on Henry Ford.

Philadelphia area to promote the value of living in the city and inner ring suburbs

See "Campaign will market older towns," subtitled "The message: Close-in suburbs and less-known areas of Phila. can be good places to live, and cheaper," from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Social Compact in the news

Ironically, I wrote the email below to an e-list on asset-based community development last week, not knowing about this article, "A new look finds wealth in inner city," in the Los Angeles Times.

Another problem with a focus on chains is where the money ends up going. While data on the impact varies a little, generally the amount bandied about is that a chain store has a multiplier impact of 14 cents for each dollar spent there, while for a locally owned store, more than 50 cents of every dollar spent in the store recirculates in the local economy.
----------------
I end up not being super impressed with their work, not that it isn't great in terms of their ability to drill down and discover people/data. See this paper by Scott Bernstein of the Center for Neighborhood from the late 1990s: Using The Hidden Assets of America's Communities & Regions to Ensure Sustainable Communities. This paper spawned the kind of analysis employed by Social Compact.

The issue isn't that there are 5 poor people living in a house instead of 2 people. The issue is how do we rebuild urban commercial districts given an incredibly concentrated retail industry, one that for the most part is "chained up," that chains have little interest in urban areas, particularly underserved/poor areas.

To me, the issue is rebuilding the local economy at the neighborhood level (also see Community Economic Development Handbook by Temali).

And this brings up issues of entrepreneurship development, capital formation, capacity building, etc. Anyway, there is someone who says that the phrase "information is power" is only half right, that "information is _potential_ power." The issue is how to utilize the info.

How do we convert the information from potential into power? It happens that this is the big thing that I am dealing with in my work, and is something that for the most part I am not writing about in the blog, because it is the formulation phase. I am working with another consultant on this. Hope to have an integrated framework laid out by the end of the year, although part of it will be delivered within a report to a commercial district in Pittsburgh, and in a community on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and we are talking about it at a conference in Vermont in October.

Insight generally and insight of the day

Barcelona Spain - sewer drain C20080601 017
Originally uploaded by fotoproze

Last week's New Yorker has an article on the process and generation of insightful thinking, "The Eureka Hunt [ABSTRACT]."

My morning insight on my bike ride into town today was about manhole covers for drainage sewers. I ride down North Capitol including under Rhode Island and New York Avenues. The manholes for the drainage sewers are very large of the open grate variety. There are wide holes in the grate to allow water through.

They are dangerous for bicyclists because the width of the channel in many versions are wider than bicycle tires.

The obvious thing would be to make the channels narrower.

Or the insight is to put the grates in with the channels perpindicular rather than parallel to the street. Then the channels would be easily traversable by any and all bicycle tires without any problem.

Maybe I'll submit a proposed rule to the Federal Highway Administration with a copy to the Institute for Traffic Engineers.

(Flickr photo of a drainage sewer covering grate from Barcelona by fotoproze.)

"Community" chipper and log splitting

Instead of branches and yard waste and trees downed as a result of storms ending up in the traditional waste stream, shouldn't they go into a separate operation where they can be chipped/created into mulch?

--------------
We are in the process of acclimating to our new house, and are still working towards creating a vegetable garden as well as a compost pile. This weekend we took down a "shrub" that through a few decades of lack of maintenance grew into about a 20 foot high shrub of at least 9 feet in diameter.

I could just take all the branches to the dump. But that isn't what I'd like to do. And there is far too much for a compost pile, even if we had one.

I don't know if DC has what we might think of as a community "chipper" but we should. Including at the dump, where it would then be a great way to reduce the the waste stream.

For about a year, I lived in Mt. Rainier, and there, Mondays are bulk trash and yard waste day. I presume that the yard waste is separately streamed and mulched.

Any ideas?

After a storm around the first week of June, a number of trees were downed in my new neighborhood. I will say that the city dealt with the problems--blocked roads, etc.--pretty quickly.

But I got to thinking, after seeing a small log splitter at a friend's house in Rockville (she is a ceramicist and so she needs a lot of wood to fire her kiln), that the city could also go around and make usable wood/a revenue stream out of what might merely be thought of as trash. Image from Kaiser Tree Preservation Company. Our friend came out with her chain saw and helped us take down the aforementioned "shrub."

Another way to build supportive foundations for the development of independent businesses and entrepreneurship

Andrew calls our attention to this article from the Los Angeles Times, "TechShop: Where do-it-yourself inventors do R&D," subtitled "Silicon Valley workshop offers tools to an innovative community."

From the article:

By offering affordable access to otherwise out-of-reach tools, TechShop is lowering start-up costs and providing a commons for previously isolated minds. It's a place where "makers" -- as members of the do-it-yourself movement are known -- can make such products as water-cooled stacks of computer servers and remote-controlled robots that do videoconferencing.

It's doing for physical goods what Kinko's did for printed products, said David Pescovitz, a research director at the Institute for the Future, a forecasting group in Menlo Park. "TechShop has the potential to be the service bureau to the maker culture," he said. The atelier occupies a maze-like 15,000-square-foot warehouse near Stanford University. Twelve work tables fill the main space. Rooms are designated individually for activities such as painting, foam molding and neon production.

Since opening in October 2006, TechShop has attracted 300 members, each paying $100 a month for hands-on access to the sophisticated tools. The operation also sells supplies and charges for classes.

Randi Lynn Beach, For The Times. Former Hewlett-Packard engineer Chris Tacklind, left, works with Daniel Fukuba in TechShop's welding lab. Jim Newton, the man behind TechShop, wants to expand the concept to 50 sites in five years.

Rebuilding the support and capital network and structure for independent retail businesses

The Post has an article in the Sunday paper on crowdsourcing as a way to create desired independent businesses, in "Online, a Community Gathers to Concoct A Neighborhood Eatery." I'm not sure that would work exactly, and it's big on using the idea of "crowdsourcing" to make something old new and sexy.

The real issue is how to you deal with the very difficult issues of creating a business plan, creating a business concept, creating a robust business system for your business so that it will succeed, finding capital, creating and executing a marketing plan, etc.

If I asked you to do all at once, except for the most atypical of people, you would be paralyzed, "crowdsourcing" or building a business network and support system is a way for people to come together to seed new retail businesses.

Below is something I wrote about this more broadly, focusing on capital formation issues, in November 2005.
------------------------------
(This is something I have been meaning to write about for some time, but it's also sparked in part by Brian Miller's response to the entry on "Inner city's inner strengths mined.")

One of the problems in creating independent businesses is that the scale of chain competitors is so large that it is hard to compete on the same playing field. One way to address this is to specialize and be small, such as a cookbook and gardening bookstore or a mystery bookstore, but it can be difficult to succeed in small markets.


Handleman Company Sales Representative Matthew Bashioum of Troy manages CD inventory at Wal-Mart store 2873 at 2001 W. Maple Rd. in Troy, Friday morning, 10/28/05. (Todd McInturf/The Detroit News).

Leased departments. In the old days, department and discount stores (Kmart, Korvettes, etc.) didn't run all of their departments in a store. They had what they called "leased departments," which were leased to and stocked and managed by third party companies such as Handleman, which had a very close relationship with Kmart Corporation for decades. Typically book and jewelry departments in large department stores were run by separate companies and often still, branded cosmetics counters may be run by the Cosmetic Manufacturer. This model still has legs...

Silver Spring Books in Silver Spring is actually managed differently than depicted in some of the George Pelecanos books. It's run as a type of business cooperative. Three separate owners of the store own bookshelves, stock them with books, and spend two days/week running the store. Each book is tagged by the owner so that accounts are properly settled. While each owner has a specialty, they can stock and sell any type of book. What customers see is a bookstore with breadth, whereas the three owners individually could not likely provide such breadth, by working together in a way that is invisible to customers, each must provide only 1/3 of the amount of money necessary to outfit and stock a bookstore.

Similarly, there is an antiques store on Antiques Row in Kensington, Maryland that rents individual rooms to different proprietors. There is one clerk and cash register, but this way a much greater breadth of inventory can be offered. The Hoopla gift store on Barracks Row on 8th Street SE does the same thing.

Finally, there is the example of Belvedere Square in Baltimore. This is a "market" that is privately run. Just like a public market like Lexington Market or Eastern Market, each "stall" is privately owned and managed.

The difference is that Belvedere Square is something like an upscale Dean and Deluca. Not in that it is one store, with leased departments. At Belvedere Square there are 11 different stores, ranging from Atwater's Breads and Soups, Ceriello Fine Foods, to the Grand Cru wine shop.

Customers peruse the selection of great breads at Atwater's in the Belvedere Square Market.(Sun photo by Doug Kapustin)

While you can rip on this as just more "gentrification," think about it. You're trying to attract a supermarket to your community. Few independent business people can muster the money required to outfit a 15,000-30,000 square foot singly-branded supermarket (this requires upwards of $2.5 million). But you can probably find a number of different entrepreneurs to run their own sections, from produce to meats and poultries. One of the shops made fresh orange juice right before your eyes. The only thing the array of stores is missing at Belvedere Square is a dry goods section.

Customers get homemade soups from Ploughboy Soups in the Belvedere Square Market.(Sun photo by Jed Kirschbaum)

Here is a way to reduce the amount of capital needed to open a "supermarket," while providing entrepreneurship opportunities and a great retail experience--"retailtainment"--besides. (At the same time, it sets higher expectations for customer experiences that most of the stalls in Baltimore's six public markets aren't meeting...

Cross Street Market is a cool public market, in the heart of the most successful neighborhood commercial district in Baltimore, Federal Hill. But the vendors in the market are having a difficult time changing to meet the needs of new customers (Cross Street Market is a couple buildings down from a Vespa dealership...) and the upper income residents of the area are shopping instead at the Whole Foods Market that is 1.5 miles away.

Boston Globe bicycling coverage

Two photo features on "Ten Tips for Cycling Commuters" as well as on the first "Bike Friday," an event sponsored by the City of Boston and including a police escort.

Walkscore and the Boston Globe

The Boston Globe has a nice feature on Boston's walking environment, in Starts & Stops: Feet give the best, cheapest mileage," and mention the Walkscore as well as how it ranked Boston third in the country for the number of walkable neighborhoods.

I think an interesting Sunday Dr. Gridlock feature in the Post would be on Walkscores comparing the municipalities/counties in the region, as well as different types of neighborhoods in DC.

A simple way to "solve" the foreclosure crisis

would be to shift to 40 year mortgages for people with a greater difficulty for paying at current rates, given changes in housing values and interest rates. So what if they spend more money over 10 more years. It's still likely cheaper than paying rent, even without the mortgage interest deduction.

If the developer doesn't care, then what happens?

Senate Square apartments, 200 block of I Street NE. Architect: Phil Esocoff.

I have a line:

when you ask for nothing, that's what you get. When you ask for the world, you don't get it, but you get a lot more than nothing.

The same goes with the quality of the built environment.

When you demand little, you get little in return.

If you don't demand quality, for the most part, you don't get it.

And with buildings in DC, we only get one shot, one attempt to influence what happens within our lifetimes.

-----------
The Planning and Zoning process, by not focusing very much on placemaking and the quality of the experience, and context and urban form, means that we aren't producing a quality built environment.

This mattered less, when architecture and construction were about beauty and craftsmanship, creating buildings that would last. They couldn't imagine building bad buildings, it just wasn't part of their ethic or world-view. (Also see Kuntsler's Home from Nowhere.)

Now it's all about value engineering. (There are exceptions.) So if you don't demand quality, you can rest assured that you won't get quality.

Another line I have is a take off of the book title, Architecture: Choice or Fate?

I joke that the choice of the developer is the fate of the neighborhood and city. If the architect and developer care about quality you get it. If they don't, you don't. Or if the architects are suburban rather than urban in orientation, then you can be assured that they won't get how to design and build in urban-appropriate ways.

That's why you need a strong zoning and planning environment, and a focus on urban design, to get quality. (And note, most developers in the region argue it's easier and faster to get projects through in DC than it is in places like Arlington or Montgomery Counties.)

---------
The Florida Market "redevelopment" process has been acrimonious for a number of years. A group of us haven't been impressed with the urban renewal like proposals that emanated from the Sang Oh Choi group and we opposed them*. In order to bull the proposals through the Choi group hired connected lawyers, made donations to City Councilmembers and Mayoral campaigns, and got Vincent Orange to pass a law (he already modified the Comprehensive Plan at the Council level, without public input) "mandating" the urban renewal.

Now that law still hasn't been executed (although you can never really get a good and straight answer out of the developer's lawyer...). And since a new investor has come into the Market area owning more land than the Choi group, and because Gallaudet has indicated they have no interest in selling their land, the Sang Oh Choi group has backed off on the broad proposal, and they will focus on mandating their will in a much smaller area of the Market district.

But all along, because they had the special law passed by City Council, they have been for the most part intransigent and dismissive of public input. I argue that for the most part, the developer's legal representative misrepresents what is happening in various public forums, before ANCs, and even before the Zoning Commission. But that's the way it is in the city.

As far as the Gateway Residences project is concerned, doing something there is fine. But doing something crappy there is not.

All along, the developer had little interest in seeking out alternative input focused on improving the quality of the project.

And I would argue that the Development Review section of the Office of Planning didn't demand substantive and significant urban design improvements either.

So the project proposal, in many respects, stunk/stinks.

But somehow, after the June 5th Zoning Commission hearing, the Developer and their agents woke up and realized that the Zoning Commission identified problems with the proposal, and their concerns with lack of community input, and that the Developer had to start responding.

[Much of the change had to do with the involvement of ANC6C, and the awarding to them of party status in the matter. The project is located in ANC5B, although immediately abutting ANC6C. Many of the Commissioners in ANC6C are leagues beyond the relative rubes who are the Commissioners in ANC5B. As a result, the Developer couldn't just steamroll things through like before.]

I will admit, they did. The project isn't totally terrible.

But it still needs a great deal of improvement.

And the facade, being glassy and all, just isn't right for that particular place. Really, like with Senate Square and its use of the warehouse-industrial style in homage to the industrial character and history of the area along the northeast corridor railroad tracks emanating north of Union Station, as reflected in still extant buildings such as the Woodies Warehouse, the Sanitary Market Warehouse, the XM Satellite building, and others, they should have utilized a similar style.

This is an opportunity lost that will never be recovered. All because of developer intransigence and a belief that because they had greased the system, they could do what they wanted.

XM Satellite Building. Photo from BeyondDC.

* Last night I received an interesting snub from one of the developer's representatives. I realized later it was because my efforts (and others) likely cost him personally millions of dollars of "rents" earned at the expense of others, through seizure and involvement of the government by eminent domain. (Of course, the developer and other partners in the project lost out as well.)

Gap analysis: planning and zoning

1. I joke often that I started my civic involvement as blowback to the failures of urban renewal and the H Street Community Development Corporation on H Street NE to bring about quality urban revitalization.

I had lived in the neighborhood since the late 1980s.

Many tens of millions of dollars had been spent on the creation of Hechinger Mall, building a bridge over the Union Station railyard for H Street, on two office buildings, which for a time housed a supermarket which failed, a strip shopping center, two HUD-subsidized senior housing apartment buildings, a set of garden apartments (Pentacle Apartments across from Hechinger Mall), the demolition of the "Trinidad" Trolley Barn, the building of the parking-fronted Auto Zone store, the demolition of an alley and its buildings for the Wiley Place Condominiums (800 block of 13th Street NE), three sets of brick modern rowhouses in the place of frame buildings, and one gated rowhouse development in the place of an alley and buildings (700 block of 3rd Street).

And the neighborhood didn't improve. (Until lately.)

I have been trying to figure out why since the late 1990s.

2. Planning vs. Zoning, combined with Political Involvement.

I am not into legal stuff, and I haven't read the Home Rule Charter, but my understanding is that the City Charter gives most authority on land use decisions to the Mayor. (With the proviso that the federal interest is represented by other bodies as laid out by various Federal laws.) Practically, this means whatever executive branch agencies deal with this issue.

But the Zoning Commission is a separate charter agency, independent, but connected to the executive branch through various needs (Office of Planning provides analysis in support of Zoning activities as does the Department of Transportation, the Building and Land Regulation Administration and the Zoning Administrator of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs implements the Zoning regulations).

The problem is that Planning and Zoning are disconnected.

People who work for the Office of Planning need to think of themselves as advocates for a better city.

And I have stated in the past, in various testimonies, that Planning and Zoning should be about maintaining and extending the qualities of a great city.

But zoning focuses mostly on the lot and individual building, as well as building mass and volume, and a little bit on the site.

Planning focuses on "areas" and comprehensive land use.

Since the processes are developer driven, both planning and zoning end up responding to and being a lot more responsive to developers rather than to the principles and vision of creating a better city.

The fact that zoning is law and planning is vision means that too often the vision ends up on the floor of the hearing room, trampled by the land use attorneys and developers who are trying to make as much money as possible with as little investment as possible.

3. And this doesn't even get into public finance questions and legislative and executive branch over-involvement and suasion in the process.

At least in Maryland (see these articles on the investigation of Baltimore's Mayor Dixon, "Dixon gifts probed" and this of Ulysses Currie, both from the Baltimore Sun) public officials get investigated when they get overly cozy with developers and businesses, and get rewards. Maybe the DC politicos aren't getting the same kind of direct financial benefits, but the suasion and unobjective involvement by public officials in such matters is no less sleazy and dirty.

(Would that the Post have a "story gallery" when it comes to these matters locally, comparable to how the Sun is handling coverage of Mayor Dixon and Senator Currie.)

At least in Montgomery County, the Planning Board stepped up to the County Executive (see "Planners Oppose Two Key Measures For Live-Music Hall," from the Post), although the County Council can still overrule the Planning Board. Since they get those checks from developers and the Planning Board doesn't, likely the Planning Board will get overruled.

4. The Committee on 100 and other good government and planning organizations in the city argue for the creation of a Planning Commission.

I see the utility of it. But I have reservations. First, I am not sure that the appointees would be any different from the kinds of connected appointees that tend to be on such commissions already. Second, so much of planning in the city has little oversight of the Office of Planning.

A planning commission, like the Planning Board in Montgomery County, should be responsible first for the land use plan, second for the transportation plan, and third for the capital improvement plan and budget (DC doesn't have a comprehensive capital improvement plan).

And it should have oversight and review power over all other city agency planning efforts, be they health and hospitals, parks, schools, higher education, public works, libraries, etc.

And it should have oversight and review power over land-use-related tax abatement proposals. Normally these go through City Council and/or the Mayor and Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, and while the Chief Financial Officer reviews and makes recommendations to City Council, currently tax abatement and legislative-executive branch involvement in zoning and land use issues isn't reviewed by the Zoning Commission in regards to the matters that come before them.

SO NOBODY IS LOOKING AT THIS IN A COMPREHENSIVE AND CONNECTED FASHION.

If such a commission wouldn't have this oversight and review power, than it would be wasted.

But with this level of independent review (granted the mayor would fire appointees that didn't do his bidding, but that is nothing new with any mayor), at least the kind of backroom dealing that is pretty typical,

Urban design in Washington, DC

"Pretty soon, you won't recognize the place. Promise." This is a curse and a threat as much as something to look forward to.

1. Fred Kent, president of Project for Public Spaces, prefers to not use the term "urban design" because he feels that it becomes all about design, with little emphasis on both art and the quality and intensity of the experience. That's why he uses the term placemaking.

2. I've always "compromised" on being that doctrinaire, believing that the principles and practices of urban design are important, and important to know. It's why in the label-index keywords, I use "urban design/placemaking" to tag these kinds of issues, to encompass the practical reality that these questions about both about design and placemaking experience and vitality.

3. But in DC, it too often is rote, not much about the art, just about design, which is what Fred Kent talks about.

I had a "spirited discussion"/argument with an architect at a meeting earlier in the week. She thinks she knows urban design inside and out. She doesn't. At least in terms of the quality of the experience and the overall impact on the built environment. (I will say she does have some good ideas, which were embodied in her presentation. But they were about design, not the quality of the place and the experience.)

Most architects focus only on buildings. And for the most part the buildings, even sites, don't reach out to, connect with, improve, and extend the quality of the overall built environment.

(Ken disagrees with me. He thinks that the best planners are architects. But I guess I have dealt with, through my involvement in DC stuff, so many architects who fail at context, that I think the best planners, and there aren't many of them, are the planners that also understand urban design, connection, and context.)

She has a great reputation. But when I pointed out a particular glaring gap in one of the projects she heralded and is heralded for, she was pissed, and huffed that there were good reasons for violating accepted urban design principles in that instance. I don't think she has a lot of experience with being questioned in pointed, direct ways. I said I figured that there must have been value engineering reasons for why they cut corners there.

Without offering any "good reasons," she claimed that "there were good reasons for ignoring urban design considerations" for that particular case.

In my experience, whenever a developer, architect, or planner attempts to justify ignoring urban design, that their proffered reasons never add up.

They are dissembling. (That's a polite word for lying.)

4. At last night's Zoning Commission hearing on Case 06-40, the Gateway Residences project at the Florida Market, this came up in a different way.

I really wonder if any of the staffers in the Development Review section of the DC Office of Planning know anything about urban design and the quality of place.

I mean it. They aren't very good.

If they did, I imagine that their recommendations and approvals would have been much different, and that much earlier in the process the developer would have been forced to be more responsive to urban design concerns as addressed by various stakeholders earlier in the process. Instead, almost to the point where it is too late, these concerns were ignored. (More about this in the next blog entry.)

5. In my processing-remonstration of the experience last night, I got to thinking about my testimony about the Comprehensive Plan back in 2006, during the public hearing process.

Like typical transportation departments which "serve all modes of travel equally" but treat the car as more equal than others, when you treat all of the Comprehensive Plan elements as equal, "land use" becomes more equal than all the others.

Over the course of the hearing schedule, I came to the conclusion that Urban Design should have been defined as the primary element, serving as the guiding force for the entire document.

#2 would be Land Use

#3 would be Transportation

#4 would be Economic Development (although I will say that the process also helped me confirm my belief starting in 2005 that there is a difference in focus between an element that would be titled "building a local economy" vs. "economic development; some day I'll write a journal article about it).

The Urban Design Element reads very well, but somehow, when it comes to executing the idea and concept of "urban design" when it comes to projects, something is lost, and the city is being reproduced into a bunch of monotonous glass boxes.

Rendering for the Washington Gateway project, which will be constructed just west of the Florida Market.


When all the elements are equal, land use is more equal. And when land use is more equal, zoning trumps all, and zoning is all about the requirements on the lot. Zoning is not about the overall impact on the quality of the built environment.

6. Maybe the design side of the Office of Planning, Neighborhood Planning and Revitalization/Design section, needs to provide reports on Zoning Cases independent of the Development Review section, on the design and transportation aspects of projects (although more and more, the Dept. of Transportation is providing reports, although they probably aren't all that groundbreaking either).

7. If you only have time to read one thing, maybe it should be this:

-- Close Encounters with Buildings by Jan Gehl et al.

If you have more time, you can read the Urban Design Compendium.

There are books too, especially Creating a Vibrant City Center, and the out of print City: Rediscovering the Center, although part of this book is available as Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.

To understand how it comes together, read this speech by Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston.

DSL

My DSL is down at home and Verizon won't be out until Tuesday, so expect less blogging.

Wayfinding signage for Florida Market

Tonight there is a hearing on Zoning Case 06-40 on the Gateway Market. I'll be testifying, and others, including Frozen Tropics, in "ANC 5B meeting and Thursday's hearing," have written about the issue.

Regular blog commenter Christopher and I collaborated on creating what I think of as "guerrilla" wayfinding signage for the Florida Market. It's why I haven't been blogging much lately...

---------------

One of the big problems for the Florida Market District is what Kevin Lynch called legibility. People need an introduction in order to understand what appears to be a chaotic place, a place that was described by a tour goer once as "the anti-Whole Foods."

The front side of the sign is a retail business directory. It's a way to make the Florida Market understandable. It has a map of the district, shows the businesses that sell to retail customers, and includes specifics about how to get around and how to shop the "Florida Market way."


2. Creating the signage was also an opportunity to address a gap in DC's wayfinding signage heirarchy. There are three purposes for wayfinding signage: informational; directional; and historical-cultural.

Except for some map signs outside of Metro stations, the DC wayfinding signage system doesn't provide map-based directional-information signage within districts.


This sign is designed to provide a model of how it can be done. (Although Takoma Park, Maryland also has something similar.)

Inset, Takoma Park street sign, business directory

3. One of the conceptual breakthroughs we had was incorporating design elements from the WMATA subway and bus maps onto a non-transit map. After all, the most recognizable map in the region is probably the WMATA subway map. (Then maybe the "diamond' of DC. Then maybe the L'Enfant map.) That means we used the red line of the subway map instead of a railroad track to denote the line.


This isn't a first exactly, but it is still rare. DDOT and DCOP maps don't do this.

4. Most maps, including Google, and I informed them about it, but they haven't bothered to change it, as well as DDOT! (for the Metropolitan Branch Trail map) put the New York Avenue station in the wrong place. We didn't.

5. This came out of the back and forth with Christopher that I really enjoyed. The design method, one incorporating prototyping, feedback, and modification throughout the process, in early stages, is far superior to the more rigid rational planning model with constrained scopes and limited ability to be creative.

6. The back side of the sign is historical, information about the Florida Market, as well its place within the city's market system, and the broader food production and distribution system.

That was a cause of some conflict within the process of developing the narrative, because the thinking about representing the history within these three dimensions was inchoate, not fully articulated.

At the end of the process, now we understand better what we were doing.

7. The sign is a melding of the Cultural Tourism DC history trail signage program and the Discover DC signage program managed by the DC Department of Transportation.

We tried to get from DDOT the PMS color numbers to best match the colors on our faux signage, as well as information about the typesizes, but the person responsible for the DDOT wayfinding signage program never responded. I guess they don't feel a sense of urgency to respond to email...

However, rather than call the sign Discover DC, we call it Explore DC, but replacing the DC with the particular district being discussed.

We think that Explore, rather than Discover, is more inclusive, and includes those of us who live here too, but don't necessarily know every nook and cranny in the city.

8. This effort could also be thought of as the beginning of the creation of a thematic history trail about food production and distribution within the city. There is a marker as part of the Barracks Row trail at Eastern Market.


But a directory like the one in the sign that we created for Florida Market could be added to the Eastern Market district. And at the Maine Avenue Seafood Market. And at places where markets were once extant, like the Center Market downtown--which served as the foundation of the retail and entertainment district downtown, or the O Street Market in Shaw.

9. We don't have permission to erect these signs at the present. If we did, we would add "you are here" markers on the map side of the signs, at the various places it would be erected.

We could also have a couple variations of information on the back of the sign, so that we could use some of the other information we came up with, but weren't able to use due to space limitations.

One place I'd like to be able to install a sign is at the north exit of the New York Avenue subway station. If we were able to do this, we'd have to add to the map the new hotel being built adjacent to the station. And the back side of the sign there could be about the railroad history of the area, rather than the Florida Market.

10. Now off to get these printed (despite an Internet outage at home) and to revise my testimony and...

11. Thank you Christopher!

12. Note that for the last year or so, I've been quite interested in street signage in all its dimensions: directional, informational, heritage-cultural, including entryways and within-district signage, at different levels, such as for pedestrians vs. drivers, etc., wayfinding, and how a community identifies itself within a signage system, the various heirarchies, etc.

For the study I worked on in Brunswick, Georgia, I really developed this piece as it related to the downtown and the city and county more generally, even the region, even though it wasn't part of the original scope.

You could argue that what we recommended there is an indirect evaluation of the DC wayfinding and cultural interpretation signage system, because my reaction to this system, and thinking about what's missing--a gap analysis so to speak--infuses what I think about and recommend to other places.

(Also, the idea for more specific and block-by-block directory signage on the street in commercial districts has been sparked by some work we are doing in Pittsburgh, and visits to Pittsburgh's Strip District, back in March 2006.)

Bicyclist on a DC street

Bicyclist on a DC street
Originally uploaded by rllayman

This is a Washcycle photo.

Who would be the best person to hire as DC Dept. of Transportation director?

I'm not sure. I'd probably ask Chris Zimmerman. Oh, he's on the Arlington County Board, and currently chairman of the WMATA board. But he is probably the best elected official in the region on these kinds of issues...

-----------
Via the WMATA press release, "Metro announces key appointment: Organizational changes include establishment of new Chief Administrative Officer" and the DDOT press release, "Fenty Names Interim DDOT Director."

DDOT director Emeka Moneme will become WMATA's Chief Administrative Officer, and Mayor Fenty has appointed DDOT general counsel Frank Seales as interim director. Regardless of his experience, having a lawyer running the Department of Transportation doesn't do the need and necessary vision "justice."

Planning as a dialectic

This will come off as a little disembodied, because it's part of a thread from an e-list on new mobility (newmobilitycafe@yahoogroups.com). The list has world-wide participants.

---------------
Here's the problem, at least in my experience in the U.S. Planners plan. Planners are subject to suasion by the political and economic elite. Planners use the rational planning model, which tends to be overly constrained, with narrowly defined scopes of work for planning processes.

(When I worked on one such plan, not a transportation plan, but a commercial district revitalization plan, I ignored the constraints, and did a wide-ranging analysis, but then, every hour I spent extra meant I made less money/hour, a lot less.)

Planning processes for the most part aren't allowed to be creative, or to go outside of the boundaries of the scope. And plans are mostly vision. And generally there are disconnects between planning and zoning. Zoning for the most part is parcel focused, while planning focuses on overall districts, districts in which a particular piece of land is only a part of the whole. But it is the urban form as a whole that matters to us as people living and working in and using spaces.

All developers do, for the most part, is build buildings. They can build them adjacent to transit or as part of walkable communities or not. If the buildings are adjacent to transit, then they need to be linked to and built around these linkages.

But for the most part, zoning regulations, even with the extranormal requirements of "planned unit developments" aren't fine grained enough to really bring this about.

Getting back to planning, transportation planning is at best, about transportation, not just highways, but given the theme/name of this list, I am coming to the belief that transportation planning really needs to be repositioned even further, on "mobility and public spaces planning" with the requisite changes in vision and focus.

That was reflected in the blog entry I just sent.

Municipalities bobble this too. E.g., in Montgomery County Maryland they are building an "intermodal" transit station atop the Silver Spring subway station, which will include the adjoining railroad stop, the WMATA and RideOn (county) buses, and bring the inter-city buses over. The website chortles about the connection that will be provided to local bike trails. But even though the station is in a large office district, there will be no bicycle station within the center. There may be one built nearby at some time in the future, but there is no funding for it...

We have a fair way to go yet to get to New Mobility.

I'm shocked, shocked...

Greater Greater Washington reports in more depth about the hearing initiated by Delegate Norton on Union Station, in "Norton berates Union Station reps over photography, intermodal plans." It's also covered in today's Post, in "Photographers Detail Difficulties Shooting Facility: Group Complains of Interference."

I find it funny that people, including Delegate Norton, are just noticing that Union Station, for the most part, has little oversight. That's the way that Congress set up the quasi-government entity to take it over.

Organizational structure is destiny. Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces has a line something like this:

If you design places for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you design places for people and activity, you get people and activity.

Well, if you design organizations to have little oversight, and no responsibilities to the greater public, you get organizations with little oversight, insulated and disconnected from the public they are supposed to serve.

And you can tell that the Union Station Revitalization Corporation doesn't care all that much about historic preservation and architecture, or they wouldn't have built such an ugly parking structure on the back of an incredibly beautiful building.

At a hearing years ago, I referred to the first part of the garage as "prison architecture" and said that the proposal for the extension (now built) was an improvement only by comparison, looking more like "cheap public housing."

Union Station barely noticed that last year was the 100th anniversary of its opening. Although they do try to leverage the historic nature of the building in terms of its marketing.

"Shop where history lives."

For one, I'd have a set of historical-cultural information markers and a wayfinding system, especially to explain how to use transit. And a visitors information center--20+ million people go through Union Station each year. Etc.

But there's almost no way for these kinds of proposals to be made-pushed, under the current setup. And because they don't have to be too responsive to the public, they don't think about it on their own anyway.

Then there is the whole intermodal issue. Yes, inter-city buses should be run out of Union Station. They aren't. Because Union Station isn't really accountable, they didn't have to address it. Sure the people who ride traditional Greyhound buses are poorer, etc., but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be served. (Of course, the bus station could have been incorporated into the New York Avenue station instead, but that's another missed opportunity.)

For information about the history of Union Station, check out Bill Wright's dissertation, which is incredibly well-written and broken up into easily readable chapters.