FSP 1.1

Commuter elasticty: London Congestion Charge

Price: up from 0 to £5.
Quantity consumed: down 30%

In most cases, the introduction of the daily £5 charge on cars
entering central London has been a great success. Traffic volume into
inner London has fallen by more than expected, and the use of public
transport has risen. There are few, if any, signs of the "rat runs"
at the edges of the zone promised by the more apocalyptic critics.
Even the perennially disgruntled London cab drivers seem to approve of
the 30% improvement in congestion since the £5 charge began.

The congestion charge's very success has seen it raise less money than
expected to fund public transport: £68m in the first year, compared
with Mr Livingstone's original projections of £140m -- although even a
£72m shortfall is relatively small beer in a total London transport
budget of £4bn. Businesses inside the zone continue to complain that
it has hurt their profits, although the evidence is mixed. And the
165,000 penalty notices sent to drivers each month for failing to pay
on time suggests administration needs to be improved.

[I'm not sure exactly what '30% improvement in congestion' means.
30 % fewer cars ? 30 % shorted delays ? 30 % shorter travel time ?
In any case, it must mean less traffic. ]

The Guardian (UK).

See previously: Commuter elasticity: Golden Gate Bridge Toll hikes raise revenue.

Dynamic Three Layer map of NYC

Dynamap of Manhattan uses three interlaced images to display three different
maps of Manhattan -- a street map, a subway map, and one showing landmarks
and neighborhoods -- all onto the same surface. Tilt it to one side and you see the
street map, tilt it another way and you see the subway map. Easily determine
the exact street intersections of subway stops.

Buy your own for $17 from Dynamap.

Vieux Québec

View of Vieux Québec from hotel window of high street and city hall.
Elegant, walkable, and scenic, Québec City functions as a provincial capital.

Click to enlarge image.

Québec has a much better preserved past than Saint Louis,
and a vastly better preserved French langueage and culture.

Measure how busy auto traffic on a street is

How do you measure how busy auto traffic on a street is ?

Pleasanton city traffic engineer Jeff Knowles explains this new method
the city is considering adopting to measures the impacts of traffic on
residential streets that would rely less on numbers and more on
"quality of life" issues.

Instead of looking only at how much traffic streets can bear, the new
standards would try to gauge how traffic volume effects residents'
ability to walk across the street, ride bicycles, or get in and out
of driveways.

Under the current system, the flow of traffic on streets and
intersections is graded on a A-through-F letter scale, with "A"
describing traffic that's flowing smoothly, and an F describing
gridlock.

If the city's computer models show a new development would push
traffic in the area past the "D" level, its backers must scale their
projects back or pay for road improvements that address the problem.

That system has worked for major arterials, where the goal is to
prevent traffic congestion. But on residential streets in
neighborhoods, residents may notice increases in traffic long before
streets reach their carrying capacity.

MotoristNews, BATN

Sad Saint Louis

Tour of devastation in northside Saint Louis.

Built Saint Louis tracks the decay of Saint Louis, MO.
Lovingly annotated with maps and walking tours.

Above, below: 1400 block of Bremen.

Some positive stories also at BuiltStLouis.

See also: Toby Weiss finds the best of what is left, and what may yet be built.

Additional snapshots of Saint Louis:

Above: Theodesia and Goodfellow, December 2002.

Below: on Clara just north of Page, 2002 January.

San Carlos transit oriented development

The City of San Calros on the San Francisco is finally getting developed
some transit oriented housing, between its downtown and the train station.
A good thing, finally.

Pacific Hacienda consists of two buildings, one at 618 Walnut Street
and one at 633 Elm Street which faces City Hall.

Locals got a chance to tour inside the project, consisting of 89
1- or 2-bedroom condominiums and additional office space at
633 Elm St. The project has been six years in the making, well-worth
the wait for Wuthmann. For him, the location was ideal as the project
is just blocks away from downtown San Carlos, the library, the City
Hall and the train station.

According to the sales office at Pacific Peninsula Group, 49 units
have already been purchased or reserved. The prices begin at $395,000
for a one-bedroom unit and $649,000 for two bedrooms.

The project also includes 13 below-market rate units for those with
low and moderate incomes. Affordability is a relative term in San
Mateo County. For the condominiums priced at $265,000, ranking at the
low end, a one-person household can make no more than $63,350.

For more info on Pacific Hacienda and BATN.

More on eligibility for low/moderate income status in California:

The 89 unit luxury condominium development will include 13 one-bedroom
Below Market Rate units priced specifically for the low income and moderate
income categories as established for San Mateo County.

The income limits for eligibility for these units are determined by family
size and are as follows:

Maximum allowable household income - Low Income

1 Person - $63,350

2 People - $72,400

3 People - $81,450

Maximum allowable household income - Moderate Income

1 Person - $76,850

2 People - $87,850

3 People - $98,800 

SF Transbay Terminal

Plans for the SF Transbay Terminal linking BART and Caltrain are proceeding.

San Francisco is served by several passenger train systems, but they
miss connecting with each other by a mile. This new terminal would connect
Caltrain and BART and MUNI.

Planetizen

Planetizen is an excellent urban planning slashblog. Linked.

Collective upstart architecture

These days, young architects are forming collaborative firms right out of
architecture school; many don't even consider jobs with traditional firms, where
they worry they will have to spend years designing bathrooms and closets.

"Part of the collaborative spirit among younger architects is that they're seeing
what's required to compete in a profession dominated by fame and by track
record," said David Rockwell, who worked with the Think team. In an effort to
gain notice, he said, young architects ? emboldened because they can first
support themselves with computer-based design work ? are banding
together. Goodbye Fountainhead, Hello Kibbutz [NYT].

Why blog ?

Blogging provides a public post-it note about something. An observation,
a quotation, a picture, an idea.

Posting a link is a vote in support of the linked-to resource, whose rank
will be increased by google, blogdex, etc.

Many a blog entry serves also as a public vote to support a particular
noted improvement. For instance, if I write, Office atria should sport
three-way mirrors --watching them, watching you, watching them.,
random people googling for atria will encounter my idea.

Most of the posts here are on the topics of

1. economics, especially pricing mechanisms;
   
2. information architecture, user centereed design, and usability; or
   
3. urbanity and transportation and physical architecture.
   

Q.Is it unusual to mix economics and urbanism ?
A.No, see for example Emanuel Tobier of the Wagner Graduate School of
Public Service of New York University or Jane Jacobs (neither of whom has
a blog (heh)).

Blogging furthers the revolution of do-it-yourself media criticism. Another
advantage to the Internet is that stories with a local bent in news magazines like
Newsweek and Time can be fact-checked against the version offered by
bloggers and by local newspapers, which are usually available online, and which
also usually have a more nuanced approach to the story.

And like Matt Welch said, the New Journalism of the 1960s
was built on a foundation of exposing boring conventional newspapers
for sucking up to power, lulling readers to sleep, and missing the truth.

I am also testing the notion that I can write great works by writing only
fifteen minutes per day. I have a few ideas for books
on information architecture, urban design and transit,
and applied economics, and want to see if

* I have sufficient illustrated examples and anecdotes to
support such a longer work; and

* If my inclination to write will be improved and my direction
in writing will be better focussed by starting with a review
and reflecting on the accumulated base of blog entries.

Train, Bus: unsigned

Update 2003 March 29: Palo Alto Daily News

Caltrain spokeswoman Rita Haskin sent a
handwritten apology note to Bowman.
No signs have yet been posted at the station, however.

----
Published Sunday, 2003 March 23
Letters to the Editor

Caltrain mystery

I want to complain about the treatment Caltrain metes out to
passengers on weekends. (Editor's note: Train service on the
weekends has been suspended for two years so Caltrain can repair and
improve its tracks. Buses are being used on weekends instead).

There is no information whatsoever at the Palo Alto University
Avenue depot regarding the bus that runs in place of the train.
There is no agent to ask. All is locked down. People are going
around asking each other if they know where the bus leaves from.

Once they have discovered the location, they find out they should
have bought a ticket from the machines back at the depot. One sign
with the correct information near the ticket vending machines would
have helped many of us on Sunday, March 16, during a heavy rain
shower from getting drenched, running back and forth before we
finally succeeded in boarding our bus.

Trudy Bowman
Kipling Street
Palo Alto
[Palo Alto Daily News See also: caltrain.com/news_ctx_fact_sheet ]

More data for the APTA paper.

Urbanity designed

Some more notes about urban design:

1. Communities vie for uses that produce sales tax dollars such as
shopping centers and office parks. That's called fiscalization
of land use.

2. By adding traffic fatalities to homicides, William H. Lucy,
professor of urban and environmental and planning at U.Va.
with graduate research assistant Raphael Rabalais show
inner ring suburbs are safest place to live.

Lucy reports, 'The truth is people traveling from
the exurbs to the city have many more opportunities to
get killed than those traveling closer in'.
Lucy and Rabalais' Original Study[.PDF], press release: 1, 2.

News coverage: Contra Costa Times, Perimetergo.

3. A letter from Mike Jacoubowsky argues the grade-school
environment of removing lockers and prohibiting cel phones encourages
students to bring cars, if only to for use as lockers to secure after-school
gear. No wonder few children bicycle or walk to school.

4. Another study shows 70 percent of tot run-over deaths involve SUVs.

Wallmart on Stilts

The Dallas Plan Commission unanimously rejected
plans for a Wal-Mart Supercenter on Thursday.

The combination discount center and grocery
store, which would feature parking below an
elevated retail area, would be a departure from
Wal-Mart's typical suburban stores. The
retailing giant touted the store as a unique
urban concept.

Dallas Morning News

See also dingbat:

Dingbat The building type most profoundly destructive to pedestrian frontage. A
building is raised on columns in order to maximize parking underneath. This type
inadvertently created by C.S.D. codes which key the allowed building area to the
quantity of parking accommodated on-site. P.N.D. codes specifically preclude this
type. A private building which denies typological discipline without functional
justification or is otherwise disruptive to the urban fabric. Modernist buildings
tend to extremes of articulation and heterogeneity of tectonic expression tend to
be Dingbats, as the modernist design process values unconstrained invention
over emulation or urban determinants. P.N.D. Codes attempt to preclude
Dingbats except with public and civic buildings, which are expected to be fully
expressive of the institutions they embody.

related links:
http://www.laweekly.com/bestofla99/essays/essay209.php3
(dingbats in los angeles: )

* floating:
They were called dingbat houses because of the quick and shoddy way they
were constructed. Frank Carroll: Three room house, living room, bedroom and
bathroom. The crew was two men and they put the frame up and the plywood
and the roof and had it ready to go in a day and a half and if you wanted your
windows you put em in and screens you put em in and any other finishing you
wanted done. You may leave in the morning and yours was the last house on the
block, and come home and there were two more just below yours, now yours
was not the last house on the block. The dingbat houses were a great
improvement over the squatters' camps, but the ragged construction style
created hazards of its own. Dust blew in through the cracks in the walls and
doorways, piling up against the houses, creating small dunes throughout the
neighborhood. Pat Lappin: That was the worst for the women besides the heat.
They couldn't put the babies on the floor because it was so splintery. About the
first thing they did when they got a paycheck was to get congoleum for the floor.
And of course that helped the dust problem but at least their kids could crawl
around w/o getting splinters.

suburbian distopia, 1957

Already huge patches of once green countryside have been turned
into vast, smog-filled deserts that are neither city, suburb nor
country. . . . You can't stop progress, they say, yet much more
of this kind of progress and we shall have the paradox of
prosperity lowering our real standard of living.

-- William H. Whyte Jr.

[more information on the Smart Growth Strategy.]

Street Patterns: grid or cul de sacs

Berkeley didn't follow the misguided example of San Francisco,
which forced the grid pattern of its streets into the hills.

Instead, the streets of Berkeley were thankfully built to wind
around its curvier neighborhoods, so that on a map they
resemble a brain rather than a waffle iron. And the paths,

Grunland said, were a natural means of connecting residents
from their homes to the nearest trolley or rail head at a time
when driving was not an option.

He dismisses some of the local myths surrounding the
creation of these numerous hidden paths and staircases.
With a few exceptions, they were built by developers.

-- Berkeley Path Wanderers Association

Road Charges

A friend of mine, a bicyclist, argues that because I'm on the bridge
so much, I'm contributing to its wear and tear, and ought to pay even
more than bikers and Sunday drivers. Hello-o! I'm not wearing and
tearing the bridge; I'm just driving on it. My tires are made of
rubber, just like yours. Earthquakes, weather, and rising costs of
fuel, labor, security and insurance are responsible for the budget
deficit, not my dumb little Honda. -- Debby Morse.

Urbanity on two levels

Complaints such as
Beyond the backyards of modest single-family homes, great cement
monstrosities rise up, casting a local park in shadow and offering a
host of out-of-place attractions: a 9-story office park, a 12-story
hotel, a 20-plex movie theatre and two 7-story parking garages. The
architects have made no attempt to have the buildings fit in with the
original neighborhood's ambience, and the nearby station
notwithstanding, these developments seem, if anything, to encourage
car use. There is no pedestrian street front, only a series of large
buildings, each with their large car entrances and adjacent parking
lots. (Construction is still under way, so this factor may change.)

The contrast between the old and the new is perfectly epitomized by
an old family-run cafe in a remaining storefront and the gleaming
black-tinted glass of the Starbucks and Jamba Juice franchises that
now occupy the bottom floor of Park Plaza, the office building.

-- SFGate.com.

are uninformed by designs such as

Sinclair Centre

which have a pedestrian street level with nominal traffic
and parking, and an industrial lower level, with arterial traffic,
trucks, busses, and parkade access.

Homesick ?

I stumbled across this, it's enough to make me homesick.

from Vancouver.com.

City Life

Cities are building sports stadiums, but talent wants bike paths.
Business is not a spectator sport.

While professional sports are seen more and more as a way to achieve
"major league" status and attract talent, our data suggests that there
is little relationship between these big-ticket venues and high-tech
workers. Many successful high-tech regions, notably Austin and
Raleigh-Durham, have little or no professional-sports presence.

The reason, I think, is that we're seeing the replacement of
spectating with participating.

Knowledge workers don't want to devote an entire Sunday to watching
football. These people are active. They want to participate. They don't
want to stand on the sidelines. A lot of cities believe that they'll make
it in the new economy if they get a professional sports team and build
a downtown mall. They couldn't be more wrong.

It's almost like taking drugs away from an addict: No more stadiums.
No more convention centers. What cities need to do is really simple:
Make it fun. Create a music scene. Build bike lanes. Make sure that
there are parks where people can play Ultimate Frisbee. Think about
the city's historic assets -- the old buildings -- as cool spaces for
hot companies. Richard Florida.

[Also see Out Town.]

You want to build a

You want to build a school, it's bad. A new bus facility is bad. A bike
path is a 'bike freeway,' and a four-story affordable housing project is a
'skyscraper.' . . . The future could look like Carmel, a nice place with no
services that nobody can afford to live in.

-- Mike Rotkin, UC Santa Cruz lecturer, SF Chronicle, 2001 Aug. 22.

In the past decade, highway construction in major American cities
outpaced population growth, and still congestion worsened-and
worsened most precisely where the most new roads and
highways were built.

-- U.S. News & World Report, 2001 May 28.

If environmentalists were leading the way, they would be doing more
advocacy work in our urban centers, marching for new buildings.
Instead, they have been leading the NIMBY wars.

-- James Howard Kunzler

Out town

Even as places like Austin and Seattle are thriving, much of the
country is failing to adapt to the demands of the creative age. It is
not that struggling cities like Pittsburgh do not want to grow or
encourage high-tech industries. In most cases, their leaders are
doing everything they think they can to spur innovation and
high-tech growth.

But most of the time, they are either unwilling or unable to
do the things required to create an environment or habitat attractive
to the creative class. They pay lip service to the need to 'attract
talent,' but continue to pour resources into recruiting call centers,
underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls, and
squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium
complexes. Or they try to create facsi of neighborhoods or
retail districts, replacing the old and authentic with the new and
generic---and in doing so drive the creative class away.

-- Richard Florida.

[Also see City Life, and NYT coverage.]

STL, urban ?

"Location, the condition of the building -- Edison Brothers
kept the property in excellent shape. They liked the
flexibility; we have 300 suites in the first phase and
can get to 480 suites. That includes 63 condos on
three floors and four floors of indoor parking,".

St Louis BizJournal.

Paramount

Is the Paramount Theatre Oakland, CA's greatest eyesore landmark ?

United obviously thinks so, and they're not alone.

pathway

Many parking lots offer no obvious path for pedestrians
to get through, so passengers and drivers squeeze betwen the
parked cars. A better design provides for a walking path.

Above is the Livermore, CA ACERail station.

Truth in advertizing

As advertized		Reality
From Realtor.com's O'Fallon, MO listings

Sprawl

Density Continuity Concentration Compactness
Centrality Nuclearity Diversity Proximity

There are a number of ways to define and measure sprawl. There are a
number of ways to quantify the costs of some settlement patterns,
including sprawl. However, there is almost no way to calculate the
benefits of sprawl, though this does not suggest there aren't
benefits, only that it is very hard to calculate.

You might try the following:

1. William Fischel at Dartmouth on the political measures.

2. George Galster at Wayne State on the econometrics of settlement.

Some reports published by Fannie Mae's Housing Policy Debate.

3. Helen Ladd at Duke on the the taxation measures.

4. Anthony Downs on the costs of sprawl.

Thanks to Charles Buki for this list.

code orange

I begin to see a pattern, and it's not the one these instructors see. But who am I
to try to figure things out?

The D.A. told us up front in his presentation that this isn't a workshop. But like
some fictional Clockwork Orange thugs being mentally conditioned to loathe
violence, we're in School to listen, learn, and see the light of our own 'deviant'
ways—and certainly not to contribute.

New Urbanism

NU may not provide "a viable alternative" for this or that group, but
that's a matter of demand. I work in the DC area, and frequently
confront the issue of consumer preference writ large in some of the
counties here -- mainly Fairfax and Loudoun and Virginia and
Montgomery and PG in Maryland. What I see is consumer preference by
the middle class, black or white, for a large lot and a big house as
far away from real or perceived social problems as possible and as
commute time will permit. There is simply very little demand for NU
by newcomers to the middle class aspiring to obtain their version of
the American Dream.

-- charles buki

HERBERT MUSCHAMP

Power, Imagination and New York's Future

October 28, 2001

-- HERBERT MUSCHAMP

circle around the square

circle around the square

Geometry as cited in architecture criticsm:

Some residents object to allowing buses to circle around the square
instead of using the north side of the station as a turnaround, Hunt
said.