Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

 Early in my days of pro center city advocacy, I was somewhat troubled about how advocates jumped on the ideas of Hans Monderman and the woonerf or shared street, streets designed to mix motor vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists, as a way to slow traffic and better balance mobility between the car and non motorized forms.

It wasn't because I don't believe in making pedestrian and bike trips better, but because the US physical environment is so dominated by the car and much of the nation's urban form, outside of the cities built up to the streetcar era ("Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis") is shaped for the car.  In short, a woonerf, at least in the US, will still be dominated by the car, and worse, by mixing different types of traffic, it will create new conflicts.  

One place you see this in DC is at the Wharf, both on the boardwalk where there can be vehicles, and in the outer perimeter where there is a separate bicycle path, but it is crossed frequently by pedestrians getting to the sidewalk.  

For the boardwalk, they probably should have made all the service access underground.  WRT the cycletrack, it probably should have been further out into the street right of way.

There is an article in the Washington Post, "Why Europe is going ‘car free’," about congestion zones and low emissions zones for cars, (but not so much discussion of pedestrian districts in most major cities, which is a distinguishing condition between US cities and European ones).  That Europe is going car free while the US is not.

In one way, it's another example in the US of what I call "next generation asphalt nation," that instead of aiming to shift more traffic to sustainable modes, we are focusing on electric cars and maybe hydrogen powered heavy trucks, to be more environmentally conscious, when not driving is the best choice for the environment--note this is happening some as people switch from cars to electric bikes.

The amazing thing about so much of Europe is that it retains the "streetcar era" and "walking city era" urban form.  So you can go "car free" because your life is not harnessed to the car the way it is in the US--92% of all trips involve a car.

In short the author is making the same mistake as woonerf opponents.  Promote better policies where they can work.  Don't try to adopt other treatments without consideration and adaptation.

For example, people in DC talk about a congestion zone pricing scheme.  But DC, especially with the Trump Administration's destruction of government, has so many commercial district competitors in  the metropolitan area: Montgomery, Fairfax, Arlington, and Loudoun Counties, and Alexandria City, that businesses could easily pick up and leave.  That's much harder to do in NYC or London.

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This came up today in the Park in SLC for which I am on the board.  A graduate student doing a design study of the park suggested grade separation of the walking and bicycle paths--the park is a one way loop road with smaller lanes for walking and biking, a motor vehicle lane, and a parking lane.  It works pretty well.

Labels: car culture and automobility, congestion pricing, land use planning, low emissions motor vehicle zones, sustainable mobility platform, transportation planning

Many parks and business improvement districts provide more limited services on weekends, when these districts may have more patronage not less, but it doesn't comport with "business hours."

They need to have more frequent pick up on weekends.  

This has to do with planning for seasonality and 12 month parks.

Note that the park users are to be lauded for putting the trash at the waste can.  There are photos of Dolores Park on a weekend that are super trashy ("Enough litter to fill 460 bags of trash left behind by Dolores Park revelers over weekend," San Francisco Chronicle).

That's the point made in the entry, "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part One | Levels of Service" wrt parks that need more service than what is typical.  That goes for parks in temperate areas too.  In winter, parks tend to be used less.  But not in temperate areas.

Labels: asset management, civic assets, parks and recreation planning, provision of public services, public administration, sanitation and solid waste

I think coordinated "Open Doors" events like this are a great way for the cultural community to market itself while providing access to people who might not otherwise visit.

-- Southern California Museums “Free-For-All” day, Sunday March 16th

The only thing is one day probably isn't enough, I'd do the full weekend.  The downside of such Open Doors events, like the one the Smithsonian Museums sponsors in September, is that they are super crowded and can be uncomfortable.

Although in the SoCal case, it turns out that some of the institutions aren't open on Sundays, only Saturdays, so it works out.

Cultural heritage tourism. When you travel, looking for such events can be pretty cool.  So many cities have them, such as New York City, Pittsburgh, and Toronto.

Labels: arts-culture, cultural heritage/tourism, cultural planning, museums, special events and programming

A $900,000 grant by the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund (BCYF) to a nonprofit organization known as Thrive Arts Inc. in 2022 is the latest evidence that Baltimore’s version of the “nonprofit industrial complex” wields too much power. 

As reported by The Baltimore Sun, Thrive Arts was incorporated in 2021 but lost its corporate charter last year after failing to file tax returns for three straight years, and is [legally] now defunct.

It was an extraordinarily large grant for a small organization with no proven track record. Yet to be confirmed is how much of the $900,000 was disbursed to the grantee and spent on the purposes for which it was intended or returned to the city.

I do intend to do a book review on the book Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State, which discusses how cities began outsourcing dealing with inequality and social issues to nonprofits.  This brief blog entry is by the author too, "The Origins of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex."

I have written many times over the years about problems with DC government grants and nonprofit execution.  

This is in the news more recently because of alleged bribes to a councilmember ("Trayon White expelled from the DC Council for corruption but he’s free to run for his old seat," AP) and government employee ("Former DC government official charged with taking bribe,"NBC4) by a grantee eager to secure their place in the system.

But it's been an issue for a long time, in fact the organization in Baltimore that is criticized by the author is similar to one that engaged in improper grant making in DC ("Harry Thomas, former D.C. Council member, is sentenced to more than three years in prison," Post), leading to the jailing of a Councilmember.

Minneapolis had some terrible problems/mistakes during covid, when it granted tens of millions to a grantee to provide meals, when the grantee had zero capacity to do so ("Minneapolis man admits to stealing at least $3.8 million from COVID-19 relief programs," KARE-TV).

Thinking about this I have five main points:

1.  A lot more money needs to be invested in capacity development and technical assistance for nonprofits, especially those receiving government grants.

2.  There must be transparency with the grant making process--something definitely not present in the Baltimore example.  An RFP and open call process with deadlines and decision making criteria.

3.  Accountability mechanisms must be in place to ensure that the right stuff is being done with the money and that it gets results.  This has been an issue with violence prevention programs in many places, including DC, where one recipient of funds recently was imprisoned for murder ("Former D.C. Violence Interrupter Sentenced for His Involvement in Drive-By Shooting," Washington City Paper, "Violence Interrupters Push Back Against Calls for Defunding," Washington Informer,  Many cities are putting hopes in violence interrupters, but few understand their challenges," NBC News).

4.  Evaluation of success and failure needs to be built into the program ("D.C.’s Violence Intervention Programs To Receive In-Depth Evaluation,".DCist").

Abstract 

The academic literature has viewed drivers of corruption in isolation and, consequently, failed to examine their synergistic effect. Such an isolated view provides incomplete information, leads to a misleading conclusion, and causes great difficulty in curbing corruption. This paper conducts a systematic literature review to identify the drivers of corruption in the construction industry. Subsequently, it develops a system dynamics (SD) model by conceptualizing corruption as a complex system of interacting drivers. Building on stakeholder and open systems theories, the proposed SD model shows how the complex reinforcing relationship between authoritative, organizational, cultural, and financial drivers of corruption further increases corrupt practices. The new model also provides lessons that can be helpful in the development of policy frameworks to control corruption in the construction industry. To achieve success in the fight against corruption, the findings of this research suggest that (1) corruption must be understood at both the organizational and state levels, (2) anticorruption practices must be informed by ethically grounded stakeholder management strategies, and (3) anticorruption reforms must go hand-in-hand with strategies to tackle the economic downturn.

No wonder corruption is so endemic.  It's embedded deep within the system.  Below is the diagram from the article showing the dimensions of corruption within construction.

Labels: corruption, electoral politics and influence, ethics, nonprofit sector, organizational behavior, policing, provision of public services

Narcan is handed out Saturday March 8, 2025 on Fort Lauderdale beach to combat drug overdoses during Spring break. .(Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Florida had more than 140 million visitors in the 2024 spring break season, Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference Thursday. Miami joins Fort Lauderdale and Orlando in the top five most popular domestic destinations for spring break travel according to AAA.

But when the world was beginning to emerge from the pandemic in 2021, partiers flocked to Miami Beach and law enforcement was overwhelmed with more than 1,000 arrests. The following year, several people were injured in shootings. Last year, Miami Beach said they were "breaking up" with spring break

Although out of 140 million, I guess the crime statistics aren't so bad.

Labels: crime, emergency management planning, emergency services, policing, tourism

Bloomberg has an obituary on M. Paul Friedburg, a landscape architect based in Minneapolis, "Remembering the Landscape Architect Who Embraced the City," which has an interesting turn of phrase that I've thought about but never so succinctly.

Friedberg, who died on Feb. 15 at 93, made landscape architecture urban, injecting new relevance into a design discipline that originated in luxurious European country estates. He saw landscapes not as isolated or self-contained patterns of green space and civic features, but as an urban gradient of exploration and discovery. For him, play was not a recreational activity taken up by very young people; it was the notion of urban socialization itself — the unexpected encounter, the surprising view corridor, the coalescing of disparate groups of people within the rhythms of the city.

Also see from the New York Times "M. Paul Friedberg, Landscape Architect Who Celebrated the City, Dies at 93," this article about the aging of Peavey Plaza, "Minneapolis Tussles Over a Faded Plaza," and this about the remaking of Pershing Plaza in DC to a World War I Memorial, "Lines Are Drawn Over Design for a National World War I Memorial."  And from the Architectural Record, "Tribute: M. Paul Friedberg (1931–2025)."

I remember a conversation I had with a planner, and he made the point that adding green infrastructure to cities, depending on how it is effected, can be seen as a suburbanization of the urban landscape.  This has bothered me for some time.  There is a place for nature and green infrastructure in cities, but it needs to be complementary to urban design.

An undated photo of Jacob Riis Plaza in New York shows that youths understood Friedberg’s vision for an urban landscape. Courtesy of the Cultural Landscape Foundation

From the article:

Friedberg’s first bit of acclaim came in 1963, when a grant from the Astor Foundation allowed him to design an expansive courtyard and playground for the Carver Houses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This public housing landscape offered climbing walls with offset brick footholds, jungle gyms, pavilions and an amphitheater, with sculptural arrangements of raised planter beds. Both a playground and civic plaza, it put communal assembly on equal footing with children’s recreation. ...

Subtle changes in material let visitors know when they were transitioning from one zone of the landscape to another; there were no fences. It was play stripped of prescription, intended to foster creativity, choice, self-determination and democracy. Friedberg later described it as “a happening” in the landscape, in the parlance of the times. Legendary New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved about it in 1966, saying that it “breaks every sterile mold and state convention of the city’s park, playground and open space policy for the last 30 years.” Play at Riis was meant to be a “challenging and creative process,” Friedberg wrote. “Ideally, it would be best to leave a playground unfinished, letting children bring their creative participation to it.”

The one problem with modernist urban landscape architecture is that it often doesn't wear well.  It may need constant maintenance and programming to enliven it, as it can be bare, spare and uninviting when empty or near empty.  Over time, some of Friedburg's projects were remade as a result.  Which also happened to the works of other landscape architects like Dan Kiley, where the maintenance requirements for intricate public spaces were beyond what a parks department is normally capable of providing.

Peavey Plaza

Labels: landscape architecture, parks planning, urban design/placemaking

The San Francisco Chronicle ("Why 20-somethings are abandoning San Francisco — even when they can afford it") makes the point that as the demographic of younger people shrinks in the center city, mostly due to lack of jobs or high rents, there are fewer customers for night life--bars, restaurants, etc.

“Young people supply culture and creativity, which are the beating hearts of a city,” said Assembly Member Matt Haney, who represents eastern San Francisco. “When a lot of young people leave a city, that place loses some of its soul.”

Overall, from 2013 to 2023, the share of 20-somethings in San Francisco County dropped from about 18% of the population to about 14% — the largest such decline of any major U.S. county and nearly quadruple the national drop. The data prompts a big question relating to the city’s economic future: Is this the mere ebbs and flows of San Francisco’s demographics at play, or the start of something much grimmer? ...

“You can feel the drain of young people from the city just by how empty the bars are,” said Aaron Paul, co-owner of San Francisco bars Macondray and Zhuzh. “It’s definitely a tough time to be working in nightlife.”

Positioning in neighborhoods versus entertainment districts.  I saw this in a different way in DC in terms of neighborhood demographics.  As people age they go out less to bars, spend less in restaurants, and maybe on concerts, etc.  So there is a distinct difference in clientele and positioning for restaurants in entertainment districts versus neighborhood districts, which is captured in the various "Richard's Rules for Restaurant (Food) Based Revitalization, Salt Lake City and DC's Chinatown" posts over the past 20 years.

Aging out.  And I've written about how people age out of living in "entertainment districts" as they get older, their household configuration changes, etc. I've written about this, "Daypart and age-group planning in mixed use (commercial) districts" 2009), partly in response to a Washington Post article (but there were others), "Residents of Washington's U Street Corridor Tired of Area's Growing Noise.."

Sometimes restaurant pricing seems out of control.  I was looking at the tasting menus of the restaurant Gravitas in DC, which got online opprobrium because of the chef-owner's support of Elon Musk's wacking government--when government is the main business in DC--and I was somewhat shocked at the pricing.  

It's a once/year super special occasion if anything.  But the food looks amazing.  

Get the $60 upcharge for wagyu prime rib, which seems cheap compared to the caviar course that can be as much as $1800.

Patton's is not the kind of restaurant that should be placed in a neighborhood (Savoir is on the cusp) even though it's definitely a high income neighborhood, unless somehow it can develop a regional clientele that transcends its neighborhood location.  My sense is that the average neighbor might go there once/year, which isn't enough of a revenue stream.

Musings/further implications for night life in the city

1.  Reduced number of the college aged going forward.  Extending from this, another demographic trend that will negatively impact cities is the decline of the college age population.  Fewer students in college ultimately means fewer graduates moving to cities.

2.  Fewer patrons means that some places are over-supplied with entertainment districts, and likely some will suffer.  Is that a problem for H Street NE in DC ("H Street NE went from riot-torn neighborhood to success story. Now it’s lost its magic," GGW, although I wrote about this in 2023, "H Street NE nightlife district, failing?" and "A follow up on the H Street article: Learning from Philadelphia | More sophisticated daypart, retail, cultural, and experience planning").

3.  Some entertainment districts will broaden their reach by adding upscale establishments, e.g., the Minetta's Tavern mentioned above is but one of a large number of expensive choices in the Union Market district.

4.  Programming and management of the district will help some become stronger than others, remaining successful.  Union Market has a significant chunk of property owned by a sophisticated property owner and manager, while H Street NE is laissez faire with a commercial district revitalization organization and Eastern Market is encumbered by city ownership and other issues ("Eastern Market DC's 150th anniversary last weekend | And my unrealized master plan for the market").

5.  High quality transit access probably makes a difference, e.g., Union Market has a Metrorail station within walking distance, not so much for H Street NE or Ivy City.

6.  Arena/stadium entertainment districts may have similar issues.  As ticket prices increase, the patron base shrinks, and older patrons are less likely to consume a lot of alcohol or stay out later.

7.  WFH affects after work happy hour culture and sales.  Fewer workers, fewer younger workers, means happy hour is a less successful sales event.

8. Private clubs will diminish the amount of spend available to "in the wild" restaurants ("Inside Ned’s, the private club for a new generation of D.C. cool kids," Washington Post).

9.  And I forgot that Gen Z is less inclined to drink alcohol ("Why Gen Z is drinking less," TIME Magazine).

Labels: demographics, high cost of housing, nightlife economy, restaurants, urban revitalization

 (Bigness Complex: Industry, Labor, and Government in the American Economy, Second Edition is actually the title of a book about corporations, of the time when I was in college.)

Bloomberg reports, "Small Towns in the US Are Better for Upward Mobility, Study Finds"  ("Big cities fuel inequality within and across generations," Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences Nexus), that upward mobility is more present is smaller cities than large ones.  Abstract from the paper:

Urbanization has long fueled a dual narrative: cities are heralded as sources of economic dynamism and wealth creation yet criticized for fostering inequality and a range of social challenges. This paper addresses this tension using a multidisciplinary approach, combining social sciences methods with satellite imagery-based spatial pattern analysis to study the US urban expansion over the past century. We examine the impact of physical urban spatial characteristics (size, population density, and connectedness) on equality of opportunity, measured through intergenerational mobility, as well as its association with levels of income, wealth, and social capital. Our findings confirm that contemporary cities, particularly population-dense and expansive ones, are indeed divisive forces—acting as centers for income and wealth generation but failing to deliver equal opportunities for economic mobility. Perhaps surprisingly, this polarizing dynamic is a recent phenomenon. In the past, the most urbanized regions performed well in terms of income creation and equality of opportunity. Our analysis supports the hypothesis that the mid-20th century marked a pivotal shift toward more unequal and less inclusive patterns of urban growth.

You could say hogs are comparable to the students in small schools, but they usually come from highly resourced families, and the schools provide less opportunity because of the hogs.  

In the book chapter, “Big School, Small School” Revisited, the author suggests that the desired option of type of school depends on the preferred outcome--more students participating, or fewer students participating but at the benefit of quality performance.  While in "Big School? Small School? Does School Size Matter?: Can large schools foster a small school culture?" (Psychology Today), the author suggests creating smaller schools within the context of larger schools is the way to deal with the Big School, Small School phenomenon.

Conclusion.  In short, I'm not surprised.

The "solution," at least to me is to ensure that civic assets are widely distributed and treated as networks ("Neighborhood libraries as nodes in a neighborhood and city-wide network of cultural assets,"- "Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape,") especially in under resourced places ("National Community Planning Month: Schools as neighborhood anchors"), along the social urbanism approach, complemented by the creation and maintenance of "social infrastructure" programming to get people involved.

-- "An outline for integrated equity planning: concepts and programs," 2017
-- "Equity planning: an update," 2020
-- "Social urbanism and equity planning as a way to address crime, violence, and persistent poverty: (not in) DC," 2021 
-- "Black community, economic and social capital: the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago/Chicago," 2021

Labels: economic mobility, equity planning, social infrastructure, social urbanism

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This is a reprint from 2020.  For the most part, links have not been checked.

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Women's civic and garden clubs were major actors in local civic affairs, including urban design (as beautification sometimes) until the 1960s at least.

Land use planning and architecture.  Some argue that the principles of land use planning are designed to favor men ("If women built cities, what would our urban landscape look like," Guardian).  From the article:

In a classic 1980 essay called What Would a Non-sexist City Be Like?, the American urbanist Dolores Hayden called for centres that would “transcend traditional definitions of home, neighbourhood, city and workplace”. Since then, others have taken up the argument that a woman-friendly city would be more porous, the divisions between home and work less rigid, so that domestic work is acknowledged as a productive activity, and carers (of children, disabled relatives and older people) are less excluded from economic life. In any case, such divisions are often artificial, with women in developing-world cities undertaking economic activity that has too often been ignored.

-- "Female-Friendly Cities: Rethinking the Patriarchy of Urban Planning," Ms. Magazine
-- "Women's Place: Urban Planning, Housing Design, and WorkFamily Balance," Fordham Law Review
-- "Women in the Urban Environment," Signs Vol. 5, No. 3, Supplement. Women and the American City (Spring, 1980), pp. S188-S214

The presence of women as an indicator of safety in the public space.  For years I have been strongly influenced by points made in writings about safety in public spaces and how the number of women out and about can be seen as an indicator of success or failure.  John King, urban design writer for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about this ("Great architecture, clean streets, culture -- it must be Minneapolis") in discussing Minneapolis as an example of his ten principles about how to make cities great:

Women know best. The first night in Minneapolis, I dined at Cafe Brenda on walleye and wild rice, which, with blueberry muffins, constitute the trifecta of local cuisine. A stroll past sleepy blocks of warehouses evolving from red-light district to residential neighborhood led me to the banks of the Mississippi. Walking along grassy parkland toward the Falls of St. Anthony, I had the place to myself -- except for one woman jogging casually past me toward the horizon.

When a city feels safe enough that a woman jogs along, alone, at dusk ... somebody is doing something right."

The presence of women as an indicator of what works and what doesn't in managing public spaces ha been discussed over the years in various writings on New York City's Bryant Park.

Keith Bedford for The New York Times. A man and a woman: Minding the gender gap in Bryant Park.

From the 2005 New York Times article "Splendor in the Grass":

It was lunchtime at Bryant Park, and thousands of office workers were gathered beneath the emerald veil of trees. Ever since the park was renovated 13 years ago, it has been a remarkable space, and one of its most remarkable aspects is that the number of men and women is about equal, a balance that is carefully monitored as a barometer of the park's health. In 1980, when the space was rife with drug dealers and other scurrilous sorts, the ratio of men to women was about 9 to 1, said Dan Biederman, president of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation.

But when the park reopened in 1992, the comfort level of women was seen as key to its resurgence, which is why the park's designers paid special attention to accouterments that appeal to women, like bathrooms with full-length mirrors, kiosk food and flowerbeds.

These days, the male-to-female ratio is just about even. And with this balance comes the possibility of triangulation, which Mr. Biederman defines with scientific precision as the tendency of an external stimulus to prompt strangers to interact. "If there's enough triangulation from things in the park," he said, "then people who don't know each other will break down and talk to each other."

Transit, women and safety.  Around the world women are harassed, even killed, in transit, India being particularly notorious.  In a number of places, women-only taxi services have been created to provide safe transit.

For example, SheTaxis, a women-focused taxi service in Greater New York City, modeled after the service in Mexico City ("Mexico launches fleet of pink cabs - driven by women, for women," New York Daily News) which was launched in 2009, launched in 2014 ("New Service Offers Taxis Exclusively for Women," New York Times).

But overall in the US, such services haven't fared too well.

SeeJaneGo, a ride hailing service catering to women, operating in Orange County, California, shuttered in 2018 ("See Jane Go, a ride-hailing service for women, by women, says farewell," Orange County Register).

In response to public safety issues, Mexico City has dedicated cars on its subway system for women although similar cars in Beijing don't seem to be working too well ("China's Women-Only Subway Cars, Where Men Rush In," New York Times), although such cars have existed in Tokyo since 1912 ("I used the women-only train carriages in Tokyo, for good reason – and I'd welcome them in the UK too," Independent).

Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris of UCLA has authored a number of papers on bus stop safety. Many transit agencies have introduced anti-harassment programs.

-- Hollaback! is an organization that addresses street harassment issues
-- Hot Spots of Bus Stop Crime, Prof. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, UCLA
-- Geography of Transit Crime, Loukaitou-Sideris et al., UCLA
-- Transit Security: A Description of Problems and Countermeasures, FTA

Restroom equity.  One long standing issue is restroom access.  Women tend to take longer to use restroom facilities (men can stand for some of their needs, taking less space, while women need stalls), but in public buildings like sports facilities, train stations, airports, and convention centers, more restroom facilities for women tend to not be provided.  Some cities and states have been changing laws to address this ("'Potty Parity': Equal Wait Time for Men's and Women's Restrooms," Time Magazine).

Cover image: Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way), by Sue Macy.

Women and bicycling.  There are many initiatives around promoting bicycle use by women.  One of the earliest was by the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals (Women Cycling Project).   Now many local and state bicycle and alternative transportation organizations have women access initiatives.

The Race Pace chain of bicycle shops in Greater Baltimore has had for many years a sub-store called Bella Bikes dedicated to women's cycling, within their Ellicott City location.   More bike shops are adding this kind of offering.

Women and political power. While there is no doubt that men are a majority of the holders of elected office at all levels across the United States ("Why Does the US Still Have So Few Women in Office?," The Nation), increasingly, women are winning elections for mayor in cities around the country.  DC's Muriel Bowser is one such example, but there are many others, including Houston, Salt Lake City, and in 2017, Seattle and Montreal.  More and more women are being elected to City Councils, etc.

Post the Trump victory, many more women are running for political office at all levels ("A year after the Women's March, a record number of women are running for office, will they win?," Washington Post; "More Than Twice As Many Women Are Running For Congress In 2018 Compared With 2016," NPR).

And a signpost of this movement was the midterm national election, where a great number of women of a diversity of race and politics were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, although generally this was more a case of Democratic Party members over Republicans ("Banner Year for Female Candidates Doesn't Extend to Republican Party," New York Times).

Gender budgeting.  In 2017, the Economist ran a provocative editorial, "Why governments should introduce gender budgeting," building on an earlier article, "Why national budgets need to take gender into account."

From the editorial:

At its simplest, gender budgeting sets out to quantify how policies affect women and men differently (see article). That seemingly trivial step converts exhortation about treating women fairly into the coin of government: costs and benefits, and investments and returns. You don’t have to be a feminist to recognise, as Austria did, that the numbers show how lowering income tax on second earners will encourage women to join the labour force, boosting growth and tax revenues. Or that cuts to programmes designed to reduce domestic violence would be a false economy, because they would cost so much in medical treatment and lost workdays.

As well as identifying opportunities and errors, gender budgeting brings women’s issues right to the heart of government, the ministry of finance. Governments routinely bat away sensible policies that lack a champion when the money is handed out. But if judgments about what makes sense for women (and the general good) are being formed within the finance ministry itself, then the battle is half-won.

By not looking at the differential impacts of policy in terms of gender, bias is structured into outcomes.

-- "This Is What a Feminist Country Looks Like," New York Times
-- A Feminist Government, Government of Sweden

Labels: architecture, transportation planning, urban design/placemaking, urban history, urban planning, women/gender issues

This is actually a letter to the editor published in the Toronto Star.  But it makes the argument that many of us have.  The budget deficit is primarily a function of tax cuts.  The recent vote by the House of Representatives extends Trump tax cuts which will lead to massive budget cuts in areas where people really need the services currently provided ("House Passes G.O.P. Budget Teeing Up Enormous Tax and Spending Cuts," New York Times).  From the NYT:

The House on Tuesday narrowly passed a Republican budget resolution that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and a $2 trillion reduction in federal spending over a decade, clearing the way for major elements of President Trump’s domestic agenda.

The nearly party-line vote of 217 to 215 teed up a bitter fight within the G.O.P. over which federal programs to slash to partially finance a huge tax cut that would provide its biggest benefits to rich Americans.

The blueprint sets the contours for the legislation that House Republicans will now turn to writing. It puts a $4.5 trillion upper limit on the size of any tax cuts over the next 10 years, but does not dictate which taxes should be reduced, a complex and politically tricky question of its own that could take months to sort out.

It also calls for slashing $2 trillion in spending over the same period, without specifying which programs should be cut, though top Republicans have targeted Medicaid and food aid programs for poor Americans. And it directs increases of about $300 billion for border enforcement and defense programs, alongside a $4 trillion increase in the debt limit.

The letter

The government should implement a moratorium on any and all tax cuts. They are economically senseless and politically expedient. The budget deficit issues we have are never going to be solved with tax cuts. That’s all we have done for a long time and deficits have only increased. It’s a bad habit politicians have normalized and they know it. A moratorium on tax cuts in a healthy economy would increase government revenue as the economy grows and expands. To supplement the increase in government revenues — taxes on the rich should be increased moderately. Why some will ask? Because they can afford it and it will not change their lot in life. They will still be rich. They have been the main beneficiaries of past tax cuts which only increased our deficits. 

-- Tom Colson, Toronto

This is also an issue in Utah.  The Republican Legislature may be the most in lock step with Trump of any of the legislatures in the U.S.  E.g., looks like they're going to make adding fluoride to the water illegal ("Utah close to fully banning fluoride in water, stripping cities’ ability to decide," CNN), the Governor is big on supporting immigration crackdowns, the Legislature is cutting the higher education budget some, to focus on degrees that are all about getting jobs, etc. 

The state is growing.  And growing places need more investment in infrastructure, not less.  But the Legislature is focused on tax cuts ("Utah Legislature poised to cut taxes for 5th year in a row," Utah News Dispatch)..  So much for funding education and other priorities.

Labels: electoral politics and influence, provision of public services, public finance and spending, tax cuts, taxation

The Financial Times, "Is it the end for hanging out?," reminds me that I meant to write about this when it was first reported, in "What happened to hanging out on the street?" in Bloomberg.  Researchers replicated the studies of William H. Whyte ("‘American Urbanist’ Review: Standing Out of the Crowd With William H. Whyte," Wall Street Journal), which formed the basis of the book, The Social Life of Urban Spaces, and the larger version, The City, which is a classic in urban design.  

From the article:

Are city streets places for pedestrians to hang out, or are they routes to be traversed as quickly as possible? Americans are increasingly treating them as the latter rather than the former.

That is the striking implication of a recent interdisciplinary study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Applying modern artificial intelligence techniques to old video footage, the researchers compared pedestrian activity in 1980 and 2010 across prominent locations in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia. Their unsettling conclusion: American ambulators walked faster and schmoozed less than they used to. They seemed to be having fewer of the informal encounters that undergird civil society and strengthen urban economies.

... The researchers found a consistent evolution across all four locations. At each site, pedestrians walked faster in 2010 than they had in 1980, by an average of 15%. Time spent lingering in public spaces declined by roughly half, and fewer people were forming groups. In general, walkers appeared more atomized and rushed in 2010 than they had a generation before.

I e-talked with Anne Lusk about this, she is a researcher at Harvard School of Public Health, and wrote her dissertation on the community aspects of multi-use trails.

I think the authors of the study, deep in "machine learning" and such, miss the point.  "Hanging out" is the dependent variable, while "flexibility with your time during the workday" is the independent variable.

People hang out less because they have more regimented work schedules, shorter lunch breaks, must be seen in the office, etc.

Furthermore, at least the suburban segment of workers, tends to be less familiar with their surroundings in the center city, mostly only between the garage if they drive or the transit station if they take transit, and their office destination.

Plus, as the FT article makes a point of more, while there has been an explosion of high quality public spaces downtown, there are lots of crappy ones still, making it less convivial to "hang out."

And yes, homelessness takeovers of park and other public spaces contributes negatively too.

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Also see:

-- "Extending the "Signature Streets" concept to "Signature Streets and Spaces," (2020, originally 2015)
-- "The layering effect: how the building blocks of an integrated public realm set the stage for community building and Silver Spring, Maryland as an example," (2012)

And the recent piece:

-- "An interesting public space development project in Downtown Pittsburgh: extends the range of after-work activities to keep office workers engaged"

Labels: "streets as places", Downtowns/Central Business Districts (CBDs), plazas, urban design/placemaking

From the Los Angeles Times article, "Culver City, don’t roll back your ambitious safe street redesign" which describes how a more conservative city government is considering rolling back an especially successful road diet-sustainable mobility balancing effort that has supported denser housing development, more users of transit, bicycling and walking, with minimal discomfort for motor vehicle operators of a two minute longer trip in the evening.

The project, called Move Culver City, was a 1.3 mile pilot project, quickly built for relatively low cost with paint, removable planters and plastic bollards. The goal was to test the theory that if people are given quality transportation choices, they will use them.

A review of the project after a year found an 18% increase in people walking and 32% more people biking through the area. At the intersection of Culver Boulevard and Main Street, the number of bikes counted. nearly doubled. Bus travel became faster and ridership increased more on the corridor compared to citywide. People said they were biking, walking and taking transit more often in the area, according to the review. They felt safer, more comfortable and noticed fewer speeding cars.

As for traffic? It moved faster in the morning hours, and in the evening it took drivers about two minutes longer to pass through the area. Two minutes. That’s a minor inconvenience. It certainly seems like a fair trade off to make the corridor safer and more convenient for alternative modes of transportation — which was the purpose of the project.

The city couldn’t widen any more streets (and that doesn’t solve traffic anyway) or build more single-family subdivisions. City officials decided to create a denser, transit-friendly, walkable, bikeable center that would allow more people to live in the city and give commuters more options to get to their jobs. The vast majority of Culver City is still car-centric, but this small section shows how urban Los Angeles can build more affordable, equitable and environmentally responsible communities.

Yet even the modest encroachment of Move Culver City may be too much for opponents of the project, who seem particularly offended by the bus lane. There is a proposal to add back a car lane and make buses and bicyclists share a lane, which would dissuade all but the most confident cyclists and slow the buses, thus making alternative modes of transportation a lot less appealing. And for what? So some drivers can get to their destination two minutes faster.

Also see "Cars don’t have to rule Culver City, or the future of L.A. transit," LAT. Interestingly, the local high school newspaper gets it even if elected officials and automobile dependent folks do not, "MOVE Culver City: Rethinking Urban Mobility in the Heart of Screenland," Culver City High Centaurian.

US Department of Transportation backs down on sustainable mobility/Complete Streets programming.  Meanwhile, the US DOT has removed its webpage on Complete Streets principles ("‘Complete Streets’ Webpage Falls Prey To Trump Purge," Streetsblog).  Note my Signature Streets concept is more expansive ("Extending the "Signature Streets" concept to "Signature Streets and Spaces"," 2020).

-- Complete Streets webpage, US DOT, via archive.org

-- Urban Design Guide, web version, book purchase
-- Urban Bikeway Design Guide
-- Transit Street Design Guide

And it should be no surprise because Trump and his Republican agenda is backwards looking, favoring the automobile.  But it does indicate the agency, at least under Trump, will be moving back towards privileging the automobile.

And in Utah, in yet another example of state government preemption of local control ("Red-state Republicans are dogpiling on blue cities," Washington Post), State Senator Wayne Harper, who doesn't represent Salt Lake City, is moving a bill to put a one year moratorium on Salt Lake City's livable streets-sustainable mobility initiatives "so they can be studied" ("Salt Lake City’s plans to build safer streets may hit a dead end — at least for a while," Salt Lake Tribune).

Salt Lake is a leading innovator in traffic calming, bike lanes, trails, and sustainable mobility initiatives, although I think they could do even more.  And, umm, such interventions are already studied before being implemented.  From the article:

A late addition to transportation-focused SB195 calls for a roughly yearlong moratorium on new road projects that aim to reduce or slow down traffic on streets in Utah’s capital. The bill, introduced by Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, passed the GOP-dominated Senate on Thursday along party lines, 19-6, with six Democrats opposing the measure.

The moratorium would run from May 2025 to March 2026 as state transportation officials study all the traffic-calming projects the city had implemented or planned to build from July 2015 to July 2035.

Republicans have a supermajority in the Legislature and zero compunction against preemption of local governance, so it's a slam dunk the law will pass.

Planning and building for the city you want to be versus planning for the past.  I guess we'll see how oriented UDOT is to sustainable mobility. My experience is that they are pretty good, with Trax and bus transit, and the MoveUtah initiative among others.  But still it wastes a year.  And maybe UDOT will buckle.

When I was reading the SLT article, I was thinking, "Salt Lake City is planning and implementing urban design measures for the city it wants to be," while legislators like Pearson must be totally in thrall to the reality of the Salt Lake Valley's sprawl paradigm.

The same thing goes for Culver City, do you plan for the future, or for the past?

Freeway widening versus congestion pricing.  Also see "Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. Here’s What Can," Scientific American.

Interstate 45 is getting a $13-billion makeover in Houston. The project aims to reduce congestion by adding new lanes—a common story for the many highway expansions that are constantly happening across the U.S. In nearby Austin, Tex., I-35 is being widened as part of a $4.5-billion project, for example, and near Sacramento, Calif., an expansion of I-80 for close to $500 million is underway. A planned project that involves a major expansion of the New Jersey Turnpike will cost $10.7 billion.

Despite the massive price tags, these projects likely won’t reduce congestion for long. That’s because of a phenomenon that transportation researchers call induced demand: in areas with a lot of pent-up demand for driving, any new capacity from added lanes gets filled up quickly.

 After a widening project, “congestion gets better for a little bit..., and then we’re back to where we were. And then somebody says, ‘Oh, we’ve got to widen again,’” says Susan Handy, a transportation engineer at the University of California, Davis. “So how far is it going to go?”

... Widening roads has been the go-to strategy for reducing congestion for at least a century, Handy says. It sounds logical and intuitive: if you have a limited supply of something in high demand, such as the ability to drive on a particular stretch of road, increasing the supply by adding new lanes should make that experience available to more people.

But increasing the supply of something also drops its cost—which can encourage more people to take advantage of it. More supply sometimes induces demand, or at least it allows more of any pent-up demand to be expressed. “Adding capacity makes driving cheaper from the standpoint of travel time and inconvenience and annoyance,” Handy says. More people might opt to drive on the road involved, which can eventually cause congestion to rebound. 

Fortunately for people stuck in traffic today, congestion pricing programs are short-term solutions that work like “escape valves” on congestion, and they’re being implemented across the country. Unlike widening, which decreases the cost of driving and thus causes demand to rebound, congestion pricing regulates the cost of driving in a particular area or lane to tamp down on traffic, Burris explains. Some, such as the program recently rolled out in New York City, include tolls for entering a certain high-volume area. London, Stockholm and Oslo also have similar programs.

Trump says no to congestion pricing.  While they are likely to lose, the Trump Administration aims to cancel New York City's recently introduced congestion zone toll ("Trump Wants Congestion Pricing Dead by March 21. New York Won’t Budge," New York Times).  Which only after a month, is successful in reducing traffic and raising money to be used for transportation improvements.

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Disclosure: Sugar House Park was in the process of working with City DOT to convert the right most lane of 2100 South abutting the park with an extended sidewalk and bike lane.  We'll get to do it.  But now it won't likely be realized until after 2030, and I term off the board in 2030.

Current condition (I want to plant the median too.)

Median strip sunflower plantings, Guardsman Drive, Salt Lake City

900 East abutting Fairmont Park

Extension of the 9-Line Trail, 900 South, abutting Liberty Park

I also want to do a special intersection treatment at one of the street crossings

Broad Museum, Los Angeles, Public art crosswalk by Carlos Cruz-Diez

And plant-related improvements to bus shelters (currently there aren't shelters, just stops)

Labels: bicycle and pedestrian planning, congestion pricing, sustainable mobility platform, transit marketing, transportation demand management, urban design/placemaking