Hello, everybody. I want to thank you all for coming out this afternoon. My name is Eve Corrigan, and
I work with BTOP. That's Bloomington Transportation Options for People. It's a lot easier to say in
its acronym. And we're a nonprofit group dedicated to creating better urban form, a more sustainable
culture, and enhanced quality of life to people in the Bloomington area by increasing use, funding,
and development of alternatives to auto transport. As part of this, we are presenting a 2007 Livable
Cities Speaker Series to raise awareness about how planning, transportation, and growth policies affect
our community and contribute or detract from its desirability as a place to live.
I would like to take a minute to thank our sponsors today for their generous contributions to support
this. They are Tabor Bruce Architecture and Design, Olympus Properties, and The Courtyard by Marriott.
If you appreciate what we're doing, please, when you have the opportunity, thank these businesses for
their support.
Our founder and president is Buff Brown. He is the one who finds all these wonderful speakers we feature.
And I'm going to take this time to turn the mic over to him so he can tell you more about today's presenter.
Thanks. It's a great turnout today.
This is the first speaker for the 2007 Livable Cities series. That's a name change from our urban planning
scholar series, but we believe that livable cities is really where we're trying to get. And we have
a professor of civil engineering, Dr. Norman Garrick today. He received his PhD from Purdue in 86.
And he has since then taught at the University of Connecticut, so he's been teaching now there for 20
years. He's done extensive advising with state and federal transportation agencies and consulted on
various aspects of urban design, sustainable transportation, and planning. His career bridges academic
study and engineering practices. He has served as a teacher, a researcher, a transportation consultant,
on a number of charrettes nationally and internationally, and is a construction engineer. He has a BS
in civil engineering from the University of West Indies, Trinidad. He has also held the prestigious
Fulbright Fellowship, which took him to Kingston, Jamaica in 2004 for four months, where he researched
transit, motorization, and urban transformation,
in that rapidly changing cities. He's done a number of independent research on a number of cities in
town that you'll be in the United States that you'll hear about today. He is a member of the CNU board
and that's the Congress for New Urbanism. He's been involved in a document that is a new document that
is being considered by the Institute of Transportation Engineers for adoption
It is entitled The Context Sensitive Solutions in Designing Major Urban Through Affairs for Walkable
Communities. So, without further ado, let me introduce Dr. Norman Garrick.
Thank you, and good afternoon, and I'm very pleased to be in Indiana. Well, yes, finally, and it took
me, I think, 20 years to get back here. I don't know why it took so long, but I'm back. I did enjoy
five years. It was a very important five years to me, a very formative years in terms of my
professional career. I did my master's and PhD at Purdue University and I'm back here. I'm also very
pleased to be part of this series because I really am fascinated with the work that Buff and his crew
and all of you all are doing here in Bloomington because I think
to change transportation policy, it's gonna take the effort of lots of different people at different
levels. It's such a dysfunctional system, and I think even the people that are perpetuating the system
understands that it's a dysfunctional system and that it needs to change, but how we go about changing
it? You know, there is so much, I guess, impetus not to change this big elephant. In my town of Storrs,
Connecticut,
We're trying to build a town center. We have a university that always beats IU at basketball. But we
have no town. And there is a $170 million project to build a town center. I think it's gotten a lot
of national attention. And the town told the developers, give us a walkable community. And the developers
came back with plans for narrow streets,
modest turn in radio and so. And when the town saw this, they said, you can't do that. Because they
are still in that mindset of a suburban place. So even when people say they want one thing, I mean,
it is so hard to turn around what it is we're trying to do. So I'm starting out with this presentation
with, I was just in,
LA that everybody thinks is this horrible suburban sprawled place. And I went to LA for the first time,
I think four years ago, and I actually was surprised that LA is not this horrible sprawled place. It's
a sprawled place, but it's not horrible. It has a lot of moments.
And it's a lot of moments that relates to the fact that it is LA and that there are all these villages
that developed around an incredible train transit system 50, 80 years ago. And that structure is still
in place. But what fascinates me about going back to LA now is that it's actually trying to restore
what it was and become
what it could be as a world city. And this picture is from the Transit Center, which is, I think, one
of the most beautiful example of its kind in the country. When I was in Pasadena, when I was in LA two
weeks ago, I stayed downtown, I took the subway to Union Station, and I got on the bus to go to the
airport. I got on the gold line to go to Pasadena,
And you would think that you were not in LA because I was in a different system, a parallel system to
the LA that everybody knows. And I was fascinated by this place because I didn't even know it was there.
But it's this beautiful urban place, lots of people walking around and connecting to the train and to
the bus. And you walk to the end of the place and you look over and you see LA.
And there was a shock that they have this nice urban place that they're trying to create, but it's surrounded
by highways and all the horrible mess that we have created to be able to accommodate cars. Okay, so
I think this is great to show that even in LA, which is some people's image of what we shouldn't do,
they understand that there is a need for change.
And I think we are at that stage where we're needing to change. Okay, so next slide. What is that? Okay,
go to the next, one more. Okay, that's it. I don't know if any of you saw this article last week. On
my way to the airport on Thursday, I decided to pick up the USA Today, which I never do.
And I opened to the third page and I saw this article and I was like, wow. I mean, you couldn't make
up this stuff. It's like, this is perfect. Cities afraid of debt by congestion. And a lot of things
come to mind when I read that headline. But one of the things that I want to share is the idea that
this is a problem, that
Everywhere in the country, we are afraid that if we don't accommodate the car, then we're gonna be in
trouble, okay? And it's crazy, I mean, we have to accommodate the car or else we're gonna be in trouble,
dead by congestion if we don't deal with the congestion. So, Buff, next one please, thank you. So their
solution is this. Let's go to the next one to show actually what this looks like.
This is what they're proposing in Phoenix. So as you can imagine, there were lots of things going through
my mind. This is a 24-lane highway. It's bizarre. So the article talks about, oh, OK, they're doing
this in Phoenix, and they already have one in Atlanta. Are these people crazy? Well, anyway.
The idea of a 24-lane freeway, I don't like driving on freeways, but the idea of driving on a 24-lane
freeway to me is scary. So that was the other thing that came to mind. Okay, anyway, so let's go on,
Buff. So I started thinking, Phoenix and Atlanta. Okay, so what do we know about Phoenix and Atlanta? Next one.
This is a chart from a study that was done by a group in Australia, in Port Australia, Newman and Kenworthy.
Some of you might be familiar with his work. And what he has done is to characterize the performance
or the characteristics, transportation characteristics of different cities from around the world. I
think about, I don't remember the number, I think 60 cities. And looking at things like this is in,
Urban density. Phoenix. Atlanta. It's not so much that they're different from Ho Chi Minh City or Mumbai
or Kuala Lumpur. It's just how much that they're different. I assigned this in class, in my sustainable
transportation class.
I signed it in class for the students to look at the numbers. And one of the students said she just
couldn't believe that the American cities were really like that. I mean, she knew that we were different.
But what is this, the order of magnitude? It's 50, 60, 100 times different? It's crazy. Again.
Next one, please. This is another.
I mean, no surprise here. Let's go and see where Phoenix is. Atlanta. Not too bad. They have a transit
system. If you notice, Ochimun City is very different from, it's down there not because of the same
reasons as Atlanta and Phoenix. It's down there because people actually walk.
And the other city that is at the end, did you notice? Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Well, they can afford it,
even if it's stupid, but they can afford it. Okay, let's go on. And then this graph. And of course,
you know where we are. And the next one. And again,
Let me draw your attention to London, which is a city that seems to work fine. London is, where is London?
Anybody see London? London is like five from the end there. So again, we're talking about orders of
magnitude four or five times more freeway in Atlanta.
And the weird and confusing thing about this is that these cities are some of the most congested in
the country. So what's going on here? It don't make sense. They have more freeways, but yet, and they're
so sparse, but they have more congestion than anywhere else in the country. Okay, thank you. So this
is what I think we're doing. We're going for number one.
Go back one buff. One more. But if you notice, I think the reason for their plan is that they're upset
that Wellington, New Zealand is actually number one. So that's really the problem. That's why we need
those 24 lane freeways. Okay, let's go forward. On the next one. Okay.
This is actually what we need to be concerned with. Phoenix. OK, Phoenix. Atlanta is number one in energy
use. Some interesting things. Atlanta, two and a half times the energy use of Chicago and New York City.
These are metropolitan area, by the way, so it's not
New York City. If you were comparing New York City, it would, the comparison would be much, much worse.
We're talking about the Chicago land area compared to Phoenix and compared to Atlanta. Two and a half
times that we are concerned about energy depletion. We're concerned about greenhouse gases. If we are
concerned about it, we need to be stopped talking about alternative fuels.
Or we should be talking about alternative fuel, but we shouldn't be just focusing on that. We need to
be focusing on why we're using so much energy in our metropolitan areas. And this part of the problem
is that this does not get into the discourse. All the politicians are telling us about alternative fuels,
of technology. Technology is always going to save us. But this is a problem. I mean, does anybody want
to be living like this if they can?
Okay, Indianapolis. Okay, Indianapolis. 91% of people commuting by car in a metropolitan area. That's
not a metropolitan area. I think this is probably one of the worst in the country. It's telling you
a lot about the
what we value in this state, and the type, I mean, if somebody just showed me these numbers, and I'd
never been to Indianapolis, I would know what type of place it was without going there. I would know
about all the big parking lots, the oversized roads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Just by looking
at these numbers, this is a city. 2% walking to work? That's crazy. Transit, 3%?
And the bike percent, I had to go to a second decimal place. A decimal place. Okay, so Indianapolis.
Okay, Felix, Atlanta, Indianapolis. One more. It's an estimate, and maybe I'm wrong by a few inches,
That's where Indianapolis is coming out in that general region. Energy use, Phoenix, Atlanta, Indianapolis.
So a region that is thinking of positioning itself as a place for the future, I think this is a serious problem.
going into an era of scarce energy, where we are concerned about changing the climate in the world.
Next one, please. Bloomington. As far as I can tell, Bloomington is the best model in the state in terms
of things like commuting by car,
in terms of public transit use, in terms of walking, in terms of biking. But what I would say to you
is that we shouldn't be comparing Bloomington to Indianapolis. We should be comparing it to Boulder
and Davis, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts and places that have a knowledge base that understands
that these issues are important.
One of the things you might want to look at in terms of Bloomington is that the car use is actually
going up. The transit use, well, based on this data, is going down. I think you have made steps in the
last five years that might be turning that trend around. But more disturbing to me is the fact that
the walking percent is also decreasing. So the fact that these are decreasing is problematic, and it's
telling me
that yes, Bloomington is what I see here, but it's also telling me that there are some policies and
some design issues that need to be addressed, such as how you design your streets, such as what goals
and policies you have to develop other forms of transportation aside from cars. Next one, please. One
of the things that could
Fuel, a change in Bloomington is in terms of the change in the land use pattern. And the only way I
had to look at this was to look at the commuting times between 1990 and 2000. And the interesting thing
is that there has almost been no change in the physical structure of how people get to work. The physical
structure represented by how people get to work
in terms of the amount of time it takes to get to work. So it tells me that maybe some of the changes
we're seeing is not so that the land use is rapidly changing, but that the whole infrastructure for
walking, for biking, et cetera, is not being nourished as it should be in places like Boulder and places
like that. I'm just guessing because I've never been here before. Well, I've been here once before in
1984, maybe.
You know, nothing personal, but this is what the numbers are telling me. Okay. Next one. Okay. So this
is the free way that they're going to double, triple in size in Phoenix. And what I want to say to all
these people that are fearful is that yes, congestion is important and we need to be concerned about
how people get around. We don't necessarily want people to be stuck in traffic.
But the first thing in any transportation policy and in developing places that we want is to recognize
that congestion is not all that matters. That in transportation, we have to think about all the other
things that transportation affects, not just whether or not the streets are congested. So in developing
policies, you need to think
how you can develop policies that supports what you want to achieve in your community and not just about
moving the cars so that the cars can keep moving. I mean, the cars move in Alabama, in Mississippi.
I was there for the Mississippi Renewal Forum. But you don't necessarily want to live in some of those
places. And the next point is that
We address congestion in terms of our transportation policy in one way. We widen the roads. We widen
the roads. Congestion increase. More people stop walking. More people stop taking transit. We have to
widen the roads again, quicker than we thought. And we keep doing it over and over. And I looked this
up on the internet. So they say that if you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a
different result,
Okay, let's keep going. So I went to the Smart Growth Conference and I developed this slide for the
Smart Growth Conference. Just a list of the issues. It takes a little while. Okay, these are some of
the issues why we need to be considering changing our transportation policy. Okay, and all of these
I could spend
the whole period talking about every single one of these issues. And I just may be focused on one, too
many deaths and too many injuries. This is something that, for some reason, never gets talked about
in the US. It's a national disgrace, but nobody ever talks about it. Each year, 42,000 people die in
the US. 42,000 people die in the US from motor car accidents.
the rates of fatality in the US is 15 per 100,000. The rate in the Netherlands is six per 100,000. This
is two and a half times more. Not only that, 30 years ago, the rate in the Netherlands, the rate in
the US was exactly the same. And they have cut the rate of fatality in the Netherlands
by almost five times. And the rate here has fallen somewhat. And we're so proud that our roads are safer.
Just in the last five years, the rate in the Netherlands keep falling. And in the US, it's actually
gone up. Something is really wrong here. In Sweden, their policy is that
by the year, whatever, their policy, their safety policy is called Vision Zero, zero fatalities, that's
their goal. And yet we are pretty satisfied with 42,000 deaths in the US, and it's puzzling to me. So,
looking at that long list of things,
This is my conclusion, is that we have a 60-year experiment that has failed. And there's so much evidence
to support this. It's a 60-year failed experiment, and we really need to think that it's time to move
on. And some places have thought that, including LA. This is from my window in the hotel in LA. So,
and other places,
that need to change also, this is Paris, which you don't think needs to change, I do. It's crowded,
it's noisy, it really, you think of Paris as this wonderful city, but it really has an auto-oriented
policy, which the new mayor over the last five years or so is changing, including turning a freeway
into a beach. I don't know if you're familiar with that. The new Paris tram,
They had to take a four-lane road, and they replaced it with a tram system. It's a transformation in
a city that should be. This is what you expect in Paris, but it's not always been that way. He's been
taking road space and giving it over to bikes, and even in Paris, they're afraid of dead bike congestion,
even in Paris. London, with their congestion charging, there are lots of
building examples, Stockholm with congestion charging. The incredible experiment in a place like Zurich,
which has absolutely transformed itself. It was a great city, but over the last 15 years, it's become
a magnificent city. Zurich, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Freiburg, Curitiba, Bogota, I mean, all of those
places are places that are transforming themselves by transportation.
So the issue is that we need to try to figure out how to get out of this cycle of sprawl. Let's just
cycle through this, because I think this is fairly obvious. Autodependency is what makes sprawl possible.
And autodependency is what saps the life out of cities, Indianapolis, but even cities like Bloomington.
Autodependency leads to sprawl and urban decay. Sprawl makes it
makes the auto necessary, it makes transit non-competitive, and it makes walking and biking impractical.
And then we're told that nobody wants to walk and bike. Next slide. What we need to get into is a cycle
of smart transportation where we use transit. This is what transit is for. As a form giver, a rejuvenator,
walking and biking
are things that adds life and energy. So we can encourage them as much as possible. These leads
to communities where lots of things are together. So therefore this concentrated land use, these attractive
places, they provide more access, more choices, more competitive transit, more people walking, more
people biking. That's where we need to be leading to. And lots of people don't believe that this is
what we need, or that this is possible. They might believe that this is what we need, but what I'm gonna
be talking about today are some of the examples of where this is happening. Okay, so what I'm saying
basically is let's get smart. And this guy looks like our typical transportation planning pro.
He had lots of good technology, didn't he? Okay. Actually, Maxwell Smart made me think of somebody else
from that era, this gentleman, who is Louis Manford, who 50 years ago, he was telling us that the path
we were going down was not too good for us. And he has critiqued and written very well about it,
And to me, he is a transportation private eye, the one that has been able to deal with what the issues
are in an effective way. And one of the most important things that he has said is that we need to first
consider, more than anything else, what is transportation for? What is the purpose of transportation?
I was never taught this at Purdue.
I was taught how to make good pavement mixes and to count traffic and whatever, but we were never told
in grad school at Purdue what was the purpose of all of what we were doing. And that is the fundamental
problem is like the professionals have no sense of what it is they're trying to achieve except to move
cars, except to make pavements that don't fall apart, which we need of course.
But we need to go beyond that and understand that there is a purpose to this beyond that. In terms of
trying to answer the question and give you a clue as to what he means, what he says is that
a good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation. And that confounds some of my students
last semester when I presented it. It's maybe puzzling.
A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation. So we're not trying to make sure
that people can get around. That's not the goal. The goal is for them to have access. Good transportation
system provides more access with less mobility. It's only common sense. A good transportation system
supports strong, vibrant, healthy communities. It focuses on access, not mobility.
One of the things, I was preparing for class last year, and I spent the summer reading Lewis Mumford,
The Highway and the City. I read Alexander Marshall on how cities work. I read Stephen Plowden,
who wrote, I don't remember, Towns Against Cities? Towns Against Traffic, Towns Against Cities. Towns
Against Traffic. Stephen Plowden is a 1960s English planner.
that did a really great job at critiquing what was wrong with how they were planning for. They had plans
for freeways all up and down London, of destroying the centre of London, and he was very good at critiquing
this. And what I've tried to do with this list is to summarise what I think are the most important points.
Firstly, the starting place is that
We need to understand that transportation is about economic, social, and environmental outcomes. That's
the goal of transportation. It has to be within that framework. You cannot think about the transportation
project just for about moving traffic. You have to think about the broader goal. If you think about
the broader goal,
they can come up with solutions that work that doesn't destroy, necessarily destroy a place. If you
think about it just as moving vehicles, then the only solution you can come up with is a wider road.
The next one, we need to consider what is it, what outcomes we want. If you widen the road, what is
that gonna do to your place?
Conventional transportation planning process is we look at the traffic trends. Oh, this was so precious
in Mississippi. There was a bridge. I wrote an article called Bridgezilla. In Mississippi, there was
a bridge that was destroyed. Actually, it was the bridge that was shown all over the world in Biloxi,
and it came down with the pylons.
The state decided that they wanted a four-lane bridge, and nobody was going to stop them. And what they
did was they took the traffic counts for the last 10 years, actually, and they just extrapolated it.
And actually, the trend wasn't going up, but they added an extra point so that the trend would be going
up. And this was their justification for a four-lane bridge. The bridge is being built now.
The thing is, I mean this is horrible what they did, and this is stupid what they did, but the interesting
thing is that they presented it to the FHWA, to the Federal Highway Authority, and they were fine with
it. Even after people pointed out that this doesn't make sense from a statistical no point of view.
But my point is that in conventional planning, we say this is what happened, and this is what is gonna happen.
What Plauden says is that if there was nothing wrong with the system, then we should just leave it alone.
In projecting trends, we are saying the system is fine, and all we need to do is give more of the same.
What is needed instead is a sense of what it is we're trying to achieve. And then when we decide what
we want, they will develop the transportation system that will give us that outcome.
And this is exactly what was done in Portland, I'll get to that. The third issue is that often we talk
about mobility when what we need to do is maximize access. And I'll get to that also. The fourth point,
and I think again, a no-brainer, is that there are some ways of getting around that are cheaper, that
are not environmentally destructive, that are efficient,
Louis Mumford talks about the fact that the bridges of London, from South London, could accommodate
100,000 people per hour. To build a bridge that would accommodate that many cars, and then would have
to accommodate the cars parked in London. So the most efficient way to get people from South London
to London is by walking.
So where it's possible to walk, that's what we should accommodate in Bloomington, for example. And then
the last point is that transportation planners are obsessed with speed. Speed is important if you're
going from Chicago to Indianapolis. If you're traveling in Bloomington, it might not be so important.
What he was arguing is that we need a diversity of choices. We need a change of pace, change of speed,
depending on the situation. We need to accommodate different needs. One person have different needs
for different types of trips. We need to accommodate different people's abilities. So we need diversity.
And what we have created in the US is the exact opposite.
We have auto-dependency, and yesterday I experienced airplane dependency. I figured there maybe was
at least 12 flights from Chicago to Indianapolis. I would love to look at the energy implication of
that. I mean, we're 200 and odd miles from Chicago. I mean, it's, wow. OK.
So what I did in this presentation was I looked at some examples in the US where they're practicing
some of these things. And some of them I think are particularly apt to this situation here. And the
examples were Portland, Oregon, Arlington, Virginia, Cambridge, Mass, and Davis, California. Portland,
Oregon I think is one of the most fascinating case because
their transportation is trying to create a place. One of the things that I found in research in Portland,
I found this when I was researching for Mississippi, next one, thank you, is this document. If you can
find it, I would suggest looking at it. It's a document that was done in 1972, and they talk about the
choices for the future in the Willamette Valley.
basically looking at the implication of different types of transportation. And it's based on something
that is becoming vogue again. There are some companies that look at scenario planning, and in particular
I'm familiar with one company that has done some of this work for Chicago and Austin and other places,
where instead of just predicting trends, you're saying if we do this,
What is the possibility? So if we do a particular land use and transportation outcome, what
is the implication? If we do a different transportation and land use, what is the implication? So basically,
this is about communities deciding what type of community they want and not simply saying that congestion
is increasing, we have to do something, so let's build a 24 lane freeway.
So they're saying that they are not afraid of death by congestion, that they are going to take charge
of the situation. In Portland, what they did was, in 1972, they looked at two scenarios. One where they
did like what everybody else in the country was doing, they just continued the current trends. And the
other was, they said, but maybe we want to bring more life into Portland itself. We want to strengthen
centers like Gresham,
and Oregon cities and all the other little centers around, and we want to develop the transit to support
that. And basically, this is what they predicted with scenario one, that if you continue the current
trends, this is what was gonna happen. Increased suburban sprawl, reduction in farmland, greater dependency
on the automobile, reduced access to parks, increased air water and noise pollution,
Less diverse economy, I think that was the last one, yes. That's, you know, in 1972, visionary, okay.
And this is what exactly happened everywhere else in the country, because this is what everybody else
did. And we are surprised, okay. This is what they said about scenario two. It would be higher density
guided by environmental concerns.
Okay, and this is what they expected. Firstly, they said that they needed a comprehensive planned growth
that they wanted to see or that they expected rejuvenation of the cities, preservation of farmlands,
increased use of mass transit, increased access to parks and open space, and decrease in air, water,
noise, pollution, and I think there's, yes, a more vital and a diverse economy
So they were taking a leap of faith that if they did things differently, this would be the outcome.
As far as I can tell, it's been an unqualified success. One of the ways that we look at the success
is Portland has become increasingly carless over the last 15 years.
To the best of my knowledge, there are only two cities of this size, Portland and Seattle, where this
trend is evident. You think about the implication of what this means in terms of resources. Well, you
can see some of it here. This is the US numbers, population growing, and vehicle miles traveled growing
at a much faster rate
at a much faster rate, this is the US average, I was intrigued, I first developed this slide for Mississippi,
which has population flat-lined, not growing, or not growing very fast. The rate of growth of vehicle
miles in Mississippi is much, much faster than the national average. In Connecticut, it's essentially
the same thing. It's not much faster than the national average, but it's faster than the, we're not
having any population growth.
vehicle miles are growing. And I can never for the life of me understand why nobody says, why is this
happening? It's just accepted that this is the case, that this should happen. This is the Portland
metropolitan area. Very, very fast population growth, but the vehicle miles per capita is actually
decreasing. And actually, Buff, go back to that one. It's also interesting that
From 1990 to 2000, the population and the vehicle mass traveled were increasing at the same rate. Remember
that in the U.S. as a whole, it's much higher. And since 2000, it's actually been decreasing. So it
took 30 years, but their planning is showing, it started showing evidence earlier, but now they're really
seeing the payoff.
One of the big differences, this is a MAX that was built in 1981. This is what started a revolution
in transportation in the US. The MAX, along with the San Diego system, were the first light rail. I
don't know if you all know the story of light rail, the name. In the 1980s, streetcar and tram was such
a despised word.
that somebody came up with the term light rail to sell it. So they built these light rail systems and
now I think there are at least 50 systems in the country. This was one of the first ones. So we have
the traffic not increasing per capita. This is transit per capita in Portland.
And again, you can see the upward trend. Okay, let's go. Transit, but this is what I find intriguing.
The last time I was in Portland was, I believe it was five years ago, and Portland did not strike me
as a bike-friendly city at the time. And I saw all these bike lanes and they seemed not to be well used.
And you can see the transformation that is happening in the city.
Arlington, and I'm not going to spend much time on Arlington, but I think Arlington is also fascinating
in terms of the vision of what they wanted to be and what they did. Arlington issue was about something
called the Wilson Boulevard Corridor, which was a decaying auto-oriented commercial strip.
Arlington had the ability or was given the option to build the metro line above ground, which is what
happened in most of suburban Washington, and in fact, in parts of the city that were not as valued,
like in the northeast corner of the city, where they didn't really care that much. Arlington, the county
government,
which is really a city, I don't know why they call themselves a county, they decided that they would
use local money because they recognized an opportunity, and I'm not sure how that vision was so strong
in a place like Arlington, because, I mean, they're not always, as far as I'm concerned, always that
progressive, but they recognized that this was a way of transforming the city. This is a comparison
to what happened in Alexandria, which I would have thought would be the place with the vision, because
Alexandria is this exquisite, elegant village, 1700 village. And Alexandria, I think, missed.
Go back one, please. Alexandria missed a chance, really. Firstly, the metro goes nowhere near downtown
Alexandria. Secondly, it's above ground. So the use of the metro in Alexandria is much, much different
from in Arlington.
Next one. This is what the station area in Alexander in Arlington looks like. And I always have to make
the statement that I think the urban design is needs work. Okay. But I will forgive them that they can
work in it. Okay. The next one. So to me, what went on in Arlington was that they actually understood
this question.
what is transportation for? And what transportation is for in Arlington is about economic development,
is about urban revitalization, is about sprawl mitigation. What Mumford said was that
One of the things we need to do if we want an effective transportation system is to concentrate the
greatest variety of goods and people within a limited area in order to widen the possibility of choice
without making it necessary to travel. And this is exactly what they did in Arlington. The point, they
tried to do this and they did it with something called bullseye zoning.
some of you might be familiar with, and I've always thought that is a very unfortunate term, but it's
very descriptive. It's descriptive of the fact that all the development is concentrated. Arlington,
basically this planning took place, you can see the string of five metro stations, Roslyn, Courthouse,
Clarendon,
Virginia Square and Ballston. They referred to it as the RB Corridor. Okay, the other corridor in the
state, yeah, that one works. The other corridor is not as good, the one going to Alexandria.
This is what, okay, this is what the RB Corridor did look like in 1980. This was just after the metro
opened. Across the river, Washington D.C., to the,
The left is Georgetown. That's the Keys Bridge to Georgetown. And up in that Arlington is Roslyn, which
if you have a flight to Washington, D.C., you would recognize Arlington as that huge concentration across
the river on the flight part into international. And you can see almost nothing in the corridor.
Next one, please.
And this is the RB corridor today. You look at it and you can see where the stations are. So the bullseye
zoning around the station, the intensity of development that tapers off to single family housing. So
what they were able to do was to build up the commercial base of Arlington
without effect, without sprawl, without affecting the residential areas around it. Next one. The bullseye
zone ensuring the intensity of use. Next one, please. So the residential zone. So you can see beyond
to the more, to areas more central to the station. So the bullseye zone in tapering off and behind would
be single family housing. Next one.
This is what Arlington looks like in terms of transportation. Drive alone 42% compared to Indianapolis.
73% of transit users walk to the station. 73% walk to the station. A large number of the rest take bus
to the station.
It's a very, very different way of living. It's a very little known place in terms of planning,
but it's very, very important in terms of planning. 33% of the real estate revenue from 8% of the land
use in Arlington, Virginia. What is important and what's interesting is that
Arlington was not about growth. I mean, it's grown, it's like lots of places around D.C. What's different
about Arlington is the type of growth. It's an urban growth that there is life, there is energy, there
is commuting by walking and buses, et cetera. It has a sense of place that you don't find in Crystal
City, for example.
people are very prideful of living in Arlington and what Arlington has been able to achieve. And that's
really, I think, what sets it apart. The interesting thing about Arlington is that in Virginia, they're
having this debate again. Any of you familiar with it? In Tyson's Corner? In Tyson's Corner, they're
trying to turn Tyson's Corner, which is everybody's idea of sprawl, they're trying to turn it into a city.
And, but they're debating, should we put it on the ground or should we have it above ground? And it's
like Arlington? Okay, go and have a look. So this is an ongoing debate in Virginia. Okay. Cambridge.
Cambridge is 90 miles from where I live in Connecticut. And like a lot of places that you live close
to, you don't pay any attention to.
I go there because I have to go to the airport. It's a lovely place. I love Boston, but actually of
the cities on the East Coast, this is the city I know the least because I live close to it and I don't
bother pay attention to it. And the last two years I started to pay attention and thought, wow, what
is going on in Cambridge? And I wrote a grant two years ago to study bike and how they develop this
bike, biking in Cambridge because they didn't have bikes in Cambridge.
10 years ago. And it's been fascinating to learn about Cambridge. Some of the things that were obvious
were the bike lanes, the traffic calm, and the street improvement. So the character of Cambridge was
changing. Next one.
And what I discovered is that it's the planning that really sets Cambridge apart from other places.
It's probably some of the best in the country. I think if you're looking for a model, you could not
do worse than looking at what they've done in Cambridge. Next one. Oh, let me go back one more. I just
wanted to talk about the bag tracks. Bag tracks, do you know why I'm calling that bag tracks?
Yeah, this is not a American design. This is probably one of two places in America where you have bikes
in the pedestrian ramp. Usually in the US, you have the pedestrian ramp, you have parking, and then
you have the bike lane. In Cambridge, this is on the MIT campus in Vassar. And actually, it was done
by the university. And the town allowed them to do it. In most places, they would say, we don't do that
in America. Go away.
But in Cambridge, they have a different attitude towards transportation, and they try different things.
Next one. The framework for transportation planning is really what is fascinating to me. And I have
a student currently working on trying to get into the details of it for a project with MIT. OK.
One of the things that is interesting is that transportation planning is carried out by the Division
of Environmental and Transportation Planning. So they have combined those different issues. The environmental
and transportation planning is within the Department of Cambridge Community Development. We were in
Norfolk. I was in Norfolk working with UDA,
famous new urbanist firms. Budae has basically transformed the urban design of Norfolk. Norfolk is getting
light rail. The light rail people want their trains to go fast because that's what train people do.
Fast trains in Norfolk would destroy the urban fabric. So okay, we're building a train because we want
to strengthen the urban fabric, but we're gonna destroy it so that the trains can go fast.
In Norfolk, transportation planning, the engineers are over there doing their own thing. The community
development people are somewhere else, so they had to bring us in between so that these two people could
talk to each other to try and get the same kind of attitude. So this is a very, very, very important
issue, that here, transportation is part of community development.
So the engineer has to report to somebody that is interested in how the community is developed. The
engineer is reporting to somebody that is also concerned about community planning, economic development,
environmental and transportation planning, housing, and some health issues. So you have to have a different
mindset, or you're not going to survive as a transportation engineer or planner in Cambridge. So it's
about this issue of the broader goals
rather than just the transportation goals. The goals of environmental and transportation planning in
Cambridge improve the quality of life by protecting the environment, the natural resources, and by improving
the transportation system. So the goal of transportation is the broader goals. You're not going to get
the silliness that you get in Norfolk of the engineers coming in and talking about
the importance of making the level of service better for traffic. That has to be part of something bigger.
The goals of that office are environmental planning, including climate change. And I know that's a goal
here also. I mean, you pointed at university towns. Always interested in bigger global issues.
Cambridge are trying to actually do something about it. I'm sure it's also an issue in stores, my hometown,
even though we're not doing anything about it. The issues whether or not you are actually doing something
are just talking about it. Roads, sidewalks, parks, traffic calming, pedestrian programs, bike programs,
parking. Cambridge parking is fascinating. Cambridge is
one of the most desirable places for these high-tech companies to move to. And what Cambridge says is
that you're not allowed to build more than a certain level of parking. It's not saying that we want
this much parking and more. It's saying you're only allowed to build this amount of parking and no more.
And once you have done that, then you need to find other ways to get your workers to work, to get them
to the job. So there are lots of things like you're forced to build bicycle parking, for example. You're
forced to be part of the transportation demand management. So it's a very different view of parking.
Instead of saying that this valuable land should be given to parking, it's saying that let's try to
find other ways of accommodating this particular need.
and to use that land for the benefit and the economic health of the community. It's a very, very different
view from most places. Regional planning and, let's say, Cambridge.
So what we see in Cambridge is a very holistic approach to community planning. It's an integrated component
of community building. It's not separate. It's this issue of it's about transportation goals are about
the wider community. What we have seen is a dramatic change in terms of what is actually happening in
terms of how people commute or people travel in Cambridge.
Again, it's somewhat like Portland, but this has actually happened over a much shorter period. The amount
of people walking and biking has gone from 51% to 55% just in the last, since 2000, and I'm sure the
numbers have changed dramatically since then. The number of people riding into the city, it's went from
45% to 40%. This is one of the lowest in the country.
actually almost as good as Cambridge, UK, which is the best in the UK. It's almost as good as Amsterdam.
Vehicle traffic into Cambridge has also decreased. Okay, so we moved to another university town, and
this is a town that 2004, you know where? Yeah, Davis, California, 2004 I actually went there
I took two months because I heard it was so great and I didn't believe it was so great because I'd never
seen any place that was that great in terms of bike. This is the busiest intersection. They have a bicycle
signal, which is one of the first in the US to cross one of the bigger roads in Cambridge. Okay,
next one. Bicycle trailers.
I read a story where bicycle trailers came. Davis is the biggest market for bicycle trailers. There
are no school buses in Davis. You get to school by walking, by riding your bike, or by having your parents
take you. And the bicycle trailers are used for grocery, and they're used to take your musical instrument
to school.
So it's a very different way of living. It's a very attractive way of living. I actually enjoyed being
in Davis, and I enjoyed meeting people from Davis who, like, their eyes lit up when you said you were
from Davis. Wow, I so enjoyed my time there, they would say, and how they behaved differently. Okay,
next one. In Davis, I'd never had a car. I sometimes rented a car on the weekends to go into the Napa Valley.
But if I wanted to get to Berkeley or to San Francisco, I jumped on this beautiful double-decker train,
which is one of the fastest growing train in the country. It goes from Sacramento to, I think, Oakland.
Much faster than a car, actually, to get to Berkeley. Ride my bike to the station, jump on this double-decker
train. So it's integrated transit that works very well. Davis, California, 70,000 people is one of the
It's in the top 30 in terms of busiest train stations in the country. Davis. So we think a lot about
the bike. But one of the things that intrigued me, and I didn't understand at first what this was about,
was that Davis was 10 square miles and it stopped. The city stopped. It was like a Swiss city. You looked
down on it, there was the urban area, and then there was farmlands.
And I didn't understand how that worked. I thought maybe it was something to do with the topography
or the terrain or something. And it turns out that they have very, very advanced planning that contributes
to this. One of the things that they have, the double-decker buses, it's the university bus system.
They imported these buses from London, these old buses. But one of the things that is interesting is
that there is an agreement between Yolo County, the county surrounding Davis, and the city of Davis.
It's basically a growth boundary plan. And how it works is that in California, they have a planning
area around the city. And how it works in Davis is that
There's an agreement between Yolo County and the city of Davis that as they develop, some of that income
would go to the county. If the county allows the sprawl within the area that surrounds Davis, then that
money would not go to the county. So there is a very, it's again, very far reaching approach to control
the sprawl.
This is what Davis looks like. Within the box of the square mile city is where all the development is.
Very coherent, very planned development. I had a map comparing it to a college station where the development
was all scattered, was all sprawling, very different. Okay. Next one.
Okay, in terms of the bicycle, in terms of the bicycle, the issue with bicycle in Davis, to me, is that
they get the streets correct. My sense of why people ride bike in Davis is because the streets
are comfortable to ride the bikes on. You feel comfortable. One of the graduate students that was in Davis
while I was there, did a presentation. And his statement was that a good bicycle place is where you
can drink a cup of coffee while you're riding your bike. And I remember when I was in Davis, I was,
I think, four miles out of the city. I was actually not living in the city. I couldn't get a place in
the city. And I would ride my bike every day. And the first thing I would do was to get on the phone.
And I would stay on the phone.
while riding. And this was the first time I had a phone, so it was a novelty to me. But I was able to
ride and talk on my phone, and I felt very comfortable doing that. So you have to get the environment
correct. And the other thing that seems to support this is that Davis is one of the safest cities in
California. In terms of fatality level, it's third in the country of all cities in California. The fatality
rate is one.
per 100,000. The US rate is 15 per 100,000. The California rate is 10 per 100,000. There are only two
other tiny cities in California that has a lower fatality rate. And one of the things that is surprising
about that is you're told that bicycles are unsafe. So therefore David should have a much higher fatality rate.
So this leads me to talk about streets and what makes streets comfortable and safe. And I come up with
another list of what I think is important about streets. Firstly, the issue of the network. And this
is a very hard issue to deal with in America. Secondly, the issue that streets are for different types
of users, and you have to consider the needs
of these various users. And then the third point is that streets are places. You think of any place
and what creates that sense of place are the streets. And that's one of the things that I think driving
through Bloomington, these streets don't contribute to your sense of place. It feels
very small townish, very sparse, because of the streets, because it doesn't create that gathering place
that is not tied to what's around it. I'll keep going. The network, I was working on this document with
IT and CNU, and this is something that we have not been able to really effectively deal with because
there is so little research, and we have so little knowledge about how to build networks. But I showed
this slide to say,
that they're so important because they really tell you about the city. Everybody knows where this is
from the network, yes? So I'm not in, where is this? Yeah, it tells you about the city. It's about the
structure of the city. This is one of my favorite places. And the way it works has everything to do
with the street network. Next one?
I don't even know why I have that, but anyway. And this one? Savannah, Georgia, one of the first planned
cities. An incredibly beautiful place. The street network was awesome. One more. No, that one.
Go back one, thank you. No. Ah. Okay, there you go. The squares.
They, I don't even remember how much of them, but the square, those little one acre squares that are,
some of you know, Savannah, that are just exquisite. And I was amused about that, the first square in
Savannah in the 50s was turned into a parking garage. And you go there and you think, now, how could
they have done that?
Okay. And this, the structure, the network tells you everything about the place. Where is this? You
saw this presentation before. This is not anywhere. This is,
Atlanta, Georgia, and that goes on forever. 30, 40, 50 miles, it just goes on and on. It's Indianapolis,
actually. So what's the problem with this? Let's go on. I think it was Alexander Marshall that says
that the street networks are the bones of the city. The framework on which everything else, how the
city perform economically,
transportationally, et cetera. Everything else depends on that framework. This is the South Bank of
London, not a very nice part of London, Waterloo Station, okay, on the North Bank is the embankment,
but everything is about the structure of the city, okay. And one of the problems that we have
in the US, well, not just the US, because actually this idea came from a British planner. His name is
Stephen Marshall. And he's the one that I think has done the most good work in terms of street networks.
He wrote a book called Patterns of Streets, I believe it's called. And what he's saying is that there
is nobody professionally charged with determining what the street network looks like currently.
The only people that determine the street networks are the highway planners by default and the developers.
We have no codes or anything that tells you what the street network should look like. So it's been abandoned
basically to where the highways are and the whims of individual developers. And part of the situation
in Phoenix
is that they don't have a street network, so everything has to go on that thing. So again, talk about
lack of diversity in terms of your transportation. If that system ever breaks, that city is toast. Okay,
and Stephen Marshall in his book, Street Patterns, shows the evolution over the years of the street
network. The core of Bloomington looks like that.
But then the suburban outskirt of what you're building now is the other thing. And the way you behave,
the way you travel is very different. The connection of those places to the city is very different.
And we shouldn't be doing that. Next point. So this is what we're building. This is from this sprawl book.
Field Guide to Sprawl by, she's from Yale. And this is called, I love this, Dead Worm Subdivision. Okay.
And this is, I think that's Arizona. Okay. Yes, a bullseye, yes. This is a Zoomberg.
It's actually bigger than a boom bag. Okay. So the issue that we are confronting is that this has some
advantage. Well, actually the only advantage is that there is almost no traffic, but that's also it's
disadvantage because all the traffic has to be on those 24 lane highways. So you are,
Well, let's go on. This is a huge, huge cost to the community. So the people that live on these things
are benefiting to some extent, but everybody else is suffering. And what I contend is that you can achieve
the same effect by designing a proper street network. If you go to Wrigleyville in Chicago, you can
see how to do it.
The problem of course is that, keep rolling, inefficient traffic flow, fractured formless urban fabric,
monochromatic places, but also the economic arrangements. So you only have one type of economic arrangements
in these places. And walking back in transit are totally ineffectual as transportation. It's impossible
to serve these places.
It's difficult to serve these places. And in some cases, impossible to serve these places with walking,
biking, and transit. Let's get back to Davis. Davis, in their codes, they talk about the need for an
organic expansion of the city. Downtown Davis, this is in 1910, Downtown Davis.
1890, I think it was when Davis was founded. This is the downtown core. In the 70s, they were doing
some of what the rest of the country was doing, these cul-de-sac development, but not quite, because
those cul-de-sacs in Davis are connected by pedestrian and bike paths. So they're not your
typical cul-de-sacs, and they're not also of that scale. In the 2000s, this is what they're trying to do.
is an expansion, and their codes call for that natural expansion of the city. So the new neighborhoods
are connected, and they have neighborhood center in terms of residential, in terms of commercial,
et cetera. So all around the city, there are small neighborhood commercial centers. From a new urbanist
point of view, they are not what I would consider to be desirable. I don't like the design.
But they work because they're connected to the neighborhood. There are shopping centers, but they're
connected to the neighborhood. You can get there on your back. You can walk, et cetera. So it's a very
different way. And I pick on Davis because, please remember, in 1960, Davis had, let me see if I remember
this number, 13,000 people. It's a city that has grown up between 1960 and now.
It shouldn't look like this. It should look like outside of Bloomington, but they've had very far-reaching
policy. Their policies are downloadable. Go on the web, you can see how they work. It's very applicable
to this city. And I talked about the fact that if you design the network properly, you don't have to
have cul-de-sacs. This is Prince Lauerberg.
I think this is one of the most beautiful urban places in Europe. And they're basically, I like using
this example because it shows how the different streets are meant for different functions, different
mixes of function. The residential streets, very little traffic. I think one more. And the streets differ
not just in their cross section, not just in,
their lengths, but in terms of their connectivity, in terms of their location in the network. And you
see the same kind of thing that they talk about in Davis, the same kind of changes that you need to
make to make sure that the residential streets are not fast passing streets. So just to give you some
examples, this is one of the main streets shown as an alley in Prince Loverburg.
This is another main street in the neighborhood, Prince Loverburg Alley. This is a neighborhood shopping
street that is not as continuous. So the other two continues to the rest of the city. This one is much
shorter. It doesn't continue. This is what I call a neighborhood living street. It's a bit ziggyzaggy.
So the traffic is much slower. It has some of the things like cafes
and so on. And this is a residential street. That's a very quiet street. That's a very nice street to
live on. Okay. And just to show some of what it looks like, this is, I'm showing you the alley with,
I love this street because I've asked my students to calculate how much volume of people that this moves.
The U-Bahn that goes every 10 minutes. A light rail on the street. The bicycle, the walking.
And I asked them to calculate how many lanes of traffic, if we got rid of all of that transportation,
okay. Shawna's Alley, the sidewalks, the generous sidewalks, the texturing of the pavement, which adds
to the character of the place. And you have to remember what this was. This was the old, fashionable
area of East Berlin. And when I first went here, all of these buildings were crumbling.
It's a fascinating place. The bike crossings on Chonos Alley. Next one. The quieter living street with
the raised intersection, which slows down traffic, and horrible to ride your bike on, by the way. The
residential street, which is much quieter. It has different features so that you don't have a lot of volumes.
So the network, we knew how to do it 20 years in the 1920s, and we need to get back to doing it. Streets
must serve all types of users. Streets are integrators. In the 60s, we were thinking that the only way
to deal with traffic was to separate everything. So cars on one level. This is the, what's his name?
The Kubosier idea of the modernist city. What we're finding is that cities work much better when streets
are integrators. They're not separators. Streets need to bring things together. They need to integrate
rather than separate the different modes of travel. And they tie the city together. Next one. And I
like this street.
It's a big street. Anybody recognize this? Some of you should. Connecticut Ave. Looking down towards
DuPont Circle. It's a very big street, but it works in a lot of ways. It has generous pedestrian facilities.
It's relatively easy to cross for such a big street. So it's a street that integrates the city.
To me, it's my favorite urban place in the US. It's this Dupont Circle area. And this is the city that
I grew up in, in Kingston, Jamaica. King Street, which is an abandoned street, basically, in a lot of
ways. Only poor people are seen on this street. My family, when I was in Jamaica in 2004 for my sabbatical,
my family was always amazed that I took transit.
And I would go downtown Kingston. It's like, what are you doing down there? I think it's, you know,
compared to what we value in Jamaica, this is so much more lovely. It's just amazing. But we have adopted
the same kinds of attitudes and issues. So we talked about the need for giving non-motorized travelers
priority. It's a long list. Yeah. They're cheaper to serve, much more efficient. They don't pollute.
They don't deplete resources. They don't take up too much space. They're not armored, which is very
important factor to consider. And they tire more easily. So when you're designing, you need to consider
that. And most of all, they bring life, energy, and vitality. Cars don't bring life or energy or anything.
Dan Burton was quoted in the Smart Growth paper as saying that.
Cars don't like other cars. But people want to be around other people. Jan Gels puts it a different
way. He says that man is man's greatest pleasure. We want to be around people. And so this is why we
need pedestrians in our cities. Speed is one of the things if you're going to accommodate
Bikes and pedestrians, you need to be very concerned about speeds. This is why Davis is so safe, I think.
Going from 20 miles per hour to 40 miles per hour, the chance of being killed more than what? Increases
by a factor of 10, okay. Okay, what else do I have here? Okay, this is about where we design in America.
where in a lot of European city, this is where they want to be in urban places. There's a lot of reasons
for that, not just safety. Well, one of the theory is that this is the speed that the body was meant
to withstand a collision. So if you fall, this is about the type of energy that is transmitted to your
skull. And we have not developed thicker skulls because we have to deal with cars.
The other thing is that at 20 miles per hour, you can make eye contact. You can see people. So you can
negotiate how you travel. And this has been used in Europe, in the Netherlands, for something called
a shared street, a shared street concept, which they are actually building some in Cambridge. They call
it naked streets in the UK.
And one of my grad students did a Google search for naked streets. And he didn't like what he found.
So I decided not to use that term. OK. This issue came up. I mentioned that we're building a town center.
And the people say they want a walkable town center in Storrs. This is actually Storrs, Connecticut.
Behind me is the little street that goes to where I live.
And I ride my bike to work and I have to cross this road, which is not a pleasant experience. So about
a week ago, the developer called me and he says he's getting so much pressure because they want to put
parking in the town center, which would like to have parking in the town center. There's no parking
there now. Somebody was just knocked over.
And there is a very heightened awareness of pedestrian safety because before that, a girl was killed
on the campus by a hit-and-run driver, which, of course, it had nothing to do with the streets. It was
kids behaving very badly. So that happened. Then somebody was knocked over on the main street. So there
is this heightened awareness. So the people that don't want parking is saying, look, we told you, you
can't put parking, which doesn't make any sense if there's no parking there.
So I don't know how that proves that we shouldn't have parking. So they organized a meeting with the
mayor just before I came, the day I came. And this was last Sunday, I decided to actually look at what
speeds were like in stores. Don't go too fast, stay there. So I asked, no, no, the next one. Stay there,
there, yes.
I asked the people in this meeting, the town engineer, the mayor, I said, what is the speed on this
road? What do you think they said? They said 50, 45, 50. I mean, they all knew what it was. Keep going.
This is the speed on the road. We know these things. And we put up a sign saying that you should go
25 miles per hour. And if you go 25 miles per hour, you run the risk of being killed.
That is the speed that we found, 54 miles to 38 miles. Nobody was going less than 38 miles per hour.
Next one. And I asked the same question here, and they said what? 40? Okay. That's exactly. I mean,
everybody intuitively understands these things. The next one?
This is the main street in Storrs, Connecticut. If we win another few national championship, no, we
don't have it here. We have it on campus, the parades. And we don't burn things either. What's the speed
on this road? Let's see. Everybody knows these things instinctively. Nobody's ever actually measured
it. There's not a lot of information. We know that people behave depending on how the road is designed.
Keep going.
Next one. Next one. Just keep rolling through it and go to the next one. So we know that the speed is
affected by the design and the surroundings. And we just finished a study sponsored by the Connecticut
DOT, and these are what we found in our study. We found that roads or facilities that are road-like
or highway-like, they have much higher speed, and by that we mean shoulders, no curb, no sidewalk,
no trees, large setbacks, guide rails, all of those things that says to people that this is a highway,
go faster. This is Winter Park in Florida, very, very different kind of environment, and this is a street
or an avenue
or a boulevard-like. So a very different kind of concept. And this is something, actually, the CNU document
is trying to instill, is that we don't just have arterial collectors on local streets, but we have roads
that is a rural facility. We have streets that is an urban facility. And some of the things include
small setback, raised curbs, no shoulders parking, small curb radii,
Street trees, median, urban type, fixtures, all those things contribute to lower speeds. Keep going.
And then the last point, so three points. Three points. The first one, the network. All users must be
considered. And then the third point is that streets are places. And okay, keep going.
One of the things that I think is and must be recognized and must be understood is that they are paramount
in shaping our sense of place and civic pride. An English group put it this way. They say, great streets
make great cities. So you start with the streets. Great streets make great cities. And fundamentally
is that the street should serve the city. The city shouldn't be serving the street. The street is there
to serve the city. Keep going.
No, that is a great street. That is the Ban of Strasser in Zurich, Switzerland in a great city. The
enclosure of the street, all of the things work together, the paving, all of it works together to create
that sense of place. I took this picture
March, I was on my way to India, and I stopped in Zurich to change planes, took the train into downtown.
I had two hours just to wander the streets. And this is February. I mean, and look at, this is a cold
place. This is not. And look at the people on the streets. It's amazing. Next one. This on the other
hand is LA.
And the streets, the amenities at the side are not horrible. But because LA needs to have lots of traffic
moving, you have a very different sense of the city because of the sheer scale and size of this facility.
This is Poundbury in the UK. The residents call it Charlieville for the guy that inspired it was Prince Charles.
Okay, it was built by, designed by a incredible designer called, oh no, I'm missing his name, Leon Crer,
Leo Crer, who also designed the architecture school in Miami. And he spent more or less his whole career,
and one of the fascinating things for me is that you notice the width varies and its curves and thing.
How he sets out his city is that he determines
what the buildings and the blocks should look like. And then once he's done that, then he puts in streets.
It's the opposite of how we normally lay out cities. So this is all about designing the place rather
than designing the street. The next one. And then this last one here is a shared street. I believe in
Scandinavia, I'm not sure where, but the idea that the whole system should be shared.
And this was the concept of shared street is from a Dutch engineer named Monderman who came up with
this concept in the Netherlands. And it's more or less spread to Northern Europe and to the UK. Ben
Hamilton Bailey is one of the main designers that does this in the UK. And I mentioned earlier, there
is a shared street concept being developed for
For Cambridge, what's interesting actually is that a lot of our streets were shared streets. The street
I live on from the 1950s is a shared street, and it works very, very nicely as a shared street. And
we have gone away from this very sensible design in situations like this. In Dachshund, the city where
this has been used a lot, what they're saying is the traffic fatalities, traffic accidents has decreased.
And the traffic is actually moving across the town much smoother. It's going slower, but there's less
congestion because you don't have stop signs. The reason they call it naked street is that you don't
need signs. The idea is that it's a social control because you understood what you're supposed to do
and how you're supposed to behave rather than having signs saying don't turn here, don't do this,
et cetera. OK, I think I'm near the end.
So I guess the point of all of this, next one, is that smart transportation works. I love this picture.
This is from Wrigleyville in Chicago. And I took this picture because I just read Yangel's book and
he talked about cities are about lingering. Good streets are where you want to linger.
So it's not just about getting a place. And I was in Wrigleyville, and I saw so much lingering. And
these two women were there for a long, long time, lingering and passing time. And I don't know what
they must have thought of me taking pictures. I looked at Portland, Arlington, Cambridge, and Davis.
And what I'm trying to get across with this slide is that
Wherever we go anywhere for design, people say, but that's not Bloomington. It's not Lake Charles. We're
different. We're special. What works there is not going to work here. Every single where you go is the
same thing. In Connecticut, we have two Farmington Valley towns, which are the high income towns in
the Hartford suburbs. And I was working in Farmington.
I would give examples from West Hartford, which is a very nice town next door. And they would say, oh,
but that's West Hartford. We don't want to hear about West Hartford. So they're different. And I don't
know how West Hartford people are so different. What is important is that these places have actually
accomplished what they set out to do. And I think that can work anywhere. I don't think it's just about
Cambridge or Portland. I think particularly in a place like Bloomington,
And this is why I am particularly happy to be here, because I think the potential for Bloomington to
be different and to be a model for Indiana so that people can say in West Lafayette, oh, but that's
Bloomington. I think the potential is so great. Let me see what else I have. I made this up for my karma
presentation and the idea that
This is Kingston, this is my hometown. This is a, Chris Blackwell is the owner of Island Record, he's
a Jamaican millionaire, and he commissioned this wonderful architect that I met last summer. We were
working together with the Prince of Wales project in Kingston, and she designed this incredibly beautiful hotel.
with this infinity pool in the side looking over the city, and in the back an infinity lawn looking
up to the Blue Mountains. And we were working in Rosetown, which is one of the most depressed ghetto,
the area that Bob Marley is from. And I was working with Andres Diwani, and I was fascinated to go because
I was thinking, Andres Diwani, this millionaire architect,
that is used to talking to a much different audience. I was wondering how you would translate to poor
people in Jamaica. And it was amazing to me that people in Rosedone totally got all of these concepts.
They understood what worked and what they lacked. So Ann Hodges, this is her project. And it really
struck me that wherever you go, I mean, the things that we're trying to achieve,
in transportation is essentially the same. We're looking for economic vitality and we're looking for
the quality of life. And I think all of these, the issue of transportation in transforming place is
so great that we really need to pay more attention to what we can achieve with transportation. Let me
see if I have anything else. And the basic principles of smart transportation planning I think are universal,
okay. Yes, next one, okay.
So I guess, and the last one, the important point, I guess, to leave you with is this issue that,
one more, is that this is a question that we need to be answered. What we are trying to achieve with
transportation. What is transportation for? So thank you very much.
And ask There's one over there as well. I don't know if you please necessarily need to respond to this,
but I just wanted to add One thing to your statistic about traffic fatalities one of our friends was
in the business of collecting those and she
told us that on a further breakdown you find out that fully one quarter of those fatalities are pedestrians
and bicyclists, which kind of dramatizes how dangerous it is out there considering all the millions
of cars and the high speeds, but yet a quarter of the fatalities are the pedestrians. I'm guessing at
the number, but the
The chance of being killed if you're in a traffic accident and you're a pedestrian, I think is 1%. And
the chance of being killed if you're in a car is much, much lower. So there are many more car-to-car
accidents. But the pedestrian fatality accidents that occur, the pedestrian accidents that occur usually
have much severer outcomes. And so that's, again, why I think David's is so remarkable.
because you have so many people, more people on bikes and on foot, and yet it has compared to, what
is that place called? All those places, Riverside? Riverside, California is amazing, the fatality rate
there. 30 times more fatality per capita in Mississippi than in Davis.
It's been a brilliant talk. I really appreciate you coming here. I have kind of a pedestrian question
about naked streets, which is how, how did the automobile intersections operate in the naked street
concept? It's interesting. I think the naked street concept is lots of different concepts, but the idea
is that it's a negotiation. So you come to the intersection and you see if the car is far enough.
You make eye contact on your cross if there is a gap. One of the things why lower speeds work better
for congestion is that the gap that you need is much, much shorter. The gap that people are willing
to take is much shorter because the consequences of being knocked over is not as severe. So therefore
there is more flow
because you don't have to stand and wait for a big enough gap to open. It's the same thing. It's about
eye contact. Yeah, well, more or less, but you don't have to stop unless you need to stop. It's more
like a roundabout maybe. So you come up and you see if there is enough gap or if you are first, you
keep going. So again, it's about interaction. It's about eye to eye interaction.
I was just in Portland, I got back the day before yesterday and Greg Raisman and I took a bike ride
and it turns out that there are 8,000 intersections in Portland without any signage. These are in the
neighborhoods and I guess you better know the culture when you drive there, so I'm telling you for your
information.
And that is that the person on the right gets the right of way. But what you find is that almost everybody
takes very good care going through neighborhood streets. Any other questions? Can you step up to the
mic, please? I know it's way over there, but they're videotaping this, and we want people to hear you.
I was wondering on the naked streets also, what is the hierarchy? Who has priority? Is it the pedestrians
and the bikers and the car or how does, is there a priority? No priority. It's about negotiating. The
way I think Ben Hamilton Bailey actually has his presentation on my slide. He made a wonderful presentation
two years ago in Pasadena at the CNU. And he has the concept of system time and people time. System
time is your design for the machine. People time is that you're designed for the human environment.
And shared use street is that design where everything is about negotiating, social,
rather than system time where you have to have controls. So there is no priority. It's about the negotiating
that takes place between people. And that's what happens in walking about in, say, Grand Central Station.
You have to negotiate how you go. So there is no priority necessarily. It's just, it works. You haven't
seen those crowds converging. I love the concept of system time.
The problem, and I was thinking about this, I was on my walks in stores, the problem is that what we
have done is we have brought the system time into the people time situation. So we have developed a
design system that have basically designed out
what should be, and the only place you see people time is things like in a parking lot, because there
are no rules in a parking lot, necessarily. It doesn't make sense that we've designed one way there,
and then if you try to do the same thing on the street, you say, no, no, it can't happen, but that's
the kind of environment. So, you know, that's, it's a very different approach to design. And actually,
one of the things I'm hoping to do is to do a project which I'm trying to call vernacular streets.
which is a design that is more like the street I live in. It's very curvy, just follows the landscape.
It's narrow. There are no sidewalks. You walk in the road. What we did, what we learned, what I taught
at engineering school was that in every situation, you have to do geometric curves.
And it doesn't make sense in Leon Krayer shows that in Palmberry. Palmberry is incredible. If you can
find pictures of it, please go and have a look at it. Okay. Yeah, if I could have one more. We're just
discussing widening second street and it has to do with the answers that we need when we talk to some
of the engineers are the concept of projecting 30 years into the future based on current trends and
the kinds of
Horrible weights that'll be out there 30 years from now that we got to build for today Even though today
the problems aren't that great in magnitude and then the current delays You know at peak, you know,
you have you might wait through two or three cycles of the light Yes, and what kind of answers can we
have for traffic people who have everything down on their paper and seem very convincing in their
in their attitudes about that? Well, I mean, you have made a point. I mean, why should you be designing
for traffic 30 years from now? And also, the fact is that why should traffic be increasing in Boulder?
In what is the city? In Bloomington. Why should traffic be increasing?
The reason why traffic increases is because you create places where people have to drive into the city.
I mean, is Bloomington going to have many more businesses in the center of town? And if so, shouldn't
that be accompanied by more residents in the city? And if that is the case, then you're not going to
have the traffic. The concept of projecting out is a very simple-minded one because it's totally
doesn't take into account what is actually gonna happen. It's just saying that this is a trend and it
continues. A trend continues because what you're doing now is the same as what you're gonna be doing
in the future. The second issue is the level of service. In Davis, they say that they have level of
service is what engineers always talk about.
And you know, level of service goes from A to F. Make it sound like it has something to do with being
graded. In Cambridge, the level of service that they are willing to live with in an urban area is much,
much lower than in a rural area because they're saying that the implication of trying to accommodate
traffic is so severe in an urban area
that you need to be willing to live with a lower level of service. Also, the level of service concept
doesn't take into account the level of service of the pedestrian. If you widen the road, what is that
gonna do to people that are trying to cross the road? Okay, so all of those concepts are not part of
the engineer's toolbox yet, but we're working on it.
Portland, when I was there, is that they offer free rides on buses in the center city. And I think that
is a big incentive to people to ride on public transportation. And I think that those kinds of things
could be done in smaller cities too, and it would be an incentive. Yes, I agree. In Portland, I love
the name of it. It's called Fairless Zone in the center of the city where you're allowed to ride free
on all public transit. I think, I don't know if it's such a, I think the incentive is not
that you ride free, the incentive is that you don't have to think about getting into your pocket. Yeah.
Exactly, you don't have to deal with that. And it just makes it much more attractive to be there. I
think it's a really, really great thing. One of the things, I love the metro in DC, but I hate the fact
that you have to get into your pocket, take out the card where you're going in and when you're getting
out. I live up on the northwest side of Bloomington.
And in Bloomington, that's where we house our old poor people and our welfare mothers with children
and our people that are living with AIDS, people that are living with mental retardation, with Habitat
for Humanity. In other words, all the programs for the poor are within one neighborhood. And in the
80s, the city came out, the city of Bloomington,
came out and they took all our front yards away to build us drag strips in front of our houses. So we
have remarkably wide drag strips right now that are in front of our houses in what is potentially the
most pedestrian area in town. And I wonder if you could help us with our negotiation with our city so
that maybe you have something to offer in terms of the way that people have gone about to be successful
in making these negotiations.
Well, I would be glad to try, because clearly there is an issue there, and it's not a Bloomington issue,
although I'm surprised that, well, maybe I'm not that surprised that Bloomington is in that kind of
business of segregation.
But you're right, that those are the places that you want people to be connected. Let me go further
to say that this same area has no community center, no grocery store, no laundromat. Yeah, yeah. One
of my students was looking at the village of Chester, not Chester, Essex in Connecticut, a beautiful
village. And the multifamily house is all away from the center of town, the multifamily housing.
Of course, they don't want multifamily housing in Essex. I guess it's not an uncommon problem. It's
kind of sad, but it's not a transportation problem. It is a problem of equity and dealing with people
fairly. Actually, it's sad, but in the Middle West,
that seems to be a big issue if you look at places like Detroit and Gary, Indiana, and East St. Louis
that I'm a little bit familiar with. Hi. I will point out that actually all the new building for that
is on the East side in my neighborhood and middle away houses, but actually another new property to
expand surfaces for the poor.
and for single moms and stuff. I had a question. I live in a neighborhood that parallels Indiana University.
And it's a gorgeous campus, walking campus mostly only. Unfortunately, there's starting with a new expansion
of parking garages around the edge of the campus. And I asked them, you know, why don't you put that
on 10th Street, which goes through campus or, you know, next year.
Buildings they said no, no, no that they're very we don't want any cars in our campus so they're now
building a 600 car 600 the other ones 400 that they already built on third, but this one's going to
be 600 in the 500s, but Car parking garage along the edge of our neighborhood between IU and the neighborhood
and the neighborhood was unhappy about it because we
Feel that this increases the traffic. So now there'll be a thousand cars coming to park Along there
and it also discourages the the new people that they're building the parking for Which they're building
several buildings their science buildings and stuff And they told us that if they didn't build parking
places for him that they couldn't get good people to work there So I was wondering, you know if you have any
advice for us on that front. They are planning a couple of more around the edge of campus also. There
are lots of different response to that one because it's such a short-sighted thing. It sounds like Yukon.
That's what it sounds like to me. A few years ago, they did exactly the same. We took traffic out, which
everybody thinks is such a wonderful idea. We put the traffic on the edges. Next to the basketball arena,
they built
a big parking garage in the middle of the campus, so all the traffic has to go on this particular road.
But they also built the bookstore. So not only do you have all the traffic have to go on these roads,
but all the kids have to cross. And then they decided that it's too congested, so they need to widen
the road. But what you're talking about there, again, is this
The fact that you're building these garages, what it means is it's separating your neighborhood, and
I think this is an important point to make. It's separating your neighborhood from the university, and
it means that probably less people are gonna actually walk into the university, so they're probably
gonna need a bigger parking garage. I don't know how you deal with such, to me, it's stupidity.
Because it costs money to build parking garages. It's also the reason why we are spending $170 million
in stores is because we don't have a town. And you have a town, and they're trying to negate the town.
And I really don't understand that. I mean, if you want good people, what you want is a quality of life
that comes with a town like this. And it's puzzling. It really is strange.
But I think there are some economic arguments that they can use, that you can use their arguments. The
cost of each parking space is something like $25,000. So if you look into the economics of it, that
might be a way to have some traction with them. And you can look at what people say about university
towns and what they want in university towns. And they're not gonna come here if they continue to degrade.
The town so I think those are arguments that might have traction It certainly took a while for you can't
realize that this was the case I remember trying to talk to a provost about this and he was very very
dismissive Well, that's not the only problem we have here is for parking garages the city is planning
on bill or wants to build an parking garage right on Kirkwood and Although there's been two studies
showing that we really don't need those that parking garage. They insist that that
one of our businesses will move away if they don't have parking for their employees. And I think this
is something that we really need to get on and make sure that the city doesn't think about even doing
that. Because if a business is reliant on a parking garage, it seems to me we don't really need that
business. I mean, the places like Cambridge, they realize
Andres Duane, I sometimes get tired of calling that man's name, but he's so inspirational in some ways.
And one of the things he says is that we behave as if we are beggars. And we don't value what we have.
And that's probably true in some places that are beggars, but even towns that are beggars, they're not
doing themselves any favor by going to the lowest
common denominator, and Bloomington, the quality of life and the type of place, there's no reason why
this city should be a beggar city, okay, of all the cities in the state, so to have that perspective
that it's ridiculous. Where are they moving to? Pfizer wanted to build, we have this drumlin, beautiful
drumlin, which a lot of people consider very spiritual in stores,
And Pfizer wants to build a world-class research facility there. And people were like, no, you're not
going to do this. They wanted a world-class center. And you know where they ended up moving to?
Terre Haute. The world-class center in Terre Haute, Indiana. This is not a beggar town. You should,
I mean, you have to get through that to your politicians. That you can do better, and you can get what you want.
Thank you very much for coming. We have a few final remarks, but let's give this guy a hand. I want
you all to know that I did not tell him anything to say about parking lots or anything.
Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Dr. Garrick, for that very interesting presentation. I learned
a whole lot. And I want to mention again, thanks to our sponsors for helping us to put this on. Tabor
Bruce Architecture and Design, Olympus Properties, and the Courtyard by Marriott. We really appreciate
their support. I also want to thank the City of Bloomington for allowing us to use this space again. We really
Appreciate that so much. Thank you. And if you want to keep up with our speakers or other events, please
put your name and contact info, email usually, on the sign up sheet on the table out there.
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so much everybody for coming and we'll look forward to more speakers in the future.