CitiBikes in NYC A Hit!

Earlier this month, I wrote a post for Blooming Rock Development‘s blog about the forthcoming Phoenix bike share program. This news came in light of the mishaps with New York City’s CitiBike program. But, as streetsblog reported yesterday, the program is a hit regardless of difficulties with the bikes! This comes at a time when the heat is also so extreme that NYC set a record for the most energy used in a single day.

In just 8 weeks, usage skyrockets

As the streetsblog article states, this exceeds usage of bike share bikes in London, a city with approximately the same population. This type of program will certainly increase the number of people using active transportation to get to work, school, or the like. 30,000 daily users (perhaps more) in New York will benefit from a healthier mode of transport. We will see if Phoenix follows in its steps, but the built environment here in Phoenix will likely be a hindrance to high usage of the bikes (though, a spokesman from the City states that Reinvent Phoenix will seek to increase bikeability). Though, at least in NYC, they’ve proven that heat doesn’t deter people from riding!

Sustainability, Suburbs, and Cars, too? Can it be true?

All of us involved in urban planning are concerned with the sustainability of our cities, especially as it pertains to automobile use and its side effects (higher rates of obesity, higher rates of hospitalization for asthma, higher rates of cancer, etc.), but it would appear that, despite these significant health concerns, Delucchi and Kurani of U.C. Davis have developed a model “sustainable city” that sees no need to curb auto use or retrofit suburbia. And though we are seeing signs of peak-auto in the U.S. already; the Atlantic Cities states,

“They believe that car ownership is so desirable that any effort to address sustainability must embrace it, rather than defy it.”

This statement may have been reasonable to utter ten years ago, but right now, the demographic trend, and the rise of an informed class of consumers is pushing us toward less automobile use, more transit and TODs, and more people biking and walking to work. HUD even has a move-to-work (MTW) program in place to encourage locally designed, denser, more sustainable development to make federal expenditures more efficient.

Delucchi Kurati Model

Delucchi and Kurani claim that the secret to higher sustainability is the existence of a dual transportation network.

“Traveling around town, residents would take the “light” road network. They would walk, bike, or drive tiny cars incapable of exceeded 25 mph. There would be no on-street parking at all. The general idea is to promote interaction and accessibility. Conventional cars would travel the “heavy” road network out of town, mostly to commute elsewhere for work or shop at big box stores confined outside the city limits.”

This leads to an outcome that mimics two popular models for planners: the garden cities model (pictured below) first proposed by the British planner Ebenezer Howard, implemented in Letchworth and Welwyn; and also the segregated bus rapid transit BRT system for Curitiba, Brazil. Surely, a combination of these two ideas would be potent, but it raises more questions that in it answers.

A Model Garden City

Curitiba BRT

For example, would biking and walking increase, or would use of these micro-machines be so convenient that we would take them everywhere in town? Would I be able to drive my privately-owned automobile directly to one of these “heavy” out-of-town corridors, or would it be left at a park-and-ride? If so, this diminishes the desire to own an automobile even more. Why not, at that point, just connect the cities by heavy rail or by BRT systems? Or, why not promote a ZipCar model of car usage, with an on demand availability, rather than continue to promote the status-quo?

To me, this model perpetuates a dying trend while putting an unfamiliar twist on it, which is counter to the psychological reasons for hanging onto the suburban, auto-oriented model in the first place.

What do you think about this? Is it too far-fetched, or would you go for this? Does it solve any problems, especially those associated with the adverse effects of auto-dependency?

Encouraging Homeownership Without Encouraging Sprawl

The American dream of homeownership has been embedded in our consciousness, that picket fence, the half-acre yard, you know the routine. There is one problem with this vision: with the large lots, the 2-car garages, and wide, curvilinear streets, sprawl, disconnectedness, and the automobile have come to rule the day.

Many great accounts of how suburbia came to be the dominant development paradigm in America are available, so I will just summarize here. James Howard Kunstler’s masterpiece The Geography of Nowhere  serves up a grave account of the tragic rise and decline of the American landscape. For a focus on the political economy of the suburbanization of America, Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier is an excellent resource. And from the team at the forefront of New Urbanism, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck; Suburban Nation is a great resource for discovering the coming change in urban form.

A sprawling suburb near Phoenix, Arizona

This change is urban form is being inspired partially by us millennials, who aren’t too enamored by the current auto-dominated world in which we’ve grown up. A recent report by US PIRG show that millennials are reluctant to drive, a trend that many are associating with a blossoming online social world. Another interesting trend causing peak–driving and peak-VMT is the large number of baby-boomers dropping out of the workforce. The US PIRG report asserts that it may be 2040 before driving rises to the 2007 peak again, despite the 21% increase in population over the same period. The New York Times recently published an article covering this trend as led by the youth of the nation, and Streetsblog DC called my attention to a part of the report that is especially interesting – we millennials won’t shun the automobile forever, just until we get old, and even then, we’re probably not going to drive as much.

IBBN Flatpack Home

All this leads me to my point – the model for American homeownership needs to be adjusted to this new demographic trend. FHA and VA loans have special requirements tied to them that tend to favor newly constructed homes, most of which have been constructed at the fringes of cities. Last year, The Atlantic published an article about the decline of homeownership among young people, with the take-away points that young people are finding less employment, staying single longer, and therefore, buying less homes. Here is an observation from a young person who has secured a mortgage – the houses available aren’t what I want! I would love to see a condo, or maybe a townhome, that was in a denser urban area, that would allow me to sell my car and make a bigger downpayment, and would still qualify for an FHA loan, so I don’t have to have that 20% down. Take this home for example: a flatpack (think IKEA) home that can I can build myself in just 6-8 weeks. That’s the idea that some Dutch companies are floating to increase homeownership among the younger generation there. The cost is just $150,000 dollars, there is no labor cost, because you build it yourself, meaning you can customize it, the cost is fixed, and the financing options are available for anyone with an income of about $38,000 to $58,000. That’s solidly middle-class, where most of us millennials can expect to land, given the decline in real wages over the past 40 years (see chart below). Another advantage of these flatpack homes is that many jurisdictions in the U.S. will allow them in site-built only neighborhoods (usually the most restrictive zoning classification), as they are built on-site by the homeowner.

Long-term Real Median Earnings for Males

It’s clear to me that the current American model of homeownership, two-and-a-half kids, Spot, Fido, and that great, big lawn is out-of-date. Our generation, and probably the following generations, will continue to demand walkable, bikeable, connected, and vibrant cities for the foreseeable future. This is not just because it is the cool thing to do (though Jeff Speck’s new book, Walkable City has certainly inspired a trend among planners), it’s because we want to shy away from the dependence upon or cars and fossil fuels and get back to a world where we can walk or bike to work, and get some exercise on the way.

How can we plan for peak-auto, cater to a generation who would like to walk or bike to work, or perhaps even telecommute? We can invest in more bicycle infrastructure, as I mentioned in my last post, but we can also encourage a culture of activity, rather than a culture of gridlock and waste.