Kaid Benfield's Blog: Moving Beyond Oil

Metro area commuting data from Brookings: best and worst performers nationally

2010-05-12T13:37:17Z

Yesterday the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program released its signature report, The State of Metropolitan America. The study is a comprehensive examination of a range of data indicators on America’s 100 largest metro regions. According to the project’s website, the analysis “portrays the demographic and social trends shaping the nation’s essential economic and societal units—its large metropolitan areas—and discusses what they imply for public policies to secure prosperity for these places and their populations.”

To say that the report is data-rich is a massive understatement (if that’s not an oxymoron), and I don’t pretend to have digested all of it it. I did, however, take a quick look at the report’s commuting data (presented in interactive form here), and out of the 100 regions these are the best and worst performers:

Regions with the smallest shares of workers driving alone to work:

(National average share for 100 largest regions: 74.0%)

New York-Northern NJ-Long Island NY-NJ-PA 50.3%
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont CA 62.4%
Honolulu HI 64.2%
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria DC-VA-MD-WV 66.3%
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA 69.0%

There are no surprises among these good performers. These are regions with an abundance of walkable neighborhoods and a strong commitment to public transportation. I’m pleased to see the DC area on the list, though it’s a little frightening to consider that the reach of our metro area now includes part of West Virginia. Boston and Portland came in at numbers 6 and 7, respectively, on the list with the smallest shares.

Regions with the largest shares of workers driving alone to work:

Youngstown-Warren-Boardman OH-PA 85.1%
Wichita KS 84.6%
Akron OH 84.4%
Baton Rouge LA 84.1%
Knoxville TN 84.0%

I was a little surprised to see two older industrial regions among the metros with the highest shares of driving.

The next two categories reveal which regions improved or worsened the most during the last decade:

Regions whose share of workers driving alone to work decreased the most since 2000:

(National average change in share for 100 largest regions: -0.2%)

Austin-Round Rock TX -3.6%
Dayton OH -3.3%
Portland-S. Portland-Biddeford ME -3.2%
Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown NY -2.9%
Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk CT -2.7%

Some of Austin’s improvement may be attributable to the light rail line (above left) that has become operational there since 2000. I don’t have a ready explanation for why the other improving regions placed as they did.

Regions whose share of workers driving alone to work increased the most since 2000:

New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner LA +5.3%
Modesto CA +3.3%
El Paso TX +3.2%
Las Vegas-Paradise NV +3.0%
Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura CA +3.0%

Among the bad performers, New Orleans can be excused because of the Katrina tragedy. The other four are all Sun Belt regions where sprawl worsened during the decade. I believe the last year of data that Brookings accounted for was 2008, though, only a few months into the recession and suburban housing collapse that affected the Sun Belt particularly hard; I wonder how the data may have changed since then.

I think the share of workers driving alone is the most environmentally relevant of the mode-share statistics in the report. If three-quarters of us drive to work nationally, a reasonable goal of public policy might be to lower that share to two-thirds. Even more relevant environmentally might have been a measure that also took into account the average distance driven by commuters, since that might more closely track carbon emissions and also be a richer data point for metropolitan land use policy. After that, I think that the walking/bicycling share would be particularly revealing. We don’t have those from the Brookings data (this was not primarily a transportation study), but we do have information on public transit usage:

Regions with the highest rates of commuting by public transportation:

(National metro average: 7.0%)

New York-No. NJ-Long Island NY-NJ-PA 30.4%
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont CA 14.4%
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria DC-VA-MD-WV 13.4%
Boston-Cambridge-Quincy MA-NH 11.7%
Chicago-Naperville-Joliet IL-IN-WI 11.3%

Those five are the only regions in the country scoring above 10%. I also wish that, for all the statistics but especially this one, we had a national median as well as a national average. The sheer number of transit commuters in the New York region is high enough to have an outsized influence on the national average. (Incidentally, a somewhat different accounting of commuting data from the Census for 60 metro regions does include national medians, as well as walking and bicycling shares.) In any case, 7% nationally is a very low rate; the median share is probably even lower.

Regions with the lowest rates of commuting by public transportation:

Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville FL 0.3%
Lakeland-Winter Haven FL 0.4%
Knoxville TN 0.4%
Tulsa OK 0.4%
Greenville-Mauldin-Easley SC 0.4%

That’s just pathetic, particularly for Knoxville and Tulsa, which have sizable populations and should have well-functioning transit systems (which isn’t to say that they do, obviously). Knoxville is also a “winner” among the regions with the highest drive-alone shares.

Carpooling, by the way, is most popular in Bakersfield CA, Honolulu HI, Stockton CA, Cape Coral-Fort Myers FL, and McAllen-Edinburg-Mission TX, whose carpooling shares ranged from 17.1% to 14.2%, soundly beating the national metro average of 10.3%. Carpooling is least popular in the New York-Northern NJ-Long Island region, followed by Akron OH, Youngstown-Warren-Boardman OH-PA, Springfield MA, and Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor OH; the shares ranged from 7.3 to 8.1%. It is a curious coincidence that carpooling is unpopular in both the New York-NJ region, whose drive-alone share is among the lowest, and in Akron, whose drive-alone share is among the highest.

All of the Brookings data, including several video explanations, may be accessed here. An interactive site that slices and dices not just commuting data but also information on population, race and ethnicity, immigration, age, households and families, educational attainment, work, and income and poverty, may be accessed here. It reflects all 100 regions in the study, not just the best and worst performers that I highlight in this post.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Walkability 101-B, or why it's good to be connected

2010-05-11T14:11:46Z

The degree to which our streets connect with each other has a major impact on how our communities feel and function, and a major effect also on their walkability. Generally speaking, the more connections (more frequent intersections, smaller block sizes) the better for making travel routes more efficient and attractive. This allows the substitution of walking or bicycling for some trips that in a disconnected neighborhood would be made by car, and it also shortens driving distances, reducing emissions in the process. Being connected is a good thing when it comes to neighborhoods.

I’ve written about this subject before, and so has my colleague Rachel Sohmer. I am returning to it now because David Roberts of Grist has written one of the best lay person’s explanations I have seen of how connectivity can work to improve a community, using his own neighborhood in Seattle as an example.

Look at the maps above. The one on the left shows David’s house in relation to existing neighborhood streets and a couple of parks. The one on the right shows the circuitous route (indicated in orange) he must take to get to the park at the southern end of the neighborhood. The park isn’t that far away as the crow flies (does Seattle have crows?), but it might as well be. The same map also shows (in blue) how the route could be shortened and made more direct if the neighborhood streets were better connected.

David explains the result:

“The seemingly small difference between the blue and orange routes is enough to make a fairly large difference is our daily life: we just don't go to the park much, and thus don't interact with the other [neighborhood residents] who spend time there . . .

“The map doesn't show it well, but see that spur of Dayton Ave N that juts off 138th? The houses on that little cul de sac are within a stone's throw of my place. There may be all sorts of groovy people living there, but we'll never know, because to get there we have to go north to 143rd, west to Greenwood, south to 138th, and east to Dayton. Suffice to say: we wouldn't do that unless we already knew someone there, and we'd never meet anyone there unless we did it. So we don't.”

In the next two maps, David shows how he might redesign the street pattern if he could (his post is amusingly subtitled “wherein I play God”) and, in the map on the right, how he might improve the two parks in his neighborhood as well, by creating park buffers around the reservoir and the lake. It’s really a great post, with better and more complete explanations than I am giving you here, and I urge you to read it.

In addition to David's article, Ania Wieckowski reports in the Harvard Business Review on research by Dr. Lawrence Frank at the University of British Columbia confirming that connected streets reduce driving. Residents in metro Seattle areas with the most interconnected streets were found to travel 26% fewer vehicle miles than those in areas with many cul-de-sacs. Wieckowski also notes that recent studies show that as a neighborhood’s overall walkability increases, so does the amount of walking and biking—while, per capita, air pollution and body mass index decrease.

Even though some people think disconnected, cul-de-sac street patterns are safer, research shows that belief to be misplaced. If well designed, connected streets can in fact be safer than cul-de-sacs. Reporting on the same research by Frank, Melissa Lafsky adds in The Infrastructurist, "the theory behind cul-de-sacs was that they lessened traffic, since they change the primary function of local streets — rather than offering a way to get anywhere, now they simply provide access to private residences. The problem is that this design inherently encourages car use, even for the shortest trips." Moreover, emergency response times are shorter in connected neighborhoods with more direct routes if your community needs a fire truck, police car, or ambulance, which I hope it doesn’t.

It’s difficult to go back and repair planning mistakes that we made a long time ago, but we can certainly learn from experience and do a better job as we plan newer neighborhoods. And there are things we can do to repair existing places, too, by starting modestly with foot paths, for example. Many thanks to David for reminding us why.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Walkability 101-A, by Roger Lewis

2010-05-10T13:35:33Z

Washington Post columnist and architect Roger Lewis has published a terrific, concise summary of why we should do more to promote walking as a transportation mode and what a community needs to become more walkable. I hope that policy advocates read it.

Although it has been a long time (late 1990s) since I was a transportation lobbyist per se, I still spend a lot of time around transportation advocates, in part because it is a major focus of NRDC’s current legislative agenda, and in part because transportation and land use are so inextricably intertwined. And although most all, like myself, have consumed the location efficiency Kool-Aid, I generally have a very hard time convincing them that community features like street connectivity and streetscapes that promote walkability are things that they should incorporate into their platforms.

Maybe it is because, as I was saying in my last post with respect to city parks, it is because so much of my thinking and work is about sustainability at the neighborhood scale, while so much of theirs is about things like carbon reduction targets and the overall structure of massive state and federal programs. The community scale matters, though, and I wish we could have a community transportation title in the next federal transportation law, to fund programs for complete streets, retrofitting places to be more accessible by connecting blocks and neighborhoods to each other, incorporating green infrastructure into transportation facilities, community planning, and pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure. It could be modeled on the highly successful and popular Transportation Enhancements Program in current law, which already funds a limited menu of community-oriented projects.

Such a program would improve our access to recreation, education, goods and services while reducing our need to drive as often or as far as we do now. And, not coincidentally, it would promote public health, help restore watersheds, and improve our quality of life. Just because the benefits can’t always be measured in carbon molecules doesn’t mean they aren’t important, or that the federal government shouldn’t be a partner with states, regions and municipalities in promoting them.

Back to Roger's column, he believes that, by focusing so intently on transit-oriented development, we may be overlooking what may be the most sustainable form of transportation of all. His column (“Terms, mind-sets must be changed to encourage and enable more walking in cities”) is only 14 paragraphs long, but every one contains a gem. Some samples:

“Street patterns must be easily navigable and latticelike, with blocks that are not too big and intersections that are not too far apart.”
“A thoughtful mix of shade trees and vegetation beautifies streetscapes and makes them ecologically greener.”
“It must be safe to walk, day or night.”
“Because there is safety in numbers, streets lined by eateries with outdoor seating are even safer, not to mention livelier. People will walk along such streets because walking is delightful.”
“Look at cities such as New York, Boston, San Francisco, London, Paris and Barcelona. These cities have beautiful streets that encourage walking. Commuters in these cities happily walk 15 or 20 minutes from a subway or rail station, or from a parking garage, to their home, workplace or school.”

The “neighborhood pattern and design” section of LEED for Neighborhood Development places a strong emphasis on the quality of the streetscape, because of its importance to both walkability and community. We will find out in implementation how much of it we got right, but Roger’s column makes me optimistic.

One more personal note before I sign off for today: Not long ago I had a friendly give-and-take with a colleague whose opening position was that design should not be relevant to policy. To be fair, I think he was implicitly referring more to architectural building style than to the design of a community, and if so he had a point; but I tried to persuade him that, in fact, neighborhood design matters tremendously to sustainability and environmental quality. While I would heartedly agree that we should take care not to be overly prescriptive in policy, my position is that advocates need to know something about design in order to have a better understanding of which policy instruments will be most successful in achieving their goals. I don’t think I convinced him, exactly, but I hope I gave him something to consider.

Roger’s column helps my case, and you can read it here.

Move your cursor over the images for credit information. Next: Walkability 101-B, or why it's good to be connected.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

What will become of Pass Christian? The impact of the oil spill on community

2010-05-03T13:30:53Z

“You’ve probably had your last really good Pass Christian oyster for a while,” Captain Louis Skrmetta of Ship Island Excursions told the (South Mississippi) SunHerald. “We’re looking at financial ruin from this. We’ve pretty much realized that it is over for us for this summer, maybe even next year; who knows.”

Pass Christian, a town of a few thousand on Mississippi’s Gulf coast, east of New Orleans and west of Biloxi, is struggling for survival again. Home to the South’s first yacht club and one of the Gulf Coast’s best historic districts, as well as the hometown of ABC News anchor Robin Roberts, the Pass has seen hard times before, and all too recently. But the waters of the Gulf are its lifeblood, the basis of its seafood industry and its tourism, and all that is now very much in jeopardy because of the giant puddle of sticky ooze that is making its way to the shore, wiping out whatever life is in its path. The town’s official web site describes the community's past challenges in an optimistic light:

“Pass Christian, the birthplace of yachting in the south, has long been known as a resort style village where cool sea breezes mingle with the fragrant scents of Magnolias and Pine trees. Ancient moss-draped Live Oaks cast their shadows along scenic drive and afford rest and relaxation to the passing traveler. Pass Christian was struck by two of the strongest Hurricanes to ever hit the United States, Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We are much like the Ancient Oaks that have witnessed the history of this wonderful sea side village. We are still here, enjoying the view of the Mississippi Sound, the gentle breezes, enjoying a bowl of gumbo with friends, and sharing our history.

“Come visit our village, taste some of the best oysters ever pulled from the sea or buy shrimp fresh from one of the shrimp boats docked in the harbor, see historic homes that rival Charleston and learn of two ladies, Camille and Katrina who blew through leaving high water marks and memories.”

Pass Christian’s Wikipedia entry reports that, of its approximately 8000 homes at the time, “all but 500 were damaged or destroyed” by Katrina in 2005. The hurricane totally destroyed the public library and the nearby city hall. “In early 2007, although rebuilding was underway in much of the city, a large portion of empty, deserted homes and other structures remain.” You know how, when we discuss the impacts of Katrina on New Orleans, we stress that it was not the direct effect of the hurricane that devastated the city but the failure of the levees and subsequent flooding? That’s because the Mississippi coast took the direct hit.

Perhaps it is telling that the web site of the Pass Christian Historical Society has not been updated since 2005. The images accompanying this post speak more eloquently than words can. But the Pass has been on the rebound, however slowly.

This is in part because Pass Christian was a focus of the post-Katrina Mississippi Renewal Forum to which so many new urbanist architects and planners donated their time and expertise. Working around the clock with local officials and other volunteers, the teams crafted foundations for first-class recovery plans for the built environment, stressing traditional forms that respected and built upon the community’s historic character. There is a terrific and highly recommended 42-page summary of recommendations comprising concepts for a new city hall, walkable streets, a pattern of green spaces, respect for nature, transit routes and more. The Renewal Forum’s plans for Pass Christian could, if implemented, do for that community what the justly lauded Sustainable Comprehensive Plan is doing for post-tornado Greensburg, Kansas.

The plans were embraced by the locals, culminating most notably in the adoption of a new, form-based zoning code in 2008 that would enable exactly the kind of rebuilding that the town needed and still needs.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the plans for Pass Christian was a concept for the rebuilding of the town’s severely damaged Walmart with an innovative, pedestrian-friendly design that maintained all of the store’s square footage, needed parking and functionality while allowing it to serve as an anchor of a mixed-use development. These drawings show the damaged store redesigned as a mixed-use walkable block, wrapped with a combination of smaller boutique stores. Note how the presence of trees changes the parking lot, which would be moved to the rear:

There was considerable optimism around this concept, coming precisely at a time when the retailing giant was stressing sustainability and community in its image advertising and big-picture thinking. The prospect of an urbanist Walmart in Pass Christian was hailed in USA Today, and the company agreed to participate in a local planning charrette, touting examples of other locations where it was building more urban facilities.

Talk about wishful thinking. In the end, the company built its usual sprawling SuperCenter, a one-story "landscraper" with a giant parking lot, as unwelcoming to pedestrians and as alien to local character as ever.

The collapse of the talks with Walmart illustrates how fragile even the best concepts for sustainable planning and rebuilding can be, especially in the face of desperation (the city authorities quickly gave an exemption from its new zoning code to accommodate the retailer). Now, as the massive oil spill approaches the coast, all the hard work of thoughtful restoration planning is in peril. How can businesses find money for sustainability when they can’t find customers? How can the town address gaps in its street grid or construct new green squares when the community’s very reasons for existence are in jeopardy? Right now survival comes first, and who can blame them? One can recover from a 1969 hurricane over time, if the next disaster doesn't occur until Katrina 36 years later. But a major economic disaster on top of a recession just five years after a major natural disaster? That's different.

“I’m not so much worried about when [the spill] will get here but instead more about how long it will be here,” commercial fisherman Captain Tom Becker told Bobby Cleveland of the (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger. “I’ve pretty much blown off this season, and now I’m worried about future seasons. There’s a lot of us in the same boat — charter fishermen, commercial fishermen and essentially everybody on the Gulf Coast since the water is so much a part of our economy.”

Writing in the SunHerald, Robin Fitzgerald reports that attorneys representing the owner of a Pass Christian seafood company have filed a class-action lawsuit naming Cameron International Corporation, BP, Transocean, Halliburton Energy Services Inc. and Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. as defendants. The suit represents all Mississippians who live, work in or derive an income from the coastal zone who may sustain loss or damage that would not have occurred "had the defendants exercised the high degree of care imposed on them.”

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Chicago's spiffy new bike station

2010-04-21T13:31:11Z

Thanks to Streetfilms and the National Association of City Transportation Officials, here is a neat video on a great new facility in Chicago's Millennium Park. It provides all sorts of services to bike commuters, other cyclists, and tourists. I really like it:

Thanks to Ben Welle for first posting this on his City Parks Blog.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Has the automobile era jumped the shark?

2010-04-14T13:00:59Z

Has the automobile era jumped the shark? The Walkable and Livable Communities Institute thinks the answer just might be ‘yes.’ In an unsigned Facebook post (authored perhaps by walkability guru Dan Burden?), the Institute says:

“I am ready to declare that America has hit peak VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled). We leveled out in 2001 in per capita growth, then in 2006 in actual growth, and there is now a slight decline overall. Not many of my modeling friends are ready to agree.... but what if we now measure community building success as reduced VMT...? What would be wrong with that? What would be wrong with measuring success with happiness instead?”

Indeed.

And in another Facebook post, the Institute features the University of Connecticut's Norman Garrick:

“On a recent Thursday in February, two disparate incidents in cities on opposite coasts may have signaled the end of the hundred-year ascendancy of automobiles in American life. In Portland, Oregon, the city council voted 5-0 to accept a new bike plan with the ambitious goal of increasing the percentage of people riding bikes from 6% (the highest of any big city in the country) to 25%. Three thousand miles away, on the opposite coast, the New York City Department of Transportation announced that they would make permanent the closing of Broadway to vehicle traffic . . .

“The tentative signs of the end to the dominance of cars in American culture are showing up in a number of ways. For example, the number of vehicles per person in America peaked in 2001. In fact, this decade is the first since the automobile era began in 1900 that the number of vehicles per person was smaller at the end than at the beginning of the decade. Likewise, the number of miles driven in America for each man, woman and child peaked in 2004 – both of these peaks occurred long before we even dreamed of the current economic downturn which seems to have just accelerated the trends.

“So what is going on? Well, for one there is a growing recognition by cities that we can no longer afford to expand or even simply maintain the massive highway infrastructure that they have accumulated over the last 60 years. And in fact, cities are learning that it is way cheaper to provide for bikers, walkers and transit users. The current bike infrastructure in Portland was built up over 15 years for $60 million. This puts in stark relief the fact that $60 million would buy us little more than one mile of freeway.

“Second, cities need to be cool to succeed and it is hard to be cool when you’re completely surrounded by the detritus of car culture – huge roads, parking lots and parking garages. Besides, younger citizens seem to be growing disillusioned with that car culture - a number of recent studies have found that young people in rich countries are buying cars at a much lower rate than their parents did at the same age . . .

“Just as the start of the automobile era created winners and losers, so too will a new post-automobile era. The question is whether or not we in the USA will wake up to this new reality in time to take advantage of the economic opportunities and needs of the new era -such as the need for American manufacturers of streetcars, for instance . . .”

Food for thought. Visit the Walkability and Livability Institute’s web site here, and go here for the full text of Garrick’s article.

Thanks to Lora Lucero and Ken Firestone for pointing me to this story.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Poll finds overwhelming US support for improved public transportation – slideshow summary

2010-04-07T13:36:09Z

Here are just a few tidbits from a new national poll conducted by Transportation for America, Public Opinion Strategies, and Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates:

An overwhelming majority (82%) of Americans believe the country would benefit from improved public transportation.
Most Americans (57% “strongly”) would like to spend less time in their cars.
An overwhelming majority of Americans find current public transportation either not available at all (47%) or not convenient (35%) in their communities.
A strong majority (59%) see public transportation as the best strategy for reducing traffic congestion.

There is much more. Here is an excellent slideshow summary of the poll results:

Read more detail about the poll here, and federal transportation secretary Ray LaHood’s statement about the results here.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

What cities should do to become more sustainable and resilient (and it’s not what they are doing currently)

2010-03-30T13:24:25Z

Warren Karlenzig, founder and president of the consultancy Common Current, believes that many cities’ current sustainability efforts are misplaced. In particular, he asks, “should efforts such as focusing on renewable energy and energy efficiency [to power buildings] deserve the highest priority, when a city such as San Francisco produces 78 percent of its greenhouse gases from transportation and only 17 percent from buildings?” The question appears in one of two recent posts by Karlenzig on sustainable resilience (“Urban Resilience Planning for Dummies”) on the blog Green Flow. It’s a good one.

In the second post (“Urban Resilience for Dummies, Part 2: Failing the Milk Test”), he answers his own question with some advice for environmentalists and conscientious municipal officials:

[Considering the need to plan for resilience in the face of climate change and diminishing resources, - especially fresh water and oil], “what aspect of U.S. metro development stands out as the most ill-advised and risky? Short answer: exurban sprawl.

‘If the ‘Great Recession’ taught us anything, it is that allowing the unrestrained sprawl of energy-inefficient communities and infrastructure is a now-bankrupt economic development strategy and constitutes a recipe for continued disaster on every level.”

I would go even further and ask why we enviros trumpet successes in getting pledges from big-city mayors to cut energy consumption and emissions in their jurisdictions while focusing almost no attention on the suburbs, where the real inefficiencies are, especially for transportation. As David Owen puts it, further shrinking the per-capita energy profile of an already-efficient place such as Manhattan is “like putting skinny people on diets.”

Back to Karlenzig, he points out that a recent British industry study forecasts a major oil crunch by 2014-15 that could potentially mean shorter supplies and much higher prices for gasoline. Because US cities do not use oil for electric power generation, he believes we should be shifting more of our resources to pursuing efficiencies in transportation and other key areas that will be more severely impacted by the high price of oil.

Of course, NRDC believes we should be doing both. Even Karlenzig is quick to concede that his concern about currently neglected issues “doesn't mean that increasing renewable energy and energy efficiency shouldn't be part of every community's planning, projects and budgets.” But he does argue that “at no time has effective planning, land use and public transit been so key to ensuring economic vitality, as well as equity (access to jobs and services with transit), environmental sustainability, climate security and health.”

Karlenzig also believes that we are not doing enough to address water consumption, particularly in the West, and food security, both of which also have close links to energy and carbon emissions.

Taken from his first post, here are Karlenzig’s “general urban resiliency rules of thumb.” Note that first on his list is smart growth per se, and the next two are closely related to a smart and efficient built environment:

Planning: Enable the development of vibrant mixed-use communities and higher-density regional centers, that create a sense of place, allow for transportation choices (other than private automobiles), and protect regional agricultural, watershed, and wildlife habitat lands.
Mobility: Invest in high-quality pedestrian, bicycle, and public transit infrastructure with easy access, shared connectivity and rich information sources, from signage to cell phone alerts.
Built Environment: Design new buildings and associated landscaping--and retrofit existing buildings--for state-of-the-art energy (smart grid applications), and resource efficiency, integrated with mobility options.
Economy: Support businesses in order to provide quality local jobs and to meet the needs of the new economy with renewable energy and other "green" technologies and services. Support local and regional economic decision-makers in adapting to the new world of rising prices, volatile energy supplies and national demographic shifts.
Food: Develop regional organic food production, processing, and metro-area distribution networks.
Resources: Drastically cut use of water, waste and materials, re-using them whenever possible.
Management: Engage government, businesses and citizens together in resilience planning and implementation; track and communicate the successes, failures, and opportunities of this community-wide effort.

Karlenzig writes that he has incorporated these into a chapter in the upcoming Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises, to be published this summer from the University of California Press and Watershed Media.

In Karlenzig’s view (and mine, for what it’s worth), sprawl has done more than send carbon emissions through the roof and caused excessive water use. It has also destroyed valuable farmland, sensitive wildlife habitat, and irreplaceable drinking water systems “at great environmental, economic, and social cost. We can no longer manage and develop our communities with no regard for the limits of natural resources and ecological systems that provide our most basic needs.”

He notes that a few US cities and metro areas are, in fact, doing some of the right things:

Build and re-build denser and smarter
Focus on water use efficiency and conservation
Focus on food
Think in terms of inter-related systems

As I’ve mentioned before, NRDC has chosen sustainable communities as one of its strategic priorities for the next five years. Karlenzig’s advice seems right on target as we further refine that agenda. I hope the larger smart growth community will pay some attention as well; right now we define our cause much too narrowly, aiming at achieving near-term policy objectives. In my view, we must find more of a balance, because the opportunity costs of not pursuing a broader sustainability agenda are simply too high.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Reflections from Eric Britton on how art, walkability, transportation, and shared experience nourish us

2010-03-29T13:38:04Z

Eric Britton, the founder of the New Mobility Agenda and editor of the World Streets online newspaper covering international sustainable transportation recently posted a really nice étude while, fittingly, listening to one of Chopin’s nocturnes. Although we have never met in person, I’ve enjoyed a number of conversations with Eric over the years on nuts-and-bolts transport issues and was very pleased to read something more personal and reflective that suggests why we do this (in addition to, you know, saving the planet and all that).

Eric was kind enough to post one of my pieces on his site some time back (hey, I was even translated into Italian), and I hope he will allow me the indulgence of quoting from his recent article, “Musing: Chopin, sustainable transport and sustainable lives”:

“Chopin reminds us -- you can hear it right here, can't you? -- of the importance of quiet and reflection in our daily lives. Quiet and reflection yes but with plenty of ideas, drive and passion -- not at all a "sit back and wait for it to happen to you" life.

“Here in this spirit are three quiet and to me really quite thrilling moments in the life of sustainable ways of getting around (which of course and exactly is why we are all here and what I want for you and all our children).

On any day in any city in the world, being able to walk quietly and safely on an ordinary street holding the hand of someone you love.

On a visit to Ludwigsburg in southern Germany, on a chilly autumn afternoon as school is just getting out, hearing a distant flutter of almost bird like noises which soon materialize into a gaggle of chaotically peddling schoolchildren, girls and boys, large and small, chatting and laughing as they safely and joyfully make their way home on a reserved bike path. (Shouldn't those be your children?)

Warmly ensconced in a seat on a clean train getting where we wish to go while comfortably reading a big fat book as the wheels turn beneath us.

“Then, and finally for this end of a long week musing, there is the concept of shared space, so important to the composer, writer, painter, playwright and film maker – the vital shared space they seek and create by means of our eyes, ears and minds. No one can listen to Chopin, or Chekov or Molière or or . . . without being drawn into the special space they first create and then draw us in.

“We now know this. This concept of shared space is critical for us as well. It's an indisputable fact. There can be no sustainable development, no sustainable cities, nor real well-being for all without deeper and wiser sharing. We have a lot to learn about this.”

I love it. Go here for Eric’s full article and for a neat YouTube link to Chopin’s Nocturne (Opus 15, No. 1, in F).

A bit about New Mobility:

“Unconstrained by bureaucracy, economic interests or schedules, the New Mobility Agenda was launched in 1988 as a wide open international platform for critical discussion and diverse forms of cross-border collaboration on the challenging, necessarily conflicted topic of "sustainable transportation and social justice". There are no easy answers - but there are answers . . . if that is you are willing to take off the fetters and get to work.”

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Hi, I’m Kaid, proud to be an 'avid cyclist'

2010-03-26T13:37:56Z

Amazingly, there are some well-meaning transportation advocates who would like the phrase “avid cyclist” banned from the lexicon. Their argument goes something like, “this phrase marginalizes all who bicycle and causes people in policy positions to discount cycling as a ‘normal,’ utilitarian activity.”

Huh? The notion was first raised by Michael Druker, whose thoughtful work on “the fundamental attribution error” I cited quite recently in another post. Here’s part of what he says:

“As if it wasn’t enough that we scare people away from cycling with our exclusively car-oriented infrastructure and even a socially constructed fear of cycling, we also do it by marginalizing cycling as something done only by the kind of people who cycle. Make a mental count of how often you’ve seen news reports or commentary refer to “avid cyclists” [note by KB: almost never], and the number of times you might have used this term yourself [lots].

“Banish ‘avid cyclist’ from your vocabulary. Self-marginalizing language like this is why we can’t have nice infrastructure.”

(I’m tempted to go into a rant about how no one uses the subjunctive mood anymore, but I’ll save that for another day.)

Soon others picked up on Druker’s admonition, including Mikael on Copenhagenize.com, Brad Aaron on Streetsblog, and my fellow urbanist and cyberfriend Dave Reid. I saw tweets and retweets.

Self-marginalizing language like this is why we can’t have nice infrastructure. Oh, please. The sentiment is absolutely right – we should take care to avoid marginalizing cyclists, especially those who ride for utility – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn't accurately describe someone as an avid cyclist.

Take me, for instance – I’m taking this week off (So why am I still writing the blog, you may wonder? Good question.) and riding my bike - indoors if necessary when it’s wet outside - nine straight days. I’m striving for 40ish-mile, fast-paced rides every other day, with 20ish-mile slower rides in between, when I also lift weights. I’ve taken seven cycling vacations, five in France (sigh). At my peak fitness which, sadly, is probably a thing of the past, I could hang with cat-4 racers, if not with the likes of Amanda. Am I not an “avid cyclist”? How about Geoff, down the hall from me, who commutes to work by bike in 20-degree weather and takes 60-mile training rides on the weekends? Or my friends Bob and Barbara who, as far as I can tell, ride every day pretty much for the hell of it and have never once taken a vacation without their bikes. Bob even rides a fixie, so he gets maximum challenge out of each mile.

So I say: Don’t try to tell me not to use a perfectly good phrase that accurately describes me and many of my friends. Don’t ban the phrase, just use it properly, and I’ll stay on your side. (And read up on the subjunctive, while you’re at it.)

Thursday was a recovery day, so I took a 20-mile ride that was mostly on trails. The route took me into Georgetown with the Potomac on one side and the C&O Canal on the other, then back through the woods into Bethesda, going right by Bethesda Row, our area’s best suburban retrofit, and through lovely neighborhoods, just about all of them walkable and compatible with smart growth, and then back home.

The longest stretch was on the Capital Crescent Trail (photos at top of post and just above left), slightly downhill into Georgetown and slightly uphill to Bethesda. If I had stayed with the trail instead of veering off to return home on suburban and city streets, I would have come to where the new Purple Line transit link will begin, and run alongside an extension of the trail from Bethesda to Prince George’s County.

Wednesday was more ambitious, taking me over the rolling hills to a route that is popular among avid cyclists (!) for training, mostly flat with few stoplights until you come to the monster climb up to Falls Road (locals know it well), after which I went down to the lovely Great Falls Park (only long enough to turn around and tackle the climb back to Falls Road) and then over the rollers to Potomac Village. On the way back, the monster turned into our area’s sweetest descent, but I did go up another killer (Chain Bridge Road, above right, for the locals) near the end to earn my lunch.

If you’re a rider, avid or not, it’s now officially spring. Get on your bike and go somewhere!

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

A "complete street," circa 1906

2010-03-25T13:32:43Z

As a member of the Complete Streets Coalition, NRDC believes that streets should be for everyone: walkers, cyclists, drivers, transit users, merchants, offices, even nature. Streets comprise the most important public spaces in our communities, and as such they should be designed with ambition and care, to nourish us, not just convey us. And multiple categories of users should be accommodated harmoniously and safely.

The late-20th century notion that streets should be designed primarily for automobile traffic, with everyone else in a submissive role, is an historical anomaly. It hasn't been that way throughout most of civilization. To illustrate that point, check out this amazing video from a century ago, which purports to show the view from the front of a streetcar as it makes its way down Market Street in San Francisco. While the scene is utter chaos (and that is not what I'm advocating), and one can't help but wonder if there hasn't been some tricky video editing, it certainly depicts a shared space. Enjoy:

We can do (a lot) better than that now, thank goodness, but we could also do a lot worse than to seek to recapture some of the fundamental humanity shown in that clip as we work to rebuild and strengthen our streets and our communities.

Thanks to Amanda Eaken for pointing me to this video.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Most important analysis of land use you'll see all year: CNT proves benefits of smart growth nationwide

2010-03-24T15:48:17Z

The Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology today dramatically expanded its “location efficiency” mapping and analysis to 337 metropolitan areas across the country. This impressive resource details the housing and transportation costs associated with specific neighborhoods, along with neighborhood-based, per-capita driving rates and carbon emissions, for each region The work now covers basically every part of the US that is served by a metropolitan planning organization, or 80 percent of our country’s population.

At the same time, the organization released its new report Penny Wise and Pound Fuelish, which may just be the most important document in the field of land use that you’ll read all year. Big-time congratulations to our friends at CNT for making this happen.

(Warning: seriously wonky post coming up. But it's really important, so bear with me.)

As regular readers know, I have long been a fan of CNT’s great work, especially the GIS-based mapping that allows users to see at a glance the environmental and financial impacts of sprawl, and the benefits of smart locations in addressing both. (See, for example, carbon emissions mapping; the effect of location on affordability; in-depth looks at the DC area.) Previously the analysis had been available for 55 metro areas – not bad, but imagine the work that went into the expansion.

CNT’s new report shows that only two in five neighborhoods in American communities are affordable for typical households when their transportation costs are considered along with housing costs.

The Housing + Transportation (H+TSM) Affordability Index covers 161,000 neighborhoods, and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the affordability of each by accounting for combined housing and transportation costs. The more sprawling the neighborhood – the more spread out, the greater its distance from job centers, the less transit availability and fewer conveniences within walking distance – the greater its transportation costs. And in many places the increased transportation expenses wipe out the perceived savings in housing costs per se. (See examples from sample regions in the bar graph above.)

In the organization’s press release, CNT states that, under the traditional definition of housing affordability (30% or less of household income spent on housing), seven out of ten U.S. neighborhoods are considered “affordable” to the typical household. But in almost all metro regions of the country, when the definition of affordability includes both housing and transportation costs—at 45% of income—the number of neighborhoods affordable to households earning the area median income decreases significantly. Nationally, the number of affordable neighborhoods declines to 40 percent, resulting in a net loss of 48,000 neighborhoods with combined housing and transportation costs that stress the average family’s budget.

That's the bad news. The good news, though, is that by encouraging smarter location decisions and smarter development, we can dramatically reduce financial burdens on American families. And, in the process, we can get more vibrant, walkable neighborhoods like these:

As an environmentalist, my favorite part of the CNT work has always been the carbon mapping, which shows that per-household transportation emissions of carbon dioxide rise dramatically as one moves from relatively central locations to more sprawling ones (and, conversely, that emissions fall with smarter, more central and walkable locations). Look, for instance, at the two maps below. On the left is the New York metro area, which has long been available on the CNT site. And as a result of today’s expansion you can now also see the comparable graphic for my home town of Asheville, North Carolina, on the right. In each case (and in just about every other), the farther one goes out into sprawling areas, the more one is likely to be in the red areas of highest carbon footprint, and the closer one gets to the regional center and walkable suburbs, the more one is likely to be in the yellow areas of lower emissions:

At the risk of getting even more wonky, let me offer two graphs below from the Penny Wise report. Note that, on the graph on the left, household transportation costs (red line) increase with increasing commuting distances, offsetting the decrease in housing costs per se (green line), so that combined costs (brown line) rise and then level out. The graph on the right compares neighborhood density with driving rates: generally speaking, the higher the density, the lower the household vehicle miles traveled. I have seen scores of graphs depicting this relationship at various scales, and the shape of the curve is always the same. What I like best about it is that the greatest incremental improvements in performance - the greatest reductions in per-household driving - come at the lower end of the scale, as one moves from large-lot sprawl to moderately sized lots in more compact neighborhoods. We do not need drastic increases in density to achieve a smarter future.

Another chart from the report shows how a sample of compact, well-located neighborhoods save their residents thousands of dollars in annual household expenses. Even more impressively, it shows that, if 50 percent of regional household growth could be fashioned to achieve comparable characteristics to the better locations, the economic savings to their regions over the next 20 years could be in the hundreds of millions and, in some cases, in the trillions of dollars. That is smart growth.

Now that they are so widely available, I’m hoping that neighborhood transportation cost data will soon become part of what potential homebuyers seek routinely in real estate transactions, as is already becoming the case with Walk Score. CNT points out that “it is difficult for consumers and policymakers to estimate the full costs of a location, including the cost of both housing and of transportation. This lack of information can lead families to unknowingly make housing decisions that cause them to live beyond their means as gas prices rise and commutes grow longer. A community’s average transportation costs can range from 12 percent of household income in efficient neighborhoods with walkable streets, access to transit, and a wide variety of stores and services to 32 percent in locations where driving long distances is the only way to reach essential services.”

The data and maps for each region can be sliced and analyzed in about a dozen different and helpful ways at the user's option. And the excellent Penny Wise report concludes with a sophisticated set of policy recommendations, including transportation cost disclosure legislation, realignment of federal funding formulas to reflect true affordability, the creation of incentives for walkable, transit-served communities, and much more. I can go on and on, but you would be better served by going straight to CNT’s site and seeing for yourself. This impressive body of work was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Last updated March 24, 2010, 8:53 pm EDT.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

We will take transit if it meets our needs (IOW, don’t fall for “the fundamental attribution error”)

2010-03-18T13:32:54Z

Here’s an insight from relating human behavioral science to transportation: people who use a particular form of transportation such as driving or taking transit sometimes misunderstand the motives of those that use a different mode. We generally have a basic understanding of why we may take the bus, for example, but we make the assumption that the guy who drives is doing so because, well, he’s the kind of guy who drives.

In fact, it’s not that simple. Except for those of us who are environmental purists – and I am not one – our behavior stems not (or seldom) from something intrinsic to how we feel about driving or transit but, rather, on our particular circumstances. For most of us, how we get somewhere depends on how well each available mode meets our needs. This sounds sort of self-evident, but unfortunately the fallacy – that people in [insert name of community] do not and will not use transit in the future, given evidence that they don’t use it now – still infects too many transportation planning and investment decisions.

Michael Druker, a student in behavioral neuroscience at Waterloo University in Ontario, and writer of the blog Psystenance, calls this “the fundamental attribution error.” In a recent post, he explains:

“In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency for people to over-attribute the behaviour of others to personality or disposition and to neglect substantial contributions of environmental or situational factors. (Actually it isn’t quite fundamental, as collectivist cultures exhibit less of this bias.) People are generally more aware of the situational influence on their own behaviour.

“Thus, the fundamental attribution error in transportation choice: You choose driving over transit because transit serves your needs poorly, but Joe Straphanger takes transit because he’s the kind of person who takes transit. This is the sort of trap we find ourselves in when considering how to fund transportation, be it transit, cycling, walking, or driving.

“Let’s say you live in a suburban subdivision. You can afford to drive, and it’s the only way you can quickly and easily get to your suburban office and to the store, and pick up your child from daycare. How do you interpret the decision of other people to take transit? Is it something about the quality of transit where they are? More likely you are going to attribute it to something about those people themselves — they’re poor, or they’re students, or they’re some kind of environmentalists. It’s difficult for people to realize the effect of the situation, e.g., one with frequent transit service to many destinations along a straight street that is easy to walk to. (I’d also point out that students, the poor, and even environmentalists do drive as well.)

“Why do Europeans walk more, cycle more, and take transit more? Surely it is something about their culture? But this is an excessively dispositional attribution. I won’t deny that culture plays some role in transit use, especially in the decisions that lead to the creation of transportation infrastructure. But that infrastructure itself and the services provided on it are a strong influence on the transportation choices people make. The European infrastructure situation facilitates those other modes of travel much more so than does typical North American transportation infrastructure.

“Where our infrastructure gets closer to the European model, so does the transportation mode choice, and conversely, where Europe is more like the North American model, Europeans turn out to drive more.”

Read Druker’s entire post here. Transportation planner and writer Jarrett Walker called it “the most important blog post you’ll read this year.” On his blog Human Transit, Walker adds:

“My own work is built on the belief that people making routine trips will make reasonable choices based on their situation and options, subject to the limits of their information. Everybody knows that they do this, but they need to be reminded that everyone else does too . . .

“When we say that Americans drive because they're a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn't a rational one, in light of each person's situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation . . .

“But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it. If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don't need the ‘car culture’ to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people's situations.

“Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they're implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving. That's wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn't have to.”

Sounds right to me. If we want more people to use environmentally preferable ways of getting around, we need to build the kinds of communities and provide the kinds of convenient and comfortable alternatives that make the preferable choices also the rational ones.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Rave on, Jim Kunstler

2010-03-10T13:40:21Z

James Howard Kunstler is not a man given to understatement. He makes Al Gore seem subtle. Heck, he almost makes Al Sharpton seem subtle, but that’s a closer call.

No, Kunstler is more the kind of guy who wants you to feel a little uncomfortable, a little agitated. And he’s been on a mission for at least two decades now to wake us up to the horrors we have created with suburban sprawl, making America “a nation of places not worth caring about.” He wants to motivate us to do something about it.

But he speaks a lot of truth, and he is wildly entertaining, which is why he is such a popular speaker on the urbanist circuit. The TED video below (more on TED in a bit) is from a 2004 lecture in Monterey and shows him in his full glory. The lighting in the video (unintentionally, I’m sure) makes him look particularly menacing; it’s the kind of visual portrayal you might see in a negative political ad trying to show an opponent unfavorably. But it’s a great talk.

As his TED bio says, “his confrontational approach and propensity for doomsday scenarios make Kunstler a lightning rod for controversy and critics. But his magnificent rants are underscored with logic and his books are widely read, particularly by architectural critics and urban planners.” If your time is limited, watch at least a little of it anyway. Enjoy:

About TED:

“TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.” More than 500 TED Talks are on the web.

(Inspiration for today's title here. Likely inspiration for the inspiration here.)

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Zoning reform, libertarianism, and the nature of community

2010-02-26T13:39:45Z

The city planners of Anchorage, Alaska, are attempting to bring that city’s land-use regulations into the 21st century. In particular, they are proposing a variation on form-based zoning that would encourage mixed uses, orientation of development to the street, and pedestrian- and people-friendly building design. This has been a massive undertaking, in the works for the better part of a decade. And it is running into opposition.

Note: Today’s post is co-authored with my good friend Lee Epstein, a seasoned and very policy-savvy environmental lawyer and land-use planner.

Longtime Anchorage planning director Tom Nelson articulated the rationale in 2006 in the Alaska Business Monthly:

“Like most cities, Anchorage's land-use regulations have encouraged single-use districts, and reliance on a single mode of transportation to connect them--the automobile. This has led to a more sprawling land-use pattern and greater consumption of energy resources than would otherwise be the case . . . as one looks ahead, there is a need to create other viable, attractive and less energy-consumptive choices for transportation--be it walking, biking or transit--as well as to shorten distances to destinations . . .

“Mixed-use developments, winter-city design, energy-conserving buildings and transportation systems, creation of public spaces and retention of important open spaces are all increasing in usage. These trends in land development coincide with many of the solutions proposed in response to the changing economic circumstances and community aspirations in Anchorage. As developers, residents and local officials see the benefits of these attributes, Anchorage's land-use code needs to change in order to help accommodate and facilitate them.”

Writing last week in the Anchorage Daily News about changes the new code would bring to the commercial sector of Anchorage development, Rosemary Shinohara reports that “under the proposed new rules, a local builder no longer could put a windowless, blank side of a commercial building next to the street” but, instead, would be required to choose from a menu of options within each of three major design categories:

Windows, entrances and the building's orientation in reference to the sidewalk and street. Opening to the street rather than just to offstreet parking lots helps walkability, visual appeal, and a sense of community.
Building design. Shinohara: "Examples of choices are setting an upper story back from the lower stories; building a plaza; adding a second color, texture or material to the front of the building; or creating recesses or projections so the facade is not just a flat surface."
Northern climate considerations. The code's menu includes entrances protected from the weather, sheltered or ice-free walkways, sunlit atriums, and balconies or marquees that project out over a sidewalk or entrance, providing cover.

Seems sensible, no? But Shinohara also writes that “a group called the Building Owners and Managers Association has started a petition drive to get the city to kill the massive, seven-year-long, 14-chapter modernization of local zoning laws, of which commercial design standards are part. They want the city to stay with existing code,” which as far as we can tell has pretty much allowed commercial developers to do whatever they want. This is, after all, a notoriously independent part of the country that doesn’t warm to government involvement very easily (except, um, for those timber, oil, and gas subsidies, but that’s another matter).

The proposed code is scheduled to come before the city’s decision-making Assembly for adoption this spring.

Anchorage’s circumstances raise some important issues about how best to improve urban landscapes and urban livability – sometimes in the face of libertarian attitudes about government. More expansively, how best can citizens and their governments, organized by the consent of the governed into a constitutional system aimed at enforcing the responsibilities of citizenship toward the common good, better attain those ends? That’s a mouthful, but the query is aimed at those who will always say, “Not me, buddy. I know what’s best for me. And unless you’re calling to rescue me from my burning building, stay out of my hair, OK?” Such a response is too often engendered whenever new local requirements are proposed, whether necessary to clean up a community’s rivers and streams, keep children out of danger or, heaven forbid, keep truly ugly buildings from proliferating like dandelions in the spring.

But let’s face it: Blank walls running along a city street are ugly, and they’re even dangerous. They allow for no “eyes on the street,” crucial (by all professional law enforcement accounts) for keeping streets safe. And they’re the architectural equivalent of presenting your backside to the rest of the world – all the time. Lovely.

But how do you “legislate” them away? How can a local government best achieve the legitimate aims of enhancing public safety and securing for the benefit of all citizens a more functional, efficient and, yes, attractive community? After all, you can’t pass a law that requires “good taste,” whatever that is. (At least that’s the apparent complaint of some of our architect friends, who fear some draconian curb on their creativity. C’mon. Apart from the fact that form-based codes are themselves the work of gifted architects, maybe it’s that insistence on sculptural freedom and “creative” architecture that sometimes gets us into this fix in the first place. But don’t get us started.)

Regardless of what some might think, most of us do live in communities. And the constitution says that communities have the right – and the responsibility – to provide for the public good, and the general health, safety and welfare of all their citizens. Sometimes that is going to mean that, after a lot of open consideration, an ordinance will be passed that requires citizens to pony up to the mutual responsibilities bar: ‘We [insert name of community] pledge to keep you safe and keep our community livable and economically energetic, while you [insert name of citizen and business alike] pledge to uphold certain standards of behavior and action.’

That’s how we see attempts such as those that Anchorage is making, or similar ones elsewhere, to try to eploy reasonable new zoning standards to improve a city’s image and look, its functionality, walkability, and environmental quality. We elect representatives to make these decisions, and if the process is an honest and open one, we should honor our subsequent responsibilities as citizens.

With respect to Anchorage’s proposed new zoning, no, good taste cannot be legislated. But certain minimum standards and principles can be articulated that express qualitatively or quantitatively how a community wishes to present its face to the world – standards relative to proportionality, bulk and height, scale, location on a street, pedestrian functionality and yes, even how the street-level façade should function. A city might achieve this with a variety or menu of choices, or provide some incentives and disincentives to property owners and developers. (For an interesting presentation showing the issues Anchorage is trying to address, and some modest improvements the new code would encourage, go here. Most of the images in this post are from that presentation.)

The bottom line is that local communities can and should take on, through mechanisms like zoning, how they look, how they function, or how green they become – because the alternative is to succumb to the lowest common denominator, and (as Ian McHarg once said about failing to achieve environmental quality through good planning and zoning) to let the devil take the hindmost.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.