Liberal Landscape

Tashkent

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Christopher Winters

I was in Tashkent (Toshkent in Uzbek) for a few days in late October. I found it a rather uncomfortable place. Problems started at the airport, where it was necessary to negotiate an enormous undisciplined crowd to inch through passport control—and then wait an hour for baggage, and finally face another crowd at customs. Even at Incheon, where my trip to and from Tashkent started and ended, Uzbekis found it impossible to queue up. The Korean security guards were made so uneasy by massive Uzbeki line-cutting that they disappeared. It is tempting to speculate that a life lived in an exceptionally authoritarian and kleptocratic state leads to a tendency to disobey rules and ignore other peoples’ needs whenever the chance arises, but that would surely be simplistic.

My only previous trip to Tashkent had been in the fall of 1970. Neither of my trips lasted long enough to make me quite sure of my judgments, but it’s clear that quite a lot has changed since 1970.

Some of the changes are pretty trivial. Statues of Uzbek heroes have replaced statues of Soviet heroes. The former Revolution Square, which once held (in turn) statues of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx, has been renamed Amir Timur Square, and now features a statue of Amir Timur (Tamerlane), who is remembered more fondly in Uzbekistan than in the many lands to which his armies laid waste.¹

Statue of Amir Timur in Amir Timur Square.

There are also a fair number of new highways and overpasses. Rising levels of car ownership, as in most places, have made things harder for pedestrians.

Sebzor ko’chasi, a major north-south highway, which cuts right across central Tashkent.

Much of Tashkent used to be made up of traditional, one-story, Central Asian buildings on irregular streets. Many of these buildings were badly damaged in a major earthquake in 1966, and it’s likely that the government was rather embarrassed by them anyway. While some such neighborhoods away from the center have been reconstructed, many traditional inner-city neighborhoods have just been levelled. There’s now a huge amount of unbuilt-on land, bordered by green metal fences.

Green fence, hiding remnants of a traditional neighborhood in central Tashkent that has been largely obliterated.

In parts of the central city, however, urban planning has created a completely new kind of landscape with government buildings and parkland connected by wide streets, a few of which are closed to traffic part-time and used for recreation and informal markets.²

Open-air art market in central Tashkent.

The most appealing parts of Tashkent for me were the remaining Soviet-era residential neighborhoods. Soviet housing doesn’t enjoy a very positive reputation, and for good reasons. It was not built to last, and in most places including Tashkent it hasn’t been maintained very well. Furthermore, the towers-in-a-park designs are frowned on in urbanist circles, although of course in Soviet times the spaces between buildings were set up for pedestrians, not cars. Nonetheless, on a beautiful fall day in Central Asia, the Soviet-era neighborhoods, with their generous tree cover, looked pretty good to me

Soviet-era neighborhood, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Soviet-era neighborhood, practically hidden under a canopy of trees. The condition of the sidewalk is typical.

except where they’ve been redesigned to allow parking.

Former open space devoted to parking in a commercial center in a Soviet-era neighborhood.

Then there’s Tashkent’s subway, which is impressively decorated in the ponderous Soviet style. If Tashkent had more tourists, the subway would be a major tourist attraction—except for two things. First, photographs are strictly forbidden. Second, to enter the stations one must not only subject oneself to a thorough bag search but also show identification and undergo an interrogation. When the security guards discovered that I could communicate with them in Russian, they didn’t want to let me go. Our conversation was of the standard banal sort that everyone travelling in untouristed areas gets used to. I was asked not only “Where are you going?” and “How long will you be in Uzbekistan?” but also “Are your married?” and “How much money do you make?” This might have seemed like simple friendly banter had the questions not been asked by well-armed, uncosmopolitan, and somewhat bored young men whose job was to intercept terrorists. I pretended not to know a word of Russian on my second and third subway trips, but I was still not made to feel very comfortable. Perhaps the need to undergo an interrogation partly explains the fact that the subway appears to have relatively few passengers.³ The emptying out of parts of the central city surely hasn’t encouraged Metro use either. The Metro does take you to quite a few places in Tashkent, however.

Map, Metro and streets, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Map showing the Tashkent Metro with the street network in the background. GIS data modified from the BBBike.org version of OpenStreetMap. This data set clearly shows only a small proportion of Tashkent’s parkland, but I don’t have the resources to correct it.

Tashkent seemed to me too visibly authoritarian a place to be very appealing, but visiting it was enormously satisfying.

Posted in Urban, Transportation | Tagged Tashkent | Leave a comment

The Songdo International Business District: report from the ground

Posted on November 19, 2016 by Christopher Winters

Many of the world’s major urban building efforts have occurred as part of “megaprojects.” It would be very difficult to define “megaproject” in a way that everyone would agree to, but it’s probably fair to say that urban megaprojects are conglomerations of large buildings built within a few years of each other on the basis of a good deal of central planning.⁴ The Hudson Yards project in New York is one example. Canary Wharf in London and La Défense in Paris are earlier instances. Many, maybe most, of the world’s biggest urban megaprojects have been built in the cities of the Persian Gulf and China, which of course have been growing quickly and doing so with government always a major actor. Examples of such megaprojects are Jumeirah Lake Towers in Dubai and the Lujiazui area in Pudong, Shanghai.

The developers of most 21st-century megaprojects have felt that they had to advertise that their projects are ecologically sound and easy to access and move around in by transit and on foot. There is of course a serious difficulty here, since it’s not simple in enormously large-scale projects to create the kind of small-scale detail that is typical of areas that most pedestrians seem to find pleasant. Even when megaprojects have good rail transit access, setting up pedestrian-friendly connections between stations and destinations has been a huge challenge. The vast concrete platform at La Défense has sometimes been held up as a perfect example of what not to do (although it’s full of people at most hours of the day and evening). The difficult-to-cross roads in Lujiazui present another issue. No one would argue that Lujiazui is very pedestrian-friendly (although it’s got plenty of pedestrians anyway, and the pedestrian bridge over an important intersection has become a popular gathering place).

I visited the Songdo International Business District last week. Songdo (as most people call it, at least in English) is a megaproject in Incheon, South Korea. One doesn’t think of South Korea as having quite such a dynamic economy as, say, China or the Persian Gulf countries, but, in fact, South Korea been growing quite steadily for several decades. Its GNP per capita on a PPP basis is now only a little below Japan’s (and much higher than China’s), and the Seoul metropolitan region (which includes Incheon) now has a population by some measures of something like 24,000,000. The Seoul area features several of what can loosely be called megaprojects, of which Songdo is surely the best known. It has sometimes been billed the largest privately developed real estate project in the world.

Songdo has been built on filled land in the years since 2009. Its peculiar location is a function of its proximity to Incheon International Airport, which opened in 2001. Access is via the 18-or-so-km-long Incheon Bridge.

Map, Songdo International Business Center, Incheon, South Korea

Map of Songdo International Business Center. Data, mostly derived from OpenStreetMap, may not be quite up to date, especially the building footprints. The heavy red line shows the route of the Incheon subway line 1. Incheon Bridge is on the left.

You can also get to Songdo via the Incheon subway line 1, completed in 2009.

Entrance to Campus Town station of Incheon subway line 1. There are many additional photos (and a report on the line) at the Urbanrail.net Website.

This line connects to the A’rex Line to the Airport, as well as to several Seoul subway lines. Like most other Seoul-area subway lines, its stations are close together, and it can take quite a while to get where one is going. A subway trip to the Airport (according to the Google Map) would likely require at least an hour and a half (the route is circuitous). It would take even longer to get to central Seoul, a distance of more than 40 kilometers, 47 stations away. Buses are faster to many destinations. The bus ride across Incheon Bridge to the Airport, for example, requires approximately 30 minutes. Perhaps the inefficiency of subway travel to and from Songdo explains that fact that the stations had only a handful of passengers when I visited.

Songdo was built self-consciously as an international city. The hope was to attract foreign companies and foreign residents. Songdo’s design reflects this goal. There is very little in Songdo that’s particularly Korean (except for a tiny Disneyfied “Korean village” in a park). Some promotional literature even claims Songdo was designed to look like Manhattan. In fact, except for the height of some of the buildings, it doesn’t resemble Manhattan at all. Most structures are of the tower-in-a-park type. They do not (as buildings in Manhattan do) fill nearly all their lots and touch their neighbors. The plan (although not the architecture) of Songdo could practically have come off an “international-style” architect’s drafting board in the 1930s.⁵

Buildings fall into the usual types. Songdo includes several large corporate and governmental skyscrapers of which the largest is the Northeast Asia Trade Tower;

NEATT (the Northeast Asia Trade Tower) from Central Park.

a great many high-rise residential buildings;

Songdo apartment buildings, including hill in Central Park.

Apartment buildings north of Central Park.

and numerous educational institutions, including the University of Incheon and the Korean outposts of at least four foreign universities. It also includes a commercial district, a convention center, several museums, a substantial park, called Central Park in English, and some smaller parks. There are a number of pleasant design features. The parks, for example, include some hills (see above); this isn’t really expected on filled land. Also, the groupings of skyscrapers can create some aesthetically pleasing geometric patterns. As is often the case, these are perhaps most striking from the air or from several kilometers outside Songdo itself.

There is a huge amount of promotional literature about Songdo, mostly extolling its ecological and technological virtues. Click here for the official Website and here, here and here for some additional descriptions from corporate contributors. One of Songdo’s chief claims to fame is that its major buildings are almost all LEED-certified. Songdo also self-identifies as a “smart city”: residents all have wifi access; and traffic and sewage collection among other things are controlled by computer.⁶ Of course, as admirable as this is, it isn’t something that’s visible to the naked eye. There has also been some academic (or quasi-academic) literature in Songdo, but the pieces I’ve read appear to be based more on the promotional literature than on fieldwork.⁷ Songdo is an ambitious place, as one can perhaps gather from this poster that I saw on a construction site.

Songdo sign showing local buildings and other important structures.

A Songdo poster showing NEATT and the G-Tower (which mostly houses government offices) among some of the world’s other important buildings.

When I visited (on a warm but rather gray weekday last month) I was chiefly struck (as other visitors have been) by how empty the place was. There are not many pedestrians on the self-consciously built pedestrian paths, some of which run rather pleasantly through forest strips along major roads. In a country less law-abiding than South Korea, these empty paths might have set off alarm bells; there are no “eyes on the street” (except maybe CCTV cameras).

This empty footpath is not far from a busy arterial.

There is also a very nice network of bicycle paths, but I saw hardly any cyclists. The dense commercial district also seemed rather deserted.

Convensia Street, a major northeast-southwest artery.

There is, however, a fair amount of traffic on the exceptionally wide roads, theoretically facilitated by the fact that, as in other Asian cities, it takes a very long time for traffic lights to change.

A street crossing a couple of blocks from the city center. Red paint marks bicycle lanes.

A great deal of parking is available, and only some of it is underground.

University of Incheon campus. Note parking at left.

It needs to be said that Songdo isn’t “finished.” There are many un-built-on lots, and numerous buildings are still under construction.

New apartment towers under construction in Songdo.

Most of the new buildings are residential structures (despite Songdo’s formal name, apartments have attracted more interest than offices). Perhaps when all the building is completed Songdo will have a bit more bustle. There is also of course the possibility that it will just end up with more cars, which the wide roads will probably be able to handle. I rather suspect that, despite the emphasis on sustainability in the promotional literature and the inclusion of facilities for pedestrians and cyclists, Songdo was chiefly designed to be moved around in by automobile. If that’s true, Songdo would of course be just like most of the world’s other new urban constructions of the last several decades, and it would be fair to accuse its promotional literature of being less than honest.

I have no idea whether market conditions in South Korea would have allowed the creation of a denser, more truly pedestrian-oriented Songdo.⁸ The lack of bustle at the moment can’t in any case be blamed straightforwardly on any Korean aversion to crowds. Central Seoul and several of its neighborhoods (most famously Itaewon and Gangnam) are pleasantly crowded places. Songdo isn’t. Do its residents and workers perhaps see the place’s emptiness as a sign of progress? The fact that Songdo’s official Website shows more people in some photos than I saw while walking around for a whole day suggests that this isn’t really the case, that is, that Koreans have the same positive feelings about busy urban neighborhoods that many Westerners have come to have in recent years, but I’ll admit that I don’t have a deep enough feeling for Korean culture to be sure. As I walked around Songdo, I kept thinking of the shots of an empty EUR in the famous last minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse. To someone who prefers to encounter a few people not enclosed in cars while walking around cities, it’s somewhat depressing that contemporary planning is still producing such empty places even though it knows better.

Posted in Urban, Transportation, Pedestrian infrastructure | Tagged Incheon | Leave a comment

Walkable urbanism without many walkers

Posted on November 19, 2016 by Christopher Winters

I was recently in Atlanta for the first time since the late 1980s. I had been struck then at how un-urban the place was, despite the impressive new subway. There were few pedestrians downtown, and, on a walk up Peachtree Street to Midtown—Atlanta’s “second downtown,’’ roughly two miles (3.2 km) north—I had the distinct feeling that I was in a location where I wasn’t supposed to be on foot. There were huge amounts of traffic, but, in a large dead zone north of downtown, just about no one else was walking, with the exception of (for want of a better term) a few “street people.”

Since the late 1980s, Atlanta’s hosted an Olympics; it’s grown enormously; and its government has made a real effort to encourage the construction of apartment buildings in its central core. Its tourist maps now color Peachtree Street north of downtown orange-pink, implying that the street’s a continuation of downtown.

A small excerpt from a tourist map that I picked up at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in October 2016. The closest thing to a title is: Atlanta www.atlanta.net.

And, indeed, it now feels all right to walk there, at least by day. Many new apartment buildings have been built north of downtown, and there’s been some renovation of older buildings as well.

Peachtree Street NE, Midtown, Atlanta. Near-empty sidewalks.

But there are still only a few pedestrians, walking along next to rivers of traffic. Even in central Midtown, except at lunch hour, the sidewalks are pretty empty. I didn’t have the feeling that I was violating local mores in walking there, but, on any given block at any given moment, there were probably twenty times as many cars as pedestrians.

Note that most of Midtown gets a “very walkable” walk score on the Walk Score Website, and a few small areas are even “walker’s paradises” (1065 Peachtree Street NE, for example). Midtown even boasts about its walkability (see the sign).

Atlanta, Midtown, sign advertising walkability over an empty sidewalk.

“Wonderful walkable Midtown”–but where are the walkers?

The problem with this boast is that there aren’t very many pedestrians. This seems very odd to me.

I had a similar feeling earlier this month on my first trip to Oak Park in at least a decade.

Oak Park is often (along with Evanston) classed as one of Chicago’s most “urban” suburbs. Its association with Frank Lloyd Wright and other well-known architects certainly puts it into Chicago’s intellectual orbit. And its population can without doubt be described as urbane and mildly left-leaning with a long history of doing the right thing—at least in theory–when it comes to integration. Physically, Oak Park has many urban characteristics as well. It has good CTA and Metra service, and its central residential areas consist mostly of apartment buildings.⁹ Oak Park gets a walk score of 74 (just behind Chicago’s 76), and central Oak Park is classified as a “walker’s paradise” with walk scores of around 90.

Oak Park, however, has a somewhat tortured history when it comes to accommodating pedestrians. In 1974 (like several other smaller U.S. cities in the same era) it turned its main street, Lake Street, into a pedestrian mall. This change apparently did little to attract large numbers of customers downtown, and the city undid the pedestrianization of Lake Street in 1988.

On my visit, I was struck by the near absence of pedestrians in downtown Oak Park. I did see one camera-toting tourist, very likely on his way to look at Wright’s Unity Temple. I also saw a couple of (again, I don’t know what phrase to use) street people. But, in half an hour of walking on Lake Street and Oak Park and Harlem Avenues, I saw no one else, except for a couple of people getting into or out of cars—who don’t count! The old downtown looked more or less prosperous. The 1920s buildings are mostly renovated. There aren’t many empty storefronts. I was impressed by the fact that most of the stores are local. They include a couple of bookstores, a movie theatre, numerous restaurants, and several specialized boutiques. But they sure don’t seem to have many walk-in customers.

Lake Street, Oak Park.

There may be some technical reasons for this. The sidewalks are quite narrow. And there’s a lot of traffic, particularly on major streets like Lake Street and Harlem Avenue. Also, it turned out to be hard to cross some streets, since it took forever for lights to change, partly because drivers making turns get special signals and partly because the signal sequence takes a couple of minutes. Also, annoyingly, pedestrians are forced to press a button to get permission to cross. Suburban traffic engineers are clearly in charge of Oak Park’s traffic flow.

It took a while to realize that in most ways the traditional-looking downtown is just a façade. As in most American suburbs that have preserved some of their older buildings, there are acres of parking behind the traditional storefronts. Presumably, many (maybe most) customers come in through what were once back doors.

Parking in mid-block, Oak Park.

But I was still a bit mystified by the absence of pedestrians in the core of downtown. You’d think that the train stations, the nearby apartment buildings, and the charming small shops would generate a few.

The afternoon when I first went to Oak Park was a muggy weekday. So I went back with a camera a couple of days later, when the weather was cooler, and it was closer to rush hour. There were a few more pedestrians (more than in midtown Atlanta), but I had to wait ten minutes to take a picture that had a lot of people in it.

Rare moment of crowdedness, Lake Street, Oak Park.

A minute later, the sidewalk was empty again. Oak Park’s downtown—and Atlanta’s Midtown—definitely feel like places where the automobile comes first.

Again, as I argued in an earlier post, real walkability (as opposed to walk scores) appears to have something to do with the pedestrian-vehicle ratio. Where there are more cars than walkers, walkers do not feel very confident that they’re in a place where they belong, and they vanish. I think this may be factor in both Atlanta and Oak Park.

This is of course a phenomenon that should surprise no one. Most American places are inhabited chiefly by people who drive everywhere. This seems to be true even in a city like Oak Park that grew up as a fairly dense railroad suburb and whose downtown must once have been filled with pedestrians, and that theoretically encourages them. It’s even won an award from the National Complete Streets Coalition and is allowing new high-rise housing in and near downtown. Atlanta has supported the “complete streets” idea too. The catch is that this has not really succeeded in changing things very much. “Walkability” has to some degree become a real estate boast that, like many other real estate boasts, has only a loose relationship to reality. This is depressing. But it’s just the way it is.

Of course, it’s no doubt a sign of real progress that “walkability” has become something to boast about. I can’t imagine that that would have been true twenty or thirty years ago.

Posted in Urban, Transportation | Tagged Atlanta, Oak Park | 1 Comment

Moscow’s new circumferential rail line

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Christopher Winters

There are only a tiny number of fully developed circumferential metro lines in the world, that is, circular or ring lines that intersect with several radial lines and that therefore enormously increase potential interconnections. Curiously, many of these lines were not really planned as circumferential metro lines at all. The earliest example is the Circle Line in London, which runs on a right of way that mostly dates to the 1860s and 1870s. The “Inner Circle” was a byproduct of the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways’ need to bypass the central part of the City of London and was not bisected by radial “tube” lines until the 1890s. Tokyo’s Yamanote line, probably the busiest urban circumferential line in the world, has in some ways a similar history. It’s a late 19th-/early 20th-century railroad line that existed before Tokyo had any subway lines. Beijing’s first Ring Line, completed in 1987, was also built before there were a substantial number of radial lines to connect with. It was essentially constructed in conjunction with the removal of the old city wall.

Moscow’s Ring Line was probably the first circumferential line planned as such. It was built between 1950 and 1954 when Moscow had three radial lines crossing in its center. The Ring Line, running very approximately 3 km from the city center, not only increased connections but also provided access to most of the mainline railway terminals. Moscow’s original Ring Line was in some sense a model for later planned ring lines: the circular part of Seoul’s Line 2; Shanghai’s Line 4; Beijing’s second Ring Line (Line 10); the Oedo Line in Tokyo (run as a closed U rather than a circle); the not-yet-quite-complete Circle Line in Singapore; Taipei’s planned Circle Line; and the projected Grand Paris Express line. All of these were built—or are planned to be built—to complement a substantial number of radial lines.

Moscow has just acquired its second circumferential line, the 54-km-long Moscow Central Ring Line (Московское центральное кольцо, which can also be translated Moscow Central Circle Line), which runs at an average distance of approximately 8 km from the city center.

Map, Central Ring Line and older Metro lines, Moscow, Russia

Map of the Central Ring Line, showing its relationship to the older, mostly radial Metro lines. (Two of the short non-radial lines are isolated fragments of Moscow’s planned third circumferential line). Raw GIS data (which I’ve had to modify) are from OpenStreetMap. Map compiled with ArcGIS.

The Central Ring Line opened on September 10, and I rode it last week. Like Tokyo’s Yamanote line, it was originally built as a railroad line. The tracks and right of way, controlled by Russian Railways, had been used only for freight for nearly 100 years. A decision was made a few years ago to reuse the right of way for a second circumferential passenger line. The tracks were completely rebuilt, and the line was electrified. The trains are still run by Russian Railways, but the line is labeled Line 14 of the Metro, and a Metro ticket provides access. The stations on the line were self-consciously set up to be as close to Metro stations as possible, although there are some gaps of as much as 750 meters, and there are as yet hardly any underground passages between the older Metro lines and the Central Ring Line.¹⁰ Moscow uses electronic tickets only, so free transfers present no administrative difficulties, but long outdoor walks in January are probably not much fun.

moscow-mtsk-line-crossing-moscow-river-w-moscow-city

Central Ring Line train crossing the Moscow River. Note Moskva-Siti in the background.

The trains are state-of-the-art. The Lastochka rolling stock is modern. There is free wifi. Stations have countdown clocks. Verbal and visual announcements are made in Russian and English. Bicycles may be brought on board. The trains even have toilets. The author of a newspaper story in Novaia gazeta said that riding the trains made her feel that she was in Europe.¹¹

moscow-bicycles-in-delavoi-tsentr-station

Delavoĭ t͡sentr station. Note the bicycles.

Trains do not run as often as on the traditional Metro lines, where headways of 90 or 95 seconds are common. They only operate every six to twelve minutes depending on the time of day. Trains for the moment are much shorter than the stations. Most of the trains I took were pretty full, but there were only a few standees. This suggests that current service levels approximately meet needs. Of course, a twelve minute wait for a train can play havoc with a commute.

Inside a train. Note the Roman-alphabet sign (it alternates with a Cyrillic sign).

The logic underlying the building of the line is the same logic underlying the building of other circumferential lines. The connectivity of the Metro system has been increased enormously. Movement from one suburban area to another no longer requires travel to the center. The line was also built to reduce crowding on central city lines and especially the original Ring Line. The Moscow Metro, despite the growth of automobile use in the city, is still patronized as heavily as it’s ever been. There are approximately 6,000,000 passengers a day, and trains can be very crowded. Moscow’s population, unlike that of most European cities, has been growing quickly, so some kind of relief has been felt to be essential.

The Moscow Central Ring Line has another function. It helps redress a fundamental imbalance in Moscow’s geography. The city’s center has been booming.¹² Relatively wealthy people have increasingly been choosing to live there, and there are elaborate and growing facilities for tourists. The center is full of restored (or reconstructed!) historical buildings, shiny new hotels, restaurants, and high-end shops. Much of the central city has been rearranged so that in many ways it’s become more like a Western European city. There are heavily-used pedestrianized streets, for example, and even some bicycle paths (although, except for those in parks, these seem to be very lightly used). The Central Ring Line, especially in its eastern half, directly serves some of Moscow’s rather grubby inner suburbs. A newspaper story even called it “a gift from the powerful to the poor.”¹³ If it was a gift, it was something of a Trojan horse. The industrial areas through which much of the Line passes are overdue for redevelopment, and one of the goals of the establishment of the Central Ring Line was to encourage this process. One old industrial (and mining!) area next to the line has already become “Moskva-Siti” (more formally the Moscow International Business Center), the location of six of Europe’s seven tallest buildings (see photo above).

I had last been in Moscow in 2000, and it was clear then that the rise of automobile ownership had had an unusually harsh effect on the quality of life for non-automobile users. Car drivers seemed never to give pedestrians the right-of-way and paid little attention to red lights, and they felt able to park anywhere.

Things have changed. Automobile drivers are now far more likely to stop at crosswalks for pedestrians than drivers in most of the United States. Red lights are usually obeyed. Parking rules are often respected. It’s not that Moscow has become a paradise for pedestrians. It can be a very long wait for red lights to change. Nothing has been done about Soviet planning’s insistence that pedestrians cross major streets through tunnels—which never have escalator access. And the hard-to-avoid, enormously wide prospekty that were bulldozed through the city during Soviet times now carry mind-bogglingly large amounts of noisy, polluting traffic and are very peculiar places for casual walking. But Moscow really isn’t a bad place for pedestrians at all, and there are a lot of them. You will have company in even the most pedestrian-unfriendly places. Some Muscovites seem to be in the habit of walking nearly as much as, say, some New Yorkers.

A factor here is that rail rapid transit—an essential complement to comfortable pedestrian life in most big cities—is once again being heavily supported by the government. The Metro remains one of the wonders of the world. Even if ponderous Soviet aesthetics are not your thing, a few of the stations in the central city would seem extraordinary to anyone. Trains run as frequently as they do anywhere. And the Metro is growing more than any other European rail transit system. The Central Ring Line is not the only new route. Several additional new line segments have opened recently, and more are on the way. The largest-scale component of this will be the Third Interchange Contour (Третий пересадочный контур in Russian), a third circumferential line, overlapping (and somewhat to the south of) the Central Ring Line and more fully integrated with existing Metro lines. For a city like Moscow, where settlement extends more or less evenly in all directions, a system of multiple radial and circumferential rail transit lines—which transit blogger Jarrett Walker calls a “polar grid“—really makes sense, and the fact that plans to build this are actually being carried out is pretty impressive.

Posted in Urban, Transportation, Rail infrastructure | Tagged Moscow | Leave a comment

Is Chicago building too much?

Posted on September 2, 2016 by Christopher Winters

Even though its population is stable or declining, Chicago has been building a great deal.¹⁴ Figures from the Census Bureau suggest that this is indeed an odd situation. Here’s a chart showing the relationship between residential building permits issued in 2015 and estimated change in population from 2014 to 2015 for American metropolitan statistical areas:¹⁵

And here’s another that shows the relationship between the valuation of these 2015 residential building permits and (again) estimated change in population from 2014 to 2015 for American metropolitan statistical areas:

These graphs require a bit of explanation. Note that:

[1] The data shown are for metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), not cities and not “combined statistical areas” (CSAs) (the latter would subsume Baltimore, Riverside, and San Jose, for example, into larger units). It is possible to get building permit data for “places” (like Chicago), but, because different cities have different relationships to their MSAs, MSA-level data may be more useful for urban-area-to-urban-area comparisons.

[2] The graphs identify a few large urban areas by codes that (I hope) are easy to interpret. “Chi”=Chicago.

[3] 2014-2015 population change is estimated data. Some have questioned the Census Bureau’s determination that the Chicago MSA suffered a population loss in this period.

[4] Results would have been bit different had I chosen different years for the graphs (for example population change or permits from 2010 to 2015)—but they would not have been very different. There is a pretty high correlation between data sets for different years.

[5] Not every housing permit leads to construction.

There is, in general, a close relationship between the number of building permits and the size of population change (correlation= .891, r-squared=.793), and there is nearly as high a correlation between permit valuations and the size of population change (correlation=.888, r-squared=.789). Urban areas that are growing fastest build more.

Note the extent to which Chicago is an outlier. It is building much more than its population loss suggests it should be. (New York, often accused of not building enough, is also building more than its population change would predict. San Francisco, also criticized for building too little, seems to be building nearly as much as it should be given its medium-high population growth.)

Of course, any healthy city, even if it’s losing population, is going to want to do some building. Older structures do need replacement. But it’s not likely to build an enormous amount.

Is Chicago building too much? A case could be made. The fact that real estate in Chicago remains much cheaper than in coastal America would provide some support.

Of course, Chicago, like all American cities, has a complicated geography. While some parts of the Chicago area are losing population quickly, other areas are growing. One reason that Chicago is building so much is that areas of population loss and areas of population growth barely overlap at all.

Population loss on the largest scale has been occurring in certain African-American neighborhoods (click here, here, and here for maps). People have been leaving troubled places like Englewood on the South Side and Lawndale on the West Side for decades. Furthermore, in the first decade of the 21st century, the closure of the housing projects caused near total loss of population in a few tracts. There is little new building in these neighborhoods (with the exception of the area on the Near North Side where the Cabrini-Green housing project once stood, which has begun to acquire expensive high-rise housing).

There has also been a slow loss of population in a few generally stable neighborhoods, for example, along the North Side Lakefront, throughout the “bungalow belt” in the outer parts of the city, and in some first-tier suburbs. In these areas, aging of the population, declining family size, and gentrification (in varying proportions) have resulted in minor population loss. There is generally only a small amount of new building in these areas (new housing on the North Side Lakefront would be very attractive, but NIMBYism and the 1970s downzoning make new construction there difficult).

Population gains and substantial new construction have mostly taken place in distant suburbs, within two or three miles of the Loop, and in certain parts of the North Side. New housing is still replacing farmland in the outer urban area. And there has been large-scale replacement (or renovation) of industrial buildings, older office towers, run-down housing, and parking lots near downtown, a process that goes back at least to the construction of Marina City in 1964—and perhaps even further on the North Side Lakefront, which never ceased to be an attractive place to live for hundreds of thousands of people.

It is in these central areas where housing permit valuations in the Chicago area are highest. Is Chicago building too much? The fact that builders keep building suggests that they’re pretty sure that there’s still a market for their products. Slowly rising rents imply that they’re right. (Condo prices are generally still lower than they were ten years ago, however. Most new apartment buildings are rentals.)

The increased residential densities of the inner city generally have the support of many powerful forces: government agencies like the Department of Zoning and the Department of Planning and Development; non-governmental organizations like the Metropolitan Planning Council; corporations that appreciate the advantages of a “vibrant” city center; and urban theorists who favor density.¹⁶ There is no doubt that many ordinary Chicagoans as well are delighted by the dynamism of the central city.

Edward Glaeser has even argued that Chicago’s habit of continuing to build makes it different from just about all other older, denser American cities.¹⁷ The resulting relative inexpensiveness of real estate is, according to this analysis, one of the reasons that central Chicago is healthy, since it makes it an attractive place to major corporations. Corporate employees are not faced with the kind of housing-cost challenge that they’d encounter, for example, in New York or San Francisco. The implication here is that, if Chicago built less and its housing became more expensive, corporations would leave, there would be less demand for housing, and prices, eventually, would fall. Chicago may be stuck with continuing to build.

Chicago’s relatively inexpensive housing does create a class of losers. Those of us who’ve invested in Chicago real estate couldn’t easily afford to sell and use the proceeds to move to New York or San Francisco. One might expect that there would be protests about this, but, so far, NIMBYism has mostly concerned itself with building in established neighborhoods.¹⁸ There seems to be very little effective opposition to what amounts to an inner-city “growth machine” in Chicago.

Posted in Urban | Tagged Chicago | 1 Comment

Lima’s distinctive Metro

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Christopher Winters

I visited Lima’s Metro last week. It’s a very distinctive system, for a number of reasons.¹⁹

Map, Metro and Metropolitano (BRT), Lima, Peru

Routes of the Metro and of the Metropolitano, Lima. Raw GIS data from OpenStreetMap.

[1] Lima’s Metro does not really go downtown, and it doesn’t come very close to Lima’s newer quasi-CBD in and around Miraflores and San Isidro either (see map). This is odd in that nearly all rail rapid transit systems, for reasons that are pretty clear, serve cities’ central business districts. Rail rapid transit, always expensive to build, is really only justified when there are large numbers of passengers, and, even in cities with weak CBDs, there are still likely to be numerous jobs in government, finance, and tourism in the old downtown, and the largest passenger flows are most probably going to be to and from the CBD. Lima’s Metro comes close to the old Centro Histórico, but the nearest stations are more than two kilometers from the heart of the Centro, and this is an awkward distance to traverse. Jirón Junín, the shortest route between the Miguel Grau station and the Plaza Mayor, takes you along some blocks where (at least when I visited) there were more stray dogs than people; it’s a scary walk. There are buses along Avenida Grau that connect the station with the southern edge of the CBD, but they require an extra fare and quite a few minutes of passengers’ time, and of course you have to figure out an extraordinarily complicated bus system, largely run by private operators.

There do exist a few other Metro systems in the world that don’t go to a CBD, but they’re almost all exceptions that prove the rule. Bangkok’s Skytrain doesn’t serve the older CBD on the Chao Phraya River, but its two lines come together next to Siam Square, the effective center of Bangkok’s modern commercial life. In Miami, the Metro, as in Lima, only skirts the CBD, but it’s connected with Miami’s downtown via the Metromover. There’s also the case of San Juan’s Tren Urbano, which serves the newer commercial district Hato Rey but has never made it to the old city. This line is not generally considered to be a great success. It attracts fewer passengers than any other American rail rapid transit system except Cleveland’s,²⁰ which also serves only the edge of downtown. Lima’s Metro arguably has the poorest connection with its main commercial districts of any rail rapid transit system in the world.

Let me add that the fact that Lima’s Metro has attracted numerous passengers without serving its CBD very well does suggest that some of the received conceptions of how people move in cities may not be quite right—this appears to be an under-researched subject. It could be the case that the “desire lines” of people of modest income in Third World cities are quite different than those of middle-income people in North America and Europe. That is, these people could have less interest in travel to the CBD, since the jobs—and products—present there may not be available to them. One of the stops on the Metro where the largest number of people get on and off is Gamarra, the site of a truly enormous clothing market and of bus and van connections to many places. It may be a more important node for relatively poor people than the Centro Histórico.

Lima’s Metro, over Avenida Aviación.

[2] Lima’s Metro is entirely elevated. It’s even been claimed to be the world’s longest urban elevated railroad at 24 km (plus 10 km of surface tracks). (This claim is somewhat dubious.) Its status as an elevated railway is one of the chief reasons it does not serve the Centro Histórico. The line is nearly all built in the center of exceptionally wide streets and is very heavily engineered, in part to mitigate the area’s substantial seismic risks. Its heavy presence makes it a somewhat overbearing neighbor, and it would not have fit (or been very welcome) in the relatively narrow streets of the Centro Histórico or of places like Miraflores and San Isidro.

View from the Miguel Grau station, the closest station to the Centro Histórico.

[3] Lima’s Metro mostly serves modest neighborhoods. Many new Metro lines quite self-consciously serve a mix of districts. They do this in part to be politically attractive and to forestall accusations that their construction favors either the rich or the poor. Lima’s Metro was quite self-consciously built to serve, first, Villa El Salvador in the south, and then, when its general alignment was finally settled on, San Juan de Lurigancho in the north. Villa El Salvador and San Juan de Lurigancho are both huge settlements of (with some exceptions) poor or middle-income people. Villa El Salvador started life as a pueblo jóven (squatter settlement) and is famous for its local activists. San Juan de Lurigancho has a million people, few of whom are wealthy. “Public” transport at both ends of the lines was largely in private hands before the arrival of the Metro and mostly involved vans (“combis”) that travelled only when very full. Combi transport was (and is) neither rapid nor comfortable, and the Metro’s routing was in part determined by the very reasonable desire to improve transport for a large number of people.

The Metro does skirt the far edges of Miraflores and San Isidro, upscale residential neighborhoods and the centers of much of Lima’s modern commercial life. There are two or three stations within three or four kilometers of these neighborhoods, notably La Cultura and San Borja Sur. La Cultura, where the National Library and the Museo de la Nación (but hardly any residences) are located, is connected with San Isidro by freeway. There are bus routes to San Isidro, but the three-kilometer walk is not pleasant. I also walked from Miraflores to San Borja Sur station. The first part of this journey is fine. As in other big Latin American cities, the most bustling, pedestrian-friendly parts of Lima are upscale commercial/residential neighborhoods. But the last kilometer, past large single-family homes with three-meter-high walls topped by electric fences, is somewhat strange. The only other pedestrians were deliverymen, who were communicating with residents by intercom. The Metro does not have the same kind of easy relationship with its surrounding neighborhoods—and perhaps especially its well-off neighborhoods—that one would find in a European city. Even in the poorer neighborhoods, where there are more pedestrians, you often have to cross a major street to get to the station.

[4] The Metro took nearly thirty years to build. Construction was started in 1986, during a brief period of optimism about Peru’s future, and a small section of surface track at what is now the southern end of the line opened in 1990. Since it didn’t go anywhere very useful, it attracted few passengers. Work on the line practically ceased for twenty years, a period when Peru was experiencing out-of-control inflation, the Sendero Luminoso revolt, and other problems. Work resumed in 2009, and the southern two-thirds of the line were completed in an astonishing 18 months. The northern third, which had not even been started previously, opened 33 months later, in 2014, 28 years after Metro construction had begun.

The San Isidro Aramburú station on the Metropolitano BRT, in the middle of the Vía Expresa.

[5] The Metro has BRT competition. Besides finishing the Metro, Peru’s government took advantage of the good economic times of the early 21st century to build a bus rapid transit route, confusingly called the Metropolitano.²¹ Unlike the Metro, it serves the Centro Histórico, Miraflores, and San Isidro, running down the center of a freeway, the Vía Expresa, from south of the Centro Histórico to Barranco, a bit beyond Miraflores. This part of the route is genuine, high-quality BRT, resembling the major lines in Bogotá. The bus right-of-way is completely separate. It includes passing lanes, permitting express service. You pay with a smart card as you enter a station. North and south of the Vía Expresa, the Metropolitano still has its own right-of-way, and you still prepay your fare, but buses do have to contend with traffic lights. The Metropolitano has been drawing approximately as many riders as the Metro. The Metropolitano route, oddly, does not intersect with the Metro at any point.

The Gamarra station.

There seems to be a consensus that Lima’s Metro is a success. It has been attracting approximately 350,000 passengers a day on weekdays and Saturdays, more than had been predicted. This is a respectable figure for a single line in an urban area of medium density. Trains, unfortunately, run very full, but that of course is a sign of success, and surveys suggest that passengers are generally pleased. The fares, 1.50 soles (USD 0.45), cover something like two-thirds the cost of running the trains, so the subsidies required are not ruinous. Linea 1 is considered so successful that two additional lines are now under contract. Both will be subways and one will serve the Centro Histórico (the other line will reach the Airport). Linea 2 will cross Linea 1 at Miguel Grau and the Metropolitano at its Estación Central, thus improving connectivity enormously. Additional routes, including lines to Miraflores and San Isidro, are on the drawing boards. If and when these lines are completed Lima’s Metro will be much more like Latin America’s other major rail rapid transit systems.

Posted in Urban, Transportation, Rail infrastructure | Tagged Lima | Leave a comment

Walking, running, bicycling, and taking trains in central São Paulo

Posted on July 20, 2016 by Christopher Winters

The São Paulo metropolitan area is by most measures the largest or second largest in the Western Hemisphere,²² but it doesn’t have a very distinct image in North America or Europe. In so far as most foreigners think of São Paulo at all, it’s often as a congested, polluted, and crime-ridden place. This image is not completely inaccurate. São Paulo’s 21 or so million people²³ own more than seven million cars,²⁴ and traffic jams are frequent. São Paulo is said, as a result, to have more helicopter commuters than any other city in the world. The urban area is surrounded by hills, and air quality can be terrible. Furthermore, the crime rate is indeed high, although it’s been dropping rapidly over the last fifteen years. In 2015 the murder rate was 8.56 per 100,000,²⁵ among the lowest murder rates in Brazil, roughly a sixth that in Saint Louis—but twice New York’s.

Academic studies of São Paulo can also present a rather harrowing picture. Perhaps the best-known English-language work on São Paulo is anthropologist Teresa Caldera’s City of Walls,²⁶ which depicts a city in which anyone who can has retreated to a gated community and stopped setting foot in socially-mixed public places, leaving the streets to the poor. Some of the extensive Brazilian academic literature on São Paulo also documents the city’s extreme inequalities and intractable planning dilemmas.²⁷

Three recent trips to São Paulo suggest that this view is somewhat out of date. Central São Paulo is certainly a gritty place—graffiti are everywhere—but it has a flourishing pedestrian life, healthy public spaces, and pretty good, and improving, public transportation. In the area between, roughly, the old Centro and Itaim Bibi, streets and parks and the rail system are filled with people, apparently of all social classes, and the new ciclovias (bicycle paths) are attracting a fair number of riders.

Particularly impressive is Avenida Paulista, perhaps São Paulo’s symbolically most important street (see photo).

Avenida Paulista on a warm Sunday afternoon in winter.

Avenida Paulista is both a business and a shopping street, and there are apartment buildings at its southeastern end. A substantial number of big companies (Citibank, for example) have their headquarters on the street, and there are several shopping malls and numerous other stores as well. It’s also where major political demonstrations take place. The sidewalks are crowded day and night and could hardly feel safer. Under the current administration of prefeito (mayor) Fernando Haddad, the street has been closed to motorized-vehicle traffic on Sundays. Closing Avenida Paulista must have felt roughly as it would feel in Chicago to close North Michigan Avenue and LaSalle Street on Sundays. The street was just jammed on the rather warm dry Sunday when I was there. There were plenty of diversions. Numerous musicians, for example, had set up shop. Hundreds of people were selling things (mostly craft products). Buskers dressed in fantastic costumes were drawing huge crowds. There were dozens of open-air restaurants, many of which were broadcasting the French/Portuguese Euro championship soccer game. There were also vendors of sorvete (ice), agua de coco (coconut water), and numerous other goodies. Children were diverting themselves using updrafts from subway grates to send light objects high in the air. But it’s possible that walking up and down and people-watching were the major activities of Avenida Paulista’s Sunday crowds—and perhaps of those on weekdays too. There may be no better place in the country to see masses of Brazilians in all their variety.

Also striking is the Minhocão [“big worm”] (see photo).

The Minhocão on a Sunday afternoon.

This road, officially the Via Elevada Presidente Costa e Silva, is ordinarily one of the world’s most appalling elevated urban freeways, running only a few meters from apartment buildings in a socially complicated but basically middle-class neighborhood—and said to be one of the factors in the neighborhood’s deterioration. It too has been closed to motorized traffic on Sundays, as well as at night and on late Saturday afternoons. The Minhocão was crowded when I was there, mostly with (often lightly dressed) people walking, running, or bicycling its 3.5 kilometer length. There were also a certain number of picnickers and agua de coco vendors. It’s an incredibly scenic place. You get a startlingly new view of the landscape when you walk along it. Since it has several turns and hills you also get constantly changing views of tall buildings in distant parts of the city as well as of the bustling streets below.

The city’s major inner-city park, Ibirapuera Park, is as crowded as Avenida Paulista (see photo).

Ibirapuera Park walking/running/bicycling path.

The park features a walking/running/bicycling loop, numerous less formal walking paths, basketball, weightlifting, and skating facilities, and several excellent museums. While I acknowledge that I have no way of identifying the social class of people using the park, it’s pretty clear that there are people there from many social groups.

There are, in fact, substantial numbers of pedestrians in most of the middle-class and wealthy residential neighborhoods in central São Paulo. These neighborhoods are densely built-up with apartment buildings, and generally they feel safe, at least by day. But one should not be naïve here. Most high-rise apartment buildings are surrounded by tall fences and have armed guards. And there are places in the Centro such as “Cracolândia” where there are concentrations of down-and-out people on a much larger scale than anything you’d see in, say, the East End of Vancouver or the homeless peoples’ district of downtown Los Angeles. Even if one avoids the favelas (as I did) and skips Cracolândia, the visitor to São Paulo cannot help but notice that there are large numbers of marginalized or just plain poor people in the city. It’s not clear to a foreigner how much of a danger these people pose, but well-off Brazilians clearly think the danger is immense. This fact colors the use of public space in São Paulo and other Brazilian cities. American cities of course have an analogous problem.

There are also some environmental barriers to pedestrian life. Sidewalks are often cracked. There are steep hills to contend with. And, on rainy days, the sewers are overwhelmed. But you encounter these problems in parts of North America and Western Europe too. Central São Paulo is generally a pedestrian-friendly place.

Other non-automotive transportation facilities have improved too.

The Haddad administration has made a major effort to build ciclovias (bicycle paths).²⁸ More than 400 km of paths are planned, and most of them are in place. Here’s a map:

Map, ciclovias (bicycle paths), São Paulo, Brazil

Ciclovias in São Paulo, shown by dark green lines. GIS data for ciclovias are from Vá de Bike. GIS data for streets, parks, and water are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. The thin black lines show municipal boundaries. These were generated from a file available at GADM. I do not have data for ciclovias outside the municipality of São Paulo.

I can’t claim that most of the paths in the central city were extremely busy when I was there, but they were certainly attracting users. A newspaper story²⁹ suggests what should have surprised no one. Well-off cyclists, mostly living in the center of the city, generally use the paths on weekends, for recreation. Relatively poor people, mostly living in the periphery, use them to get to work, and they do this every day and in substantial numbers.

A few of the paths, along water courses like the Pinheiros River, allow traffic-free movement for quite a distance, but most of the ciclovias run along urban streets. Ciclovias on major streets like Avenida Paulista and Avendida Faria Lima are designed in a way that seems a bit odd to a North American: They are built in the center of the street (see photo). This clearly solves the “dooring” problem and also assures cyclists’ visibility. It may also help at intersections, where special traffic lights for cyclists provide at least some protection from turning motor vehicles. It can be a long wait, though, for the lights to change. São Paulo’s ciclovias are not built for speedy cycling.

São Paulo--Av Paulista ciclovia on weekday

Avenida Paulista ciclovia on a weekday.

The ciclovia program has apparently aroused a huge amount of opposition. Its opponents’ chief argument is that a great deal of money is being spent on facilities that are used by only a tiny number of people. There is surely an element of truth here, and the expansion of the program has been halted for the moment.

Bicycle paths have recently been built in many other Latin American cities too, for example, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. In many ways ciclovias seem an odd fit for big Latin American cities, where traffic can be heavy and drivers have a reputation for being particularly aggressive. But, in fact, aggressive driving is far less of a problem for cyclists—and pedestrians—than in, say, Middle Eastern or South or Southeast Asian cities. Traffic lights in Latin America are usually obeyed, and sidewalks are normally free of motorized traffic, although you certainly do have to be careful at corners. The ciclovia program in São Paulo and its counterparts in other large Latin American cities seem like exceptionally worthy attempts to reduce the role of the automobile in big cities.

São Paulo’s improving—and still growing—rail transit system is surely of even greater importance than its ciclovia program. Here’s a map:

Map, urban rail lines, São Paulo, Brazil

Urban rail lines in São Paulo. Red is used for lines considered to be part of the Metro. Brown is used for lines that were historically suburban rail routes. Interchange among all the lines is free. Most data were edited from files available through the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. The thin black lines represent municipal boundaries and were generated from a file available at GADM.

All the trains I rode were in good shape. São Paulo’s newest subway line, Linha 4 (the Yellow Line), with its platform doors, its open gangways between cars, its free wifi, and its ubiquitous television monitors, is particularly impressive. In appearance it’s much more like the well-funded, recently built subway lines in Asia and Europe than any other subway line in the Western Hemisphere (see photo).

Inside a Yellow Line car.

São Paulo is also (I believe) the only large city in the Western Hemisphere that has fully integrated its old suburban lines and its subway system. Although the rail lines and the two different subway companies have retained their separate corporate identities, elaborate passageways have been built to connect the systems (see photo), and one ticket gets you just about anywhere you want to go.

The complicated interchange between Metrô line 4 and CPTM (rail) line 9.

It’s true that the old rail lines, like rail lines in most places that were built originally for long-distance transport, sometimes pass rather uselessly through declining industrial areas in the inner city, but they also serve many busy commercial areas (like Avenida Faria Lima and Avenida Luís Carlos Berrini) and of course numerous suburbs that the subway lines don’t reach. The fares—the subject of recent protests—are not strikingly low given the modest salaries for unskilled work. A subway ticket costs $R3.80 (around $US1.20), less if you pay by smart card, but it’s $R5.92 if you need to transfer to a bus. The counterargument is that the one city/one fare policy ends up being a subsidy for the mostly poor people who live in the periphery.

São Paulo’s subway system proper, with 74 route-kilometers, is still rather small given the size of the city, but it attracts more riders per kilometer of track than any other Western Hemisphere metro system, perhaps in part because of its tie-in with the suburban rail lines.³⁰

São Paulo has, in other words, been an enthusiastic participant in the nearly worldwide movement to reduce the role of the automobile in urban life. It’s also clear that some of the negative stereotypes of life in São Paulo are at the very least exaggerated. I can’t claim to be an expert on the city, and I’m perfectly willing to admit that I don’t have much experience at all in the newer suburbs or in the periphery in general, which may well be as pedestrian-unfriendly as in most places. But the central city broadly defined—which covers quite a substantial area—seems to be quite a vibrant, reasonably walkable, and reasonably safe place that, despite the current recession, has been reducing its level of automobile dependence at least modestly in recent years.

Posted in Urban, Transportation, Rail infrastructure, Pedestrian infrastructure | Tagged São Paulo | 2 Comments

McDonald’s is not moving to downtown Chicago

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Christopher Winters

Newspaper headlines have claimed that McDonald’s is moving its headquarters from suburban Oak Brook to “downtown Chicago.”³¹ It isn’t. The move (if it happens) would be to the Harpo Studios site, which is at 1058 West Washington Boulevard. This is in a neighborhood that historically mostly contained industrial buildings and warehouses. These days, the largest and most solid of these have been converted into “loft” housing. More modest industrial buildings have been replaced by expensive midrise housing—or by parking lots. Here’s a map:

The large black circle shows the location of Harpo Studios. The heavy black line shows how Chicago’s central business district is defined by the Chicago city data portal. Most observers would probably say that it is somewhat overbounded, especially on the west. The green lines are CTA rail lines, and the green circles are CTA rail stations.

Here’s a photo of Harpo Studios that gives a sense of context:

Harpo Studios is on the left. The reddish building contains “lofts.” The fence on the vacant lot on the right has a sign advertising three-bedroom apartments to be built on the site that will cost “in the 800s.” There are still some industrial facilities operating within a few blocks of the area shown, but they’re disappearing fast. Three or four blocks away the old food-processing Fulton Market has partly become a district of expensive, fashionable restaurants. This area is not “downtown.” It’s a mile to the Loop proper, across a ten-lane freeway and along streets that carry a huge amount of traffic during rush hour. The official community area name is Near West Side. Real estate agents call it the West Loop.

Google has set up its Chicago offices in Fulton Market, and one of the implications of the newspaper stories is that the “West Loop” might become a new center of corporate headquarters. I wonder. Google is, obviously, different. It isn’t quite comfortable with a traditional corporate image. Its New York offices are in the old Port Authority Building in Chelsea, not far from the High Line and a couple of blocks from the extremely fashionable Meatpacking District. Chicago’s Fulton Market is sometimes known as the Meatpacking District too. It’s in some ways very similar to New York’s. It had comparable historical functions, and it’s now quite the place to go (although its housing is lower-density and much cheaper than New York’s). Google appears to have chosen its office locations to enhance its (fading) bohemian image. But McDonald’s? There’s something a bit odd here.

A suburban acquaintance once revealed that he thought that “downtown Chicago” referred to the area from roughly Wrigley Field to Congress Expressway within a mile or so of the Lake, a huge, largely residential area of which the CBD is a tiny part. It’s more or less the area where driving is difficult and free parking impossible. People who drive everywhere sometimes do not seem aware of distinctions within dense areas. You could argue that the area around Harpo Studios is a suburbanite’s dream urban location. Traffic moves more freely than it does in the Loop. There are still some open parking lots around. The sidewalks are not too crowded. On nice days middle-class people can be found eating in outdoor restaurants not far away. Could it be that a misunderstanding about the meaning of “downtown” explains McDonald’s’ location decision?

Of course, it’s wonderful for Chicago to acquire new corporate headquarters, as long as only a modest bribe had to be paid. Headquarters bring in tax receipts and prestige. There are also environmental factors to consider. McDonald’s’ old headquarters in Oak Brook is very difficult to get to by public transit. Harpo Studios is two blocks from an El station. It would be hard to argue that the move is a bad thing in any way. But it does make sense to be correct about its spatial significance.

Posted in Urban | Tagged Chicago | Leave a comment

Apartment buildings on arterials in Chicago

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Christopher Winters

There has been a large amount of infill residential construction in Chicago in recent years despite the city’s static or declining population.³² Most of this building has occurred in prosperous neighborhoods on the North Side or close to downtown. “Urbanist” observers have argued that the new construction will support Chicago’s transformation into a more pedestrian-friendly and less automobile-dependent place. In this brief essay, I argue that, because much of the building has been occurring in relatively pedestrian-unfriendly areas, this hope may be misplaced. My argument is somewhat complex, in that it involves a consideration of Chicago’s zoning pattern, a look at the history of Chicago’s neighborhood commerce, and some thoughts on the meaning of “walkability.” Let me explain.

Many writers³³ have pointed out that zoning laws are one of the reasons that American cities aren’t denser. That is, for example, the reason that Chicago’s multi-unit dwellings are found mostly along the Lakefront

chicago_more_than_50_percent_10_or_more_units_2

Tracts in Chicago and inner suburbs where at least fifty percent of the housing units are in buildings with ten or more housing units. Data from American Community Survey, 2008-2012.

is not only that, in a flat city that lacks natural landmarks, the Lakefront is the most attractive place to be. It’s also due to the fact that zoning prevents multi-unit buildings from being built anywhere else. Here’s a somewhat simplified map showing where multi-unit residential buildings may be built in Chicago without special permission.

Areas zoned RM, DR, or DX. PD areas (mostly in or near CBD) are also available for multi-unit housing, but special authorization is required. Data from Chicago’s Data portal.

Zoning codes, of course, aren’t set in stone, but they’re not easy to change. One of the reasons that multi-unit buildings in Chicago cover a larger area than is zoned for them is that much of the North Side Lakefront was downzoned during the late 1970s. It would be politically very difficult to restore the old code. Many people would like to do so, however. Blogger Daniel Kay Hertz has made of point of lamenting the difficulty of building more densely in desirable Chicago neighborhoods like Lake View and Lincoln Park, and in the nearly-as-desirable corridor stretching along Milwaukee Avenue on the Northwest Side. Large parts of these neighborhoods are mostly zoned either for single-family housing or for two-, three-, or four-flat dwellings.

In fact, there is what amounts to a major geographical loophole in the zoning codes. Many of the arterial streets in North and Northwest Side neighborhoods in Chicago are actually zoned “business” or “commercial.” Apartments over stores are permitted. In practice, so are apartment buildings as long as they’re not very tall. On this map, the red areas are zoned business or commercial:

Areas zoned B and C on the North Side of Chicago.

Chicago (as many people have pointed out) has much more business/commercial zoning than it needs. A city in which most people shop for food at supermarkets and buy just about everything else at big-box stores and on the Internet does not need the thousands of tiny shops on arterial streets that the zoning code encourages. And, in fact, most of the commercial districts defined in the zoning code are not very healthy. Many of the storefronts on, say, Ashland, Western, and Milwaukee Avenues and Irving Park Road are closed. Others are given over to enterprises that appear to attract very little business. Some of the specialized shops are, I’ll admit, of some interest. There are exotic restaurants on Irving Park, and book and comic-book stores on Milwaukee that could not pay the rent in a more desirable commercial district. But far more common than comic-book stores are, say, auto parts stores, nail salons with few customers, and newly built suburban-style drive-in restaurants and banks. Even commoner than that are older, typically small residential buildings with no stores at all. Any ground-floor commerce that once existed has long since disappeared.

One of the reasons that these commercial districts are so marginal may be that the arterial streets are miserable places for walking. This is especially true of four-lane streets like Ashland and Western Avenues and Irving Park Road west of Ashland. They have a lot of vehicular traffic. During rush hour there are even traffic jams.

That is to say, while I don’t know exactly how to define walkability, it’s surely more complicated than the WalkScore Website metrics imply. I suspect it has a great deal to do with whether motor vehicles outnumber pedestrians. Most pedestrians are perfectly happy to walk on streets like Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and the Champs-Élysées in Paris even though there is a huge amount of traffic flowing nearby. There are just about always a huge number of pedestrians too. To walk by oneself on one of these streets at rush hour (while it’s never likely to happen) would probably feel uncomfortable. Most pedestrians, however, are happy to walk by themselves on residential streets with hardly any traffic. Again, the dynamic seems to be the ratio of vehicles to people. This is not to deny that there are other factors as well—such as the scale of buildings, the presence of high-quality sidewalks, and the existence of places to walk to. Streets like Ashland Avenue in Lake View and Lincoln Park and Irving Park Road west of Ashland are poor streets for walking because they have many more cars than pedestrians. The near absence of interesting commerce and the massive amounts of traffic reinforce each other to discourage pedestrian activity.

But, curiously, one of the places where there has been the largest amount of residential construction in Lake View and Lincoln Park (and elsewhere on the North Side) in recent years is on the arterials. This makes perfect sense in many ways. The neighborhoods are generally considered unambiguously desirable. Most of the side streets in these areas are more or less completely gentrified. Older buildings in poor shape on the side streets have for the most part already been fixed up or replaced, zoning laws in any case discourage denser infill, and there is little opportunity for new building. But, because the older buildings on the arterials have not been seen as very desirable, they have typically not been renovated, and every so often one becomes available to developers. The zoning codes do permit new apartment construction on these “commercial” streets with minimal need for a waiver. Because all these streets have reasonable bus service, there’s even a certain amount of urbanist logic in building on them, although just about all the new housing on these streets comes with plenty of parking.

I took a close look at two mile-long arterial corridors where there has been recent construction, one in Lake View and one in a nearby but still slightly marginal neighborhood.

The first corridor is Ashland Avenue between Belmont Avenue and Irving Park Road. Much of the street once looked something like this:

The neighborhood around Ashland Avenue underwent a considerable amount of gentrification during the 1980s and 1990s, but Ashland itself was somewhat neglected by developers until approximately 1996, when a Whole Foods opened toward the southern end of the corridor and Wieboldt’s, a closed department store across the street, was converted into “lofts.” In the years since, Ashland has been slowly transformed from a tired commercial and residential street into a more densely built-up mostly residential one. Nearly half the older buildings have been replaced, and the process is continuing. Here’s a map:

On this and the similar map of part of Irving Park Road, red is used to show new, generally post-1998 construction (but some quite recent). Only buildings that front on the arterial are colored. Source of data: the building footprint file downloaded from the city of Chicago’s Data portal, modified approximately when there has been building since the dataset’s compilation.

Some of the new construction consists of buildings that are very much like the three-flat four-story condo buildings that have become the commonest kind of new building on the side streets, although they can have a store instead of a stoop and living space on the ground floor:

Most of the new buildings are somewhat larger though. The commonest type is the six- or eight-unit apartment building, like this:

Sometimes two or more of these are put together:

There are also a few much bigger (but not much taller) apartment buildings.

It’s difficult to provide a precise statistical portrait of this corridor, because it’s spread over five (formerly six) census tracts that extend a quarter mile on both sides of Ashland so that the corridor itself covers only a small portion of the tracts. Per capita income was $44,514 in 1999 ($63,253 in 2014 dollars). It rose to $68,529 in the 2010-2014 American Community Survey (which has 2009-2013 income data but reports numbers in 2014 dollars). The number of residents has also increased modestly. In 2000 the population was 11,359. In 2010/2014 it was 12,629. There is no way to be certain about where the new residents were living, but, because new buildings on the side streets were generally not much bigger than the older buildings they replaced, it seems likely that the apartment buildings on Ashland house a large portion (and maybe most) of the neighborhood’s newcomers. The percentage of workers 16 and over who took public transit to work also increased somewhat between 2000 and 2010/2014, from 38.34 to 44.91. There are two CTA rail stations within a block or two of the corridor, and I don’t doubt that some of the residents of the new buildings do take advantage of the bus lines that stop outside their door. But there are still few pedestrians on Ashland Avenue. It’s just not a nice place to walk, and, with the exception of that Whole Foods, there are few destinations to walk to.

The second corridor I looked at—Irving Park Road between Sacramento and Central Park Avenues just west of the North Branch of the Chicago River—is at an earlier stage of what may be a similar process. Much of the street doesn’t look very different than it did in, say, the 1990s (or maybe the 1920s!):

Chicago--Irving Park mixture

More of the older buildings, however, have been replaced by suburban-style commerce. There are also a few new apartment buildings on Irving Park Road, some larger than anything on Ashland:

Here’s a map:

This corridor (in the Irving Park community area) is much poorer than the Ashland corridor and has hardly been gentrified at all; very little of the old housing stock on the side streets has been replaced or seriously renovated. Per capita income in the six (now eight) tracts bordering Irving Park Road increased marginally from $16,532 in 1999 ($23,491 in 2014 dollars) to $23,798 in 2009/2013 (again, the corridor itself makes up only a small part of the tracts, which cover an area up to half a mile from Irving Park Road). Population hardly changed. It was 28,990 in 2000 and 28,444 in 2010/2014. There is no way to be certain about population change at the building level, but it seems possible that the addition of new apartment buildings reduced what would otherwise have been a greater decline in population. Public transit use also held nearly steady. The percent of the working-age population that took public transit to work rose from 20.03 to 22.04. (There are no rail stations close to this corridor.) The area’s stability applies to its ethnic mix as well. It was 55.1% Hispanic in 2000, 56.4% Hispanic in 2010/2014.

Despite the area’s lower-middle-class status, it is on the North Side; it’s pretty safe; and developers have had enough confidence to put up apartment buildings when lots on Irving Park Road have become available. The process is continuing; several new apartment projects are in the works. It’s possible that this corridor will look something like the Ashland corridor in a few years. But, in general, despite the new buildings, there is less sign of pedestrian life on Irving Park Road than in the Ashland corridor. There seems to be even more traffic, and there is nothing anything like as attractive as a Whole Foods to walk to.

Compared to, say, a freeway, or a railroad yard, or a coal-burning power plant, a four-lane urban arterial is a minor disamenity. But it is a disamenity, and its presence doesn’t just affect people living along it. It affects the surrounding neighborhoods too, since the arterials are so awkward to cross, especially on foot. (There are traffic lights only every quarter mile or so.) The city does seem to understand the problem. It’s installed green median strips along Ashland Avenue and Irving Park Road, but these help only marginally, especially since they weren’t put in at corners where a left-turn lane was wanted.

Many other North Side arterials have undergone a similar transformation. The streets appear to have been (or are being) transformed on the basis of urbanist principles, but it’s not clear that there’s been much of an urbanist effect. It’s even possible that the increase in population has generated more traffic, and hence lowered the neighborhoods’ walkability. The NIMBY argument that development = traffic may not make much sense in more pedestrian-friendly areas, but perhaps it does here.

It could certainly be argued that any kind of increased density is a good thing, but it’s still odd to have the densest housing in the least walkable parts of neighborhoods.

Chicago’s North Side is hardly the only place where this phenomenon is common. New or newish apartment buildings on urban arterials can be found all over the United States. They were apparently built in many cases for the same reasons as in Chicago: the availability of land; the absence of protesting neighbors; and oddities of the zoning code. I can’t resist adding that there is a precedent in Chicago, which appears to be the only city in Western world whose most prestigious housing overlooks what is for all intents and purposes a freeway, that is, Lake Shore Drive.

It’s hard to see what one could do about the problem except to downsize the arterials radically. If it were up to me, that’s certainly what would happen. The Chicago Transit Authority does in fact have a plan to put bus rapid transit on Ashland and Western Avenues, which would mean eliminating a lane of traffic and forbidding most left turns. The fact, however, that this plan has elicited an enormous amount of opposition has put it on hold. Automobile drivers do not easily give up the right to degrade an environment. Radical downsizing of the arterials doesn’t seem likely to happen soon. Until it does, streets like Ashland and Western Avenues and Irving Park Road present an enormous long-term obstacle to transforming the North Side of Chicago into a more pedestrian-friendly place even if they are acquiring new multi-unit housing.

Posted in Urban | Tagged Chicago | Leave a comment

Neighborhood types in Chicago, 2010

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Christopher Winters

The maps below present a classification of Chicago’s residential census tracts based on multivariate analysis. This approach (sometimes called social area analysis or factorial ecology in geography and sociology) is often used to classify small areas in cities. The ten neighborhood types identified on the maps were derived through a two-step process. First, the TRYSYS program was used to factor 34 important tract-level census variables by the Tryon “key-cluster analysis” method. The data come either from the 2010 census or from the 2008-2012 American Community Survey. Three oblique dimensions were identified. Then each tract was scored on the three dimensions (using a simple sum of standardized scores), and tracts were cluster-analyzed using TRYSYS‘s iterative partitioning method. Robert B. Dean did the statistical analysis.

These maps are comparable to those generated for 1990 and 2000 data when I was working at the University of Chicago Library. Essentially the same variables were used, and nearly the same geographic area was covered. The three dimensions (or clusters) are very similar to the first three dimensions found in the 1990 and 2000 data (although the order of the first two is different). In both 1990 and 2000, a fourth dimension was identified, associated with family type and age. A similar dimension in the 2010 data is not at all significant, and, in conjunction with this, the geographical pattern of neighborhood types has changed in some small ways. For example, the well-off/young-adult/non-family area roughly along North Halsted Street that was identified in the 2000 census analysis has vanished in 2010, mostly subsumed into areas classed as very well-off and very urban (type 1). But, in general, the broad pattern of Chicago’s social geography appears to have changed only in subtle ways in the first decade of the 21st century. The area of gentrification on the North Side has clearly moved west and north from Wicker Park and Bucktown, into Ukrainian Village, Logan Square, and even Humboldt Park. Gentrification has also moved west from downtown. Click here for some maps that demonstrate that there was a considerable amount of ethnic-specific internal migration in the area. Note that, because the classifications have changed, the color schemes of the 1990, 2000, and 2010 neighborhood-type maps, while similar, are not completely comparable.

No claim can be made that this is a definitive analysis of neighborhood types in Chicago. It is in the nature of this kind of analysis that a change in the variables selected or in the parameters set by the analyst can change the results significantly. There is also the issue that the 2008-2012 ACS data are not likely to be as reliable as earlier long-form data. The best that can be said is that the maps may provide one useful way of analyzing the differences in Chicago’s residential areas.

Here is a map showing neighborhood types in Chicago and its inner suburbs. Nominal scale is 1:250,000. (Click here for key.)

Here is a map showing neighborhood types in the Chicago region. Nominal scale is 1:700,000. (Click here for key.)

Posted in Urban | Tagged Chicago | Leave a comment

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