The “park connectors” of Punggol and Sengkang, Singapore

Posted on February 17, 2019 by Christopher Winters

I wrote about Singapore’s “park connectors” in an earlier post. Park connectors are paths for pedestrians and cyclists that now provide access to much of Singapore. They have been built quite self-consciously to promote Singapore’s goal of becoming a “car-lite” society. Despite their name, they often don’t connect parks. Their geography has chiefly been determined by the location of places where it was easy to insert them. This generally means corridors with few road crossings, which end up being for the most part along waterways, lakefronts, and coasts. There are now more than 300 km of such paths. Here’s a map:1

Map, park connectors and rail transit, Singapore

Map showing park connectors and rail transit lines in Singapore. The “Rail Corridor” is the corridor through which the rail line to Kuala Lumpur once passed; it’s—slowly!—being turned into a recreational trail. The MRT is Singapore’s urban “heavy”-rail system. The LRT (administered jointly with the MRT) is a grade-separated people mover serving certain new towns. “U/C” = “under construction.” GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and from the government of Singapore, modified; see footnote 1.

Most park connectors have been inserted into already built-up parts of the city. I made a point on a recent trip to Singapore of visiting Punggol and its neighbor Sengkang, two of Singapore’s newest “new towns,” where the linear recreational pathways that were later called park connectors were built into the urban fabric from the beginning. I was particularly interested in seeing just how these functioned.

Punggol and Sengkang are in extreme northeastern Singapore. The area in which they’re located was the site of villages many of whose inhabitants were farmers and fishermen as late as the early 1990s, the period when the area was earmarked as the site of two new towns. Thanks to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and then the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, development was rather slow. Many parts of Punggol and Sengkang are still not built up, and there is a great deal of construction going on, especially along the areas’ northern and eastern edges. Here’s a map:

Map, park connectors, rail transit, and buildings, Punggol and Sengkang, Singapore.

Punggol and Sengkang, Singapore. See previous map for explanation of legend and list of sources.

Like Singapore’s other new towns, Punggol and Sengkang were planned under the influence of “modern” concepts of how to build a city. Buildings do not touch neighboring buildings. Land uses are kept separate. Congestion is avoided. Despite the origin of these towns in the 1990s and their implementation in the 21st century, the ideas of “new urbanism” apparently played no role in determining their basic morphology. There are no vibrant shopping streets in Punggol and Sengkang. The commercial heart of both Punggol and Sengkang is an enclosed mall, set next to the subway station.

Waterway Point, Punggol, Singapore

Waterway Point, the center of Punggol Central District.

The two subway stations are connected with the rest of Punggol and Sengkang by what are called LRTs in Singapore: miniature driverless trains that some would call people movers.

LRT, Sengkang, Singapore.

The LRT in Sengkang.

Essentially all the housing in both Punggol and Sengkang is high-rise housing, mostly put up by the Housing & Development Board (HDB). HDB housing in Punggol and Sengkang, like other new HDB housing Singapore, is of high quality and not easy to distinguish from private housing. The negative stereotype of public housing in the United States or Britain does not apply to Singapore.

Housing in both Punggol and Sengkang is built on very large blocks, through which it’s possible to walk or drive slowly on somewhat irregular paths and streets. There are also arterials, which have a great deal of traffic and which pedestrians must usually cross by bridges. The arterials do have sidewalks, but they take you quite close to the traffic. There are very few pedestrians walking along the arterials.

Sengkang East Drive, Sengkang, Singapore

Sengkang East Drive. Part of a park connector on the right.

The physical geography of Punggol and Sengkang is significant. Most of these areas consist of a low plateau, surrounded on three sides by substantial water barriers. To the north lies the Johor Strait, which separates Singapore from Malaysia; to the east and west are former rivers that have been converted into reservoirs. The Punggol Waterway joins the two reservoirs. The waterways are several meters lower than most of the housing.

The park connectors all lie along the watercourses, just as they do in most parts of Singapore. As a result, there is no cross-traffic to deal with. But it’s almost inevitable that your starting and ending points will be several meters higher than the park connector. The views from the park connectors are often uphill to housing.

Punggol Waterway, Punggol, Singapore

Man running along the park connector that follows Punggol Waterway. In the background, up a hill and behind a tree, an LRT train.

My impression was that most park connector use is recreational in nature. There are lots of cyclists (joined, I think unfortunately, by users of what in Singapore are called “personal-mobility devices” (PMDs), that is, electrically powered scooters and bicycles).2 There are also a fair number of runners and of people who appear to be fairly serious walkers, or at least dog walkers. Most of the park connectors in Punggol and Sengkang (as well as elsewhere in Singapore) have acquired a solid line to separate pedestrians from cyclists and PMD users; in a few places there are two separate paths. There are only a small number of benches along the park connectors; they do get used, and I rather suspect that additional benches would be appreciated. I wouldn’t describe the park connectors of Punggol and Sengkang as being overwhelmingly crowded at any time, but they aren’t empty either.

Punggol, Singapore

Park connector near central Punggol, viewed from a higher roadway bridge.

The fact that the HDB shows what appear to be park connectors in some of its advertisements suggests that people find their presence a positive thing.

Punggol, Singapore.

Advertisement for Housing & Development Board (HDB) housing near Lorong Halus Bridge, Punggol.

However, it’s almost impossible to imagine that the park connectors would be enormously useful for doing most errands. Even aside from the fact that most trips will end with a climb, the park connectors rarely constitute logical paths to shopping areas, transit stations, or housing. I didn’t see a lot of park connector users who seemed to be on their way to work or who were carrying shopping bags. You do see such people along the park connectors like the Siglap Park Connector that have been inserted into older neighborhoods near Singapore’s center and that are much more likely to take you directly to subway stations, stores, and housing.

The Siglap Park Connector, which runs along an older drainage canal through long-established neighborhoods in southeastern Singapore. It’s pretty clear that, unlike the park connectors in Punggol and Sengkang, this park connector attracts numerous commuters and people doing local errands.

It’s easy to see how the park connectors improve lives for residents of Punggol and Sengkang who want to get a little exercise. I wish all city neighborhoods had them. It’s a little hard to see how they contribute substantially to making Singapore a “car-lite” society. This is not a secret to Singapore’s intelligent and thoughtful planners. A pedestrian path (a “green finger”) from the Punggol Waterway to central Punggol is planned for the future.3 The idea is that this will help integrate the park connectors into the street fabric of Punggol. You’d still usually have to go out of your way to use them, however.

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

Smoking restrictions on Orchard Road, Singapore

Posted on February 17, 2019 by Christopher Winters

Orchard Road is Singapore’s main shopping street and one of its top tourist destinations. It’s probably fair to say it’s one of the most successful commercial areas anywhere. A recent survey rated Orchard Road the best shopping street in the world.

Orchard Road shopping takes place at approximately 40 malls and in many smaller-scale establishments spread over something like 2.5 km (including an extension along Tanglin Road). There are underground connections along the street, but, in the Southeast Asian context, Orchard Road is perhaps most noteworthy as a pedestrian street. During business hours it is always crowded. There can be long waits at traffic lights, and traversing one major cross street—Scotts Road—requires a detour into a tunnel, but Orchard Road is probably more pedestrian-friendly than any other Southeast Asian street of comparable length.

Orchard Road, Singapore

Pedestrians along Orchard Road, Singapore.

Most of Orchard Road was recently (January 1) declared a no-smoking zone.

No smoking sign, Orchard Road, Singapore.

Bus stop sign Orchard Road, Singapore.

I walked up and down Orchard Road several times at the end of January and can report that there were few if any violators. There are some designated smoking areas a little off the main right of way, but their location assures that there isn’t much of a smoke problem for most visitors.

I could be wrong, but I believe that Orchard Road is the first big-city shopping street in the world to ban smoking.4 In general, Asia was slow to impose smoking restrictions, but several Asian cities—Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok—have now become among the world’s leaders in this area. Not only is smoking banned in air-conditioned, indoor public places; it’s also banned in many parks. And Singapore has really taken the lead in restricting smoking on its major shopping street.

Posted in Urban | Tagged | 2 Comments

Change in population by “race” and Hispanic status, Chicago area, 2010-2013/2017

Posted on January 6, 2019 by Christopher Winters

The Census Bureau released the 2013/2017 American Community Survey (ACS) tract-level data last month. I’ve used these data to map tract-level changes in population by “race” and Hispanic status between 2010 and 2013/2017 for the Chicago area. These maps are comparable to the 2000-2010, 1990-2000, and 1980-1990 maps that I made while working at the University of Chicago Library’s Map Collection and to the 2010-2012/2016 and  2010-2011/2015 maps that I put on this blog one and two years ago. There have been only minor changes over the last year, so I’ve included some of the same prose on this post that I did a year ago, modified where appropriate.

Note the following:

[1] ACS data are for five-year periods, not single years. The median year of 2013/2017 data is 2015, and it’s tempting to view these maps as a kind of mid-Census report of changes, but this wouldn’t be completely accurate. In fact (as confusing as this may be) they show changes between April 1 2010 and the 2013/2017 period.

[2] ACS data are not as accurate as decennial census data or the long-form data they replace. They are based on a sample, and it’s a much smaller sample than was used to compile the long-form data. The margins of error can be huge, especially for smaller numbers. Thus, at the tract level, these data are at best only rough approximations. The sample sizes are large enough so that general trends should be meaningful, but it’s perhaps best not to pay too much attention to the figures for individual census tracts.

[3] The “race” data for non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic African-Americans, and non-Hispanic Asians and Pacific Islanders include only people who classified themselves as being of a single race. This covers the overwhelming majority of respondents. It’s possible, however, that including people who identified themselves as being “multiracial” would have affected the results substantially for a few tracts in the city of Chicago. The question of just how to apportion these data, however, is not one that has an obvious answer.

[4] The boundary of the city of Chicago is shown on these maps by a heavy black line. Freeways are shown in blue. Tract boundaries are shown in dark gray on the vicinity maps. The location of dots within tracts is random.

Some general conclusions:

The Chicago area gained very few people between 2010 and 2013/2017, but there were some noticeable changes in the distribution of its population by “race” and Hispanic status. Most distributional shifts continued those of earlier decades, but there were some subtle changes as well.

[1] There continued to be a substantial increase in the number white people in the city of Chicago, especially in the area around the Loop and on the North and Northwest Sides. Older, formerly mostly white inner suburbs (as well as some “bungalow belt” districts in the outer city) continued to lose some of their white population. There was also a modest increase in white population in certain outer suburbs despite the fact that there wasn’t that much outer-suburb greenfield construction in this post-recession period.

[2] Problem-ridden African-American neighborhoods like Englewood continued to lose population. Healthier, mostly African-American neighborhoods like Bronzeville continued to gain population (including some non-African-American population). There was also a gain in African-American population in many suburban areas, especially south of Chicago but elsewhere as well. There have also been African-American gains here and there in the city of Chicago. for example in West Rogers Park and in the Southwest Side “bungalow belt.” Many of the areas into which African-Americans have been moving are majority white. Chicago continues, slowly, to desegregate.

[3] Asian(-American) population declined in some of the Far North Side enclaves where Asians had concentrated in earlier decades, but it increased in some other tracts not far away. There was a continued growth of Asian population near the Loop and west of Chinatown—in Bridgeport and McKinley Park, for example—and in many suburban areas, especially in the West and Northwest. But, except for Chinatown, no part of the Chicago area is nearly all Asian. Middle-class and wealthy Asians tend increasingly to live among white people of comparable economic status.

[4] Some traditionally Hispanic neighborhoods—Little Village, for example—lost Hispanic population, as did a few gentrifying North Side neighborhoods—Logan Square and parts of West Town, for example. But Hispanic population grew substantially in a great many other places, for example, further north and west on the North Side, further west on the South Side, and throughout the suburbs. There was apparently an influx of Hispanics in many of the outer-city and inner-suburban tracts where non-Hispanic white population was down.

Even more clearly than a year ago, it’s possible to summarize these maps by saying that white people, who traditionally were more inclined to flee to the suburbs than any other group, are more and more favoring the city, while minority groups, historically disposed (or forced) to take up inner-city residence, are increasingly moving outward. This is a fairly major change in the character of Chicago urbanism.

Here’s a set of maps of Chicago and vicinity:

Dot maps, showing population change by race and Hispanic status, 2010-2013/2017, Chicago and vicinityAnd here’s a set of maps of the Chicago region:

Dot maps, showing population change by race and Hispanic status, 2010-2013/2017, Chicago region

 

Posted in Urban | Tagged | Leave a comment

Dubai becomes a little more walkable

Posted on December 24, 2018 by Christopher Winters

Dubai is known as a very car-oriented place.5 Exhibit number one is Sheikh Zayed Road, a 16-to-24-lane limited-access highway that extends through nearly the whole length of Dubai’s post-1990s neighborhoods including those containing most of the city’s famous skyscrapers.

Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Sheikh Zayed Road from the pedestrian bridge built to allow Metro passengers to cross it. Dubai Metro is on the right, Dubai Tram is on the left. For the first twenty years of the widened road’s existence, it was practically impossible to cross it on foot.

Pedestrian needs were the last thing on its creators’ minds when it was built, and for several decades Sheikh Zayed Road was all but uncrossable on foot. A New Yorker article from 2005 suggested that Sheikh Zayed Road was “as if Fifth Avenue had been allowed to evolve into the Long Island Expressway.”6 Sheikh Zayed Road is not the only problem faced by pedestrians in Dubai. The fact is that, if you try to walk just about anywhere in one of the newer parts of the city, you will frequently come to places where the sidewalk ends or where cross-traffic makes it impossible to move forward.

Near Burjuman station, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Pedestrian-unfriendly commercial urban street. Southwest of Burjuman station, Dubai Metro in the background. Photograph taken February 2010.

In fact, as I was reminded in the course of a recent trip to Dubai (my fourth), this stereotype exaggerates. The older parts of Dubai—especially Deira on the right (northeast) bank of Dubai Creek but also Bur Dubai across the Creek—predate Dubai’s massive automobilization. Deira isn’t particularly old–there were just a few dozen buildings there in the 19th century—but, even without old buildings, it does a pretty good job of functioning like a traditional Muslim city.

Suq, Deira, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Commercial street in Deira.

Its streets are narrow and irregular. There are small street-level shops lining many streets. Some streets have been pedestrianized, and a few pedestrianized blocks have even acquired rooves.

Gold suq, Deira, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

The gold market in Deira. Covered section is in the background.

The latter mostly serve a tourist market that seems to be doing pretty well. Across the Creek in Bur Dubai, there are even some tiny neighborhoods—Shindagha and al Fahidi—where traditional urban buildings have been restored or (I think more often) reconstructed, and these neighborhoods are even more pedestrian-friendly. There is a path along the Creek on which motor traffic is forbidden, and it gets quite a lot of use.

Walkway, Shindagha, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

The walkway along Dubai Creek in Shindagha, Burj Khalifa (8 km away) in background.

Even the outer parts of Deira, like the area around the Riqqa Metro station, where the streets are wide and straight, have busy sidewalks, full of restaurants and hotels and apartment and office buildings built flush with the street. It’s hard to imagine a more pedestrian-friendly area.

Al Rigga Road, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Along Al Rigga Road, outside Deira proper.

The fact that, faced with draconian fines, drivers do respect pedestrians—they stop at red lights and even at crosswalks—helps enormously. Deira and Bur Dubai are much more pleasant—and safer—for pedestrians than just about any other places in the Arab world.

Even in the much larger parts of Dubai that have mostly been developed over the last thirty or so years and that really were built mostly to accommodate the automobile there have been some developments over the last decade that have in some gentle ways changed things a little.

The most obvious change is that a Metro was built, complementing an already existing pretty good public bus system. The first Metro line opened in 2009, the second in 2011.

Map, rail lines and pedestrian facilities, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Map of Dubai and vicinity focusing on rail lines and pedestrian facilities. GIS data from Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified considerably, chiefly by the addition of some recently built walkways. The database includes pedestrian facilities like bridges across streets and extremely short alleyways that may be somewhat confusing in a map at this scale, especially in the older parts of the city, but the broad patterns should be clear.

The Metro was constructed in every way to modern standards. For a time Dubai’s Metro was the world’s longest driverless system. The stations (even those on the elevated portions of the line) are all air-conditioned.

Dubai Metro, United Arab Emirates.

The Al Ghubaiba subway station, Dubai Metro.

Trains come along every couple of minutes during peak times. The system is generally considered a great success. There are approximately 350,000 riders a day (in an urban area of maybe three million). There are definitely some issues for people who want to walk to the stations that are situated in the outer part of the city. But these have been at least mitigated. When the Metro was being constructed, it built enclosed, air-conditioned bridges over the roads it follows, even Sheikh Zayed Road. You don’t have to buy a Metro ticket to use these bridges. There are also additional pedestrian bridges, typically not built as part of Metro construction, that take you to destinations close to but not right at stations. The most spectacular of these is a 1-km enclosed bridge between the Metro’s Burj Khalifa station and Dubai Mall (said to be the world’s largest). Anyone who doubted the willingness of Dubai’s residents to walk anywhere would be amazed by the sheer number of people who use this bridge. Cynics would say that it’s no coincidence that Dubai’s busiest walkway is air-conditioned, includes moving sidewalks, and takes you to a mall.

Covered bridge to Dubai Mall. Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

The covered (and air-conditioned) bridge between the Burj Khalifa Metro station and Dubai Mall. Photograph taken October 2015.

A “tram” system was added in 2014. This light-rail line complements the Metro, intersecting with it in two places and serving several new developments in the Jumeirah area. There is also a monorail to Palm Jumeirah. Neither the tram nor the monorail has attracted a huge number of riders. The price of the (private) monorail may be a factor. The fare is 15 AED (USD 4.08). (The fares on the Metro and tram are reasonable.)

Even more significant (and contrary to every stereotype about Dubai), the government has embarked on a program of building walking and bicycling paths and urging their use. These are all separate from the road network. As in many other automobile-oriented cities, it has seemed easiest to build new pedestrian facilities that have nothing to do with the existing road network rather than to try to improve sidewalks and street crossings and perhaps to impede traffic. The catch is that, as in most places, the new pedestrian facilities don’t fit together very well or necessarily permit walking to places where one would want to go.

The first large-scale construction of pedestrian facilities may have occurred in semi-private developments in a part of Dubai known as the Dubai Marina.7 The most impressive single development here is Jumeirah Beach Residence, said to be the largest new residential complex in the world (2010). This area was marketed particularly to Europeans, and the advertisements endlessly extol its “7 km of landscaped public walkways.”

Ad for the Marina’s walkways. This ad is plastered over nearly every construction fence in the development. It’s clear that the project’s builders believe this to be a selling point. Photograph taken October 2015.

Most of these paths follow a waterway that connects with the Gulf at both ends.

Marina, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Walkway in the Marina.

There is also a street called the Walk (2008), which has a wide sidewalk and only a narrow automobile lane.

The Walk, Marina, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

The Walk, Marina, Dubai.

The street is lined with restaurants (mostly North American fast-food restaurants putting on a very elegant face) and seems to attract quite a lot of business even during Dubai’s hot season. In other words, the developers have done what they could to create a congenial walking environment here.

Several other new developments in southwestern Dubai have followed suit and have incorporated walking facilities into their planning. Note all the green on the lower left of the map.

Pedestrian paths have also been built (this time mostly by the Roads and Transport Authority) along beaches. There’s a 6.8 km “Jumeirah Jogging Trail” between roughly the Burj al Arab and the new Dubai Water Canal dating from 2014.

Jumeirah Jogging Track, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Jumeirah Jogging Track. Its relative emptiness is typical.

It continues in two separate shorter segments south of the Dubai Water Canal. It attracts both runners and walkers—and a few (not quite legal) cyclists.

The massive Dubai Water Canal project has led to the construction of possibly the most ambitious pedestrian development of all. The Dubai Water Canal is in effect an extension of Dubai Creek southwest from its former terminus in the Nature Reserve. It passes southwest of “Downtown Dubai” and then turns back toward the Gulf, passing by the new Business Bay, a mammoth development of skyscraper office and apartment buildings. There are walkways on both sides of the Water Canal and some pedestrian bridges too (latest segment opened, 2018). The walkways are impressive, but I couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be very few people using them when I was there.

Dubai Water Canal, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Dubai Water Canal walkway with lone runner and cyclist. Note “Downtown Dubai” and Business Bay in the background and the construction site to the left. Despite Dubai’s reputation for being a high-rise city, most middle-class people probably live in two-story single-family houses more or less like those shown in the middle distance.

Runners, walkers, and cyclists were greatly outnumbered by the mostly South Asian laborers employed to maintain the paths. The paths did get a little more crowded after sundown. There are even a few lone women joggers after dark, a real sign that this is a safe area.

Dubai Water Canal, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

There are a few more users along the Dubai Water Canal late in the afternoon and even after dark.

It also needs to be said that many sites along the Dubai Water Canal are still undeveloped. It’s often mentioned that this billion-dollar project has inspired ten billion dollars in development work, and, when this work is further along, more people may use the Canal walkway. But it’s clear that the development of the Dubai Water Canal walkway has not turned very many residents of the housing developments on its banks into avid urban pedestrians. This appears especially true of Asian residents of these developments. I couldn’t help but notice that most users of the walkway are ethnic Westerners, largely expatriates.

The walkway along the Dubai Water Canal is supposed to be extended to the old Dubai Creek someday, but, for the moment, it stops where there’s a tangle of limited-access highways at the edge of “Downtown Dubai.”8

Dubai Water Canal, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

End of Dubai Water Canal walkway.

There are also quite a number of new cycling paths at the edge of the city, which I haven’t visited. There are supposed to be 500 km of “cycling tracks” by 2021 and 850 km by 2030.9 Note that Dubai has a pretty good record of actually building what it sets out to build.

It’s quite striking how much Dubai has had a change of heart when it comes to its urban development policies. Dubai’s urban decision-making is not at all transparent, but what is clear is that its government is acutely aware of foreign comments and completely au courant with current trends in planning. I’m sure that there is wide awareness of the fact that Western planning agencies no longer think that accommodating the automobile should be the most important goal of urban planners. There is also the issue that Dubai’s government loves to astonish the world, and it has chosen to do so in part with its decisions about urban architecture and planning. The emphasis on turning an automobile-oriented place into one more congenial for pedestrians and cyclists is surely one manifestation of this tendency. The fact that Dubai is competing with Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, and other places—many of which have their own schemes for tilting modal splits away from the automobile—has certainly also been a factor in the shift in emphasis.

 

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

New streetcar lines in St. Louis and Milwaukee

Posted on December 24, 2018 by Christopher Winters

Two Midwestern cities—St. Louis and Milwaukee—both acquired new streetcar lines in November, and I went and rode them last week.

The lines are comparable in size. Both are miniscule given that they’re in urban areas that are dozens of kilometers across. The St. Louis line is 3.5 km (2.2 miles) long, the Milwaukee line 3.3 km (2.1 miles). Here are maps, drawn on the same scale:

Map, Loop Trolley, MetroLink, Delmar Loop, Central West End, Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri

The Loop Trolley in context, showing MetroLink, Forest Park, the Central West End, and the Delmar Loop.

Map, Milwaukee streetcar, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Milwaukee streetcar in context, showing the location of some of the neighborhoods it passes through.

The lines weren’t cheap to build. The St. Louis line is said to have cost $51,000,000, the Milwaukee line approximately $125,000,000. The difference is surely connected with the fact that the latter line is double-tracked throughout and has more rolling stock and much more elaborate stations.

Neither line is speedy. Each was taking approximately twenty minutes for a one-way trip; average speed was thus something like 10.5 km (6.5 miles) per hour. One factor here is that stations come along frequently. Both lines have ten stations in each direction (the Milwaukee line runs part way on two parallel streets and claims to have 18 stations in all).

Both lines really are for the most part streetcar lines. The St. Louis line runs in traffic as it passes through the “Delmar Loop.”

Loop Trolley St. Louis Missouri

The Loop Trolley in the Delmar Loop.

East of there it consists of a single reserved track, either in the middle of or at the edge of a street, but it still must wait for red lights.

Loop Trolley, Delmar Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri

The Loop Trolley on Delmar Boulevard east of the Delmar Loop proper.

The Milwaukee line runs in traffic the whole way except at its terminuses and for a few meters under a freeway. It too spends several minutes of each trip waiting for red lights.

Milwaukee streetcar north of downtown

The Milwaukee streetcar running south along N. Jackson St.

The two lines in some ways are quite different.

The St. Louis route—known as the Loop Trolley–seems to have been created chiefly to give a boost to the commercial district at its western end called the Delmar Loop (or just “the Loop” in St. Louis English). This is a congenial traditional commercial district that, these days, serves chiefly as a restaurant row. It is heavily patronized by students and staff from nearby Washington University, but in fact, people visit the street from all over the St. Louis area, which is extraordinarily short of congenial traditional urban commercial streets. The Loop’s advertising proclaims it one of “one of the 10 great streets in America.” The truth is that, on its own terms, the Loop may at best be one of America’s thousand greatest streets. There are many hundreds of commercial streets in New York that are livelier, and probably just as many spread among Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco. Even in St. Louis, nearby Euclid Avenue, in the Central West End, has many more pedestrians and more interesting restaurants and much more interesting architecture than the Delmar Loop and appears to be thriving these days in a way it’s never really done in the thirty odd years I’ve been visiting it periodically. The Loop seems pretty quiet in comparison. It’s quite possible that the presence of the Loop Trolley may help redress the balance. The new cars, built in an antique style, fit the Loop’s image as an old-fashioned, urban, pedestrian-oriented street. (And the shiny wooden interior of the cars is actually quite attractive.)

Inside the Loop Trolley.

The St. Louis line, short one of its two cars, was running only every 45 minutes or so when I was there, and there is no “next train” information available either in the stations or online, so the chances are that walking the whole route would be faster than waiting for a train. There is, of course, the issue that a transit line that runs every 45 minutes and, for the moment, only eight or eleven hours a day four days a week isn’t much of a transit line. As many observers have pointed out,10 it’s hard to defend the Loop Trolley as urban transportation. It serves two MetroLink stations and runs in the same streets as several bus lines that offer faster and more frequent service.11 The fact that it doesn’t accept transfers from Metro, the St. Louis transit agency, considerably limits its potential. There were only a handful of passengers on the runs that I observed.

It must be added that the Loop trolley isn’t quite as redundant as it first seems. There are a couple of dead blocks between the Loop proper and the Delmar Loop MetroLink station. This might seem trivial in New York, but St. Louis remains a city with an extraordinarily high crime rate; its murder rate by most measures is the highest of any big U.S. city—higher than the murder rates in Honduras or Venezuela. The Loop proper seems to be quite a safe place, but the nearby ghetto isn’t, and people in St. Louis are conscious of crime in a way that people in, say, New York no longer are. The ability to travel through a few possibly dangerous blocks in the Loop Trolley might add to people’s security (although the prospect of a 45-minute wait for the thing to come undermines this pretty much completely). But, again, the line was mostly built, I’m sure, to add to the Loop’s aesthetic appeal, and it’s quite possible to argue that it really does do that.

The Milwaukee streetcar (“the Hop”) is very different. It’s more like recently opened streetcar lines in Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Kansas City, and Oklahoma City in that it connects downtown with a nearby destination or two. In Milwaukee’s case, the most important non-downtown destination is the Intermodal Center, which incorporates the Amtrak station. The Milwaukee streetcar also grazes the “Historic Third Ward,” an old industrial area that’s become a fashionable residential and entertainment district. Its northern terminus is in the socially complex but mostly upper-middle-class Lower East Side residential area. It could be argued that the streetcar’s route doesn’t serve Milwaukee’s downtown very well. The heart of downtown Milwaukee runs east-west along Wisconsin Avenue, across a freeway and three blocks north of the Intermodal Center. This is where most of the major stores, hotels, and office buildings are located. The Milwaukee streetcar has stops at Wisconsin Avenue, but they’re a couple of blocks east of what would once have been identified as the 100% location. It’s likely though that, if the streetcar had run along Wisconsin Avenue, it would have encountered traffic problems. There seem to be few problems on the less trafficked streets it does run along.

The line uses modern streetcar equipment. It’s scheduled to run every fifteen minutes and seemed to be coming close to doing so when I was there. There are no countdown clocks in the stations, but schedules are posted. The trains were most certainly not crowded when I was in Milwaukee, but some runs had a couple of dozen passengers. Still, the cars were far from full.

Inside the Milwaukee streetcar.

The fact that the line is temporarily free and still a novelty is probably helping to build passenger loads. Current plans are to begin charging a dollar in a year and to keep fares separate from those of the Milwaukee County Transit System buses. I can imagine use of the streetcar plummeting when fares are implemented.

There are proposals to extend the Milwaukee streetcar route network, perhaps into the poverty-stricken areas northwest of downtown, perhaps up toward the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The trouble with this idea, of course, is that a street-running streetcar with no signal preemption is likely to be slower than a bus. You can’t justify building a short traditional streetcar line on the grounds that it will speed up transportation; it won’t. It is possible that the streetcars will add to the aesthetic appeal of the neighborhoods through which they pass. In an era when places are expected to compete with each other, this isn’t a trivial reason for building streetcar lines, but it’s not the one usually stressed by their proponents.

Note added 1 December 2020. The Delmar Loop Trolley in St. Louis ceased operating after December 29, 2019. Its rolling stock continued to be unreliable, and it never did attract many passengers. Efforts to restore service have so far come to nothing. The Pandemic, of course, hasn’t helped.

Note added 18 July 2022. See reader communication below. The Delmar Loop Trolley has resumed some service.

Posted in Urban, Transportation, Rail infrastructure | Tagged , | 1 Comment

“Transit villages” in Hong Kong that predate the use of the term “transit village”

Posted on December 2, 2018 by Christopher Winters

Hong Kong has four quite distinct urban rail systems:

[1] the MTR (Mass Transit Railway), which consists of approximately 231 km of modern urban rail lines that run throughout the special administrative region; it incorporates the formerly separate lines of the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR);

[2] the streetcar line along the north end of Hong Kong Island that features (wonderfully antiquated!) double-decker trams on approximately 13 km of routes;

[3] the short 1-km funicular railroad that runs up toward Victoria Peak (the oldest of these rail systems);

and

[4] a light-rail system in the northwestern part of the New Territories that includes approximately 36 km of routes.

Most visitors to Hong Kong become familiar with the first three of these systems, but few are even aware of the latter, although, in the history of world urbanism in the last forty years, it’s arguably of some importance.

Hong Kong’s light-rail system was built in conjunction with the building of several of the “new towns” in the New Territories, specifically Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and an addition to the older settlement of Yuen Long.12 Hong Kong’s new towns were first planned in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a period when the older built-up parts of Hong Kong—southern Kowloon and the northern part of Hong Kong Island—had become incredibly crowded; a few parts of Kowloon were said to be the most densely populated urban places in the world. The territory’s British authorities decided on an ambitious scheme of building enormous new towns in several of the flatter parts of the New Territories to house much of the territory’s population.13 There were new towns throughout the New Territories. Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long are all in its northwestern corner. They are arguably among the first newly-built urban areas of the last fifty years that were designed quite explicitly around rail transit facilities. Light-rail transit was planned from the beginning in these three new towns. It’s true that the rail lines didn’t begin to operate until 1988, several years after the first buildings went up, but space for lines was reserved, and the planning of the towns is said to have taken the presence and location of the rail lines into account. They were, in other words, “transit villages” or “TODs” years before these terms came into wide use. While it could be argued that, with transit use high just about everywhere, all of Hong Kong is a kind of transit village, in most cases, rail lines were planned and built only long after areas were settled. The sequence was different in the three new towns of the northwest New Territories.

A few basics:

[1] “New towns” were an important concept in British planning circles in the years after World War II. Several new towns had been built in Southeast England in (roughly) the 1970s. The largest of these was Milton Keynes. New towns were supposed to be reasonably independent of nearby large cities, and a great deal of attention was therefore paid to internal circulation. Hong Kong’s new towns were naturally influenced by British practice. As in Britain, there was a sense when Hong Kong’s new towns were being planned that travel within the towns would be overwhelmingly more important than travel elsewhere; the towns were supposed to be “self-sufficient.”14 The inclusion of light-rail lines in Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long was an attempt to make self-sufficient places function smoothly.

[2] The belief that internal transport would be more important than connections with other places turned out to be incorrect in Hong Kong (as, arguably, it did in Britain as well). The new towns were supposed to be the site of a huge number of jobs, and they all (especially Tuen Mun) included industrial districts, but there were never as many jobs as plans called for. Furthermore, as the factories that were built in Hong Kong’s new towns closed or reduced staff due to competition from the Mainland in the 1980s and 1990s, more and more of the residents of the new towns found themselves commuting all over Hong Kong. At first they mostly did so by bus, but, eventually (2003), West Rail, an extension of the KCR that was incorporated into the MTR rail transit system in 2007, was built. This circuitous but unusually speedy line provided service to central Kowloon as well as connections to other MTR rail lines. The LRT increasingly became a feeder to West Rail. Here’s a map (on which the still numerous bus lines in the area aren’t shown):

Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, Yuen Long, Hong Kong

Map of the northwestern New Territories, Hong Kong, focusing on rail transit lines and pedestrian facilities. GIS data from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, somewhat modified.

[3] Hong Kong’s new towns are substantial places. In 2016 Tuen Mun had a population of 487,404, Tin Shui Wai 286,232, and Yuen Long 160,010 (total: 933,549).15 The northwest New Territories’ light rail lines are busy. In recent years, they have carried approximately 489,000 passengers a day.16

I made a point of visiting Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long on a recent trip to Hong Kong. Except for a quick ride on West Rail a few years previously, I’d never been to the northwest New Territories. I was particularly interested as always in what these places looked and felt like, and especially in finding out whether new towns built along light-rail lines had distinct characteristics.

We tend to associate new transit-oriented development with many of the features that are fashionable in planning today, for example, calmed traffic, bicycle lanes, and, in general, the re-creation of the traditional street, with housing that’s built flush with the sidewalk, often with ground-floor stores. I was struck by how little Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long conform to these ideals. Instead, they reflect the city-planning notions of the era when they were built (or, as one would expect of a colony, the period just before), and even some of the now deeply unfashionable notions associated with urban theorists of the first half of the 20th century. Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long feature, for example, tower-in-a-park housing, the siting of commerce in special areas away from streets, the separation of pedestrians and traffic, and a concern for keeping automobile traffic flowing. Their geography is based on a rigid zoning regime that has come to seem a little passé. In this sense, they turned out to be much like Hong Kong’s other 20th-century new towns.

Here’s a map just of Tuen Mun that shows building footprints and that will give some idea of the texture of the largest of these places. Neighboring buildings do not touch in Tuen Mun, and few buildings are flush with streets.

Rail lines (subway and light rail) and pedestrian facilities, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

Map of Tuen Mun, emphasizing rail transit lines, pedestrian facilities, and building footprints. The largest buildings are mostly factories (they also include the platform on which the Town Centre sits). Note how the built-up area ends abruptly where the land slopes upward on its western and eastern edges. GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, somewhat modified.

Except for the older parts of Yuen Long, the other new towns have analogous internal geographies. They are most certainly not much like traditional cities in which buildings cover almost the entirety of small blocks, and they are most definitely not the products of a mindset that has anything to do with “new urbanism.”

The “Town Centre” of Tuen Mun, for example, is positively Corbusien. It’s built on a platform. Individual buildings have space around them. The train line, roads, loading docks, and parking facilities are under the platform.

Town Centre, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

Tuen Mun’s Town Centre. The area shown has several government buildings. Commerce, although separate, is not far away.

It seemed like a healthy, bustling place to me when I was there, although it was most definitely not crowded.

Unlike in Corbusier’s (in)famous plan voisin for central Paris, the platform doesn’t extend much beyond the CBD. If you want to walk between Tuen Mun’s central platform and nearby residential areas, you have to go downhill. You don’t need to look far for help; directional signs are common:

Town Centre, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong.

Directional sign for pedestrians, near Tuen Mun’s Town Centre.

You’ll be directed along paths that avoid main roads. Many pedestrian paths are located between buildings, parallel to, but away from major roads.

Walking path along LRT line in Tuen Mun. This is one of the few places in Tuen Mun where an LRT line doesn’t follow a road.

There are tunnels under major cross streets.

Tuen Mun, Hong Kong.

Pedestrian path tunnel, Tuen Mun

Sometimes pedestrians are expected to take bridges across main roads. There are usually elevators for those who don’t want to climb stairs or ramps. Still, clearly, the automobile is being “privileged” here despite the extremely low levels of automobile ownership in the new towns (this is true elsewhere in Hong Kong as well17).

Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

Tuen Mun Heung Sze Wui Road in Tuen Mun. Note the pedestrian bridge. There are sidewalks parallel to this major road, but they are set back from the street. Clearly, the road came first, although it’s probably used by fewer people than the light-rail line or the pedestrian paths.

The new towns all have a great deal of recreational space. There is a substantial amount of parkland that incorporates heavily used walking paths, sometimes with separated lanes for cyclists.

Tuen Mun Park, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong.

Tuen Mun Park. Note the (lightly used) separate bicycle lane.

In addition, there’s a walkway along most of the length of the elevated West Rail tracks and quite a nice seaside “promenade,” apparently built as part of Hong Kong’s relatively recent project to build “promenades” along all the coasts it could.

Tuen Mun, Hong Kong.

Tuen Mun’s coastal promenade. The structure on the right is a levee that separates the promenade from the Pearl River Delta.

Most of the commerce in the new towns occurs in small- or medium-scale shops in buildings that typically don’t face roads with traffic. These tend to be near train stations.

Tuen Mun. Hong Kong.

Shopping center in Tuen Mun.

The light-rail lines mostly follow roads. To get to the stations, passengers must often cross busy streets.

LRT, Tin Shui Wai, Hong Kong

The LRT along a major road in Tin Shui Wai. Note the crosswalk and pedestrian bridges (from one of which this photo was made.)

In only a few places (see the third photo above) do they take shortcuts away from roads.

Only in the older parts of Yuen Long that existed before the nearby new town was built is a light-rail line located in the middle of a street. In this case, it’s in the middle of what appears to be a successful traditional commercial street, which is far more crowded than the Corbusien center of Tuen Mun.

Tai Tong Road, Yuen Long, Hong Kong.

Tai Tong Road in Yuen Long. Except for the LRT in the middle of the street, this part of Yuen Long resembles mixed commercial/residential areas in the older parts of Hong Kong. This district was the site of an old market town long before Yuen Long new town was established nearby.

The light-rail lines are definitely not “state-of-the-art.” Speed is modest. The trains stop often for red lights, and stations are generally close together. It takes perhaps six times as long to get from Tuen Men to Yuen Long by light rail as it does by West Rail. Still, it’s not a bad experience. The one- or two-car trains are usually only moderately crowded, and the stations all have good lighting, reasonable seating, protection from rain, and countdown clocks. Trains come along every few minutes, although the extraordinarily complicated service patterns assure a longer wait for many.

Tai Tong Road, Yuen Long, Hong Kong

Tai Tong Road LRT station, Yuen Long.

In one respect, the new towns are quite un-Corbusien, and not at all like the low-rise English new towns either.18 Their housing consists almost entirely of enormous multi-unit apartment buildings. Several buildings are forty or fifty stories tall. This is true both of public housing (the majority of units in Tuen Mun and Tin Shui Wai19) and the slightly more luxurious private housing.

I don’t know how much the height of buildings in Hong Kong’s new towns was discussed by their builders, but Hong Kong had little choice but to build upward. It just doesn’t have much flat land given its population of nearly eight million.20

Despite the overwhelming predominance of extreme examples of a type of housing that’s associated in Western countries with urban dysfunction, Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long are by all accounts extremely safe places. To an outsider, they seem congenial enough. Although few rich people live in these new towns, the areas seem reasonably prosperous; there are lots of people in pedestrian zones; and the central role of transit and walking makes them ecologically sound.

These are definitely not, however, among the most prestigious places to live in Hong Kong. There is no reason to think that this has anything to do with the area’s light-rail system. The causes are the new towns’ location and the generally modest status of their inhabitants. Tin Shui Wai in particular has a reputation for being downscale, in part because so many of its inhabitants are said to be relatively recent immigrants from the Mainland (or their children); native-born Hong Kong residents can be rather scornful of Mainland Chinese. There are in fact some objective problems in these places, notably the absence of local jobs and the cost in time and money to travel to central Hong Kong.21 There may also be a certain amount of social anomie.22 Shu-Mei Huang reports in a recent book that the inhabitants of Sham Shui Po, a very modest neighborhood in northern Kowloon, fiercely resisted being moved to Tin Shui Wai even though the move would certainly have led to an improvement in the quality of their housing. They preferred to stay in one of the grittier parts of Hong Kong’s central city. They had friends and relatives there, and they were close to places they wanted to get to.23 Middle-class “professional” people who have a little money (and few if any children) also tend to prefer to live in or near the city center. If they have a lot of money they might opt to live in the hills above the center or, for example, in quasi-suburban Kowloon Tong. No doubt the short commute is a major reason for this preference. I can’t prove it but suspect that an appreciation of inner-city bustle may be a factor too. In any case, living in the northwest New Territories is not high on very many peoples’ wish list.

It’s not clear that daily life in Tuen Men, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long is tremendously different from daily life in the new towns built in roughly the same years that lack light rail. All of Hong Kong’s new towns are extraordinarily transit-oriented. Census data suggest that there are only minor differences in journey-to-work mode between different non-central parts of Hong Kong. According to the 2016 census, 79.1% of Tuen Mun’s working population took public transit to work, as did 78.4% of the working population of the Yuen Long/Tin Shui Wai area. The figure for Hong Kong as a whole was 77.6%.24 It’s just that some of the new towns use buses for local transit rather than light rail. Some of the other new towns—Sha Tin, for example—consist of an even narrower corridor than, say, Tuen Mun and get by just fine with MTR rail lines. The presence of light rail in the new towns of the northwest New Territories probably does assure a more comfortable, less polluting, and (to many of us) aesthetically more pleasing ride. Perhaps that’s enough to justify its existence.

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

Was Chicago still building “too much” in 2017?

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Christopher Winters

I put up posts in 2016 and 2017 in which I pointed out that, given Chicago’s continued population losses, there was an enormous amount of building in the Chicago urban area, or at least an enormous amount of building-permit filing.

Here are two new graphs that show exactly the same data for 2017, a year later than the data in last year’s post.25 Like the earlier data, these figures are for new, privately-owned housing units only.

This chart shows the relationship between residential building permits issued in 2017 and estimated change in population from 2016 to 2017 for American metropolitan statistical areas:

Building permits, 2017, vs. change in population, 2016-2017, for United States metropolitan areas.

And this chart shows the relationship between the valuation (in thousands of dollars) of these 2017 residential building permits and (as in the earlier graph) estimated change in population from 2016 to 2017 for American metropolitan statistical areas:

Building permit valuations, 2017, vs. change in population, 2016-2017, for United States metropolitan areas.

These charts look very much like the earlier ones. There is, in general, a very high correlation between the number of building permits issued and the change in population (.906, r-squared = .822) as well as between the value of these building permits and the change in population (.909, r-squared = .826), but a few urban areas are outliers. Chicago is arguably the greatest outlier of all. Its “residual” from the regression line is larger than that of any other urban area in proportion to the number and value of its permits.

The simple explanation for the Chicago anomaly seems to be that, while some parts of the Chicago area are indeed losing population, there is considerable growth close to the city center and in the few places on the North Side where large-scale construction is possible. There is an enormous amount of building in these areas. (The earlier posts contain a bit more analysis, as well as some caveats.)

There’s another obvious partial explanation for Chicago’s apparently anomalous showing. Note that all three of America’s largest urban areas—New York and Los Angeles as well as Chicago—have consistently been building more than their relatively modest population growth suggests that they “should” be doing. This is not surprising. Larger metropolitan areas, other things being equal, are likely to do more building than smaller ones. Even in a badly depressed, declining city, older housing stock will sometimes get replaced. And none of America’s three largest urban areas, even Chicago, could be described as depressed.

I set up regressions in which housing permits and housing-permit valuations were dependent variables, and 2016-2017 population change and 2017 population were independent variables.26 Both independent variables turned out to be highly significant. Population change was much more significant than population. Still, adding the latter to the equation increased the correlation considerably (for the two independent variables and permits, correlation = .976 and r-squared = .953; for permit valuations, correlation = .969 and r-squared = .939).

The correlations came as close to 1 as correlations normally do in real-life situations, but there were still some modest “residuals.”

On the basis of their 2016-2017 population change and their 2017 population, the following urban areas had “too many” building permits (these are the highest ten out of 382 urban areas;27 the figures show the number of excess permits):

Dallas 7994
Chicago 7991
Nashville 7495
Austin 7306
Denver 7156
Charlotte 4237
Houston 3220
Raleigh 3216
Myrtle Beach 3085

The following urban areas had too few (these are the bottom ten in order):

Riverside 9794
Miami 6121
San Antonio 5458
Phoenix 4280
Columbus 3892
Minneapolis 3742
Las Vegas 3285
Philadelphia 3167
Sacramento 3156
Boston  2840

Similarly, on the basis of their 2016-2017 population change and their 2017 population, the following urban areas’ building permit valuations were “too high” (only the first ten are listed; the figures show by how much in thousands of dollars the valuations were high):

Dallas 1919301
Los Angeles 1647122
Chicago 1607408
San Francisco 1458704
Nashville 1389825
Denver 1313374
Seattle 863914
Orlando 829254
Greenville 791324

And the following urban areas’ building permit valuations were “too low” (bottom ten only):

Riverside 1799008
Las Vegas 1725791
New York 1587580
San Antonio 1558862
Washington 1494855
Philadelphia 1237660
Columbus 852732
Miami 625441
Atlanta 573035
Lakeland 533558

Chicago, in other words, still appears to be the odd city out. It ranks among several fast-growing, prosperous Sunbelt cities in having much more building than one might expect rather than with the admittedly mixed group of cities at the bottom of the list that are mostly either older places (like Boston) with many barriers to new construction or else are Sunbelt cities (like Las Vegas and Riverside) that are still recovering from pre-Great-Recession overbuilding.

As I noted in the earlier posts, the figures that suggest that Chicago has a surprisingly robust building industry for a northern urban area that is losing population jibe completely with what one can observe every day in many parts of the city.

(The last paragraphs, starting with “There’s another obvious partial explanation,” were added on November 2.) 

Posted in Urban | Tagged | Leave a comment

Lyon’s Confluence

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Christopher Winters

A simplistic view of post-World-War-II French urban transportation planning would identify two very different phases.

In the 1950s and 1960s, and well into the 1970s, the government largely devoted itself to catering to the automobile. Limited-access highways were built to connect French cities and to speed movement by car in the suburbs that were growing rapidly in many urban areas. There was only modest investment in public transport.

By the 1970s, there was a widespread understanding of the limits and problems of a mostly car-based transportation system, and there was a radical change in emphasis. Since then, there has been much more investment in public transport. An intercity network of high-speed trains has evolved (the first TGV line opened in 1981); the Paris Métro began growing again (early 1970s); and rail rapid-transit systems were added in Marseille (1977), Lyon (1978), Lille (1983), Toulouse (1993), and Rennes (2002). Furthermore, tramways, which had come close to vanishing completely in the 1960s, have been added in 27 cities.28 In addition, numerous cities have engaged in pedestrianization schemes in their centers and occasionally elsewhere. Bus, tram, and bicycle lanes as well as parking restrictions have also reduced the amount of space available to car drivers. Although most changes have been the object of huge amounts of discussion and not everything planned has actually been implemented, there really has come to be a consensus that it would be wise to push back at least a little against the hegemony of the automobile.

I don’t want to overstate the case for the chronology proposed above. There was no day in, say, 1975 when everything changed; the shift in emphasis occurred over several years. It’s also the case that there was one spectacular exception to the rule that there was little investment in public transit in the three decades after World War II. The first line of the Paris RER opened in 1969, and the RER continued to grow through the 1970s. It’s also true that limited-access highways continued to be added even after 1980, but mostly not in big cities. Note also that, with the exception of the creation of the Parc Rives-de-Seine to replace an expressway along the Seine in Paris, even the most obnoxious facilities for automobiles have generally not been removed.

Of course, there were similar trends throughout the Western world, but, with its long-term habit of having the government do more than in many other countries, France saw a particularly sharp break in what was emphasized, and it was definitely a pioneer in the creation of cross-city suburban rail transit (the RER), high-speed passenger rail (the TGV), urban bicycle sharing (Vélib’), and perhaps even facilities for pedestrians.29

I spent several days in Lyon last month. I’d visited Lyon quite a number of times over the years and had always appreciated its big-city feel and its hills (and views!), but I’d never been there for more than twenty-four hours at a time. I was particularly interested in looking at the Confluence, a more or less new neighborhood that has grown up over the last fifteen years and that, in some ways, exemplifies the general trends in French urban planning. I say “more or less new” because the Confluence—the southern end of the peninsula between the Saône and the Rhône—has been there for as long as Lyon has. But the area south of Perrache Station was a somewhat disreputable working-class and industrial area that was quite cut-off from the rest of Lyon in the decades preceding the current renovation work. It required a long walk “under the vaults” (the train tracks) to get to what is now known as the Confluence, and there wasn’t much there that would have been of interest to outsiders (except, it’s said, those in search of prostitutes). The addition of an only partly underground freeway in front of the Perrache Station during the 1970s increased the neighborhood’s isolation. The decline of much of the Confluence’s industrial facilities in the 1990s, however, presented an opportunity for Lyon’s powers-that-be30 A decision was made to rejuvenate the area, leveraging, first, the scenic joining of two rivers,31 and, second, the Confluence’s proximity to Lyon’s central business district, which, arguably, begins on the north side of Perrache Station and whose center lies only a kilometer or two north. The Confluence, in other words, was similar in some ways to Hamburg’s HafenCity. There was a chance to extend the CBD and to create a new kind of neighborhood on a very large site.

Map, Confluence, Lyon, France

Map of the Confluence and vicinity. GIS data from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, somewhat modified.

Fifteen years later, work in the Confluence is far from finished, but enough of what was planned has actually been accomplished so that it’s possible to get a sense of what the “completed” area will be like.

The Confluence differs from HafenCity (and many other new neighborhoods) in that it was inhabited at the moment that work on its “rejuvenation” was begun. Its northeast fifth (roughly) was a working-class neighborhood called Sainte-Blandine, the site of numerous interwar public housing projects. French pre-World-War-II social housing facilities—called HBMs (habitations à bon marché)—were (and are) quite different from the mostly suburban, giant tower-in-a-park HLMs (habitations à loyer modéré) built after World War II that are now widely despised. HBMs, in contrast, were generally constructed flush with the sidewalk. They were basically plain versions of the middle-class apartment buildings of the same period and were in fact generally located in areas where most of the housing was privately built.32 A casual observer would not be able to identify them as public housing. HBMs have generally aged well, although, of course, they often need some renovation. A decision was made simply to leave Sainte-Blandine in place, offering improvements and replacements when necessary.33 One result of this decision is that the Confluence differs from most new neighborhoods in being quite socially and economically diverse; it’s a pretty good example of the new ideal of mixité. It also has a historical component that’s a little deeper than, say, the nautical symbols that dot HafenCity. There’s still a well-used pétanque (or maybe boule lyonnaise) court next to the 19th-century Église Sainte-Blandine, and there are still several very working-class cafés along the Cours Charlemagne, existing quite happily among half a dozen new midrange hotels that have been added to the area over the last decade as its respectability has grown.

Most of the rest of the Confluence has undergone substantial change.

The northwest quarter of the neighborhood, for example, has become a more or less upper-middle-class apartment district, with some offices. One could argue that a government project to house the well-off isn’t quite fair, but those living in the area are generally paying a substantial amount for their housing, and it’s hard to imagine a successful urban-renewal scheme that catered only to the poor.

Apartments, Confluence, Lyon, France.

Upscale apartment buildings across from the Confluence shopping center, Lyon.

Halfway south is a gigantic shopping mall, with a Carrefour, a Monoprix, and numerous other shops. These shops generally seem to be catering to those who are well-off, but, as is true of big shopping malls all over the world, people from all classes are certainly welcome to come and buy things. The shopping mall was built on a man-made inlet that’s often used for recreational boating.

Shopping mall, Confluence, Lyon, France.

The Confluence shopping mall. Note the well-used seating area. The bridge carries the century-old railroad line through the mall.

The southwest part of Confluence—which is identified by the English-language name “The Docks”—has become predominantly an office district, with some apartment buildings and restaurants and a large art gallery in an old sugar warehouse mixed in. The new architecture here is quite eccentric. Several of the buildings, the headquarters of Euronews for example, have what might be termed exoskeletons.

Euronews, Docks, Confluence, Lyon, France.

Euronews headquarters, one of several somewhat eccentric office buildings in the fashionable “Docks” area along the Saône in southern Confluence.

The southern end of the Confluence (near the actual confluence of the two rivers) has acquired an impressive museum.

Musee des Confluences, Confluence, Lyon, France.

The Musée des Confluences near the actual confluence of the Saône and the Rhône.

There is also a small, rather austere park where the rivers come together.

Confluence, Lyon, France.

Park at the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône.

Infrastructure has been very much part of the plans for the Confluence. Tram line 1 has been extended south through the Confluence. It runs quite frequently along the middle of the Cours Charlemagne. Signal preemption means that it almost never has to stop for red lights.

Tram, Cours Charlemagne, Confluence, Lyon, France.

Tramway line T1, Confluence. Note the mix of older and new residential and commercial buildings along the Cours Charlemagne.

South of the Confluence the line runs over the Rhône on a tram/pedestrian bridge to Gerland, another neighborhood where old industries have given way to other things, in this case office buildings devoted to technology firms as well as apartment blocks and a major concert hall.

Map, subway, tramways, and pedestrian facilities, Lyon, France, and vicinity

Map of the Lyon and vicinity. GIS data from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, somewhat modified.

The Confluence (like many other newly-built or newly-renovated places in the Western world) is quite self-consciously “green.” It has been planned to be as little oriented to the automobile as possible. One of the major features of the Confluence is a new walking/bicycling path along the Saône. This path has been extended (with two medium-sized gaps) far north of the Confluence so that it’s now possible to walk north along the Saône for dozens of kilometers.

Pedestrian path, Saone, Lyon, France.

Walkway along the Saône, Lyon.

In the areas where the Saône and its walkway pass by Vieux Lyon on the right bank and Croix-Rousse on the left bank, the river valley is quite narrow, and the views of a dense, hilly, and relatively old city are very pleasing. I don’t know quite what to make of the fact that many more people use the walking path for sitting than seems to be the case along recreational trails in urban areas in the English-speaking world. As a result, while the path along the Saône is marked as a piste cyclable (bikeway) on official maps and while some cyclists do use it, it’s often not possible to bicycle much faster than at walking speed here.34

A similar, but generally wider, path, often with a separate piste cyclable, has also been built along the east bank of the Rhône, that is, across from the Confluence. Like the path along the Saône, the creation of the Rhône path was not strictly speaking part of work on the Confluence, but it certainly grew out of the same view of the ideal city as being friendly to what the French call “modes doux” (literally, “gentle modes”), that is, transportation modes other than the automobile.

Pedestrian and bicycle paths, Rhone, Lyon, France.

Walkway and bicycle path along the Rhône, Lyon.

Both paths get a huge amount of use on pleasant weekend days. A measure of the number of kilometers of off-road pedestrian paths per million inhabitants would end up ranking Lyon quite high.35

Work on the Confluence is continuing. A large section of the southern Confluence that once held giant factories consists today mostly of open fields and weeds. Unlike in the rest of the Confluence, pedestrians are, naturally, scarce here. There are plans to fill this area in with apartments and office buildings, and (I’m afraid) a giant parking facility.36 There’s also quite a substantial railyard in the southern Confluence that was supposed to be moved elsewhere but that remains in place.

The Confluence’s greatest problem has been the failure to dislodge the partly elevated 1970s A7 freeway that blights its Rhône shoreline.

A7 autoroute, Confluence, Lyon, France.

The A7 in the southern Confluence, Lyon.

When the Confluence was being planned, the idea was to move the A7 to somewhere in the western suburbs, but this move (which would have been expensive and which would have damaged a substantial swath of territory) has never been carried out. The highway is incredibly noisy and polluting and really limits what can be done with the Rhône side of the neighborhood. The feeling is that the road is such a key link that it can’t simply be torn down.

Despite the presence of the A7, I was pretty impressed by the Confluence and the associated paths along Lyon’s rivers. Government set out to change a substantial swath of city, generally in a direction that made it far less oriented to the automobile, and it’s actually accomplished a great deal of what it planned to do and seems primed to continue the work.

 

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

Schuylkill Banks makes Center City even better

Posted on September 4, 2018 by Christopher Winters

Philadelphia’s Center City (which I recently visited for the first time in more than a decade) is one of the United States’ finest pedestrian spaces. It’s possible to walk comfortably just about anywhere within its roughly twelve square kilometers, and, when you do, not only do you get to see a physically appealing zone of high-density urbanity,37 you’ll also have plenty of company. Nearly 200,000 people are said to live in Center City, and, since Center City incorporates Philadelphia’s CBD and tourist sites like Independence Hall, its daytime population is considerably higher. Center City’s population skews young and well-educated, factors that contribute to its “vibrancy” (and safety).38

Center City doesn’t, however, do very well by the substantial part of its population that would like carfree places to bicycle, run, or walk long distances. One might think the Delaware would be an excellent site for a long recreational path, but its shoreline is hugged by Interstate 95, and it wouldn’t be easy to insert an agreeable trail along it. Except very early in the morning, the one exception—Penn’s Landing just south of Market—tends to be too jammed with tourists to be usable as a recreational path, and it isn’t very long in any case. The northward extension of the path (shown on the map below) consists mostly of bicycle lanes running through predominantly industrial districts not far from I-95, and the short recreational path to the south isn’t connected to anything.

Map, pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Center City, Philadelphia, and vicinity, showing passenger rail lines, parks, and recreational paths. GIS data from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap (edited a great deal) and the OpenDataPhilly Website.

Fairmount Park—Philadelphia’s big city park—would seem to be an obvious place for recreational activities, and in fact it’s full of cyclists, runners, and pedestrians at all hours of the day and early evening, many of them surely from Center City, which isn’t far away. The southernmost part of Fairmount Park—near the Philadelphia Museum of Art—abuts Center City. The catch is that, perhaps more than any other big city park in the United States, Fairmount Park has been mutilated by facilities for automobiles. The Schuylkill Expressway (Interstate 76) runs the entire length of its West Bank portion, and busy Kelly Drive on the East Bank and King Drive on the West Bank are right next to the otherwise fine Schuylkill River Trail. I once (1979) ran a marathon in Philadelphia that consisted of three loops around Fairmount Park, almost all of which lay next to busy roads, and I felt I’d ended up absorbing more pollutants than on any day of my life. There is of course also an aesthetic problem with running or walking next to a busy highway. In the years since 1979, Philadelphia’s created a “city marathon” that uses city streets for part of its course, and it’s instituted some weekend road closures in Fairmount Park. Still, an awfully large part of Fairmount Park remains devoted to automobile use, and it’s an imperfect place for exercise that requires moving substantial distances along recreational paths.

Over the last few years, “Schuylkill Banks,” a short but much more attractive extension of the Schuylkill River Trail, has been built south of Fairmount Park.39 This new trail is not only closer to Center City, but it also lies further from major traffic arteries. It mostly runs along the narrow space between the Schuylkill and a CSX Railroad branch used only for freight.

Schuylkill Banks, Schuylkill River Trail, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

One of the few places along Schuylkill Banks where there is room for much more than a trail.

For the next-to-most-recent extension (2014), there really was no space at all, and the trail at some expense was run on a “boardwalk” over the river. This segment is quite striking.

Schuylkill Banks, Schuylkill River Trail, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Schuylkill Banks boardwalk early in the morning.

You get wonderful views of Philadelphia’s modest but distinctive skyline, of the 30th Street Station, of new apartment buildings along the river, of the athletic facilities at the University of Pennsylvania, and of a few remaining factories. It’s not that Schuylkill Banks runs through a pristine environment. The Schuylkill Expressway on the West Bank is extraordinarily noisy, and users must also contend with the sounds of construction, of speedboats showing off on the river, of Amtrak and SEPTA trains, and of traffic on the bridges that cross the river. There are also occasional freight trains along the CSX line that lies right next to the Trail. But to me all of this visual—and aural—complexity adds up to a pleasantly intense spatial experience. Like many of the other successful urban recreational trails that have been built in American cities in recent years, Schuylkill Banks works in part because users of the trail are reminded constantly of just where they are. The trail provides an extraordinary sense of place. If it had been built in a national media center like New York or even in Boston, Washington, or Chicago, it would have received a huge amount of favorable publicity. It has been covered pretty well by the Philadelphia edition of Curbed and by the Philadelphia Inquirer, and of course it has a good Website.

Since the latest segment opened in February of this year, the trail has ended awkwardly at a power plant run by Philadelphia’s electric company, PECO. The plan is to run the trail all the way to the Delaware, perhaps 9 km away along the winding river. Two isolated segments south of the PECO plant already exist, but a bridge across the Schuylkill and additional land acquisitions will be needed to join everything together and to extend the trail south. It’s taken something like ten years to build the existing 2.5 km trail, and it will no doubt take many more years to reach the Delaware. But, even incomplete, the trail provides a striking view of part of central Philadelphia to those who bicycle, run, or walk along it.

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

The Queens Quay renovation in Toronto

Posted on August 2, 2018 by Christopher Winters

When I was in Toronto, I also explored a much smaller project: the renovation of Queens Quay.

Queens Quay is a short (3.3 km) street along Toronto’s “Harbourfront.” Over the last forty or so years most of its western 2 km has been transformed from an industrial thoroughfare into a street of expensive high-rise apartment buildings on its north, inland, side and recreational facilities on its south, lakefront, side.

Until well into the 21st century, most of the space on Queens Quay was devoted to automobile (and truck) traffic, although the street did gain a light rail line in 1989.

Map, buildings and transportation facilities, Queens Quay, CBD, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Map of Queens Quay and vicinity. GIS data from Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified a great deal.

In recent years part of Queens Quay West (from Bay Street to Spadina Avenue, approximately 1.3 km) has been converted into a much less traffic-oriented place. Automobiles have generally been limited to only two lanes. Most of the rest of the thoroughfare has been divided into three similarly sized corridors, one each for the light-rail line, cyclists, and pedestrians. Pedestrians get the south side along the Lake, which varies in width tremendously depending on what’s built there. There is also a narrow sidewalk on the north side of the street. The Queens Quay renovation occurred over many years but has been considered more or less finished since 2015.

The symbolism of this transformation is pretty clear. Cars are being relegated to a minor role on Queens Quay.

The renovation of Queens Quay has been thoroughly documented in various places, for example, at the Complete Streets for Canada Website. The only thing I can add is to point out how special this change is. I don’t know of any other street in North America that has so clearly been subdivided into four more or less equal-sized spaces for pedestrians, cyclists, streetcars, and automobiles. This is, I’ll admit, chiefly because there are so few cities with streetcar lines in North America. Automobile lanes have been shrunk to make room for pedestrians and cyclists in a number of places, for example along Broadway in Midtown Manhattan.

The 1.3-km-long renovated section of Queens Quay is of course just a drop in the bucket in an urban area with thousands of kilometers of roads where automobiles come first. The Queens Quay bicycle and pedestrian trails do continue west to Mississauga and beyond but are not always separated and run awfully close to major highways in places. The bike trail also continues east but quite quickly becomes uncomfortable for pedestrians. And just to the north of the renovated part of Queens Quay is the Gardiner Expressway, one of North America’s most egregious urban freeways, a hulking structure that makes walking to Queens Quay a bit of a chore and that brings truly massive amounts of traffic through and into Toronto’s central business district. The Queens Quay renovation is a wonderful model that, so far, is pretty exceptional.

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