Toronto’s extends its subway even further into car country

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Christopher Winters

I spent several days in Toronto this month. This was perhaps my twentieth trip to Toronto since 1966. I had been a witness over the years to Toronto’s astonishing transformation from a socially conservative place whose inhabitants were mostly of British “stock” into one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities. More than half of the Toronto area’s inhabitants are now immigrants themselves or else are the children of immigrants. Toronto’s immigrants come from everywhere, but particularly from China, South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

Toronto’s massive immigration has not only increased its diversity; it has also enormously increased its size. Toronto has grown faster than any other big urban place in eastern North America. Depending on where you put the boundary, the Toronto region now has between six and a half and perhaps nine million people. It is thus the fourth or fifth largest urban area in North America, and, if only because the Toronto area is by far Canada’s largest metropolitan region, it plays a substantial role in the world’s urban hierarchy.

On my recent trip I made a point of exploring Toronto’s new subway line to Vaughan. This extension is only 9 km long, but even that modest length appears to make it the longest completely underground rail transit extension in North America for quite a number of years (possibly decades).1

Toronto’s public transit system has been reasonably good for quite a long time. It relies heavily on a subway whose total route length (79 km) is not enormously high, but that attracts more passengers a day than any other North American subway except those in New York and Montréal, that is, more than the much larger systems in Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco. In addition to the subway, Toronto has an extensive streetcar network in the inner city as well as the GO train system of suburban railroad lines. In recent years, the TTC (the Toronto Transit Commission) has also worked assiduously to improve bus service. Buses run on ten-minute-or-better headways on numerous lines, including many in the outer city.

Toronto’s new subway line is an extension of Line No. 1 (the western branch of the U-shaped line on the subway map), from Sheppard West to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre.

Subways, GO trains, streetcars, and pedestrian facilities, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Map of Toronto and vicinity, with a focus on urban rail lines and pedestrian facilities. The latter include footpaths and bicycle paths other than sidewalks. GIS data from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified a great deal.

The line opened last December. The spacious stations are pleasant and in some cases are joined to elaborate bus terminals where it’s possible to wait indoors. The new line takes passengers well outside the area where older subways in eastern North American cities usually bring their customers. The stations are all deep into car country, and, except for the stop at York University, are not likely to be close to the places where most passengers are traveling to and from.

The terminus, at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, for example, features a single office building, acres and acres of parking lots, and a rather elegant bus stop. There are big box stores and some medium-rise apartment and office buildings in the distance, but threading one’s way on foot through the parking lots on a cold winter day would not be much fun. The station seems to serve chiefly as a stop for buses to numerous suburban destinations, and, when I was there, a large number of passengers were indeed making transfers between bus and train.

Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, Vaughan, Ontario.

Vaughan Metropolitan Centre. The main subway station entrance is the exotic building to the right of the image center. The bus station is the rounded building to the left of the image center.

Some of the other stations on the line are even more clearly located in outer-city places. The Highway 407 station sits in the shadow of a freeway across a major highway from a cemetery, the only nearby destination to which most people would be willing to walk. The station’s southern and western neighbors are fields. Across Highway 407 (a formidable walk among a tangle of fast highways) is a neighborhood of auto-repair shops. There is parking. Still, this is not the kind of place where subway stations on older lines are usually built.

Highway 407 subway station, Vaughan, Ontario.

The Highway 407 subway station.

Toronto’s last subway extension, the Sheppard Line (2002), also took one outside the comfortably walkable parts of Toronto. It runs parallel to Highway 401, a kind of beltway, which, like similar roads in the U.S., has acquired office buildings along much of its length (there are apartment buildings too). The thought in building this line was that it would serve workers in and residents of these highway-oriented structures. The catch is that the eastern four-fifths of the subway runs under a wide road that is not at all inviting to pedestrians. It does have a well-maintained sidewalk, but hardly any of the buildings along the road have sidewalk entrances. They were built to be accessible chiefly by automobile (this is even true of the buildings built since the line opened). Not too surprisingly, the billion-dollar Sheppard subway attracts only something like 40,000 passengers a day.

Sheppard Avenue, Toronto, Ontario

Along Sheppard Avenue. This is not pedestrian country despite the presence of a subway line and numerous apartment buildings. Photograph taken August 2014.

The two ends of the hybrid subway/light-rail line that is now under construction under Eglinton Avenue are also located in territory where walking is uncomfortable. The line will run through several kilometers of strip malls and big-box stores and intersections that you can cross on foot only after waiting a very long time for a walk signal.

Meanwhile, the inner portions of Toronto’s subway system suffer from terrible overcrowding. A “relief line” has been planned for decades but hasn’t yet even been started.

It turns out that there are some pretty good reasons for the odd geography of Toronto’s recent subway construction.2

Toronto’s distinctive socioeconomic (and related political) geography has played a major role. The so-called “great inversion,” in which the well-off come to occupy urban centers and the poor move to city edges, has affected Toronto as much as anywhere in North America.3 Toronto’s congenial central city, while remaining a socially complicated place, has been the scene of a considerable amount of gentrification over the last fifty years. It’s Toronto’s suburbs—or at least its inner suburbs (mostly located within the boundaries of the amalgamated city)—where urban problems including transportation problems are often felt to be most acute. Not only are these the areas with the most serious traffic jams; they’re also the areas where recent immigrants—who sometimes have no access to cars—have been most inclined to settle. An argument favoring the extension of the subway into the suburbs is in some ways an argument in favor of transferring resources from the well-off center to the not so well-off city edge. Or so a left-of-center politician might put it.

In Toronto’s idiosyncratic politics of the last couple of decades, however, it’s often been right-of-center politicians who have had the more decisive role in favoring subway extensions, although they most certainly don’t talk in terms of redistribution of wealth. This statement requires some explanation. As elsewhere in North America, the left in Toronto has typically been more inclined than the right to favor investment in non-automotive transportation modes. In the 2010 election battle between the notorious Rob Ford and George Smitherman the former even argued that the left had been engaging in a war on the car—and managed to win the election. But Rob Ford did not dislike all public transport. Arguing that “streets are for cars,” he revealed something that it’s fair to call a hatred of streetcars and bike lanes, but he strongly favored the building of subways. Rob Ford’s brother Doug Ford, just elected premier of Ontario, has continued this tradition, arguing for an extension of the subway to far-suburban, low-density Pickering, 16 km from the current subway terminus and already served by GO trains.4 In other words, the Toronto area’s populist, right-leaning politicians have actually been in favor of extending Toronto’s subway system to the outer city even though doing so is at odds with their obsessive interest in saving taxpayer money. This is partly a tribute to the high regard in which the TTC is often held—and also due to the fact that supporters of right-leaning politicians tend to live in the outer city and would like better access to the subway.

Subway extensions to the outer city make sense for reasons connected to Toronto’s urban morphology as well.

Apartment buildings in the years since World War II have generally constituted a much larger proportion of the new housing stock in Toronto (and a few other Canadian cities) than in the United States. There have been a number of reasons for this. Canada has never allowed mortgage interest deductions on income taxes, and there has thus been less incentive to spend lavishly on housing. This tendency has been reinforced by the fact that Canada has almost always been a little poorer than the United States, and apartments (other things being equal) are cheaper than single-family houses (which are as expensive in Toronto as anywhere). Canadian cities including Toronto have also generally had a stronger planning apparatus than U.S. cities. While Toronto’s planning history is formidably complicated,5 planners have sometimes in recent decades been able to push for denser, sprawl-avoiding housing (although there is still plenty of sprawl around Canadian cities). Toronto’s large immigrant population may have played a role here too. People from China and Iran, for example, may be less likely than native North Americans to think it’s normal to live in a large house on an enormous lot (although there are plenty of exceptions). The point is that much of Toronto’s massive suburban growth in the last several decades has been influenced by planning directives and economic and cultural forces that have worked together to push toward dense building that can be served reasonably by public transit. The catch is that there hasn’t always been much coordination between the building of rail transit and the siting of apartment buildings, and this fact, in conjunction with the pedestrian-unfriendly landscape mentioned above, means that the potential synergy between density and transit is only partially realized. But it still exists.

North York—especially the two kilometers between the Sheppard-Yonge and Finch subway stations that includes the area known as the North York City Centre—is the place that most clearly demonstrates the power of the subway to create pedestrian-friendly density when both government officials and property developers are on the board with its doing so and when social forces help matters along. When the line to Finch was being planned in the early 1970s, the area consisted mostly of modest single-family homes. It now has dozens of skyscraper office and residential buildings. The inhabitants of the apartments consist disproportionately of immigrants.

North York, Toronto, Ontario.

North York from the Yonge and Lawrence area to its south. The Don Valley lies in between.

It’s significant that many of the original commercial buildings on Yonge Street have survived and that many of the new buildings also come with street-facing shops. Much of the commerce on Yonge consists of surprisingly modest storefront ethnic restaurants instead of the banks and chain stores you usually find in new developments. Thus, not only is Yonge Street in North York lined with high-rise buildings. It also has places you can walk to, and there are people walking there at all hours of the day and evening.  I don’t know whether North York is really an “edge city,” but, if it is, it must have the best pedestrian environment of any edge city in North America. A healthy pedestrian life is as always connected with high transit use. The Sheppard-Yonge and Finch stations are two of the three busiest non-downtown subway stations in Toronto.

Yonge Street, North York, Toronto, Ontario.

Along Yonge Street in North York. The commercial buildings presumably date back quite a number of years; note the ethnic restaurants.

For the moment, North York seems to be an exceptional place, but in the medium run it’s not supposed to be. One of the goals (dreams?) of many planners in Toronto for years has been to turn the Toronto area into a region with multiple high-density, walkable centers all connected by transit. The hope is that even places like Vaughan Metropolitan Centre will become something like North York City Centre. Of course, while planners are perfectly capable of making maps showing where dense regional nodes should go, they generally don’t have the funds actually to construct them. It’s an open question whether developers will really build such places on a large scale.

The move to improve transit in the outer city has nonetheless become pretty well entrenched. Public transportation in the Toronto region has been overseen by an organization called Metrolinx since 2006. The subway extension to Vaughan was built with the full support of Metrolinx, which has planned a truly massive increase in the amount of public transportation in many parts of the Toronto area. Work has started on light-rail lines in Mississauga, Hamilton, and northwest Toronto;6 the Eglinton crosstown line in Toronto; and several BRT lines. In addition, Metrolinx also plans to electrify Toronto’s GO suburban rail system and to increase the quantity of service substantially on its main lines. The 15-minute all-day service on the GO line along the Lakeshore would make this something like North America’s first S-Bahn/RER service, although I don’t believe that there are any plans for complete fare integration or for simplifying transfers between the GO trains and the subway.7

The building of all these lines is intended to transform Toronto into a 150-km-wide urban area where high-quality public transport is available nearly everywhere and where walking and bicycling are possible in many areas other than the central city. It’s a very ambitious goal, far beyond anything planned seriously in any U.S. metropolitan area in so far as I know. I have no idea whether the new line to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre—and all the other planned new suburban lines—will one day serve the kind of dense suburban places that they’re supposed to help create, but Toronto is certainly moving in an interesting direction.

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

Chicago hospital thinks it’s in Schaumburg*

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Christopher Winters

Parking lot, Thorek Hospital, Uptown, Chicago, Illinois

Thorek Hospital is a 118-bed hospital on Chicago’s North Side. It is most definitely not a major research institution. It ranks as “below average” in U.S. News and World Report ‘s evaluations of U.S. hospitals. Many (although not all) of its Yelp reviews are savagely negative. There’s nonetheless every reason to think that it’s a reasonably competent place, and, if I ever had a bad fall or a heart attack while walking in its vicinity, I’d be very glad that it was there.

I’ve lived a couple of blocks from Thorek since 1996. Fortunately, I’ve never had to use its services. The aspect of Thorek of which I have chiefly been aware is that, since something like the 1980s, the hospital has been on a campaign to bulldoze its neighborhood. It’s systematically acquired property in its vicinity, torn down whatever was there, and used the land for surface parking. Thorek’s smallish main building is now complemented by three huge parking lots that cover approximately five times as much land as the hospital itself. These lots are rarely very full. In fact, most of the time they seem rather empty. Here’s a map:

Thorek Hospital and vicinity, Uptown, Chicago, Illinois, 2017, showing building footprints.

The area around Thorek Hospital. The building footprints dataset dates from 2017. The red lines show CTA tracks. The purple polygons show Thorek parking lots. The main hospital building is just east of the biggest parking lot. See note on GIS below for information on sources.

And here’s a 2012 air photo:

Thorek Hospital and vicinity, Uptown, Chicago, Illinois, 2012, Aerial photograph.

Joined 2012 air photos of the area around Thorek Hospital. The red lines show CTA tracks. The purple polygons show Thorek parking lots. See note on GIS below for information on sources.

Thorek’s obsessive effort to create surface parking puts it completely at odds with its location. The hospital is diagonally across from a CTA rail station, and it sits in a medium-high-density, prosperous, and generally safe neighborhood.

Exactly why Thorek became so interested in surrounding itself with parking lots is not altogether clear. No doubt it felt that it needed some parking, but it would have saved a huge amount of money had it opted to preserve most of the area’s urban fabric and built a mid-rise parking facility. I can’t explain Thorek’s actions in any way except to invoke a vague concept like “suburban mindset.” Important buildings in the suburbs are typically surrounded by massive amounts of parking, therefore … One aspect of a suburban mindset of course is to be frightened half to death of complicated urban neighborhoods. Parking lots from this point of view functioned as a kind of moat between the hospital and the neighborhood.

Let’s take a look at the history of the area.

The blocks around Thorek were mostly rather empty until the early 20th century when they began to be filled in with small apartment buildings and Chicago “greystones,” which served either as single-family houses or (more commonly) contained three or four apartments. Here are Sanborn maps from the turn of the 20th century:

Sanborn maps, 1905 and 1894, of area around Thorek Hospital, Uptown, Chicago.

Sanborn maps showing structures around the start of the 20th century. Somewhat confusingly, the blocks north of Irving Park Road (then called Graceland Avenue) were mapped in 1905 while those south of Irving Park Road were mapped in 1894. This is a composite image from several different pages, which have not all yellowed to the same extent. I’ve added modern curbs as well as CTA tracks (which date from 1900) and Thorek parking lot outlines. See note on GIS below for information on sources.

The elevated rail line that is now called the CTA Red Line arrived in 1900, and the lots that were vacant in 1905 were filled in one by one in the years just afterward. There was enough demand for this land after the El arrived so that most new buildings were three- and four-story apartment buildings. There were also some commercial structures. This neighborhood—the southern end of Uptown and northernmost part of Lake View—was never exactly wealthy, but it wasn’t poor either, and it adjoined the quite upscale single-family neighborhood now known as Buena Park just to its north. Thorek Hospital was added to the mix in 1911, occupying a relatively modest mid-block space on Irving Park Road. Here’s a set of Sanborn maps from the 1920s:

Thorek Hospital and vicinity, Uptown, Chicago, Illinois, 1920s, Sanborn fire insurance maps

Sanborn maps showing structures in the 1920s. The area north of Irving Park Road was mapped in 1928; the area south of Irving Park Road was mapped in 1923. I’ve included modern curbs, CTA tracks, and Thorek parking lot outlines. See note on GIS below for information on sources.

During the 1950s and 1960s, numerous tall apartment buildings were built in the blocks between Thorek and the Lakefront. Although the 1950s and 1960s were generally years of massive suburbanization in older American cities, Chicago was pretty successful in encouraging the construction of middle- and upper-middle-class high-rise housing in its North Side Lakefront neighborhoods. Neighborhoods just inland from the Lakefront did not do so well. There was definitely some downward “filtering” in the blocks right around Thorek. A couple of SROs just south of Thorek came to house a considerable population of economically marginal men, and, in the 1970s and 1980s, numerous Mexicans and other Latin Americans moved into some of the older apartment buildings in the area. None of the blocks became predominantly Hispanic, but there were enough Latin Americans to support a Mexican supermarket at Sheridan and Dakin next to the El station, and there were a few blocks (for example Cuyler between Broadway and Clarendon) that featured full-time salsa music all summer and car-repair activity down on the street pretty much all year. These years were the only time when there was some reason to worry about the future of Thorek’s neighborhood, and, not coincidentally, they were the years that Thorek began building a moat of parking around its main building, which was now located at the Broadway end of its block.

Slow gentrification, however, definitely set in by the 1990s, although it’s never been as powerful a force as it was further south; numerous long-time residents have stayed put. Most of the “filtering” over the last twenty or twenty-five years, however, has definitely been upward; newer residents have tended to be a bit better off than those they replaced. There has also been a modest amount of new construction. This consists mostly of four-or-so-story apartment buildings, which have replaced wooden single-family houses or marginal commercial buildings (including that Mexican supermarket). Thorek itself was partly responsible for the construction of a nine-story senior apartment building just to its west. Several much larger apartment buildings within a few blocks of Thorek have just opened, are now under construction, or are planned; several of these are TODs (“transit-oriented developments”).

The neighborhood remains economically complicated, but on the whole it’s a fairly prosperous place. Per capita income in the two tracts that contain Thorek was $48,254 in 2012/2016 according to the American Community Survey (Chicago average: $30,847). One striking feature of the neighborhood is that, despite the gentrification, it’s remained ethnically diverse. In 2012/2016 it was 68.6% non-Hispanic white, 12.3% Hispanic, 11.6% non-Hispanic black, and 4.5% non-Hispanic Asian. Like most of Chicago’s North Side Lakefront neighborhoods, the area around Thorek is a place with an unusually high proportion of well-educated people. 65.0% of the population 25 and over had a college degree in 2012/2016 (Chicago: 36.5%). The area’s doing all right.

Automobile ownership is modest, especially considering the area’s prosperity. 43.9% of households were carfree in 2012/2016. Most people (even many car owners) seem to get about largely on foot or by transit. Others have brought suburban habits into the city and drive everywhere, even though parking is scarce and/or expensive and minor traffic jams are common. There are, in fact, several automobile-oriented entities in Thorek’s immediate neighborhood, most dating from the decades when the neighborhood’s future was most uncertain: a BP gas station with a convenience store and a car wash on the southwest corner of Irving Park and Broadway; a storage center facing a U-Haul rental facility on Broadway north of Cuyler; and a (more recent) Walgreen’s with a parking lot at the southeast corner of Irving Park and Sheridan. Despite these incursions of “automobility,” I think it’s fair to say that, while the area is not Manhattan, it’s not the suburbs either, and it works well enough for those who prefer to have little to do with automobiles, although Thorek’s huge parking lots are certainly an aesthetic barrier to walkability.

Thorek Hospital continued its bulldozing all through the 1990s, even as the never-very-serious threat of neighborhood decline vanished completely. When I moved in in 1996, there were still several greystones in the area that’s now Thorek’s biggest parking lot; these were soon torn down. There was a McDonald’s where its northern parking lot now stands; I acknowledge that the destruction of the housing that once stood here predates Thorek’s acquisition of the site.

While many of the people who live nearby have lamented Thorek’s behavior, no one’s ever, so far as I know, tried seriously to stop it. One reason is that it wouldn’t be easy to do this. Chicago’s land-use laws wouldn’t have provided any help. The city’s weak historic preservation statutes only cover a limited number of landmark buildings and a few quite distinctive areas; ordinary early-20th-century landscapes are generally not protected. And Chicago’s zoning laws mostly act to discourage what are felt to be excessively intense land uses; they do not prevent lowering land-use intensity.

Of course, Thorek Hospital is hardly the only institution that has thought that the replacement of dense inner-city buildings with parking lots was a good idea. This is a widespread phenomenon in American urban areas, but it’s been commonest in places that were truly depressed or where the use of the land really was obsolete. Thorek’s been doing its dirty work in a healthy neighborhood that’s been getting healthier, and it’s a little hard to see the point.

Note on GIS sources

The GIS data were taken from many different sources, and they don’t always fit together perfectly.

Curbs and 2017 building footprints come from the City of Chicago’s data portal.

The CTA tracks were downloaded from the bbbike.org version of OpenStreetMap.

The outlines of Thorek’s parking lots come from the “land use inventory” data set prepared by CMAP, formerly the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. CMAP’s land-use data-set, a descendant of a land-use data set prepared by the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, was not really intended to be used for maps as detailed as those shown here; they generally underbound the parking areas. I’ve resisted the temptation to edit them, since the exact boundaries of the parking lots have changed over the years as buildings have been torn down, and I thought the outlines were probably good enough.

The 2012 air photos were downloaded from the United States Geological Survey’s EarthExplorer Website.

The 1894 Sanborn maps were downloaded from the Library of Congress “Sanborn maps online” Web page. I georeferenced the separate pages.

The 1905 Sanborn maps were downloaded from the University of Illinois’s Sanborn fire insurance maps Web page. I georeferenced the separate pages.

The 1923 and 1928 Sanborn maps were downloaded from ProQuest’s Digital Sanborn maps 1867-1970 Website, hosted by Chicago Public Library (and unavailable except to subscribers). These files were scanned for ProQuest from a set of black-and-white microforms published by Chadwyck-Healey. Resolution of downloads from this site is poor. There’s nothing to be done about this. I georeferenced the separate pages.

Footnote

*Schaumburg is a suburb northwest of O’Hare. The term “Schaumburg” in some dialects of Chicago English has come to imply an intensely suburban place. Those who began using “Schaumburg” this way were surely thinking of a district in Schaumburg that contains malls, big-box stores (an Ikea, for example), and office buildings, all surrounded by enormous parking lots. If the term “edge city” means anything, it would definitely apply to this area. Much of Schaumburg in fact is a medium-density residential suburb, with mid-sized single-family houses and modest apartment buildings. An unusually large proportion of its streets acquired striped bicycle lanes as long ago as the 1990s. The colloquial use of the word “Schaumburg” as an epithet isn’t quite fair.

Posted in Urban, Transportation | Tagged | 1 Comment

Hamburg’s ambitious HafenCity

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Christopher Winters

In the world of urban planning, Hamburg has perhaps become best known for HafenCity, which has been slowly replacing Hamburg’s obsolete 19th-century port in the years since 2003 (an enormous new container port has grown up across the Elbe). HafenCity is claimed to be the largest urban renewal project in Europe. It is not only big, but the fact that (unlike, say, London’s Docklands) it abuts the old central business district makes it particularly important. The coming-into-being of HafenCity has presented Hamburg with an opportunity to create a kind of ideal 21st-century inner city.

I spent a fair amount of time in HafenCity when I was in Hamburg late last month. In many ways it’s an admirable place. Its mixture of office buildings, residences, and institutions gets away from what is widely felt to be the pernicious effect of rigid zoning in mid-20th-century cities, although there is a certain amount of internal zoning: residential areas are largely on the western side of HafenCity, offices in its central spine. Just about all the new buildings contain “sustainable” elements; most have achieved gold “ecolabel” status (that is, a European Union certification analogous to LEED status). There are numerous pedestrian- or bicycle-only corridors. Automobiles are allowed, but play almost no role in internal movement. For the most part they are kept to the edge of HafenCity, or put underground. HafenCity even includes a new subway line (U4). It now has two stops, and a third will open soon. There is also access to HafenCity from subway lines U1 and U3 just to its north.

HafenCity, Hamburg, Germany

Map of HafenCity and vicinity. The blank spaces in southern and eastern HafenCity include a number of construction sites. Eventually, nearly all these areas will be filled in. “U/C” = under construction. “Other passenger r[ail]r[oads]” include the S-Bahn and regional (RB/RE) lines. GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified a great deal.

HafenCity’s form provides an excellent window into what people who have the power in the early 21st century to create urban spaces are thinking cities should be like. The fact that HafenCity’s ecological virtues are stressed in its official literature is pretty significant. So is its relatively modest density. No one officially connected with HafenCity has ever seriously proposed building really tall buildings there or recreating anything like, say, a 19th-century city.

HafenCity’s status as a 21st-century enterprise is manifested in one more way. It may be the product in part of government planning and have all kinds of official backing and financial support, but it is also a speculative real-estate venture. It’s supposed to be a commercial success. Thus, it’s created an enormous publicity apparatus. There’s an elaborate Website and two on-site information centers, where one can begin a free tour or choose from a great many beautifully illustrated brochures.8 Of course, one should view advertising for HafenCity like any other advertising, somewhat skeptically. I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that the substantial academic literature on HafenCity describes the place just as positively as the advertising.9

I must admit that in some ways I found HafenCity mildly disappointing, chiefly perhaps because on weekdays at any rate it seemed rather empty. It doesn’t feel at all like an inner-city neighborhood in a major city. The Hamburg metropolitan area has a population of something like five million and has several dense, bustling, and complicated inner-city neighborhoods.10  These are all quite different in feel from HafenCity, which has a population of something like 3700 in its two square kilometers. HafenCity is also the location of approximately 14,000 jobs, but the other inner-city neighborhoods host commerce too, and the figure given for HafenCity apparently includes jobs in the long-existing Speicherstadt.11 Let me add that HafenCity’s emptiness has something to do with the fact that it’s not even half finished. Only approximately one of its two square kilometers has been built on. Eventually, there are supposed to be two or three times as many inhabitants and jobs. And it needs to be said that on weekends HafenCity gets a bit more crowded, as numerous mostly local tourists visit HafenCity’s largest building, the Elbphilharmonie, or go on guided tours.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder whether HafenCity wouldn’t feel a bit more, well, urban (that is, bustling) had it been built to a higher density. The apartment buildings are mostly only six or seven stories tall, and they do not touch each other except at their base. I’ll admit that I may be imposing a personal aesthetic taste that makes no sense in the context. It might have been difficult to get world-class architects to participate in a project with buildings that weren’t quite separate from each other. It’s also possible that a denser project might have found it harder to pass the ecological tests that HafenCity set for itself. Furthermore, it’s easy to imagine that there wouldn’t have been as much of a market for larger apartment buildings. Away from its center, Hamburg is not a particularly dense place. The city of Hamburg has approximately 2400 people per square kilometer, and the Hamburg region is even more spread out.12 Hamburg’s most prestigious districts (for example, around the Alstersee) are definitely not built to a very high density. They consist of smallish apartment buildings and quite a few single-family houses. There aren’t very many high-rise residential buildings in Hamburg. The modest, ecologically sound buildings of HafenCity fit Hamburg pretty well. Let me add that plans for some of the as yet un-built-on areas along the Elbe show taller buildings.

Dalmannkai, HafenCity, Hamburg, Germany.

Dalmannkai, one of the largely residential quays along the western edge of HafenCity. Access into the side of the Dalmannkai buildings facing the water is by foot or bicycle only . There’s a road parallel to the water on the buildings’ other side. The large building in the background is the Elbphilharmonie.

I still couldn’t resist contrasting HafenCity with the Speicherstadt, just to its north.

Speicherstadt, Hamburg, Germany.

The Speicherstadt, Hamburg, an enormous warehouse district between HafenCity and the CBD. The Brooksfleet waterway (shown) runs roughly east-west through the main part of the Speicherstadt. The buildings have land connections to the north and south.

The Speicherstadt, built at the end of the 19th century, was claimed to be (and probably really was) the world’s largest warehouse district. The Speicherstadt, which consists mostly of two rows of enormous buildings on both sides of a canal, separates the Altstadt from the old port. It is still one of the world’s most distinctive places. It was constructed at the one time in Hamburg’s long history when the city, the largest port in continental Europe’s most powerful country, could be said to have taken on elements of “world-city” status. It was the world’s 20th largest city in 1900 and 18th largest in 1914.13 Its size and status were connected with Germany’s pre-World-War-I effort to build a major empire in Africa and the Pacific. A huge number of goods were flowing through Hamburg’s port. The Speicherstadt was built to support this trade. It’s truly an amazing place in a way that HafenCity, as a physical entity, really isn’t.

It needs to be added that, like Germany’s other big cities, Hamburg, even without HafenCity’s ecologically sound features, would seem to most Americans like a rather “green” place.

Rail transit, pedestrian facilities, Hamburg, Germany

Map of Hamburg and vicinity. Note that the HafenCity boundary shown is approximate; HafenCity officially includes the Speicherstadt. “U/C” = under construction. “Other passenger r[ail]r[oad]s” include the S-Bahn, regional (RB/RE) lines, and the AKN Eisenbahn in the north. “Pedestrian facilities” include footpaths and bicycle paths other than sidewalks. Because sidewalks are near-universal in Hamburg, such facilities are more continuous than they appear to be on the map. GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified a great deal.

There is plenty of healthy inner-city housing. Public transit, consisting of integrated U-Bahn, S-Bahn, regional rail, and bus routes, is excellent. Most lines have services at regular (often five- or ten-minute) intervals until late in the evening. The elevated portions of the U-Bahn, like their counterparts in Berlin and Vienna, look like the “els” in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia but are mysteriously much quieter for reasons that I wish I understood.

Marathon, U3 elevated line, Hamburg, Germany.

An elevated portion of the U3 U-Bahn line. Photo taken during the running of the Hamburg marathon.

Sidewalks are generally well-maintained. Cyclists are catered to admirably, with spaces on sidewalks or lanes in streets that almost never put cyclists at risk of being doored (the pedestrianization of bicycling does make speed difficult, however).

Wandsbeker Chaussee, Hamburg, Germany.

Bicycle path on the sidewalk along Wandsbeker Chaussee, a street just east of the Altstadt.

Drivers are almost always respectful of pedestrians and cyclists. There are also nearly continuous walking/bicycling paths around Hamburg’s inner-city lake, the Alstersee, and along the Elbe downstream from Hamburg; these paths are jammed on weekends and busy on weekdays.

Landungsbrücken, Hamburg, Germany.

The Landungsbrücken, a zone along the Elbe where ships of all sorts dock. The pedestrian area forms an admittedly untypical part of the walking path along the Elbe.

It is true that there are freeways and major highways in Hamburg that can be enormously overcrowded and horribly polluted by diesel fumes, but official policy in recent years has leaned in favor of restricting car use, and Hamburg is generally a comfortable place for anyone preferring to live a life that has little to do with automobiles.

HafenCity is different from the rest of Hamburg. It’s newer. It’s on an island in the Elbe rather than inland. And the relationship of building to street to non-motorized-vehicle right-of-way in HafenCity is different than elsewhere. HafenCity is also far less bustling than certain other inner-city neighborhoods and has the controlled feel of most of the world’s newly created urban districts. I suspect, though, that it would be difficult to prove that HafenCity is substantially sounder ecologically than the rest of Hamburg even though this is one of its major claims to fame.

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Jakarta tries to get beyond 1960s “modernity”

Posted on April 1, 2018 by Christopher Winters

I had been in Jakarta only once before, in 1998. I concluded then that Jakarta was just about the most pedestrian-unfriendly city on earth. Many of its roads had only the narrowest of cracked sidewalks—and carried mind-bogglingly huge amounts of traffic most of which consisted of incredibly loud and polluting two-stroke motorcycles. In several cases the narrow sidewalks were bordered by unspeakably dirty canals on one side and overcrowded roadways on the other and seemed almost absurdly dangerous.14 Numerous streets even in the central city actually had no sidewalks at all, or else had sidewalks that had been so completely taken over by vendors that one had little choice but to walk in the roadway. Crossing streets was extremely difficult. Drivers never yielded to pedestrians, and there were hardly any traffic lights or bridges. There were naturally very few people walking anywhere, even though motor-vehicle ownership in Jakarta was not very high. Curiously, population density in the city was rather substantial, and there were numerous very tall buildings, but access to these buildings was intended to be mostly by vehicle. It was very odd that Southeast Asia’s largest urban area was so automobile-oriented, but that was just the way it was.

Jalan Sudirman, 1998, Jakarta, Indonesia

Jalan Sudirman, Jakarta, in September 1998. Image digitized from a slide. Note the narrow sidewalks.

I’ve since learned that much of the autocentric planning in Jakarta can be attributed to the actions of the government of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, who ruled in the years between Indonesia’s independence after World War II and 1967.15 Sukarno had actually been trained as an engineer and had worked for a year as an architect, and he brought to politics a set of strong prejudices about cities, which he was able to act on after becoming a near dictator in 1957. Sukarno’s ideas can fairly be termed Corbusien. He was absolutely obsessed with turning Jakarta into a modern-looking city, that is, one with tall buildings and wide highways. He is said to have been particularly proud of Jakarta’s Semanggi cloverleaf highway interchange (“the first in Southeast Asia”). It was Sukarno who presided over the construction of a network of mostly elevated toll highways in the Jakarta area, and who insisted on bulldozing Jalan16 Thamrin and its extension Jalan Sudirman through the center of the city, and it was he who pushed the construction of skyscrapers and what in effect was a new CBD in South Jakarta.

In Sukarno’s imagination, all of these new urban features represented progress and modernity, and their presence made Jakarta a modern city. It’s worth remembering that the period of Sukarno’s reign was the 1950s and 1960s. This was the era when superhighways were being pushed through the centers of American cities and when Brasília was being built. Pedestrian needs played virtually no role in much of the urban planning of this era, and they certainly didn’t in Jakarta, even though Jakarta, unlike U.S. cities or Brasília, was the kind of place where only a minority of the population could afford a private car.

Sukarno was effectively deposed in 1967 and replaced by a military officer, Suharto, who ruled until 1998. The Suharto government apparently concerned itself much less with urban matters, and local officials had more power. But it’s not clear that there was any great change in priorities. Jakarta kept growing, and it continued to rely almost exclusively on automobiles. The unfortunate consequences of Jakarta’s excessive reliance on motor vehicles were no secret. Air pollution levels in Jakarta were sometimes astonishingly high, and traffic jams were so frequent that it could take hours to travel a few kilometers. There was also the ever-present issue that the poor had limited mobility in a city built for cars. Plans to build a subway line were formulated at least as long ago as the early 1990s, but they were never implemented, and a financial crisis in 1997-1998 put them on hold indefinitely.

In the years after my 1998 trip, however, as in many other urban areas, there was a real change in what was felt to be desirable. The government has been taking quite a number of steps to alleviate the problems of automobile dependence.

[1] Old train lines were revived. The KRL Jabodetabek is a regional, mostly electrified rail system that dates back to the Dutch colonial era. It had so deteriorated and was felt by the government to be so antique that it was actually closed completely in the 1960s. It reopened in 1972 (long before the current revival of interest in reducing the role of the automobile in urban transportation), and the government has gradually modernized the system in the years since. It elevated some of the central-city tracks in the 1980s. It renovated stations. It acquired new (or used) Japanese rolling stock, and it insisted that passengers use electronic tickets. And it recently (2017) added a branch to the Airport.17 These days, trains on the major lines run every few minutes for most of the day. The KRL Jabodetabek (like its counterpart in Mumbai) resembles a rail rapid-transit system in its service frequency.[18 It does, however, betray its origins as an ordinary railroad. There are grade crossings. Tracks are shared with intercity passenger and freight trains. And the system doesn’t quite go where a modern rapid-transit line would. It only skirts the edge of the CBD and spends a great deal of time in industrial areas.19 There are roughly 850,000 passengers a day. This is an impressive number, but perhaps not so high when you consider that the Jakarta area (Jabodetabek) has a population of something like 30,000,000.20

[2] A large BRT system was established. The government also built TransJakarta (sometimes spelled Transjakarta), opening the first line in 2004, and adding numerous new lines in the years since. TransJakarta is claimed to be the world’s largest bus rapid transit system. It now consists of more than 230 km of routes on thirteen separate corridors.

Jalan Sudirman in South Jakarta showing a TransJakarta stop and some of the skyscrapers that form Jakarta’s new CBD. Note the building in the distance that also appears in the 1998 photo. This photograph was taken from a spot further north.

There are also a number of feeder routes (which appear not to be counted in the statistics). On most of the corridor routes, bus lanes and stations are in the center of major roads. Passengers prepay. Stations are sheltered from the elements.

TransJakarta station, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Inside a TransJakarta stop.

Transfers are free. Many of the buses use natural gas. Service on the major lines is frequent, and stations include countdown clocks. The system is quite impressive and makes getting around Jakarta by public transit enormously easier than it was in 1998. TransJakarta is generally considered a great success and its expansion has enjoyed considerable political support. But it needs to be said that there does not seem to be signal preemption, and red lights definitely slow the system down.

Traffic blocking TransJakarta buses, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Jalan Thamrin showing TransJakarta buses waiting for cross traffic. At right is a ramp that provides access to a station.

An additional problem is that some of the corridors are not fully separated from the main roadway. Only the original route 1 has acquired even “silver status” from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. TransJakarta has also evidently not been very successful in luring people out of cars. There are approximately 450,000 passengers a day, which does not seem like a huge number when you consider that the Jakarta proper (to which TransJakarta is limited) has a population of more than 10,000,000.21 That is, many smaller BRT systems in (mostly) smaller cities (for example, those in Bogotá, Guangzhou, Mexico City, Istanbul, and Curitiba) attract far more passengers.

[3] Construction of a subway and an LRT line was begun. After several earlier attempts that ended in failure, the government has recently finally begun to build a modern rail transit system. The initial segment, from Plaza Indonesia in the CBD to the southern suburbs, is scheduled to open in 2019, and an extension north to Kota Tua and a second, east-west line are supposed to follow. The CBD portions of the line will be in subway. This “MRT” will be joined by an “LRT” line (which, despite the label, will apparently have its own right-of-way). The first part of this, in northeastern Jakarta, is supposed to open before the Asian Games in August 2018, and it too will be extended, first toward the city center, where it will meet the subway, and then in several directions at once.22

[4] There have been some traffic restrictions. Motorcycle traffic has been restricted on some roads at some times of day. And. of course. the TransJakarta lanes are in theory closed to ordinary traffic.

It could actually be argued that,  even if modal share remains modest, Jakarta has become a place with a fairly large amount of reasonable-quality public transit and that, within a couple of years, it will have quite a bit more (see map).

Map of Jakarta, Indonesia, showing rail transit and BRT lines.

Map of Jakarta and vicinity showing the locations of the still under-construction (“U/C”) MRT and LRT as well as the Jabodetabek railroad and the TransJakarta BRT lines. Base GIS data are from the BBBike.org version of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat.

I spent a few days in Jakarta in mid-March. I’ll gladly concede that my twenty-year-old memories may not be altogether reliable, but I had the sense that things really have changed, at least to a limited extent. Sidewalks in central Jakarta are still pretty empty, but there seemed to be a few more pedestrians than in the past, many of whom were on their way to or from TransJakarta stations. The stations come along approximately every kilometer, so walking is often needed to get to destinations. The building of BRT stations in the middle of many major streets has an additional advantage: station bridges can also be used for crossing streets. Many of the bridges even come with elevators, although I noticed that some of these are broken. Most passengers seem to avoid them. Of course, a bridge every kilometer constitutes a fairly ungenerous street-crossing provision!

The sidewalks may get a little more use than was the case twenty years ago, but there isn’t much sign that they are any safer or more pleasant to use. Sidewalks are narrow, and adjoin traffic lanes. Surfaces are often cracked or missing. Vendors sometimes block the way. Motorcyclists feel free to invade any sidewalk at any time.

Furthermore, it is still not easy to cross streets with no bridges, even at corners with traffic lights, as drivers of turning vehicles do not feel they need to stop for pedestrians. Many Jakartan pedestrians tend to slither across streets, expecting that, if they walk slowly, drivers will miss them. This does not feel very safe to me, or, it seems, to most Jakartans. The majority of those willing to cross busy highways through moving traffic appear to be young men. I did come across a couple of actual pedestrian signals in the tourist area Kota Tua, but drivers were ignoring them.

Pedestrians, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Crossing a street in Kota Tua, showing how helpful one of Jakarta’s rare walk lights is.

There are still hardly any special provisions for pedestrians. The OpenStreetMap database’s pedestrian facilities categories show very little except paths in some of the few parks. It misses paths in kampung, however.23

There are, it must be said, a few streets—side streets off the major roads, streets in Glodok, the old Chinatown, and, arguably, some of the streets in kampung—which work more or less like traditional Western big-city streets, where shops and housing offer easy pedestrian access. But even on these streets, shops and residential buildings often have parking facilities. There is not much expectation in Jakarta that anyone will walk anywhere.

None of this is a secret to people in Jakarta, and there have been some grassroots protests. A new group—the Jakarta Pedestrian Coalition (Koalisi Pejalan Kaki)—has been trying to change conditions.24 This group has been quite successful at generating publicity, which is an important first step. It’s not clear, however, that it’s managed to change conditions.25

This jibes completely with the well-known recent study in which physical activity was measured for 111 countries.26 Indonesia came in last.

The disappointing ridership figures for TransJakarta are sometimes blamed on middle-class reluctance to use public transport, and it’s likely that there is much truth here. But surely the poor pedestrian environment, which makes it difficult to walk to and from the stations, is a factor as well. Public transit can’t live up to its potential if the stations are only marginally accessible.

I did come across one event that I found startling and delightful. On Sunday mornings, Jalan Thamrin and Jalan Sudirman, except for the TransJakarta lanes, are closed to traffic for several kilometers, including the stretch through Jakarta’s CBD.

Car free day, Jakarta, Indonesia.

“Car free day” crowds along Jalan Thamrin maneuvering through an area of subway construction.

There must have been at least a hundred thousand people enjoying this event on the Sunday I was there. Most were walking or hanging around, but there were some cyclists and runners as well. There were also food vendors, advocates of various causes, and buskers. The latter included dozens of people dressed as characters from Javan traditional tales, as well as a great many musicians, most of whom were presenting what seemed to be Indonesian pop, but I came across a group of two violinists and one guitar player who were doing pretty well by Pachelbel’s canon.

Car free day, Jakarta, Indonesia.

“Car free day” participants in a normally very busy traffic circle. Note the vendors and buskers to the right.

Jakarta’s street closures were of course inspired by Latin America’s ciclovías. They go back to 2002, although they have become more common and regular in recent years. The event that I attended seemed to this perhaps naïve observer like an almost perfect manifestation of one of stated goals of the original ciclovías in Bogotá: to encourage people of different social strata to enjoy public space together.27 It was an infinitely happier use of public space than Jakarta’s norm, in which public space mostly involves pedestrians working their way gingerly along noisy, irregular sidewalks and across uncrossable streets.

The most common phrase for ciclovía in Indonesian seems to be the English “car free day,” which tells you something: this event is an import. The “car free day” is an astonishing vision of a very different Jakarta. The coach turns back into a pumpkin at 11 sharp, however. This felt rather depressing to me. Perhaps it does to Jakartans as well.

It’s rather curious that in Southeast and East Asia, it’s generally the richer urban areas—Hong Kong, Singapore, and the cities of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (in something like that order)—that have become the most transit-oriented and pedestrian-friendly, and the poorer urban areas—those of Burma and Indochina, for example—that have remained most reliant on private motor-vehicle transit, even though private motor-vehicle transit is surely out of reach of many of the inhabitants of the poorer cities.  Jakarta’s efforts to become a modern city have left it much more like the latter places than most Indonesians would probably want to acknowledge. Its transit share remains low, and its pedestrian infrastructure is pretty awful. Jakarta is still one of the world’s least pedestrian-friendly cities. The rotten pedestrian environment of course sets up a feedback loop with the low transit share. Sukarno was wrong. In 2018 anyway, being modern does not seem to mean wide roads and cloverleafs and tall buildings that you can get to only in a car. It appears to mean allowing automobiles only a modest place.

Will current efforts to add better transit to Jakarta change things? It’s easy to imagine that they will help the transit dependent and the minority of middle-class people who prefer taking public transit. But has there been a case where an urban area in recent times has gone from having a low transit share to having a high one? I’m not sure there has. It’s not easy to change well-entrenched cultural habits that define transit use and urban walking as low-prestige, or to alter a society where a huge proportion of the built environment is designed exclusively for automobiles. Maybe the best that one could hope for is a bit of change around the edges, but even that is likely to happen if and only if the government keeps supporting the building of rail transit—and maybe above all if it begins to devote serious energy into disciplining automobile drivers and improving pedestrian infrastructure.

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Tall residential buildings (including hotels) by urban area

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Christopher Winters

This chart, compiled from data generated on February 4, 2018, shows urban areas by the number of finished tall buildings that were classed by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat as “residential” or “hotel”—or were multiuse buildings of which at least one of the uses was “residential” or “hotel.” This list is not very different from the list of urban areas by residential buildings alone, although several cities (for example, Las Vegas) with a great deal of tourism (and hence hotels) appear only on this list.

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The skyscraper apartment buildings (and some other distinctive features) of Panama City

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Christopher Winters

I spent a few days in Panama City at the end of January. I had been there only once before, in 2012, before the Metro opened. It’s a surprisingly distinctive place.

Part of Panama City’s skyline, from Amador Causeway. The highway that takes a water route around the Casco Viejo is visible in the foreground.

Panama City’s most astonishing feature is surely its skyline, one of the world’s most impressive. Curiously, more than 80% of its tallest buildings are residential structures. Among cities of the Western Hemisphere, only New York, Chicago, Miami, and Toronto have a larger number of tall (> 150 m) apartment buildings, and Panama City has so many new towers under construction that it could easily pass Miami and Toronto soon. Here’s a chart of tall residential buildings in the whole world, compiled from data assembled by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat:

This chart, based on data generated on February 24, 2018, ranks urban areas by the number of finished buildings that were classed by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat as “residential” including multiuse buildings with a “residential” component. Only urban areas with more than ten such buildings are included. Note that Council on Tall Buildings data are compiled by political municipality, not by urban area, and I’ve done some consolidation. This process as always raises some questions, such as: If Seoul and Incheon are put into the same urban area, why not Tokyo and Yokohama? And why not join, for example, Hong Kong and Shenzhen or maybe even all the Pearl River Delta cities? I acknowledge the arbitrariness of some of my decisions and have added notes about the underlying data to the last column. For a similar chart that includes hotels along with residential buildings, click here.

Consider, for the moment, how extraordinary Panama City’s position is. Its urban area has a population of only a million and half. It’s smaller than every single one of the other urban areas on this list with the exception of resort town Pattaya, in many cases by an order of magnitude. All the urban areas with anything like as many tall residential buildings as Panama City are much larger. Panama City is definitely punching above its weight when it comes to tall apartment buildings.28

Why were all these buildings built? The reasons are not completely clear. Many of the apartment dwellers are no doubt well-off Panamanians of whom there are quite a few,29 but it’s quite clear that a large proportion of the units are only occupied part time and that a good number of the inhabitants of the buildings are foreigners. Numerous Latin Americans feel a need to acquire property in a relatively safe foreign country, and Panama fits the bill. Like the United States, Panama uses the U.S. dollar as its currency; it lacks burdensome foreign-exchange controls; and it’s felt to have a reasonably stable political system. Even more than the United States, it welcomes well-off part-time foreign residents, including many North American retirees. Furthermore, costs are lower than in the United States (Panama City has sometimes been characterized as a cheaper alternative to Miami for Latin Americans in search of foreign real estate). Also, there’s no getting around the fact that the Panamanian authorities are generally considered not to be particularly interested in how well-off people have acquired their fortunes. Some people say that Panama City’s apartment buildings were built at least in part with profits from the Latin American drug trade, or with the proceeds of various kinds of corruption. I have no way to judge the accuracy of this widely-held view.

It’s actually quite difficult to get precise data on who’s living in the apartment buildings, since the Panamanian census doesn’t seem to gather data at anything comparable to the U.S. census’s tract or block level and only provides very basic socioeconomic information. The most detailed easily available data are for corregimientos (districts). Corregimientos in Panama City cover too large an area to be useful in looking closely at the apartment districts alone, but it’s easy enough to get a good sense of Panama City’s social geography from these data. The apartment buildings are nearly all located close to the Pacific, in predominantly upper-middle class neighborhoods (see the map).

Panama City and vicinity showing both the location of tall apartment buildings and the distribution of mean monthly household income in 2010 by corregimiento. Base GIS data are from the BBBike.org version of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat. GIS political boundaries are from GADM (and don’t jibe perfectly with the OpenStreetMap data). Data on income are from the 2010 Panama census (no corregimiento data are available for the area west of the Panama Canal). Data on tall buildings are from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Mapping software: QGIS.

You’d think when you see Panama City’s skyline that the streets of the city would feel a bit like those in Manhattan. They don’t. The buildings are surprisingly automobile-oriented. They come with a great deal of parking, and there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic for much of the day on some of the streets in the apartment districts. There are sidewalks just about everywhere, but they’re not very well maintained, and they’re generally not all that busy, although they’re not empty either. At corners, sidewalk users run into the usual Third World problems. Some drivers simply won’t stop for pedestrians no matter what. Crossing streets on foot isn’t something you do casually.

El Cangrejo, Panama City, Panama.

Sidewalk in El Cangrejo, Panama City’s most pedestrian-friendly well-off neighborhood.

Many of the commercial areas in the apartment districts are quite suburban in form too, with huge amounts of parking. There are several large vertical shopping centers. There is also a major inland commercial center along the Via España in El Cangrejo, which has a form I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. There is a reasonable amount of space for both pedestrians–and parking.

Via España, Iglesia del Carmen Station, Panama City, Panama.

The Via España, where an attempt has been made to accommodate both pedestrians and cars (the main roadway is to the right). Note the entrance to the Iglesia del Carmen Metro station.

The conversion of this street from a very wide two-way boulevard into a slightly narrower one-way street, which occurred when the subway was being built, was what allowed this form to be created. Dogmatic urbanists would hate the accommodation to automobiles, but merchants on the street would probably argue that there was no choice. El Cangrejo is certainly the closest thing Panama City possesses to a traditional middle-class residential and shopping district; it’s also a major banking center. It’s a reasonably congenial place for pedestrians, except at street corners. It’s not a coincidence that most of Panama City’s mid-range hotels are located nearby and that this area is the only place in Panama City where tall apartment buildings have been built away from the coast.

Panama City, Panama.

Panama City and vicinity showing the location of the Metro, roads, pedestrian facilities, and tall apartment buildings. Base GIS data are from the BBBike.org version of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat. “U/C” = under construction. Data on tall buildings are from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Mapping software: QGIS.

Panama City does provide pedestrians with one truly outstanding experience. There’s a recreational path along the Bay which (like the highway it parallels) is known as the Cinta Costera. The Cinta Costera path takes you from the Punta Pacifica, where many of the high-rise apartments are located, to Panama’s 17th-century core, the Casco Viejo. Because of the curve in the Bay, you can see from one end to the other. The views are really wonderful. The Cinta Costera path gets quite a bit of use, which varies enormously depending on the time of day and the day of the week. In the morning, the path seems to be populated almost entirely by more or less serious runners, cyclists, and walkers.

Cinta Costera, Panama City, Panama.

The Cinta Costera walkway on a weekday morning.

At midday it’s nearly empty except for a few foreigners. Late in the afternoon, the path gets crowded with people of all sorts, and on weekend afternoons it can feel as though all Panama City is there.

Cinta Costera, Panama City, Panama.

The Cinta Costera walkway on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s a successful space, but I don’t want to exaggerate its virtues. It’s only 4 km long (and I suspect that the distance between kilometers 3 and 4 is short). It’s also not too far from the Cinta Costera highway, and you can hear traffic every second.30

Panama City also offers another high-quality walking and bicycling experience, along the Amador Causeway. This causeway came into being as a breakwater for the Panama Canal’s Pacific entrance. Because it adjoins the low-density former Canal Zone, the Amador Causeway is not easily accessible to as many people as the Cinta Costera, but it still attracts numerous users, especially on weekends.

Amador Causeway (Calzada de Amador), Panama City, Panama.

The Amador Causeway during a Sunday morning ciclovía, when the middle lanes of several Panama City highways are reserved for cyclists (and a few skaters). Note the container ship exiting the Panama Canal in the background.

Panama City’s Metro is also quite impressive considering Panama City’s modest size. It’s true that the Metro itself is not that long—16 km, of which 7 km  are in a subway—but a second 22 km line is under construction, and additional lines are planned. The current route runs from Albrook (the site of Panama City’s major bus terminal and what is said to be Latin America’s largest shopping mall),

Albrook, Panama City, Panama.

The heavily used pedestrian bridge between the Metro Albrook terminus and Panama City’s major bus terminal and an enormous shopping mall. It’s surely the most impressive piece of pedestrian infrastructure in Panama City. 

through the old downtown around the 5 de Mayo Plaza, then along Via España through El Cangrejo, and finally on an elevated line north/northeast through some heavily populated, relatively poor neighborhoods.

San Isidro, Panama City, Panama.

The San Isidro Metro station, the northern terminus of the Metro.

Trains are short—only three cars long—but the stations were built to handle five-car trains, and it’s planned that they will when Line 2 opens. Trains operate quite frequently during the day, and are often jammed. Approximately 260,000 persons a day have been riding Panama City’s Metro, which isn’t bad for a small system in a city that is not exactly gigantic.

For a medium-sized city in a medium-income country, Panama City has acquired an impressive set of modern big-city features. I wouldn’t say that it always feels like a traditional big city when you’re down on the ground—but neither do most other Third World cities. Their major growth period occurred when accommodating automobiles seemed more important than anything else, and autocentric habits have become thoroughly embedded in the structure of class privilege. It wouldn’t be easy to reverse this.

 

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The difficulties of carfree life in Bangkok

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Christopher Winters

I’d been in Bangkok half a dozen times since the 1990s and had come to know the city moderately well. Although it’s a large, pleasantly complicated place, with a rich traditional culture and a distinctive approach to modernization, Bangkok had never been one of my favorite cities: it was just too automobile-oriented. Considerable investment in new rail transit lines in recent years, however, encouraged a revisit, and I spent several days there in mid-January. In this post, I describe my reaction, after a bit of background history.

One key to understanding Bangkok is that in modern times it has always had a much weaker city-planning apparatus than some other Southeast Asian cities, notably Singapore. There has been a strong preference for doing as much as possible by private enterprise.

Thus, as Bangkok grew enormously between the years of the Vietnam War and the 1990s, it invested practically nothing in public transport. The expectation was that most urban transportation would be by automobile, or by privately-run bus companies. Automobile—and motorcycle—ownership grew to high levels, especially given Thailand’s status as a middle-income country. The city expanded horizontally and ended up covering an enormous area, something like 3000 sq km. Thai cultural preference for single-family houses was a factor here. (A complication is that Bangkok’s large Sino-Thai population—at least according to a widely believed stereotype—has traditionally preferred living at greater density.) An elaborate network of mostly elevated expressways was built by the Expressway Authority of Thailand, some in partnership with private enterprise, but, as in so many places, limited-access roads could not come close to keeping up with demand, and traffic jams and high levels of air pollution became features of Bangkok life. Furthermore, because motorcycles with two-stroke engines made up such a large percentage of vehicles, noise levels on Bangkok’s major urban roads were among the highest in the world.

Sirat Expressway, which runs in part through many of Bangkok’s older neighborhoods along the Chao Phraya River. There are several of these elevated expressways, which of course degrade the landscape for people living nearby. They also complicate life for pedestrians trying to cross speedy traffic at entrances and exits.

The widespread realization that road-building alone could not solve Bangkok’s mobility problems led to a decision in the 1980s to add rail transit. The early history of Bangkok’s modern rail transit lines, however, is not pretty. The government preferred to pass on responsibility to private enterprise, at least in part (the State Railway was involved too). The result was two separate failures. The Lavalin Sky Train and the Bangkok Elevated Road and Train System (the “Hopewell project”) both went bankrupt. The latter bankruptcy left Bangkok with a legacy of thousands of concrete columns, which became one of the most distinctive features of its urban landscape. Finally, an elevated railroad run by the Bangkok Mass Transit System (BTS) opened in 1999. It was joined by a subway system operated by the Bangkok Expressway and Metro Public Company Limited (MRT) in 2004 and the elevated Airport Rail Link (run by the State Railway) in 2010.

Map. rail transit lines, roads, and pedestrian facilities, Bangkok, Thailand, and vicinity

Map of central Bangkok and vicinity showing rail rapid transit lines, pedestrian facilities, roads, and waterways. “U/C” = under construction. Initials along rail lines (added 11 April 2018) show company affiliation; see text just above for explanation. Older, long-standing commuter rail routes on 1-meter gauge track are omitted. See text below for comments on the diverse pedestrian facilities. Base GIS data from the MetroExtracts versions of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat.

The first two systems have both been extended since their debut, and further extensions are under construction, mostly elevated. Except for a stretch through Rattanakosin, the oldest part of Bangkok, even the MRT subway has shifted to building only elevated lines. Additional rail lines are planned, including monorail lines to be operated by two additional companies.

The MRT Blue Line under construction west of the Tao Poon station. Many middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in Bangkok consist, like this area, of somewhat isolated tall apartment buildings inserted among generally lower, older buildings. The city’s residential districts have a lower population density than the presence of skyscraper apartment blocks would lead one to expect.

The preference for passing as much rail building as possible onto private firms has had consequences. Fares, for example, are pretty high considering that Thailand is not a rich country. You pay by distance on Bangkok’s urban rail system, and travel between the ends of lines can cost nearly $2. Furthermore, while the rail transit lines seem to form a kind of network, there are no free transfers between routes run by different companies or to the privately run bus companies—or, of course, to the motorcycle taxis that often cover a journey’s “last mile.” As a result, it can cost several dollars to cross the city, more than you’d have to pay in New York or Paris. This must have some effect on ridership, which is less than a million in an urban area of perhaps 15,000,000. Bangkok has only to a limited degree become a transit-oriented place.

The peculiar geography of the elevated/subway dichotomy in Bangkok is also connected with Bangkok’s use of private firms to build its rail lines. BTS was the first successful rail-building firm, and it naturally got to build in the busiest, most important places, which happened to be the most pedestrian-oriented parts of the new central business district: along Sukhumvit and Silom Roads, for example, and around the Siam Square shopping malls. The BTS always aimed to build what it called (in English) a “Skytrain”; all its lines are elevated. The MRT concession called for a subway line, and the MRT ended up building for the most part in places where, in many cities, subways would have seemed less necessary: major arterials that have only a modest amount of pedestrian-oriented commerce. It needs to be said that the elevated railroads do not seem to discourage pedestrian traffic very much. The modern trains running on welded rails make very little noise—far less noise than the road traffic—and the quite massive concrete elevated structures in a generally hot city actually may provide a bit of welcome shade.

The Asok station on the BTS elevated Sukhumvit Line, which abuts one of Bangkok’s many shopping malls. Note the overhead walkways, the traffic, and the pedestrians crossing the street at left.

Despite the city’s autocentric development history, Bangkok seems at first sight to be a “vibrant” place with a healthy pedestrian life. The major commercial streets in the new CBD, as well as in older neighborhoods along the Chao Phraya River like Chinatown and Banglamphu are full of people, modest shops, and street vendors.

Pedestrians maneuver among street vendors in Bangkok’s Chinatown.

Side streets in these parts of the city are often pleasantly crowded too, and so are many commercial centers in the suburbs.

The very substantial fly in the ointment is that it’s so hard to cross streets. Drivers simply won’t yield to pedestrians, even when pedestrians have a green light and drivers are making a turn on a red. There is also an issue when motor traffic emerges from side streets or driveways. Here too drivers expect that sidewalk users will yield. I haven’t been able to locate statistics for Bangkok alone, but it’s telling that Thailand has the world’s second highest rate of automobile fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants.

Of course, casual automobile aggressiveness is a problem throughout the Third World, and it’s not unknown in developed countries (like the United States!), especially in places where there are few pedestrians. But the problem seems most acute in certain large urban areas of the Third World. There are parts of some cities (Delhi and Jakarta, for example) where pedestrians have practically been intimidated out of existence. Bangkok has lots of pedestrians, which makes the awkwardness of pedestrian-motor vehicle interaction all the more problematic.

The marginalization of pedestrians in much of the Third World is no doubt in part a function of the association of automobile ownership in poorer countries with wealth and a certain tendency in these countries for wealth to come with automatic privileges. There is also the issue that widespread automobile ownership is a fairly recent phenomenon and that driving skills are pretty low. The lack of enforcement of the traffic rules in many places is another factor. Then there is the related (and extremely complicated) issue that “rule of law” does not seem to come naturally in certain non-Western countries.

It needs to be said that these things can change. Russian and Italian cities were precarious places for pedestrians not so many years ago. Some combination of enforcement and culture change has made them much more pedestrian-friendly. In Moscow and Rome drivers often stop when pedestrians are approaching crosswalks. In Bangkok and many other Third World cities crosswalks are meaningless and even traffic lights don’t prevent drivers from feeling they have the right of way.

Have things gotten better in Bangkok? They probably have. Red lights are more likely to be obeyed than they were in the 1990s. The ratio of cars to motorcycles seems to have increased. This may have unfortunate consequences in some ways, but on the whole this is a good thing for pedestrians, since motorcycles are noisier and more polluting than cars and since motorcycle riders are far more likely than car drivers to pay no attention to traffic rules (for example, to ride on sidewalks when there’s a traffic jam). Furthermore, government-mandated reductions of lead in gasoline and a shift from two-stroke to four-stroke engines in motorcycles have marginally reduced road noise and air pollution. And, while I haven’t been able to locate figures, many people in Bangkok believe that the growth in rail transit lines has reduced the number of vehicles on the roads despite the continued rise in automobile ownership.

The government, however, has done little for pedestrians. Aware that there’s an issue here, the authorities have cracked down somewhat on sidewalk vendors, who, up to a certain point, actually make sidewalks more interesting for pedestrians, but, so far as I can see, they’ve done nothing to make street crossings less precarious, which is where the real problem lies. Punishing the poor is easier for many governments than disciplining the relatively wealthy (Thailand’s poisonous class-based politics may exacerbate this tendency).

In any case, Bangkok, unlike, say, Singapore or Hong Kong, has made little effort to build walkways of any sort. The “pedestrian facilities” that appear in the OpenStreetMap data base (see map above) consist mostly of paths in Bangkok’s few parks (which can be very crowded);

Runners and walking pedestrians in Lumphini Park, Bangkok.

alleys in the older parts of the city near the Chao Phraya River and footpaths in the anomalous (and still rural) Phrapradaeng Peninsula; overhead crossings over major streets (which almost never have escalators or elevators); a single walkway under the elevated railway in what has become Bangkok’s most important modern shopping district;

The overhead walkway that runs between the Chit Lom and Siam stations under the BTS elevated railroad, Bangkok.

and (maybe most distinctive) a certain number of paths along remaining canals. Some of these date back many decades, and, in certain cases (for example, in the eastern part of the city) go on for many kilometers. Others are not very usable for long-distance walking. They feel rather private, are discontinuous, and can bring one too close to badly polluted waterways. However, as the sign in this photo suggests, many canals, with a bit of improvement, could become distinctively Bangkokian and extremely useful pedestrian corridors.

An advertisement from a local council showing how the path along one of Bangkok’s many canals might be transformed into a public walkway.

A few canal walkways have been renovated seriously. One is the path (which even contains a lane for bicycles) between Lumphini and Banjakitti Parks, the central city’s two largest public open spaces.

The walkway with a bicycle lane northeast of Lumphini Park, Bangkok. It includes two bridges over highways, which must present a problem for cyclists. Walkways like this are very rare in central Bangkok.

The possibilities of the bicycle, however, have generally been neglected. The government has painted a few bicycle lanes here and there and has built a serious if somewhat useless bicycle track around Suvarnabhumi Airport. It’s also allowed a bikeshare program to be set up. But bicycling just isn’t safe enough to seem practical to most people, and there are few bicycles on Bangkok’s streets.

Bangkok remains a big, serious city that is enormously likeable in many ways, but it remains an extraordinarily difficult place for anyone who wants to walk more than a short distance.

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Spatial inequality in central Havana

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Christopher Winters

I spent three days in Havana in mid-December. This blog would not exist if I didn’t believe that intense observation for a short period can lead to real insights about places. I wouldn’t, however, claim that three days in a city of two million is enough to learn much, especially when (as is true in this case) I haven’t read a great deal of what’s been written about it. I still can’t help but share one observation. Central Havana, thanks to more than a quarter century of catering to tourists, has become an area of shocking spatial inequality. Let me explain.

Central Havana consists of two major sections, each subdivided into smaller districts.

Map, pedestrian facilities, some neighborhood names, central Havana, Cuba

Map of Central Havana and vicinity. Base GIS data from the BBBike.org and MetroExtracts versions of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat. Note that the green lines used to indicate pedestrian facilities show not only walkways in parks and along boulevards and certain shorelines but also pedestrianized streets in Habana Vieja. 

On the east is Habana Vieja, the oldest part of the city, which includes the port and most of remaining oldest buildings. On the west is the Centro, which looks to have grown up in the latish nineteenth century.

Northern part of the Centro, looking northwest. The tallest buildings are exceptions, but otherwise the great majority of structures seem to date either from late in the 19th or early in the 20th century.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Havana didn’t extend much beyond Habana Vieja and the Centro; click here to see an 1899 map of Havana held at the American Geographical Society collection at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Havana’s population at the time was something like 200,000, and central Havana was built up quite densely, with two and three story buildings on generally narrow streets. I’m not sure quite why Havana built so densely. Mexico City, for example, much bigger then as now, generally has lower buildings in its 19th-century sections. Perhaps the chief reason for Havana’s density was the prosperity of those who benefited from its sugar industry, which had access to slave labor until 1886.

Much of central Havana must once have been lived in by well-off people. But the relatively wealthy seem to have moved to neighborhoods further west like Vedado and Miramar starting at least early in the 20th century. These neighborhoods are generally built to a much lower density than the central neighborhoods, although they include numerous substantial 20th-century residential (and hotel) buildings.

Street in Vedado, Havana, Cuba. This district filled in much later than central Havana. It’s essentially a 20th-century neighborhood.

Most of the inhabitants of Habana Vieja and the Centro these days seem to be relatively poor people, although one study I looked at suggests that many are “professionals” employed by the government.31 Most people seem to get around on foot. Few own cars; there’s not much room in their neighborhoods for cars anyway, which is just as well, since so many of Havana’s cars pollute badly. These neighborhoods are actually great places to walk in, except that sidewalks are narrow and in terrible shape. Most pedestrians seem to prefer the streets, which are in bad shape too; potholes, often deep, are common. You have to be especially careful at night, since streetlights are rare and dim.

A mostly residential street in the Centro, Havana, Cuba.

Many of the buildings are in wretched shape too. The problem is especially acute near the ocean, where structures are subject to damage from spray every time the wind blows from the north, but there are buildings that are falling apart on nearly every block. Collapses are apparently not rare. I don’t know the extent to which nearly sixty years of authoritarian left-wing government can be blamed for the condition of Havana’s older buildings. It’s certainly true that Communist governments in Russia and its European satellites were also generally indifferent to maintenance of ordinary real estate (although they could lavish enormous energy on the renovation of pre-Communist landmarks).

There is one major exception to the rule that central Havana is a wreck. Parts of Habana Vieja have been thoroughly renovated. One east-west street—the Calle del Obispo—has been fully pedestrianized, and just about all the buildings on this street have been cleaned up.

The Calle del Obispo, Habana Vieja, Havana, Cuba.

It’s possible to walk, say, from the cruise ship dock at Terminal Sierra Maestra along the Calle del Obispo all the way to the Prado (formally the Paseo de Martí)—the monument-laden thoroughfare that separates Habana Vieja and the Centro—and not encounter anything that suggests poverty. This walk would take you past numerous respectable restaurants and high-end shops. It also passes by several museums. And it looks as though most of the buildings on this street now have commercial rather than residential tenants on their upper floors. Several north-south streets leading off the Calle del Obispo have been subject to essentially the same treatment. If you don’t look too closely, you could easily imagine on any of these streets that you were in a resort town in Spain or Argentina.

I’m simplifying a little here, since there are certainly renovated buildings here and there in the Centro (especially close to the oceanfront Malecón) and even a certain amount of pedestrianization, and you don’t have to go far from the Calle del Obispo to hit ruins, but there is still certainly an amazing contrast between renovated and unrenovated Havana. It’s striking to see such visible spatial inequality in a supposedly socialist state, and it’s easy to imagine that serious Cuban Communists (if there are any left) would not be pleased by what has happened in central Havana.

However, some of the literature on the renovation of Habana Vieja suggests that this view is wrong and that the restoration work that’s been carried out under the direction of City Historian Eusebio Leal Spengler jibes completely with the regime’s ideals.32  There has, it’s said, been only modest displacement. The fact that large numbers of poor people live close to the renovated districts is not a consequence of incomplete gentrification but the result of careful, ideologically colored planning. Proceeds from the tourist industry have even been self-consciously used to improve the quality of life for the relatively poor inhabitants of central Havana. For example, some of tourism’s profits have been devoted to repairing the ancient system of water distribution. Ideology has also affected what’s gotten renovated. It’s not an accident that renovation has stressed the re-creation of Havana’s ideologically neutral colonial past and deemphasized many decades of North American influence.

In other words, what looks like a somewhat obnoxious kind of tourist-oriented gentrification isn’t quite as it appears. Spatial inequality in central Havana is real, but it’s the result more of the uneven distribution of building renovation than of gentrification-associated displacement. It’s true that renovation was a response to the needs of the tourist industry, but it’s the state that decided to emphasize tourism when its older economic underpinnings were undermined by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and it’s the state that determined that tourism would focus to some degree on colonial Havana rather than, for example, on beaches and casinos.

I have no way of judging the extent to which this argument is valid. But it’s certainly true that, while there may be vivid spatial contrasts in central Havana, there is most certainly nothing like segregation. Poor residents visit the Calle del Obispo and adjoining streets, and many tourists stay in casas particulares (private homes) that are most often found away from the hyper-renovated parts of the city. Furthermore, it’s more or less self-evident that a tourist industry can distribute its profits much more widely than centralized industries tend to do in that it creates thousands of jobs. It’s true that these jobs are not highly remunerative, but, in a country where “professional” government positions can pay $20 a month, modest jobs in the tourist industry can look pretty good. Cuba’s complicated currency system adds to their allure; tips are likely to be in convertible rather than in ordinary pesos. And who could argue with the proposition that the renovation of central Havana—an architecturally stunning and endangered place that looks like nowhere else on earth—is in many respects a great thing?

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Change in population by “race” and Hispanic status, Chicago area, 2010-2012/2016

Posted on January 4, 2018 by Christopher Winters

The Census Bureau released the 2012/2016 American Community Survey (ACS) tract-level data last month. I’ve used these data to map tract-level ethnic changes between 2010 and 2012/2016 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 2010-2011/2015 maps that I put on this blog a year ago. There have only been subtle 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 2012/2016 data would be 2014, and these maps can be thought of showing changes for an average of four years from 2010, but in fact (as confusing as this may be) they show changes between April 1 2010 and the 2012/2016 period.

[2] ACS data are not anything like as accurate as decennial census data or even 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 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 by a heavy black line. Freeways are shown in blue. Tract boundaries are shown in 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 2012/2016, 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 continued to lose some of their white population. Also striking: There was only a modest increase in white population in the outer suburbs. A factor here is surely that there just 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 and here and there in the city of Chicago. 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] A very few gentrifying North Side neighborhoods lost Hispanic population, 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.

One way to summarize these maps would be to say 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.

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

Dot maps showing population change by "race" and Hispanic/Latinx status, 2010-2012/2016, Chicago and vicinity

Population change by “race” and Hispanic status, 2010-2012/2016, Chicago and vicinity.

And here’s a set of comparable maps for the Chicago region:

Dot maps showing population change by "race" and Hispanic/Latinx status, 2010-2012/2016, Chicago region

Population change by “race” and Hispanic status, 2010-2012/2016, Chicago region.

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Glimmers of non-autocentric urbanism in Austin

Posted on December 31, 2017 by Christopher Winters

Austin, with a population of just under a million, is now the 11th largest city in the United States.33 Both the city of Austin and its urban area grew by more than 16% between 2010 and 2016. No other U.S. with more than 250,000 people in 2010 grew this much. Austin generally ranks near the top in various measures of the importance of the tech industry too. For, example, in Richard Florida’s ranking of global cities by venture capital investment, Austin ends up between much larger Toronto and Shanghai, and tenth in the United States.34

As it happens, Austin was by far the largest North American city I’d never been to, and I spent three days there just before Christmas.

I was struck by several things:

[1] Pedestrians are not rare in Austin’s downtown. I wouldn’t say that I came across any sidewalks that were really crowded, even at noon on a weekday, but downtown Austin certainly has more pedestrians than, say, the downtowns of much larger Houston and Dallas. The proximity of the University of Texas with its student population of more than 50,000 may be a factor here. So surely is the amount of residential land use in, and on the edge of, downtown (see just below). The large homeless population contributes too, although I’ll bet the city fathers would rather that no one noticed that.

[2] There’s a huge amount of new mid- and (especially) high-rise residential construction in central Austin.

Map, pedestrian routes., apartment buildings, Capital MetroRail, Austin, Texas

Central Austin. Base GIS data from the BBBike.org and MetroExtracts versions of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat. Data on tall buildings from Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Most “pedestrian facilities” are open to bicycles. A couple of the pedestrian facilities on the edge of downtown are protected bicycle lanes.

There are numerous residential buildings over 100 m tall, including the not yet quite completed Independent, which will soon replace its neighbor the Austonian as the highest American residential tower west of the Mississippi. Austin may be the only big city in the United States whose downtown skyline is dominated by residential buildings:

Part of Austin’s downtown from south of the river.

These new buildings are most definitely not TODs; they all come with a great deal of parking. It’s not altogether clear that a, say, fifty-story building whose major entrance is a ramp to a multi-floor parking facility necessarily makes much of a contribution to downtown “vibrancy,” but it’s absolutely true that an awful lot of people are, at least in theory, attracted to the idea of “downtown living” in Austin (prices are high for Texas), and you do see at least a few apartment-dwellers walking around the central city.

[3] There’s quite an impressive set of paved and unpaved “hiking/biking” trails stretching along both sides of the Colorado River of Texas, which lies just south of downtown (see map, above). On a cool Sunday afternoon, these trails were much busier than any downtown sidewalk. I was struck (as I was while visiting the Atlanta BeltLine the previous month) that most trail users were walking. Runners and cyclists were a minority. This is definitely not the case on recreational trails in North American cities where neighborhood walking is commoner.

A small section of the Ann and Roy Butler Hike and Bike Trail in Austin.

I was particularly impressed by the pedestrian-only bridges and walkways over the River, one of which—the Pfluger Bridge—has become a multi-use meeting place.

The Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge, Austin.

Of special note are two trails that run (or will run) along creeks that pass through downtown into the Colorado and that have a history of causing floods. The first trail runs along Shoal Creek. A rough path along this creek has been there for a while. It’s narrow, winding, irregular, and perhaps not very safe. In so far as I could see, the Shoal Creek Trail is little used. But its lowest portion is being improved radically, and this may change things. Waller Creek, on the eastern side of downtown, is scheduled to get an even more ambitious recreational path, as well as a series of parks.

[4] Austin has had a passenger rail line since 2010: a 51 km line between the eastern edge of downtown and the city’s northern suburbs.

Capital MetroRail’s Downtown station.

On weekdays, Capital MetroRail (as it’s called) provides fairly reasonable (roughly) half-hour service during rush hours and hourly service at midday. It also provides hourly or better service on Friday and Saturday evenings. (But note that most trains don’t go all the way to the end of the line; the northernmost station in particular has little service.) MetroRail uses self-propelled cars on an only modestly upgraded single-track line, and it was built fairly cheaply, for something like $100,000,000. Its supporters note that rush-hour trains are crowded (and that as a result extra runs will soon be added). Its detractors point out that only something like 2900 passengers a day use the system, and that per-passenger subsidies are of necessity enormous. The ride seemed pleasant enough when I took it, but no one would say that the off-peak trains were crowded. There was free wifi—and two longish waits at sidings for trains going in the other direction. The two stations nearest downtown have an impressive number of mid-rise apartment buildings either just opened or under construction that, it’s claimed, were built because of the presence of MetroRail. I didn’t see crowds of people walking between the train stations and these buildings, however.

Austin probably provides the closest thing to what one might loosely call a traditional urban lifestyle that Texas offers—at least close to downtown, walking is an option—and it’s clear that this has quite a lot of appeal for many people.

Away from this rather small zone, most people in Austin, as in the rest of urban Texas (as well as in much of the United States), apparently lead completely autocentric lives. Despite the good work of Capital Metro, only approximately 4% of the population of the city of Austin took public transit to work in 2016. Downtown’s eastern edges are given over almost entirely to parking lots (plus a couple of homeless shelters and—incongruously—several new hotels). And, at rush hour, the arterials leading out of downtown and the bridges over the Colorado are jammed with traffic. When it comes to urbanism, Austin is on the whole not quite as weird as some of its inhabitants would like to think it is.

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