MoM: Better Design & Smarter Transport Systems

Elizabeth is one of those people with Betty and Susan Sheheen and others at Cal who are really trying to define a new approach to the transportation system that we can call smarter, but smarter isn't really an adequate term for what what they have been working on. She and her colleagues have been spending a lot of time in the real world, working with real cities, real counties, real states, but not just the government, private sector partners as well. And I hope it will give Elizabeth a chance to share some of the research findings and some of the the outer reach conclusions that are now under development. The dark screen, lots of multimedia, crashing disks, there it is, Elizabeth MacDonald. Thank you, I think that just took a while to load because I have a lot of graphic images in it. The first thing I need to say is I hope you all bear with me if you are not able to see my face while I am talking. I am actually in this growing out my bang's phase of adulthood. It's kind of a girl thing, and it's kind of problematic. But I haven't yet learned how keep it out of my eyes. And the the second thing I want to say is that it's interesting to find myself in this particular line up of speakers because where as everybody else has been talking so far was sort of a high technology person. I am actually a low technology person, believe it or not. I don't actually have my own cell phone, I share it with my husband and it's currently lost because we left it at his daughter's house. So that's I do have a Prius though. But I but I am something of a of a last adopter often of technology, maybe to some extent that's because I I do believe in building on precedence and in some ways doing things with lower technology and doing things in a simpler, easier way sometimes. Sometimes with technology I I have to ask myself you have why would you ever want to do that, or live that life so, just a little you know where I am coming from. The other thing I have to say is that I am I am a bit daunted as I've sat through this conference. I am daunted because of the really short time spans that we are talking about here and the dire consequences if we don't do something. In some ways being part of on the technology side of things and some ways may be is a bit easier; I was listening to a speaker from Toyota this morning and I think it my goodness just to be dealing with those in some ways complex yes, but I think simpler than city building issues of how to improve technologies for vehicles, just somehow seems easier. And to have all those people Toyota behind me, helping me to do it, let alone putting together my power point presentation which would be nice, to have some help on that too; but we don't get that at the university. But I think that some of the paradigms shifts might be easier or may be I just imagine that they might be easier from that technology side of it than from the sitting building side of it. I am an urban designer. What can I do in the next five years to actually make a difference? Cities are really, really complex. They tend to be slow changing. There are many, many actors in the process. I am just a small part of that and from my own experience I know how hard it is to make the teeniest, tiniest little changes. What I am going to talk to you about are some precedents that come from my own research and some other cities that I am very familiar with. I am going to be in the process of that trying to think about where some of the paradigm shifts should actually happen, could happen in in my field and in cities today. I mean, I am going to start with letting you know that my orientation is that I really do believe in the idea of compact connected cities as a means to actually combat some of these these problems, environmental problems that we are facing in the world. And I do believe in urban designers having a role as being visionaries for compact cities. The earlier speaker talked about the need to minimize excuse me to maximize energy efficiencies and to minimize energy use and I do think compact urban places are one of the best ways to go about doing that. But how do we do it? Okay, the first city I want to talk about is San Francisco. You all have heard something about Octavia Boulevard. Myself and my partner Allan Jacobs were the urban designers for that project. One of the things that we had to deal with there was this fighting of entrenched modernist street standards in professional norms. Yes, we were able to take the freeway down. But in order to actually accomplish that took an awful lot. We actually sometimes joke with ourselves that now that we accomplished that, we can just clip because it such a you know a big, incredible undertaking to actually do. That's what Hayes Valley look like when the double decker was freeway was up there before it was damaged in the earthquake. Well, part of the things that the city realized and especially the neighborhood activists and citizens who lived in Hayes Valley is that, if we didn't rebuild that freeway, first of all we'd have the opportunity to rebuild all that land, right, that have been occupied by the freeway offerings, because those pieces of infrastructure occupy huge amount of land. And wouldn't it be better right here at the heart of San Francisco, where there is lots and lots of transit and ways to get around to actually build that more density with housing. So that was the first thing that the city was willing to recognize in this fight. And then the second thing was actually build a particular type of street, which we call a multiway boulevard, which could sort of be in a sense of hybrid or could be a transition type of street that could still handle the fast traffic that you needed to handle in the city, but also be friendlier for the local environment. So they were willing to think and even contemplate a street that that was a very is a very, very unusual street type, because it's a it's a multiple use street type, and by the way to also do it in such a way that we would get a little bit of a park at the end for the neighborhood as a transition back into the grid. So they were willing to even consider the idea of a multiway boulevard which is a street type that Allan Jacobs and I and our colleague Yodan Rofe did a great deal of research on and the the local people in the neighborhood knew that we've done this research on the street type which allows through going traffic on the central realm, but creates a pedestrian realm on the sides through a pedestrian scaled and pedestrian movement paced side access road for local access, okay. Now this is the type of street that was originally designed and built back in the 1860's and 70's, in Paris and in Brooklyn and Frederick Law Olmsted designed. Two of them in Brooklyn that were built in were there. He called them parkways. And they were specifically designed to accommodate all the new kinds of traffic that were being built at that time. Then they were having to deal with the new faster moving carriages, right, which were going eight miles an hour, which was a big deal at that time. And those were going to go in the central roadway, right. The other spaces the malls, the separating malls in the side space is for people on the foot or people in very slow moving carts. Only several decades later did bicycles even come in to the mix. But they were grappling with how to deal with different modes and I think that that's a lesson you know, looking back in time can help us look at some of those lessons. In San Francisco the thing that was so amazing is that they were willing to sort of suspend disbelief if you will or they were willing to to not go do business as usual in terms of the engineering look at the boulevard. So they were willing to say, okay we don't have to use this abstract safety analysis which looks to the boulevard, right, and does this potential conflict point analysis, very abstractly and says, my goodness that's so dangerous, because look at all those potential conflict points as compared to a normally configured street. We could never do it and they were willing to accept the research that we had done out in the field, were we looked a lot of these boulevards empirically and saw how they really worked. And we were able to say, hey if you dug this and these things right, and get those side access roads narrow enough and slow enough, you can have slow moving traffic and long behold, you're not going to have all the conflicts because of the way the traffic moves; a lot less on the side roadways. Okay? And they were willing to do that as a city. And people like José Louis Moscovich who you heard yesterday was willing to sort of go in the line and back this. I'm not sure that the politicians would have been willing to go that far because of things like the liability issues. You know once you try to do something according to different standards the world comes to stop as far as the lawyers are concerned. But in this case San Francisco's politicians were forced into it because it was a valid measure, they were required to implement it because the citizens had pushed for it and voted for it. So that's the cross section of Octavia Boulevard. We would have liked to have done it narrow narrower if we could have. But one of the things another thing that was really innovate was that the city of San Francisco was willing to accept the idea that we needed to get fronatage along this boulevard, and even though some of our parcels were just going to be 15 feet deep, they went ahead and build it, right. 15 foot parcels, what can you do with that? Well it turns out there is a lot of innovation of the building type sect could go that could go in there. So and we had innovation from the Fire Department in terms of being a willingness to accept a mountable curve on inside of that that mall, right, as part of their clear space that they needed for for getting into the fires. I think that they could have done it from the centre realm but they insist upon having to go into the inside. But they were willing to accept innovation. Okay, and then again the park which I think is just an incredible thing that you now have a place for people and kids in the neighborhood, where it used to be an overhead freeway. It was pretty amazing. But this whole issue about fighting these entrenched standards that are the entrenched modernist standards and professionals norms. And they are entrenched both in the professions, engineering and somewhat in planning as well and within the bureaucracy and within the city government. And how do we fight those things? Every little inch it has been a huge fight. And I think that we need to have a huge paradigm shift there to really question all of those standards in a really major way and look at the cost, the ecological cost that are associated with them and the livability cost and throw them out, have a different set of assumptions that we are going to use for them. One of the things that I did recently was this study that was funded through UCTC, Street Trees and Intersection Safety Study, where we looked at the side you know these clear side triangles that acts the requires and intersections right, and they are huge. They are absolutely enormous. And what is it that gets sort of bumped out of the equation? It's the trees. So the trees are held back, if you follow the the actual standards, some 190 feet from the intersection, well that isn't very pedestrian friendly. And it also doesn't do much to shade streets, right? For the ecological an urban heed island mitigation that we could get and yet if you look at the parking standards that citizen California by and large you know have in their books, they are very small. Well, you know, the the finding of our research was it's not the trees dummy that are causing the visibility problem, it's the cars and the SUV's, right. But it's very hard to to get people to actually understand that. Trees are easy targets. We got to change that. Second city is Vancouver, British Colombia. This is a city that everybody hears a lot about because it's considered to be one of the most livable cities in the world. They had built this incredible density in their downtown and yet it's very, very livable for families and people because you also have these incredible open spaces around the city and ways of access around the city. A number of strategies have been put in place, through both enlightened politicians and I think some very savvy and knowledgeable planning directors and staff. Their "Living First Strategy", they have had an incredible amount of growth around the downtown, emphasizing transit over private vehicles has been a bit a big part of it. But they have also making that transportation land-use connection that we have been hurried about, that [0:12:57] Betty Deacon spoke to that you also have to have urban forum an urban forum connection to it so that you can have urban designs that make these places people places that people want to live and walk in and such. So there is all these urban design guidelines that they use and approaches that they use, just embedded in everything, includes a whole range of street types, including pedestrian muse and often putting them in the very best place, such as right at the water's edge, right. So the pedestrian and the bicyclist gets the very best of the city. That's going to encourage them to use it, water front box box and bike pass. And as a case of point example, this is a project that Allan and I worked on for a redesign for Pacific Boulevard in the North False Creek neighborhood. It was all about street rebalancing. That's where it is located in the city. The city had built up these new neighborhoods around around Pacific Boulevard, lots of new people living there. The street had been completely rebuilt, right, by the developers who have built these projects. And yet they your city looked at it the citizens looked at it and said, wait a minute, we have got the wrong kind of street here. It's too traffic intensive. It's hard for people to get across. We got to do something different. We got to change it. And this was within the couple of contexts policy contexts that are really, really important. There was a transportation plan that was put in place that limited roadway capacity to 1997 levels; critical key thing that was done, right, because everything else can follow from that. You don't need bigger wider streets. And they have had a lot of success as you can see down at the bottom there, with increasing walking and bicycle trips and decreasing vehicle trips. And in Pacific Boulevard itself it was designated in a multiplicity of ways instead of as a single traffic mover ways, including as a commercial high street. So you got a situation where you go from that type of a place to this. And the the traffic engineers were willing to look at it and say, hey on this particular street we have got 3.5 meter lanes. No other streets in the entire downtown of Vancouver, let alone the city, have that, right. There is no reason why we can't have narrower lanes here as well. We've got excess capacity and let's give it back into into the public realm. It's the only time I have ever worked in a project where the engineers came to me and said we have got too much road way space; tell us what else we could do with it, how enlightening you know, I mean it was amazing. It was just wonderful experience. We designed a street that has three different sections in it, the center section where the commercial high street is. You go from a situation where there was an 86 foot wide asphalt roadway to a 50 foot wide asphalt roadway, okay, simply through narrowing lanes and eliminating unnecessary dedicated left turn or left, or dedicated right turn lanes and doing something innovative with the parking lane so that they can become part of the pedestrian realm and after that, have more permeable paving on them and the like. And then where the residential sections of the streets are to one side of Multiway Boulevard, again so that people can live on a local street as opposed to a major street, because that's the effect of that little local lane. So you go from situations like that, all that asphalt and space dedicated to vehicles to something more or like that. Right, a much more balanced public realm and a much greener public realm as well. By the way the city is also implementing this new city greenway's plan which is really interesting, if you follow the lines of that greenway, you will notice how most of the water's edge is a continuous path for bikes and pedestrians and these other greenways that are criss-crossing the city are going to be pedestrian and bike priority as well. To a large extent what Vancouver is doing that's amazing is that they are continuing to implement some of the very best ideas that were contained in some of the early planning that was done for the city in 1929. I think it's a remarkable example of actually implementing ideas for the public realm over the time and over the long term and ending up were something really great. The also implemented this idea of planning all the streets all the streets with street trees of similar species, you get these amazing neighborhood streets. That's the norm. They are very, very narrow street that's a neighborhood residential street. The roadway is about 24 to 26 feet wide. They are very comfortable with that. It's a queuing street, right. So now in the new neighborhoods you can build queuing streets because they know it, it works. So they are allowing their empirical understanding of how cities really work you know, inform their design and their engineering instead of abstract analysis. But another key thing that I want to talk to is this issue of density, because Vancouver has been densifying the downtown. But they are also interested in densifying the whole sort of peninsular that Vancouver sits on. And one of the city building approaches to do that has been to densify along corridors. Just as [0:17:55] Robert Severe talked about that's you know, a logical place to do it, because it's a place that transportation can move along. But in reality how do you do that, right? This is one of their plans. Densification along corridors brings up the major question, "Who really wants to live there?" And the problems are vehicle noise and air pollution, you know period. And you can do all kinds of things with urban form of buildings to try and mitigate some of that and this is some material that comes from a shred that that Patrick Condon is known up in Vancouver recently, but even with those building form modifications have step backs in the green view and all that. You still aren't going to mitigate the noise problem and the air pollution problem, especially if you are dealing with smaller unit sizes which mean often single aspect drilling units and so all those people, their only you know, air real air is coming right from that roadway. And you can't dissipate those vehicle problems. So noise and air pollution are huge problems for densifying cities and making them livable. The current strategy the city is working with is an equidensity strategy, where they are trying to sort of densify a node in particular neighborhoods. They are having a little bit of hard go as I understand it of selling it if you will, to their community, even though it's a pet project of the Mayor, because of the problems that people see with all the vehicles that have come going to come in, the air pollution and the noise problems as well as the congestion. In Paris by the way, a majority of the citizens are complaining that the biggest urban nuisance is noise. And they have mapped all the noise levels around their road their roadways and they have looked at the number of people that have to endure these incredible noise levels. 53 percent of the population has endured daily noise levels of the 61 to 79 decibels or above. And that becomes somewhat unlivable. So that's one of the reasons why they why they did this rather you know, low tech, hi tech thing of putting in place all these bicycles. They have also by the way changed a lot of their infrastructure to have these new bicycle only lanes throughout the city and along sidewalks in in the cycle. They've just done a few of them so far, but they are major infrastructure changes. Of course sometimes you run into problems with you know, the smart cars have been able to actually fit in some of those lanes and and the like, but it's a wonderful system. And then Amsterdam you know now this is an amazing place, fully integrated transportation system plus bicycle and transit priority. Amsterdam is right you know they are there; they are in the heart of global warming. They understand the impacts that are going to happen, low line you know, country. They are dealing with all the water rise issues and and everything they have been for a long time. So what are they doing? Well, some of its pretty low tech you know, make bicycles, what it's about. Everybody can do that you know, not not everybody can use it, but a lot of people can use it and you can get it in place relatively quickly as low tech and is distributed. And then everybody starts figuring out these sort of you know, individualizing ways of making those bicycles work for them, with how different people can sit on them and all these ways that they can use them in different ways and there is this wonderful creativity that's happening around the bicycles there. But you have to look at it within the context of what the city as a whole you know, the politicians have been willing to put in place, and how the urban designers and planners and planners are working at all these integrated levels. So if you look at their framework plans right, look at the main bicycle routes and how dense that one is compared to the main roads, you know, you can compare it to their tramway system which is pretty darn good, right, and compare to their metro system. They are relying on that surface transportation to which is more or less at the pace of a pedestrian, right, to happen on the surface where the urbanity happens and then let's just look at a particular case study. This of course is the IJburg development, I would call it a linear tramway district; 45,000 people, 12,000 jobs, all going in 15 minutes from downtown, all along this linear tramway. And if you look at what's really interesting about that, right, the brand new development, and there is the two images on the top that sort of part of the the one roadway that goes in there. Well it one lane in for cars and one lane out, most of the this public space roadway is dedicated to the transit vehicle and to the bicycles, right, for all those numbers. In suburbia, the regular you know, world that we live in, we'd look at that and we think, my goodness that is terrible congestion. But because of these other policies that have been put in place you know, there people are going to use the tramline, because they are obviously showing it. They are giving you you know the absolute clue that that's going to be the quickest and best way to go, okay, and then they can concentrate on other things in neighborhood like this, instead of having public you know, building all that land for these huge roadways and everything. You can get a new neighborhood that both has a sense of place and and is walking and bicycle oriented. And of course they have car share at there in Amsterdam as well. Okay, so the very last thing I am going to make in ever so quickly, coming back to the United States, do we have good examples here that we can look at. Well Portland, Oregon, here you know it's again about leadership from the politicians and from the planning department. Public investment as a density incentive, so simple. What did they do? Well, they had a cup. There are those re-development area. You probably have heard of it, Portland's River District, they the public investment was to lower freeway ram into this area to make it a continuous area instead of one that was divided by a raised freeway ramp. They built a new street car lane and they purchased land for public parks as well as giving a property task exemption. So what did you get for that? Well, initially the developers wanted to leave it wanted to build a 14 dwelling units per acre. They negotiated once the city was willing to pay for taking down the ramp, that the developer was then comfortable with building an 87 dwelling units per acre. When they when they further negotiated; also construct this new light way lane, then the developer was comfortable at building a 131 dwelling units per acre, right. So that's the way that the city could get what they wanted in their urban forum by using the you know, the techniques and the things that were within their control to push the market in the direction that they wanted to go in. And that's what you get for this new neighborhood, streetcars and parks, and a lot of density. And that's where I am going to end; looking back to the past as precedents for their future. Thank you very much.