CA legislators have removed language from AB 819 that would have facilitated the implementation of bikeways like this one in Chicago. Photo: CDOT via The Bicycle Blog of Wisconsin

Assembly members undermined the bill’s original intent by removing language allowing planners to use guidelines that have been established outside Caltrans, like the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, which includes designs for protected bikeways. Instead, the amended bill would only require Caltrans to create an experimentation process through which engineers can establish bikeway standards. That process is likely to be a lengthy one.

Advocates say the amended bill could be an improvement over the status quo, but it’s a far cry from giving local transportation agencies the freedom to implement bikeway designs that cities such as Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C. have rolled out with impressive results.

“The committee’s amendment is a step toward our goal of permitting the kind of bike infrastructure that we need,” said California Bicycle Coalition Communications Director Jim Brown. “How big a step this will be depends on the kind of experimentation process Caltrans comes up with. But it’s not the blanket authorization we’re seeking for local agencies to design the safest possible bikeways.”

Local transportation officials can still implement protected bikeways, but the process is much more complex than it needs to be. Without a set of approved standards to work from, agencies are subject to greater liability, and each project must contend with the red tape of Caltrans approval — a time-consuming and expensive process.

Brown said the AB 819 amendment was passed without deliberation but still requires approval by other committees as well as the State Senate. It was introduced by the California Association of Bicycling Organizations, a group which distrusts the NACTO guide and has traditionally resisted protected bikeways despite their proven benefits in safety and increased ridership in California cities, other American cities, and abroad.

“Whether through legislation or other means,” said Brown, “we’re continuing to work with Caltrans to figure out how innovative bikeway designs already used in other parts of the U.S. and Europe can be implemented in California.”

New York City's Eighth Avenue protected bike lane. Photo: BicyclesOnly/Flickr

That could change under a state bill called AB 819, which would give California cities more flexibility to implement bikeway designs that are fast becoming the best practices in leading American cities.

“The goal of AB 819 is to free up communities to implement the kind of innovative facilities we’re seeing in use in other parts of the country and in Europe,” said Jim Brown, communications director for the California Bicycle Coalition.

Under current state law, facilities such as protected bike lanes, bike boxes, and bicycle traffic signals — which are not established within Caltrans guidelines — must go through an expensive and time-consuming approval process. Although some have been built in cities like San Francisco and Long Beach, they haven’t come easily.

“Cities can get permission to experiment through Caltrans, but it’s a really long decision process,” said Brown. Using “experimental” designs also leaves planners subject to greater legal liability. “It means that cities are less willing to install facilities that might actually increase bicycle ridership.”

AB 819 would allow planners to use guidelines that have already been developed outside the state, like the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, released last spring by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and approved by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, to help them plan and fund those projects.

But the bill’s reach could be limited by an amendment proposed by the California Association of Bicycle Organizations (CABO), a smaller coalition which argues that using outside guidelines for bikeways could be problematic. Their alternative proposal, which will be considered at a State Assembly Transportation Committee hearing on Monday, would only allow new types of bike facilities to be established under an experimentation process within Caltrans.

“If you want to provide separate facilities for beginning cyclists, or for people who don’t want to ride in traffic, fine,” said CABO President Jim Baross. “Let’s do it right through an experimentation process and a design criteria that comes up that’s safe and actually works.”

A reliance on outside standards, Baross argued, could lead planners to build facilities that are inconsistent and don’t necessarily translate from other states. As an example, he pointed out that drivers in Oregon are taught to yield to bicycle riders passing on the right when making a right turn, whereas California drivers are instructed to merge into the bike lane. That, he said, could create problems within bikeway designs imported from Portland.

But Brown argued that city planners would still ultimately be responsible for the designs they choose, and repeating the work done by transportation planners in cities like New York would be superfluous.

Protected bike lanes have been proven to improve safety for all street users, and they’ve been credited with significant gains in bicycling rates, as more people become comfortable cycling on the street. Roughly twenty miles of on-street protected bike lanes have been implemented in New York in recent years. Traffic injuries have fallen by as much as 35 percent on some routes, and bike counts have soared since the city started using the new designs.

“They have thousands and thousands of people using these facilities every day,” said Brown. “Do we really think that we need to second-guess the judgment of the New York City Department of Transportation?”

You can add this to our list of the world’s best music videos featuring bicycles. Rapper Breezee One’s “Bike Chase” is a homage to bicycles and “bike boyfriends.” It’s the first single release for Detroit’s “Diva-Licious-MC,” and perhaps the best bike video of the year?

H/T Clarence Eckerson.

Enjoying car-free streets at Redding's first-ever Ciclovía-style event, Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Redding, California, with a population of 90,000, is probably best known for its sunshine, breathtaking landscapes and conservative politics. Located 200 miles north of Sacramento in Shasta County, the lush region surrounded by the Trinity and Cascade mountains offers an abundance of recreation, including a growing number of paved multi-use trails that draw large crowds of bicyclists and pedestrians.

The seven-year-old Sundial Bridge, a 700-foot long steel marvel on the Sacramento River designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has become Redding’s living room.

“It is where everyone hangs out in town, especially when the weather is nice. In a normal community, whatever normal is, you would see that sort of energy in a downtown square, or park, or even a downtown third place, but it happens to be out at the Sundial Bridge,” said Paul Shigley, the senior editor of the California Planning and Development Report (CP&DR), who lives six miles west of Redding near Whiskeytown Lake.

Downtown Redding does not draw a similar convergence of people enjoying public space because like many California cities it was designed for the automobile, and is not a particularly welcoming place for pedestrians and bicyclists. The city ranks 40th among 103 cities in California “for the number of pedestrian collisions by population,” according to a recent report [pdf]. Just last week, a 16-year-old boy was struck and killed by a driver while walking across a bridge that lacked a sidewalk.

“The town is set up to conduct motorists fast and to allow them to drive up to 50, 60 miles an hour right through the middle of town,” said Scott Mobley, a reporter for the Record Searchlight, the city’s daily newspaper.

“It’s dangerous,” said Anne Wallach Thomas, a former San Francisco resident and bicyclist who helped found the Shasta Cascade Bicycle Coalition. “Some people are lucky and they can go around some little side streets, and if you’re not lucky like me, I can’t ride my bicycle to my sister’s house, I can’t ride to the grocery store.”

In the late 1970s, the city made a poor planning decision to build a mall in the center of town and designed a network of one-way arterial streets. The mall failed not long after it was built, becoming what CP&DR described as “a glum collection of offices, struggling shops and vacant space.”

“Downtown has been pretty much a dead zone for decades. There are areas that have signs of life but the big problem is very few people live downtown,” said Shigley, who a few years ago in CP&DR named Redding one of California’s most disappointing mid-sized cities. But “check back in 10 years,” the report added.

The Sundial Bridge. "The old bridge was an absolute bitch to bike across. There was no room at all," said Paul Shigley. Photo: Jeff Worthington

The Demand

Judging from the crowds of bicyclists and walkers who show up to enjoy the region’s vast network of scenic trails, there is an increasing demand for bicycle facilities and better conditions for pedestrians. Like the Sundial Bridge, Shigley said weekend crowds pack the one-mile Dana to Downtown bikeway and walking path recently constructed by Caltrans as part of a Highway 44 bridge improvement and widening project.

“It goes from the Dana Drive big box area over to the convention center area, and it’s proven wildly popular that you can get to those two parts of town on foot and on bike,” said Shigley.

“The reason people live up here primarily is because it’s really beautiful. We have access to amazing recreation opportunities. So lots of people have multiple $1500 bikes in their garages. They put them on the car and drive some miles to get on a trail,” said Wallach Thomas.

Driving to one of the region’s popular riverfront trails might be an easy venture, but try walking and bicycling there and the conditions can be treacherous. The region’s bike network lacks good connectivity to major destinations. That doesn’t mean, however, that bicyclists are staying off the streets. Bicycle traffic counts taken last September by Redding’s Bicycle Advisory Committee and Healthy Shasta showed a dramatic 80 percent increase in riders at major intersections.

“I have no trouble being a cyclist here. I’ve been doing it for 10 years,” said Mobley, the newspaper reporter, who is an everyday bicyclist. He thinks many drivers are beginning to adjust to having more bicyclists on the streets.

“It’s been years since someone’s called me an idiot or flipped me off or gunned their engine as they go by just to intimate me. I mean, that’s happened to me but not in a long time,” said Mobley.

Although he finds it easier to bike, Mobley pointed out that a friend, who is also a regular cyclist, got run off the road last year by a driver who “literally came right up behind him and made damn sure he was in a ditch. He hurt himself. Ripped open his knee and was quite debilitated after that.”

Many cyclists are forced onto the shoulders of roads, if there are any, or the sidewalk, where it is legal to ride in Redding.

“On many days while attending Shasta High School I rode my bike several miles a day to and from school. Redding has always offered so many ways to enjoy the outdoors and now has great bike facilities along the river and so much potential for more,” said Jim Brown of the California Bicycle Coalition.

Bicyclists and other vulnerable users are lucky to get a shoulder. Photo: Jefferson Thomas

Changing Hearts and Minds

Advocates say the popularity of Redding’s biking and walking trails, along with a desire to get healthy are indeed causing more people to second guess their traditional mode of transportation. According to the Shasta Coalition for Activity and Nutrition, 66 percent of adults in Shasta County are overweight, along with 27 percent of teens.

“You start off maybe riding your bike for entertainment on the river trail and then you think, ‘wow, maybe I could ride my bike to work,’ ‘maybe I could ride to the store, ‘maybe I could ride my kids to school everyday,’” said Francie Sullivan, a member of the Redding City Council who is a recreational cyclist.

The five-member council recently began working on a Complete Streets policy and decided to make completing it “our number one priority,” said Sullivan, adding that Redding, like other California cities, is grappling with budget woes and 17 percent unemployment. “But the good news about the economy is that more people are walking and riding bikes out of necessity.”

Sullivan, a Democrat who has served in public office for more than 20 years, said Shasta County is a “conservative community” but the issue transcends party lines.

“If you go to the river trail I would venture a guess that a majority of the people who cross you on roller blades and their bikes and who are walking and running are conservative Republicans. Everybody wants to be fit and everybody gets the same mood elevation from being outside,” said Sullivan.

Father and son enjoy Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Challenges

For the first time, Redding has hired a full-time bicycle and pedestrian coordinator who is working on improving the city’s bikeway plan, which until recently had not been updated since 1998. Realizing the increasing demand for bicycle facilities, the Bikeway Action Plan [pdf] envisions increasing the current bikeway network from 124 miles to 162 miles to “improve the connections for cyclists to prime destinations.”

Changing the culture of old-school traffic engineers who are primarily concerned with moving automobile traffic and adhering to Level of Service (LOS) standards remains a difficult challenge in Redding, like a lot of California cities. Road and highway widenings are popular, while road diets are practically unheard of.

“You feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle every time,” said Zachary Bonnin, the city’s new bike/ped coordinator. “It’s a challenge to implement bike stuff.”

Bonnin, who grew up in Phoenix and got an environmental science degree at Northwestern Arizona University, also manages the city’s transportation system, the Redding Area Bus Authority (RABA), which sees anywhere from 2,000 to 2,400 daily passengers.

“They put me on board to challenge the engineers and to look at every project and to say ‘why are we doing it this way’ or ‘why can’t we do it this way’ or ‘what about bike and ped’ access and ‘where’s our bike lane’ and ‘why can’t we add a sidewalk here?’” he said.

The one-way arterials in downtown Redding are like freeways. Photo: City of Redding

The drafting of the city’s Complete Streets policy is also making some of Bonnin’s old-school transportation colleagues rethink the way they’ve designed the streets. The National Association of City Transportation Officials’ recent update of its bikeway design standards is also helping.

“They see these things and say ‘well, it would cost us more money not to do that now, then to have to deal with it later,’” said Bonnin.

The city is also hoping to incorporate improvements to the pedestrian realm in its Complete Streets policy, including strengthening its Safe Routes to Schools program, developing a pedestrian safety program and Pedestrian Master Plan to implement capital and maintenance projects. A pedestrian safety assessment prepared by transportation consultants Fehr & Peers and Oakland-based Dowling Associates recommends road diets on some downtown streets, along with bulbouts and median refuge islands.

The city’s efforts are also being bolstered by a burgeoning group of living streets advocates with ties to San Francisco’s bicycle and transit advocacy community who are working to help transform Redding into a more bikeable, walkable community.

Wallach Thomas and some longtime members of the Norcal Bicycle Partnership, Shasta Wheelmen, the Redding Mountain Biking club and some other bicyclists recently formed the Shasta Cascade Bicycle Coalition to lobby for better conditions and help educate city planners and the public. The group meets once a month.

“The safe and inviting part is important,” Wallach Thomas told the Record Searchlight. “We have world-class facilities for mountain bikes and incredible park trails. What we can’t do is leave the house and safely get anywhere.”

The reaction to Shasta Living Streets was overwhelmingly positive and even skeptics praised it. "One mother said to me, 'Anne, I want to thank you. My kids are in heaven. They're having so much fun,'" said Wallach Thomas. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Shasta Living Streets

Last weekend, after months of planning, discussion and wading through city bureaucracy, Redding held its first Ciclovía-style event, Shasta Living Streets, converting a two-mile stretch of Park Marina Drive near the Sacramento River into car-free space for people. It was the first open streets event in Northern California outside of the Bay Area.

“It was a success,” said Wallach Thomas, who was the main organizer of the event. While some city bureaucrats had doubts that anyone would show up, Wallach said well over 500 people turned out on a rainy day. It helped that the event was timed with the popular Whole Earth Festival.

“I think it’s really going to make a big difference up here changing hearts and minds,” said Wallach Thomas. “It has implications and leverage far beyond the five hours of the actual event.”

Wallach Thomas got advice from her friend Cheryl Brinkman, a member of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors who has been involved with San Francisco’s Sunday Streets since its inception. Brinkman and her husband Rich Coffin took a trip to Redding to speak to a group of advocates interested in launching Shasta Living Streets.

“Gil Peñalosa, the father of Ciclovías, always said that it’s not a competition among cities or towns. Every city or town which starts a car-free streets program helps the next city or town start their program. I’m thrilled that Redding had its first car-free event,” said Brinkman.

The organizers of the event actually received an email from Peñalosa offering his congratulations, and encouraging them to carry on their work.

“I hope this event will be a means to many great initiatives,” Peñalosa wrote. “Living Streets will show residents that streets can be used for more than just moving cars; streets are our largest and most valuable assets, the space the belongs to all, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, social or economic background.”

“As other programs inspired you, now you are inspiring others.”

Group exercise was part of the program for Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

"This is so cool," was the reaction of many kids to Shasta Living Streets, said Wallach Thomas. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: This concludes our 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form. We’ll choose the winners tomorrow.

The most important community-scale system dependent on urbanism is transit. It has long been known that density and transit ridership are linked, but it goes much deeper than that. The key to viable transit systems is not just density but walkability and mixed use—true urban places. If people cannot walk the quarter mile to or from a station, chances are they will not use the transit. Conversely, if they can easily run errands and coordinate trips on the way to or from a station, they are more likely to use transit. European data show that the percentage of walk or bike trips always exceeds that of transit trips—often by more than two to one.²⁷ In fact, walking by itself constitutes 30 percent of all trips in Great Britain (versus 9 percent transit), and in Sweden walk/bike trips are 34 percent of the total (versus 11 percent transit). ²⁸ Transit supports and extends the pedestrian environment; transit is pedestrian dependent, not the other way around. The primary alternative to the car and all of its environmental costs is the pedestrian environment and the walkable urbanism that supports transit.

A good transit system has many layers, from local buses to bus rapid transit and streetcars, from light rail to subways and commuter trains. They all feed into and reinforce one another, and they all depend on walkable urbanism at the origin and destination. The quality of the interface from walking to transit, and from one form of transit to the other, is central to displacing car trips and is the greenest technology that urbanism provides.

The relationship among transit, urbanism, travel behavior, and carbon emissions is complex but can be summarized with one key quantifiable metric, vehicle miles traveled (VMT)—effectively, the amount we drive. VMT is determined by the number and distance of trips we take, and our “mode split”—the percentage of trips taken by various transportation modes such as walk, bike, car, carpool, or transit. Each household, depending on its location, income, and size, has an average VMT per year, which when combined with various auto technologies will generate its travel carbon footprint.

Many factors affect VMT, and there are many complex models that simulate the travel behavior behind it. For example, the modal split among auto, walk/bike, and transit is affected by location and level of transit service as well as how pedestrian friendly the streets are; the average length of each type of trip is affected by land use patterns and how closely destinations are located; the number of trips per day is affected by household size; and auto ownership rate is affected by household income and size. The most significant variables in all this are the walking and transit opportunities of urbanism, a compact development form, and land use patterns that bring destinations closer together.

The power of place over travel behavior is demonstrated by mapping VMT per household across a region. While averages always lead us to stereotypes, different environments across any region reveal dramatically different travel behaviors. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a typical household in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco has an average VMT of 7,300 miles a year. This neighborhood averages only three stories but is dense by suburban standards; has a rich mix of shops, restaurants, and services within walking distance; and is a short transit ride from downtown. Its walk score (an algorithm that awards points based on the distance to the closest amenity in several categories) is 98 out of 100—as good as it gets.

The Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland was created as a streetcar suburb back in the prewar days of the Key Route Trolley system, which connected most of the Bay Area until 1948. It is filled largely with bungalow and small-lot single-family homes but has small apartment buildings at corners and a wonderful mixed-use main street along with a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train station at its center. The average household there drives about 12,200 miles a year and has a walk score of 74. Out in San Ramon, a low-density East Bay suburb without good transit connections, development patterns fit the standard sprawl paradigm, with isolated single family subdivisions, strip commercial arterials, malls, and office parks. VMT for the average home there is around 30,000 miles a year, and the walk score is 46.²⁹

So there is a four-to-one range in travel behavior over three neighborhoods in one region. They differ in density, mix of uses, walkability, proximity to job centers, and level of transit service. The density in Russian Hill is 62 units per acre, but home values are $555 per square foot. In Rockridge, the density averages 15 units per acre and values are $420 per square foot. Finally, in San Ramon, considered a very high end suburban community, the average density is 3.4 units per acre and the value averages just $320 per square foot.³⁰ The market itself is telling us that walkable places have value and, as a bonus, can reduce our carbon emissions and oil dependence. So desirable is the walkable neighborhood that a 2009 study found that in cities like San Francisco and Chicago, moving from a household with a city’s median walkability to one at the 75th percentile would increase the unit’s value by over $30,000.³¹ The challenge, of course, is to create walkable places as authentic and beautiful as Russian Hill and Rockridge that are affordable.

The point is that all of these community-scale systems—whether power, water, waste, or transit—need urbanism to be effective. Urbanism is essential for the viability of community cogeneration systems and the savings they provide in energy consumption. Denser, mixed-use development can provide the open space, community parks, and riparian setbacks needed by ecological water and waste recycling systems. And, of course, transit depends on urbanism for its fundamental viability.

These community-scale systems built around urbanism are not intended to replace the emissions reductions of efficient industrial processes, renewables in our utility portfolios, or better fuel standards for our cars. It is just that those supply-side strategies alone will not take us far enough quickly enough—and they come at a large cost premium. The combination of transit-served urbanism and green technology at the community scale is essential to complete the picture.

All of this discussion boils down to some simple choices in community building. One alternative simply extends our current land use patterns, architectural types, everyday aesthetics, and civic habits. As one example of this, imagine a room with a low-hung ceiling, sealed windows, and fluorescent lights; within a building with a mirror glass skin, set behind a parking lot off a six-lane arterial; in a zone of commercial development making up part of a suburb of subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks connected by a freeway to a metropolis of decaying inner-city neighborhoods, struggling first-ring suburbs, exclusive suburban enclaves, failing school systems, and underfunded civic programs. This would seem like a biased contrivance if it were not so commonplace.

The other choice involves a quality of place making we seem to have lost touch with. It could be described as a room with high ceilings filled with natural light and breezes; in a building wrapping a courtyard and lining a street; in a neighborhood with tree-lined avenues, village greens, and local shops; making up a part of a city filled with streetcars, public squares, parks, and cultural districts; providing the focus of a metropolis with a constellation of many varied towns and cities connected by transit, growing economic networks, cultural institutions, and social opportunity. This also may seem like a biased contrivance, but it has been realized in some significant U.S. metro areas.

In both models, each layer is interdependent and connected by deep-rooted economic, policy, and social systems. Each is a complex that cannot easily exist piece by piece but nests layer by layer into a self-reinforcing “whole system.” Certainly, the future will be a mix of these two extremes, but the question is: in what proportions?

Just how much change in land use, technology, and place making we can tolerate is the topic of the next chapter. A look back over the past fifty years of development and urban form reveals just how dramatic the shifts can be—and what trends will direct future growth. The question then becomes how to shape a vision for our future and what will be the best balance of design standards, policies, technologies,
and economies to bring it about.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

27. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “Safety of Vulnerable Road Users” (Paris: OECD, 1998), 47.
28. OECD, “Safety of Vulnerable Road Users.”
29. John Holtzclaw, Mary Jean Burer, and David B. Goldstein, “Location Efficiency as the Missing Piece of the Energy Puzzle: How Smart Growth Can Unlock Trillion Dollar Consumer Cost Savings” (Asilomar, CA: Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, 2004); Front Seat, “Walk
Score: Helping Homebuyers, Renters, and Real Estate Agents Find Houses and Apartments in Great Neighborhoods,” http://www.walkscore.com/ (accessed February 10, 2010).
30. Prices per square foot are calculated using the online real estate services of Trulia.com using quarterly real estate statistics from 2009. Densities are calculated as a net of residential parcels using data from city and neighborhood boundaries established by the corresponding municipality.
31. Joe Cortright, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities” (Chicago, IL: CEOs for Cities: 2009), table 8

Tassafaronga Village in Oakland features buildings "designed to the highest level of green standard...incorporating a wide range of complementary green strategies including solar power for on-site generation of electricity and hot water." Image: Brian Rose from David Baker + Partners Architects

Editor’s note: This week, we continue our 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” This is installment number four. Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form.

I was part of the passive solar architectural movement in the 1970s. Its core idea was to provide energy for buildings in the most direct, elegant way. We had disdain for complicated “active solar” systems, with their complex engineering, maintenance, and costs. The passive way was first to reduce the demands by building tight, well insulated structures, flooded with natural light, and then to let the sun’s radiation or the cool night air work with the buildings’ form to provide thermal comfort. The same approach needs to be taken in relation to the climate change challenge: we need to find the simple, elegant solutions that are based on conservation before we introduce complex technology, even if it is green.

We need to focus, ironically, on ends, not means. For example, in passive solar buildings, focusing on the end goal (thermal comfort) rather than the means (heating air) changed the design approach dramatically. It turns out that human comfort has more to do with surrounding surface temperatures than with air temperature in a building, so massive walls that absorb and store the sun’s gentle heat also provide a more comfortable environment without all the hot air. Or, if lighting is the goal, electricity and bulbs are just one potential means; a building that welcomes daylight is the simple, elegant solution—even better than a complex system of wind farms generating green electrons for efficient fixtures. Likewise, the goal of transportation is access, not movement or mobility per se; movement is a means, not the end. So, bringing destinations closer together is a simpler, more elegant solution than assembling a new fleet of electric cars and the acres of solar collectors needed to power them. Call it “passive urbanism.”

Once demands are reduced by passive urbanism, the next step is to add technology. Green urbanism is what you get when you combine the best of traditional urbanism with renewable energy sources, advanced conservation techniques, new green technologies, and integrated services and utilities. All the inherent benefits of urbanism can be amplified by a new generation of ecological design, smart grids, climate-responsive buildings, low-carbon or electric cars, and next generation transit systems.

These technologies function in differing ways at differing scales. There are three scales of such green technology: building, community, and utility. Building-scale technologies are ecumenical; they can be applied in any form of development, traditional urban or auto-oriented sprawl. Obviously, better building insulation, weatherization, and efficient appliances can be used in single-family subdivisions as well as in urban townhomes. So, too, can solar domestic hot water systems or photovoltaic cells. Efficient lightbulbs make sense in any location, as do efficient appliances. While bigger, less efficient buildings will cost more to green, such retrofits and new building standards are the starting point for any sustainable future—but not the final solution.

At the other end of the spectrum are the centralized utility-scale systems. Shifting to massive renewable sources in remote locations will carry the burden of building equally massive distribution facilities. Such a “smart grid,” while essential to moving large quantities of power to our cities from distant natural resource areas (wind, sun, geothermal), has a high capital cost and reduces efficiency because of transmission line losses. These expenses are in addition to costs that are already consistently higher than those of conservation. Also, large-scale solar and wind operations can create big environmental footprints, as large tracts of virgin land are developed.

What are the real needs for large utility-scale renewable energy sources? It depends on the type of communities we plan and how we build them. If we add the travel demand of an average single-family home in the United States to the energy needed to heat, cool, and power the home, the total is just under 400 million Btu (British thermal units) per year (this includes the source energy typically left out of these calculations: the embodied energy of cars, the energy to produce the gasoline, and the wasted energy to produce the home’s electricity). Assume for argument that weatherization and greening this home can reduce building energy consumption by 30 percent and that the family buys new cars with 50 percent better mileage. The result is a 32 percent overall energy reduction—not bad for “green sprawl.” In contrast, a typical townhome located in a walkable neighborhood (not necessarily downtown but near transit) without any solar panels or hybrid cars consumes 38 percent less energy than such a suburban single-family home. Traditional urbanism, even without green technology, is better than green sprawl.

Now add more building conservation measures, green technology, and better transit systems to the townhouse, and you get close to the results we will need in 2050. If you move to a green townhome in a transit village, you will be consuming 58 percent less energy than on a large lot in the suburbs. If you move to a green condo in the city, you will be saving 73 percent when compared to the average single-family home in a distant suburb.

The implications of this for our power grid are massive. If more families lived this way—say just a quarter moved from single-family lots to green townhomes—the generating capacity required for buildings in the nation would be reduced by over 25,000 megawatts per year, eliminating the need for 50 new 500-megawatt plants.²² At $1.3 million per megawatt of installed capacity, that is more than $32 billion of avoided capital cost for new power plants per year.²³ The reduced fuel costs and environmental impacts are additional benefits.

The same is true for auto use. For example, satisfying California’s need for more driving in a “Trend” future would result in around 183 billion additional auto miles per year in 2050 when compared to the more urban alternative. Some believe that if we shifted to electric cars running on green electrons, the carbon problem could be solved. However, producing that many green electrons has a hidden hurdle: it would take 50,000 acres of high-efficiency solar thermal plants, 130,000 acres of photovoltaic panels, or 860,000 acres of wind farms (nearly thirty times the land area of San Francisco) to power such a transportation system.²⁴ This would present a giant environmental footprint no matter where it was placed. Ironically, the biggest barrier to such a green, if not urban, solution may be environmentalists themselves, protesting lost desert landscapes or resisting impacts on bird populations by wind turbines (or
even objecting to seeing the turbines on the horizon).

At the middle of the three scales, urbanism offers a better framework for more distributed community-scale energy systems. In fact, there are important community scale systems that can function only within an urban framework. One of the most significant of these technologies is the decentralized cogeneration electric power plant (called combined heat and power, or CHP). Such small-scale power plants can be coupled with district heating and cooling systems to capture and use the generator’s waste heat in local buildings and industry. Currently, for every watt of energy delivered to a home, two thirds is lost as waste heat up the smokestack and in transmission lines.²⁵ Local cogeneration plants coupled with district heating and cooling systems can largely eliminate these inefficiencies. The waste heat is captured and reused, while the transmission losses are greatly reduced. Because of this, it is estimated that cogeneration systems operate at around 90 percent efficiencies whereas standard power plants average only 40 percent.

Married to urban environments, cogeneration offers a cheap, time-tested alternative—one that has been employed by college campuses and European new towns for decades. There, small power plants are placed close to dense neighborhoods and commercial centers, distributing waste heat underground to each building for hot water, cooling, and heating. These plants can burn almost any form of renewable biomass, eliminating the energy-intensive process of converting valuable crops into biofuels or finding mechanisms to transform grass to gas. More interesting are a new generation of “waste to energy” technologies that not only produce green electricity and heat but also avoid the massive landfills and trucking costs of typical garbage systems.

Typically, cogeneration systems are found in commercial applications where waste heat is used in an industrial process and the power generation balances with the electrical demand. It is estimated that in the industrial sector alone, “the potential for CHP generation is equivalent to the output of 40 percent of the coal fired generating plants in the US.” ²⁶ Utilizing similar systems in urban districts would add dramatically to this potential.

Sacramento built such a system in its downtown in the 1970s that burned “gasified” dead wood created by a Sierra Mountain beetle infestation—a net zero carbon system because it used only biomass. In addition, it had twice the efficiency of a remote plant because its waste heat was used to run heaters and chillers for all the state office buildings in the district. But to be effective, such systems are dependent on urban densities and a balanced mix of uses. Sprawl is not a candidate for district heating and cooling systems, as the costs of moving the waste heat to scattered buildings are too high. However, mixed-use urban neighborhoods could top off their energy needs with cogeneration in ways that greatly reduce costs and environmental impacts—easily creating zero net energy communities.

Water and waste systems also benefit from a community-scale approach. Sewer systems can take effluent and biologically recycle it into potable or irrigation water, usable biomass, and methane for cooking. Water demands can be offset by such graywater recycling systems, drought-tolerant landscaping, and indigenous plantings. Stormwater detention and treatment can be decentralized to community-scaled parks and integrated as landscape features. Rather than channelizing streams and rivers, setbacks can allow habitat to coexist with flood protection and trails. As with energy systems, community-scaled water and waste systems can be ecologically integrated in ways that save costs, save carbon, and enhance livability.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

22. Assuming advanced natural gas combined cycle plant technology.
23. National Energy Technology Laboratory, “Cost and Performance Baselines for Fossil Energy Plants” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2007).
24. Calculations based on average capacity factors for each technology, and land use requirements based on case studies of representative electricity-generation facilities.
25. Energy Information Administration, “Annual Energy Review 2008” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2009).
26. Al Gore, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2009), 254.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: This week, we continue our 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” This is installment number three. Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form.

For many people, urban is a bad word that implies crime, congestion, poverty, and crowding. For them, it represents an environment that moves people away from a healthy connection with nature and the land. Its stereotype is the American ghetto, a crime-ridden concrete jungle that simultaneously destroys land, community, and human potential. The reaction to this stereotype has been a middle-class retreat into the closeted world of single-family lots and gated subdivisions in the suburbs. As a result, much of the last half century’s planning has been directed toward depopulating cities, whether through the satellite towns of Europe or the suburbs of America.

But, for many others, the word urban represents economic opportunity, culture, vitality, innovation, and community. This positive reading is now manifest in the revitalized centers of many of our historic cities. In these core areas, the public domain—with its parks, walkable streets, commercial centers, arts, and institutions—is once again becoming rich and vibrant, valued and desirable. There is new life in many city centers and their public places, from cafés and plazas to urban parks and museums—ultimately drawing people back to the city.

In fact, since 2000, many of our major cities have increased their share of new home construction while their region’s suburbs have declined. For example, in 2008, Portland issued 38 percent of all the building permits within its region, compared to an average of 9 percent in the early 1990s; Denver accounted for 32 percent, up from 5 percent; and Sacramento accounted for 27 percent, up from 9 percent. There is an even stronger trend toward urban redevelopment in the largest metropolitan regions. New York City accounted for 63 percent of the building permits issued within its region. By comparison, the city averaged about 15 percent of regional building permits during the early 1990s. Similarly, Chicago now accounts for 45 percent of the building permits within its region, up from just 7 percent in the early 1990s.¹³ This represents a dramatic turnaround as cities regain their roles as centers of innovation, social mobility, artistic creativity, and economic opportunity.

Urbanism of this caliber is desirable but, unfortunately, too often limited and very expensive. A home in the metropolitan center is, in some places, the most valuable in the region—an economic signal of just how desirable good urban places can be. In such cities as New York, Portland, Seattle, or Washington, DC, urban residences command a premium of 40 to 200 percent per square foot over their suburban alternative. ¹⁴ Meanwhile, in our ghettos and first-ring suburbs, the working poor—and now even the middle class—are suffering and struggling. Urbanism is again proving its value; but if in limited supply, it soon can become too valuable.

At the same time, the bread-and-butter subdivisions at the metropolitan fringe experienced the greatest fall in value during the 2008 housing bust.¹⁵ Their physical environments along with their economic opportunities, cost of transportation, and social structures are becoming more and more stressed. Many economic and social factors are at work in this equation, but certainly a better form of urbanism is one necessary component of the renewal we need. But first, a clear definition of urbanism is needed.

Much confusion surrounds the differences between suburbs, sprawl, and what I mean by urbanism. Suburbs are not always sprawl and can be urban in many ways. Sprawl is a specific land use pattern of single-use zones, typically made up of subdivisions, office parks, and shopping centers strung together by arterials and highways. It is a landscape based on the automobile. We all know it when we see it; nevertheless, much of the debate about sprawl and urbanism is rife with misrepresentations.

For example, sprawl is typically described as discontinuous developments that wastefully hopscotches across the landscape. But healthy forms of suburban growth can also be discontinuous, as villages and towns with greenbelt separations demonstrate. Suburbs are criticized for their low densities, as if we should abolish single family homes and yards, but many great urban places integrate a full range of densities, from large-lot mansions and single-family homes to bungalows and townhomes. The classic streetcar suburbs of the turn of the twentieth century were not sprawl— they were walkable, diverse in use, transit oriented, and compact—but they were relatively low density and outside the city center, in a word “suburban.” Conversely, urban renewal programs transformed decaying urban districts into denser versions of suburban sprawl, substituting superblocks and arterials for walkable streets and single-income projects for complex, mixed-use neighborhoods.

It is the quality of the place that is most significant in sprawl: its relentless parking lots and oversized roads, uniform tracks of houses, isolated office parks, strip commercial areas, and, above all, its near total dependence on the car. To be against sprawl is not to be against suburbs or small towns. All suburbs are not sprawl, and unfortunately, not all sprawl is suburban.

Traditional urbanism has three essential qualities: (1) a diverse population and range of activities, (2) a rich array of public spaces and institutions, and (3) human scale in its buildings, streets, and neighborhoods. Most of our built environment, from city to suburb, manifested these traits prior to World War II. Now, most suburbs succeed in contradicting each trait; public space is withering for lack of investment, people and activities are segregated by simplistic zoning, and human scale is sacrificed to a ubiquitous accommodation of the car.

None of these urban design principles are new. Jane Jacobs postulated a similar definition of urbanism in her landmark 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The difference here is that urban issues are also being considered in the context of climate change and environmental protection. In fact, one can arrive at the same design conclusions from the criteria of conservation, environmental quality, and energy efficiency that Jacobs located largely by social and cultural needs. By investigating the technologies and formal systems scaled for limited resources, climate change concerns add a new and critical element to Jacobs’ rationale. If traditional urbanism and sustainable development can truly reduce our dependence on foreign oil, limit pollution and greenhouse gases, and create socially robust places, they not only will become desirable but will be inevitable.

To Jacobs’ three traditional urban values of civic space, human scale, and diversity, the current environmental imperative adds two more: conservation and regionalism. Although the traditional city was by necessity energy and resource efficient, it commonly showed a destructive disregard for nature and habitat that would be inappropriate today. Bays were filled, wetlands drained, streams and rivers diverted,
and key habitat destroyed. A green form of urbanism should protect those critical environmental assets while reducing overall resource demands.

Indeed, the simple attributes of urbanism are typically a more cost efficient environmental strategy than many renewable technologies. For example, in many climates, a party wall is more cost effective than a solar collector in reducing a home’s heating needs. Well-placed windows and high ceilings offer better lighting than efficient fluorescents in the office. A walk or a bike ride is certainly less expensive and less carbon intensive than a hybrid car even at 50 MPG. A convenient transit line is a better investment than a “smart” highway system. A small cogenerating electrical plant that reuses its waste heat locally could save more carbon per dollar invested than a distant wind farm. A combination of urbanism and green technology will be necessary, but the efficiency of urbanism should precede the costs of alternate technologies. As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute famously advocates, a “nega-watt” of conservation is always more cost effective than a watt of new energy, renewable or not. Urban living in its many forms turns out to be the best type of conservation.

In addition, the idea of “conservation” in urban design applies to more than energy, carbon, and the environment; it also implies preserving and repairing culture and history as well as ecosystems and resources. Conserving historic buildings, institutions, neighborhoods, and cultures is as essential to a vital, living urbanism as is preserving its ecological foundations.

Regionalism sets city and community into the contemporary reality of our expanding metropolis. At this point in history, most of our key economic, social, and environmental networks extend well beyond individual neighborhoods, jurisdictions, or even cities. Our cultural identity, open space resources, transportation networks, social links, and economic opportunities all function at a regional scale—as do many of our most challenging problems, including crime, pollution, and congestion. Major public facilities, such as sports venues, universities, airports, and cultural institutions, shape the social geography of our regions as well as extend our local lives.

We all now lead regional lives, and our metropolitan form and governance need to reflect that new reality. In fact, urbanism can thrive only within the construct of a healthy regional structure. The tradition of urbanism must be extended to an interconnected and interdependent regional network of places, creating polycentric regions rather than a metropolis dominated by the old city/suburb schism.

This last point is critical to understanding urbanism and the climate change challenge. City life is not the only environmental option; a regional solution can offer a range of lifestyles and community types without compromising our ecology. A well designed region, when combined with aggressive conservation strategies, extensive transit systems, and new green technologies, can offer many types of sustainable lifestyles. New York City may have among the smallest carbon footprint per capita, but to solve the climate change crisis we do not all have to live in the city.¹⁶

Identifying an appropriate balance among technology, urban design, and regional systems in confronting climate change is now the critical challenge. As a greater percentage of the world’s population increases its wealth, the definition of prosperity will become critical. If progress translates into the old American suburban lifestyle, we are all in trouble. If China and India adopt our development patterns—auto-oriented,
low-density lifestyles or even a high-rise, high-density version of the same—we will truly need breakthrough technologies to accommodate the demands. If they develop an enlightened and indigenous form of urbanism, we all will have the opportunity to address climate change in a less heroic and more cost effective way.

In fact, many developing countries are fast approaching a tipping point of urbanism. As auto ownership grows, the infrastructure to support it expands. Slowly at first, then in a landslide, the logic of surface parking lots, low-density development, freeways, and malls becomes irresistible. As cars make remote destinations viable, the historic logic of density and urbanism erodes and the economics of single-use, lowdensity suburbs grows. The built environment shifts to focus on auto mobility in ways that are hard to reverse—and with this shift urban culture dies. Traditional landscapes and neighborhoods are demolished at astonishing rates to make way for what is now seen as modern. Certainly, we cannot romanticize or literally replicate the complex historic urban fabric of, say, the Hutong in Beijing, but we can learn from it.

At the center of energy and carbon problems in the United States (and in many developing countries in the not-too-distant future) is transportation. It represents almost a third of current U.S. GHG emissions and is the fastest-growing segment.¹⁷As industry becomes more efficient and jobs continue to shift toward an information economy, transportation becomes a more dominant issue.

It seems obvious that the more we spread out, the more we must drive. But the numbers are still startling. From 1980 to 2005, average miles driven per person increased by 50 percent in the United States, a change that can be linked to the nearly 20 percent increase in land consumed per person over roughly the same period.¹⁸ By comparison, Portland, Oregon, with its regional focus on transit and walkable neighborhoods, has seen a reduction in vehicle miles traveled per capita since the mid-1990s.19 At the same time that it reduced auto dependence, the Portland region has preserved valuable farmlands and provided a widening range of housing options. Short of such regional efforts, even a doubling of auto efficiency will not keep up with the typical growth in sprawl-induced travel. We cannot solve the carbon emission problem without changing our travel behavior, and to do that an alternative to our auto-dominated communities is essential.

The good news is that truly great urban places also happen to be the most environmentally benign form of human settlement and are at the heart of a green future. Cities and urban places produce the smallest carbon footprint on a per capita basis.²⁰ New Yorkers, for example, emit just a third of the GHG of the average American.²¹ In addition, it is generally accepted that population growth in developing countries drops as a rural population urbanizes. Urbanism therefore leads to fewer people consuming fewer resources and emitting less GHG at a global scale. Urbanism is a climate change antibiotic and our most affordable solution to foreign oil dependence. Urbanism is, in fact, our single most potent weapon against climate change, rising energy costs, and environmental degradation.

Yet our towns, cities, and regions cannot be shaped around a single issue like climate change or peak oil, no matter how critical they may be. Urban design is part art, social science, political theory, engineering, geography, and economics. I believe it is necessarily all of the above—urban design cannot and should not be reduced to any single metric. In the end, great urban places are qualitative; they are ultimately defined by the coherence of their public places, the diversity of their population, and the opportunity they create for our collective aspirations. We will never treasure our cities and towns just because they are low carbon, energy efficient, or even economically abundant; we will treasure them only when we come to love them as places—as vessels of our cultural identities, stages for our social interaction, and landscapes for our personal narratives. But that does not mean that they should not also play a critical role in the climate change challenge.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

13. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions” (Washington, DC: EPA, 2010).
14. Christopher B. Leinberger, “The Next Slum?” Atlantic, March 2008.
15. Natural Resources Defense Council, “Reducing Foreclosures and Environmental Impacts through Location-efficient Neighborhood Design” (New York: Natural Resources Defense Council, 2010).
16. Andrea Sarzynski, Marilyn A. Brown, and Frank Southworth, “Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008).
17. Author’s analysis of data from World Resources Institute, “US GHG Emissions Flow Chart.” (accessed April 1, 2010).
18. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “National Transportation Statistics 2009” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009), table 1-32; Natural Resources Conservation Service, “National Resources Inventory 2003 Annual NRI,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/
technical/NRI/ (accessed February 12, 2010).
19. Metro Regional Government, “1990–2008 Daily Vehicle Miles Traveled, Portland and the U.S. National Average,” Metro Regional Government. (accessed March 1, 2010).
20. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has done extensive research revealing that urban dwellers commute shorter distances and rely on public transit more often. Their per capita emissions, as well as spending on transportation, are consistently lower than those of the average American.
21. Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, “Inventory of New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions” (New York: Mayor’s Office of Operations, 2007), 6.
22. Assuming advanced natural gas combined cycle plant technology.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: Today we are very pleased to begin a five-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” Keep reading this week and next to learn how you can win a copy of the book from Island Press.

I take as a given that climate change is an imminent threat and potentially catastrophic—the science is now clear that we are day by day contributing to our own demise. In addition, I believe that an increase in fuel costs due to declining oil reserves is also inevitable. The combination of these two global threats presents an economic and environmental challenge of unparalleled proportions—and, lacking a response, the potential for dire consequences. These challenges will in turn bring into urgent focus the way our buildings, towns, cities, and regions shape our lives and our environmental footprint. Beyond a transition to clean energy sources, I believe that urbanism—compact, diverse, and walkable communities—will play a central role in addressing these twin threats. In fact, responding to climate change and our coming energy challenge without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible.

Many deny either the timing or the reality of these challenges. They argue that global demand for oil will not outstrip production and that climate change is overstated, nonexistent, or somehow not related to our actions. Setting aside such debates, my book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change,” accepts the premise that both climate change and peak oil are pressing realities that need aggressive solutions.

Responding to climate change and our coming energy challenge without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible.

The two challenges are deeply linked. The science tells us that if we are to arrest climate change, our goal for carbon emissions should be just 20 percent of our 1990 level by 2050. That, combined with a projected U.S. population increase of 130 million people,¹ means each person in 2050 would need to be emitting on average just 12 percent of his or her current greenhouse gases (GHG)—what I will call here the “12% Solution.”² If we can achieve the 12% Solution to offset climate change, we will simultaneously reduce our fossil-fuel dependence and demonstrate a sustainable model of prosperity. Such a low-carbon future will inherently reduce oil demands at rates that will allow a smoother transition to alternative fuels—and the next economy.

In addition to these twin environmental challenges, the United States has two other systemic forces to reckon with in the next generation: an aging population and a more diverse middle class with less wealth. We are now a country in which a third of the population are baby boomers or older and less than a quarter are traditional families with kids. And for the past decade, median income has actually fallen; in fact, “the typical American household saw its inflation-adjusted income decline by more than $2,000 between 1999 and 2008.”³ So, at the same time that we must respond to climate change and rising energy costs, we must also adjust our housing stock to fit a changing demographic and find a more frugal form of prosperity.

Such a transformation will require deep change, not just in energy sources, technology, and conservation measures but also in urban design, culture, and lifestyles. More than just deploying green technologies and adjusting our thermostats, it will involve rethinking the way we live and the underlying form of our communities. The good news is that our environmental, social, and economic challenges have a shared solution in urbanism. Shaping regions that reduce oil dependence simultaneously reduces carbon emissions, costs less for the average household, and creates healthy, integrated places for our seniors: one solution for multiple challenges.

The urban solution involves both technology and design. For example, we will need to dramatically reduce the number of miles we drive as well as develop less carbon intensive vehicles. It will mean living and working in buildings that demand significantly less energy as well as powering them with renewable sources. It will involve the kinds of food we eat, the kinds of homes we build, the ways we travel, and the kinds of communities we inhabit. It will certainly involve giving up the idea of any single “silver bullet” solution (whether solar or nuclear, conservation or carbon capture, adaptation or mitigation) and understanding that such a transformation will involve all of the above—and, perhaps most important, that they are all interdependent.

In fact, the viability of new technologies and clean energy sources will depend on the success of our conservation efforts at the regional, community, and building scales, which in turn will be determined by our basic lifestyles and the urban forms that support our changing demographics. The key will be designing the right mix of strategies, a “whole systems” rather than a “checklist” approach to climate change, energy, and economics.

There are three interdependent approaches to these nested challenges: lifestyle, conservation, and clean energy. Lifestyle involves how we live—the way we get around, the size of our homes, the foods we eat, and the quantity of goods we consume. These depend in turn on the type of communities we build and the culture we inhabit—degrees of urbanism. Conservation revolves around technical efficiencies—in our buildings, cars, appliances, utilities, and industrial systems—as well as preserving the natural resources that support us all, our global forests, ocean ecologies, and farmlands. These conservation measures are simple, they save money, and they are possible now. The third fix, clean energy, is what we have been most focused on: new technologies for solar, wind, wave, geothermal, biomass, and even a new generation of nuclear power or fusion. These energy sources are sexy, they are relatively expensive, and they will be available sometime soon. All three approaches will be essential, but here I focus on the first two—lifestyle and conservation—because they are, in the end, our most cost effective and easily available tools.

Perhaps just as important as greenhouse gas reductions and oil savings is the fact that urbanism generates a fortuitous web of co-benefits—it is our most potent weapon against climate change because it does so much more.

The intersection of lifestyle and conservation is urbanism. Consider that in the United States industry represents 29 percent of our GHG emissions; agriculture and other non-energy-related activities, just 9 percent; and freight and planes, another 9 percent. This 47 percent total represents the GHG emissions of the products we buy, the food we eat, the embodied energy of all our possessions, and all the shipping involved in getting them to us. The remaining 53 percent depends on the nature of our buildings and personal transportation system—the realm of urbanism.⁴As a result, urbanism, along with a simple combination of transit and more efficient buildings and cars, can deliver much of our needed GHG reductions.

Perhaps just as important as greenhouse gas reductions and oil savings is the fact that urbanism generates a fortuitous web of co-benefits—it is our most potent weapon against climate change because it does so much more. Urbanism’s compact forms lead to less land consumed and more farmland, parks, habitat, and open space preserved. A smaller urban footprint results in less development costs and fewer miles of roads, utilities, and services to build and maintain, which then leads to fewer impervious surfaces, less polluted storm runoff, and more water directed back into aquifers.

More compact development leads to lower housing costs as lower land and infrastructure costs affect sales prices and taxes. Urban development means a different mix of housing types—fewer large single-family lots; more bungalows and townhomes—but in the end provides more housing choices for a more diverse population. It means less private space but more shared community places—more efficient and less expensive overall. Urbanism is more suited to an aging population, for whom driving and yard maintenance are a growing burden, and for working families seeking lower utility bills and less time spent commuting.

Urbanism leads to fewer miles driven, which then leads to less gas consumed and less dependence on foreign oil supplies, less air pollution, less carbon emissions. Fewer miles also leads to less congestion, lower emissions, lower road construction and maintenance costs, and fewer auto accidents. This then leads to lower health costs because of fewer accidents and cleaner air, which is reinforced by more walking, bicycling, and exercising, which in turn contributes to lower obesity rates. And more walking leads to more people on the streets, safer neighborhoods, and perhaps stronger communities.

The feedback loops go on. More urban development means more compact buildings— less energy needed to heat and cool, lower utility bills, less irrigation water, and, once again, less carbon in the atmosphere. This then leads to lower demands on electric utilities and fewer new power plants, which again results in less carbon and fewer costs. As Bucky Fuller exhorted us, urbanism is inherently “doing more with less.” Or, as Mies van der Rohe famously asserted, “Less is more.”

But for the past fifty years, our economy and society have been operating on the premise that “more is more” and “bigger is better”: bigger homes, bigger yards, bigger cars with bigger engines, bigger budgets, bigger institutions, and, finally, bigger energy sources. In contrast, urbanism naturally tends toward a “small is beautiful” philosophy. This then involves trade-offs: less private space but perhaps a richer public realm; less private security but perhaps a safer community; less auto mobility but more convenient transit. Compact development does mean smaller yards, fewer cars, and less private space for some. On the other hand, it can dramatically reduce everyday costs and leave more time for family and community. The question is not which is right and which is wrong or that it must be all one way or the other—urbanism works best with blends. The question is how such trade-offs fit with our emerging demographics, our desires, our needs, our economic means—and perhaps our sense of what a good life really is.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright © 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

1. U.S. Census Bureau Population Division, “2008 National Population Projections: Summary Table 1,” U.S. Census Bureau. (accessed February 10, 2010).
2. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2007” (Washington, DC: EPA, 2009), ES-17.
3. The State of Metropolitan America, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. (accessed June 22, 2010).
4. Author’s analysis of data from the World Resources Institute, “US GHG Emissions Flow Chart.” (accessed April 1, 2010).

Yesterday, San Francisco Streetsblog reported on a SFPD officer harassing a cyclist and the horror that it would take nine months for the case to get a full review. As much as I sympathize with the cyclist, all I could think of is, "nine months, that's it?"

The story reminded me that next week it will have been a year since a hummer driver ran down Andres Tena from behind and ran through a group of cyclists. A member of LA's "finest" allegedly wrote a report on the incident squarely placing the blame on the hospitalized cyclist and his friends and not the hummer that was eventually stopped by the LAPD while dragging a bicycle underneath it's rear axle.

What followed next was a profound stonewalling effort that has included ignoring at least two public information requests from media outlets, Streetsblog and LAist, and the City Council for a copy of the report. Four times the LAPD appeared at City Council hearings to discuss their handling of the case, and Council Members Perry, Rosendahl, LaBonge and Greuel all requested that the LAPD bring copies of the report with them. Four times, that request was ignored.

Meanwhile, the LAPD did bring a packet of mis-information, often saying things about the incident that were easily proven to be wrong. Yet, the reporting officer not only hasn't been reprimanded for his at-best completley shoddy work; he apparently has time to make phone calls to USC Journalism students and laugh about how bad he is at his job.

So for all the olive branches and committee hearings the LAPD offered in past months, let's remember one thing.  It will take nine months for a cyclist to have a review of a loutish SFPD officer up North.  In the Southland, it's been over a year, four City Council hearings, one police commission hearing, and one secret report later and Officer Cho is still on the job and laughing about how his personal biases effect his policing.  And nothing's being done about it.

(Chief Beck, you got next? – DN)

Back in September 2009, when Streetsblog San Francisco editor Bryan Goebel interviewed
newly arrived SFPD Chief George Gascón, he invited him out for a bike
ride. Gascón accepted. Sixth months later, we’re pleased to report that
the chief made good on his promise.

With Andy Thornley of the San Francisco Bike Coalition
serving as a trusty guide, Gascón embarked on a short, breezy excursion
from the Marina, exploring the local streets for a couple of miles.
 The chief’s message isn’t complicated. "We all need to co-exist," and
motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists need to respect each other’s
rights and safety, he says.  He’s working toward fostering that goal
through education and establishing a liaison to the cycling community.

Though the ride was a historic first in San Francisco and a step
forward for mutual understanding, it was also seen as more of a starter
ride. Advocates hope to take the chief on a grittier bike trip –
perhaps down bustling Market Street — in a few months.

Pamela Moye rides the 28-19th Avenue in San Francisco. Photo: Michael Rhodes

Riding
the 28-19th Avenue northbound towards the Richmond on a recent weekday
afternoon, Pamela Moye has almost nothing but good things to say about
Muni.

Aside from the occasional long wait for an M-Ocean View
train, Moye, a schoolteacher, said her experience with Muni has been
overwhelmingly positive.

"I love public transportation in San Francisco," said Moye. "It’s super easy."

What
accounts for Moye’s sunny appraisal of Muni, a system that’s subject to
near-universal griping among San Franciscans? Moye, it turns out,
benefits from the perspective of being a former San Francisco resident
who now lives in Los Angeles, car-free.

"People think I’m
crazy for riding the bus in LA," she said. Though she doesn’t agree
with that assessment, Moye said she knows far fewer people who ride
transit in her new home than in San Francisco.

Moye left San
Francisco in 2002 to pursue a teaching job after attending San
Francisco State. She was back in town on the day we spoke to complete
work on her degree seven years later, and was happy to reminisce about
her days living on 5th Avenue and Geary.

"Living in San
Francisco turned me into a non-car owner," she said. The cost and
hassle of parking, insurance, and gas pushed her towards giving up her
vehicle, and she hasn’t looked back.

After growing up in
Idaho, she found the bus her key to exploring San Francisco. "Riding
the bus is a great way to learn a city," said Moye. When she arrived
here, she said, if she had a free afternoon, "I would just get on a bus
and ride."

Now, when friends and family ask for suggestions
on what to do during visits to San Francisco, Moye tells them to take
the 38-Geary from one end of the line to the other, from ocean to bay,
one of the best ways to see a broad cross-section of the city. (Jane
Jacobs wrote about taking a similar approach to learning New York City
when she first arrived, randomly choosing subway lines to ride to new
neighborhoods every week.)

Moye has continued this practice
in Los Angeles, a city (and region) famed for its dependence on the
automobile, though it has increasingly focused on expanding transit service.

Moye
said she always felt secure riding buses here. "I never saw anything, I
always felt completely safe," she said, noting that she often rode the
bus late at night.

Los Angeles’ bus system
seems to produce more unusual tales in general, according to Moye.
Citing her favorite strange story, Moye said she "noticed two homeless
women chatting away, and I thought, ‘it’s great that they’ve befriended
each other.’"

"Then one of them moved away when a seat opened up, and I realized they were actually both talking to themselves."

Of course, "strange is relative," said Moye.

LA’s network of rapid buses and light rail lines has served her
fairly well, she said, but she still misses San Francisco, where the
main drawback was the cost of living. And while she’s now a dedicated car-free Angeleno, traveling by bicycle in
LA is still too intimidating. "San Francisco seems safer for bicycling.
It’s just not really enjoyable in LA."

As
she heads towards her final destination near Clement Street, it’s
tempting to hear her praise for Muni as the nostalgia of someone seeing
through rose-colored glasses. Still, it’s good to be reminded that this
city can reshape how people think about transportation in a way that
lasts long after they leave its dense, 47-square miles.

(Editor’s note: Because the LADOT uses the lawsuit barring bicycle projects in San Francisco as reason to "go slow" on bike projects, I thought checking in on the status of that lawsuit with the folks at SF Streetsblog could be enlightening.  Also, Michael Rhodes contributed significantly to this story.)

A San Francisco judge issued an order [PDF]
modifying the three-year-old bike injunction late Wednesday afternoon,
refusing to dissolve it completely, but allowing the "most easily
reversible" projects to go forward. It means 10 of the 21 first-year
Bike Plan projects — or about 3.7 miles of new bike lanes — outlined by the MTA
can begin, and when completed, will mark the most significant
improvements bicyclists have seen on the streets of San Francisco since
the injunction was first issued in June 2006.

"With the huge demand for biking improvements, we’re
disappointed that the Court didn’t completely remove the handcuffs, but
we’re pleased that some streets can now be improved for biking," said
Leah Shahum, Executive Director of the SF Bicycle Coalition. "A
three-year backlog means San Francisco has some serious catching up to
do and we are eager for this dark cloud over sustainable transportation
to be completely lifted."

In his order, Superior Court Judge Peter J. Busch said the completion and certification of the Bike Plan EIR
had "changed the circumstances," but he disagreed with the City
Attorney’s argument "that the proper response is to unconditionally
dissolve the injunction" before the outcome of a hearing now set for
June to determine if the 2000 page document fully complies with CEQA.

Continue…

Born in the streets of Oakland, scraper bikes first gained attention as a trend in bicycle customization that spread with viral speed, thanks to YouTube. Since the Scraper Bike video debuted two years ago, they've become much more: a practical means of greening urban space, a social movement, and a rallying point for young people organizing against violence in their communities.

Tyrone "Baby Champ" Stevenson, who styles himself the Scraper Bike King, says the first scraper bikes were created by Oakland teens who coveted, but could not afford, scraper cars -- souped-up sedans painted with bright colors and with rims so large they scrape the undercarriage. Scraper bikes are such a hit that many teens skip the cars and keep pedaling well past the age of 16.

On July 25, Stevenson organized the second annual "Bike 4 Life" ride to call for an end to violence in Oakland's neighborhoods. "We're trying to bring together a gun truce," he says, "because a lot of people in our community are dying from guns." This Streetfilm features scenes from the ride and more from Stevenson about the movement he helped launch.

Recent pilot programs in New York City and San Francisco demonstrate something that Livable Streets Advocates have known all along: by opening "car space" to the public, one can dramatically reduce car traffic and increase livability and sense of community.  While it's true that the concepts demonstrated by our friends to the north and the east are seemingly alien to the folks at City Hall these days; we've learned that once Livable Streets activism reaches the tipping point, things can happen quickly. Thus, we need to continue to celebrate and highlight some of the success stories in other cities.

The New York example is the more dramatic of the two case.  The above video, narrated by Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton, is a tour of Broadway's car-free squares.  As Mark says, the counterintuitive truth is that taking away space for cars can improve traffic while making the city safer and more enjoyable for everyone on foot. There are sound theories that help explain why this happens -- concepts like traffic shrinkage and Braess's paradox which are getting more and more attention thanks to projects like this one.

When the plan to create these plazas at the expense of car-travel lanes was first announced, some of the local press in New York predicted doom for Broadway travelers.  One paper even went so far as to call the soon-to-be-created traffic disaster "Carmageddon."  Unsurprisingly, Carmageddon has been forestalled.

In San Francisco, new pedestrian plazas on 17th Street are having a similar effect.  The San Francisco Great Streets Project has surveyed residents surrounding the new plazas and found that...

...residents of the Castro neighborhood who felt a strong sense of community character rose from 76% to 89% after the plaza opened and those who considered the pedestrian experience of the area as positive rose from 79% to 84%.

Their survey also found that people were spending more time in the plaza, views of the plaza turned it from a "route" to a place and destination, and residents of the Castro neighborhood now want more...more open space and more outdoor amenities.

The SFGSP also has some great "before" and "after" pictures of the plaza that really demonstrate the sweeping changes a little investment can make in a community.

(editor's note: this post leaned heavily on the writing of Clarence Eckerson Jr. in NY and Matthew Roth in San Francisco.)

The entire family of San Francisco city agencies responsible for
maintaining its streets made an unconventional decision to close a
portion of a street to cars and convert the new space into a simple,
yet elegant, public plaza.  The project combines all the important
elements of plaza creation that have been successful in New York City
and elsewhere: take space from cars, use simple treatments to convert
the space into a pedestrian sanctuary, including movable furniture and
leftover granite blocks from city salvage yards, and engage commercial
interests around the plaza to help maintain and care for the new public
realm.

Though some neighborhood constituents voiced skepticism that the
plaza would be empty at best, or filled with miscreants and vagabonds
at worst, the plaza’s success is hard to dispute. In fact, so many
people are using the new space and enjoying the tables and chairs, the
businesses around the plaza have contemplated leaving the furniture out
later than sunset, which was the initial closing time agreed upon
between them and the Castro/Upper Market Community Betterment
District.  This film takes an in-depth look at the construction of the
plaza with some of the agencies responsible for it, and includes some
entertaining man-on-the-street interviews.

Newsom extolling the glories of EVs, from mayorgavinnewsom via Flickr

For his transportation platform, he leads with the right foot, making a strong link between transit improvements and climate change, job growth, and energy independence.

We must leave the era of the car behind and refocus our investment and energy on building smart, environmentally sustainable transit options

Creating robust mass transportation systems will connect our local and regional economies, create jobs, give Californians better affordable transit options and ease traffic congestion.

Amen, brother.  I couldn't have said it better and I hope all environmental and transportation advocates will hammer on those points this election cycle, namely that any candidate who claims green cred must embrace transit and that public transportation equals jobs. No governor serious about addressing climate change can stand by idly (or sit by in a hydrogen Hummer) as all state funding for transit is zeroed out and environmental review for highway projects is thwarted.  Any candidate for governor that wants my vote will immediately reverse the trend away from funding transit operations and widening highways.

So I'm sure the very first platform point will be a solution for restoring desperately needed transit operating money?  Hmm, not so much.  He leads with "innovative technology," claiming that he's modernized Muni with NextMuni and Translink. While it's important to give riders information and make their transfers more fluid, we learned in the kerfuffle over 311 work orders to MTA that more than 60 percent of total call volume to service were questions about bus and train schedules, which NextMuni provides for much less money.

Gav acted on this matter and came up with a cost-cutting solution, but only after Supervisor Bevan Dufty made it a priority.  In fact, if it weren't for Dufty, the matter of various agencies milking MTA for more than $83 million in work orders by 2010 would have slid by the wayside.  Gav didn't seem to have a problem with SFPD and 311 draining the monetary gains that Prop A afforded the MTA until the press picked up on it. 

Putting out fires is not my idea of visionary leadership. 

What Gav doesn't understand or doesn't want to admit is that Muni has a credibility problem that no amount of expensive efficiency plans and innovative technologies will fix.  It's terribly important to be sure that redundant and unnecessary service is eliminated and that Muni focuses its energy on the 80 percent of its ridership on the 15 most used lines, but when the agency faces $129 million in annual budget deficits, it can't even pay to implement its Transit Effectiveness Project, whenever that clears environmental review.  Muni needs money, plain and simple.  Every transit operator in the state needs money, so until you address this issue, I'm not taking your transit platform seriously.

Although he uses the good rhetoric quoted above, Gav offers no solutions for dealing with concerns of building  housing near transit, nor reducing driving to fight climate change. The state has two excellent bills on the books, AB 32 and SB 375, which in principle chart a course toward situating new homes near transit, toward reducing driving, and preventing sprawl.  As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said, reducing the amount Americans drive is one of the biggest challenges facing our nation.  US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood and HUD Secretary recently announced a joint effort to improve regional planning, reduce sprawl, and encourage transit-oriented development. 

California governors like to think of themselves as cutting edge nationally, so why is Newsom so far behind on one of the most fundamental environmental, transportation, and energy concerns facing this state?  Mobile sources are responsible for more that 40 percent of all the state's CO2.  This might not be so obvious when you're driving around in your 18 mpg hybrid truck here in San Francisco, but the smog downwind in Sacramento is unmistakable.  

As for pedestrian safety and amenities, quality public realm, bicycling, traffic calming, speeding, and a whole host of other issues we livable streets urbanists consider important: nada.  What instead is the solution to our problems meriting inclusion in two platforms?  Of course, it's electric vehicles!

Not to harp on an issue I've written about in more detail already, but I will steal a quotation from a commenter on the Carfreeliving listserv: "Yay, electric traffic jams!"

Flickr photo: pbo31

The California Transit Association has submitted a list of recommendations (PDF) to the Commission of the 21st Century Economy,
a "bipartisan" panel mostly appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger, that
call for establishing a "stable, predictable source of long-term
funding" for the state’s public transit agencies. 

“The latest budget
shell game only reinforced what we have long known to be true, that
serious reform of the budget process is long overdue,” said Joshua Shaw, the CTA’s Executive Director. “We’re
hopeful that the formation of this commission and the work it undertakes can be
a vital step in that direction.”

From the press release:

The
Association’s report calls for the commission to support continuation
and strengthening of the transportation funding mechanisms first put
into place by the state in 1971 through the Transportation Development
Act, to modernize and standardize the existing TDA revenue stream, and
to restore stability and predictability to other sources of state
transit funding that have been put in place since the TDA was enacted.

The
recommendations also urge constitutional protections to strengthen the
intent of voters when they passed 1990′s Proposition 116, which
established the Public Transportation Account as a trust fund whose
revenues were dedicated to "transportation planning and mass
transportation purposes," and to clarify voters’ intent in defining
mass transportation purposes as "only those such as state, regional and
local bus and rail passenger service open to the general public."

As we’ve noted many times,
this year’s elimination of the State Transit Assistance (STA) fund has
really hurt public transit agencies up and down the state with fare
hikes and service cuts on the table everywhere just as ridership is
increasing.

Welcome
to town Chase.  I’m super impressed you have been reading Streetsblog
San Francisco and made an ad that reflects some of the knowledge you’ve
acquired here. This is obviously a shout out to the car-free community.
Might the admen understand the incredible cost savings of ditching the car
for a bike, which can save you more than $9,000 every year in direct
vehicle costs, not to mention the health savings from an active
lifestyle and the peace of mind of contributing fewer greenhouse gases
to a dangerously warming planet?

Or maybe this is an
homage to the cyclist as hero, walking into the sunset after defeating
the highway lobby in Washington and securing billions for transit in
the re-authorization of the transportation act.

I’m not sure a big bank like that has the time in between taking billions of taxpayer bailouts and spending them on new airplanes
to focus on the subtleties of the message they’re sending to the more
than one-hundred thousand San Franciscans who ride weekly.

What do you think, Streetsblog Nation?

(Editor’s note: I left all the San Francisco references in the article because it reads better than my attempts to re-write it.  Rest assured, I’ve seen the same billboard here in L.A., although I didn’t have my camera on me at the moment – D)

The Mercedes Benz-ollieing, sidewalk-riding, pedestrian-buzzing Thicke is an ass. As a former pedestrian and cycling advocate in New York City who worked hard to dispel the cyclist-as-sidewalk-riding menace myth, I’d like to see someone hit Thicke with a nice, solid cross-check. Stereogum has it right calling Thicke a "Dick on a Bike." Bottom line: If you’re going to promote bad behavior on bikes, at least let it be talented bad behavior.

Burdick didn’t get his top five list all wrong. I love the inexplicably askew, Donnie Darko-esque Bat for Lashes video:

And The Flobots’ catchy anti-corporate jeremiad, "Handlebars:"

Even the multi-modal Lily Allen is pretty cute riding through some of the more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly sections of London:

But how on earth did the Flight of the Conchords not make the list? Was Burdick worried that the wingers over at RedState.com would accuse the Huffington Post of being a France sympathizer if they picked "Foux De Fa Fa?"

And what about the Conchords’ "Muther Uckers?" It features prominent bicycle placement, no sidewalk riding and the fellas even wear helmets.

As for hip-hop, why not rep a local crew and Oakland’s scraper bikes? Ghost ride the (pedal-powered) whip!

I am unimpressed with the selection of "Bicycle Race" by Queen (original NSFW version) as an honorable mention. That’s so obvious.

How about some more obscure selections like this fetishized Alvin and the Chipmunks ode to bikes from 1961, "Bicycle Built for Two." Simon extols the bicycle as "gorgeous, simply fascinating" and admires its "elegant simplicity of lines." Still, I can’t shake the strange feeling that Dave is a little creepy at the end:

And while it’s not technically a music video, Monty Python’s "Bicycle Repairman" would make my honorable mention list for his willingness to root out Communism wherever it may be found. Perhaps Glen Beck can resurrect the character to fight Obama’s socialist tendencies?

(And thanks to Clarence at Streetfilms for making sure I included the best PSA ever!)

What other videos am I missing, Streetblog Nation?

About a month and a half ago San Francisco Streetsblog opened its doors and any Angeleno who is interested has been able to take a closer look at the Livable Streets Movement in San Francisco.  Thanks to Streetfilms, we can take a look at one of the signature issues for San Francisco: designing a new Market Street.  Clarence Eckerson Jr. reports:

Just about everyone who visits San Francisco’s grand Market Street
is awed by its hustle and bustle, the myriad modes of transportation,
and some of the beautiful architecture the city hosts. But just about
everyone also agrees that Market Street has a much bigger potential as
a people space that accommodates its users in more efficient and human
terms.

Streetfilms was able to talk to many advocates who would like to see
a different configuration on Market Street, people who have invested
time in making it better, and thoughts from those who use it almost
daily as a commuting option.