Transit - a Solution?

California is the home of sprawl, thanks to the way the western US was acquired and developed for profit by the corporate railroads back in the early 1900's by the Huntingtons, among others. The local Los Angeles Red Cars were a loss-leader designed to sell real estate for development in the entire Los Angeles basin. The resulting evolution of the freeway grid during the postwar era, which developed along the earlier rail structure, made the region car-centric, and now development threatens to overwhelm the region with traffic. So far, Transit Oriented Design (TOD) that overlays the old rail right-of-ways for a growing light rail system is proving problematic. The system is still developing, and the attempt to use TOD hasn't worked out the way it was envisioned. A large part of the problem is that the development around these transit nodes has resulted in market rate housing which doesn't solve the problems of affordable housing or a reduction in the use of automobiles.

The "fix" that emerged with the subsequent light rail system planning is an acceleration of the rail extension plan to create a wide-flung system of transit that will integrate the region by 2030. It's an attempt to align transit with the existing dense urban land use, which is the reverse of the way that many of the older, east coast cities evolved. Other models of a more hybrid strategy is beginning to emerge with respect to land planning and development, with planning occuring at a more regional level that creates logical transitways within existing centers of subregional density. The linked-nodes strategy works if the centers of transit are directly aligned and permanently linked.

Enter the era of seriously addressing climate change on top of these already dense urban areas which are increasingly spewing greenhouse gasses, the challenge of a lifetime. A California think tank, Next10, has established emissions goals and practices for 2030 that require drastic changes to transit strategies. The new goals Next10 are pointing to call for cutting greenhouse gases another 40 percent over the next 10 years en route to an 80 percent reduction by 2050. And with the transportation sector belching out more than 40 percent of the state’s emissions, the hard work is still ahead:

“Almost all of the success has been in the electricity sector, and almost all of the low hanging fruit is gone,” said Danny Cullenward, policy director at climate change think tank Near Zero. “Meanwhile, the transportation sector is going in the wrong direction.” Still, they won’t be enough to staunch the flow of greenhouse gases from tailpipes, which  Nichols said in 2018 will require a “deep transformation. And changing California’s car culture — that transformation Nichols wants — is widely believed to be a significant challenge on its own. Add to that the state’s battle with federal regulators to manage its own clean-car rules and the goal becomes even more difficult.

When the federal Environmental Protection Agency last month yanked California’s special authority to set its own tailpipe emission standards, officials said they would take the fight to court. “There’s just no way we can reach our goal unless we are able to move forward with that waiver and the provisions that it allows us,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said at an environmental summit.

And compare the California goals with what's occurring at the Federal level under the wayward Trump administration. The US government is now retreating into a retrograde expansion of emissions which makes meeting the goals extremely difficult. How this will resolve the battle will depend upon the politics of the country as they play out over the next year.

Keep It Simple

The IPCC Special Report is here from the UN. It documents the immediate impacts on the environment that 1.5C will likely have. It warns that strong efforts would be required to prevent disastrous consequences from dangerous levels of climate change. This means that World War II was a cakewalk compared to this, all hands on deck. An analysis of the report: "The best time to start reducing emissions was 25 years ago. The second best time is today."

Johan Rockström, chief scientist at Conservation International speaks about it.“Climate change is occurring earlier and more rapidly than expected. Even at the current level of 1C warming, it is painful,” he told the Guardian. “This report is really important. It has a scientific robustness that shows 1.5C is not just a political concession. There is a growing recognition that 2C is dangerous.” In order to blunt the coming climate change at that level, it's necessary to abandon coal and other fossil fuels in the next decade or two.

Having said all that, there's immediate, large-magnitude things that can happen right away to drastically reduce emissions. Such as protecting, preserving and restoring our great forests. Such as elimination of fossil fuel subsidies by governments across the globe. Such as rapid technology advancement in wind and solar, along with the upgrading of the electrical grids and establishing many stand-alone power sources at its periphery. Transportation in all areas, such as auto, truck, rail, airlines, and especially port traffic from overseas, will need to become electrified and supplied with renewable fuels. These strategies are not difficult, and can be widely employed in all countries, which need to develop the revenue for this. Decarbonization also has possibilities in the future with the nascent carbon capture industry that's progressing now.

There are many other things that can be done by private industry and by municipalities that can contribute to the lowering of carbon emissions in the very near future. But we don't have much time, and we need to mobilize. All of us.

Update 10/8/18: Nobel Prizes are awarded and given to economists referencing ways to adapt growth to climate change.

Update 10/9/18: 2C is nowhere near safe from a climate impacts perspective; now it's 1.5C

Update 11/2/18: Absurd for society to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace and that its primacy should determine how you structure government.

Update 11/12/18: The IPCC report tells us that climate breakdown is inevitable if we continue with growth-based neo-liberal economics.

Update 12/17/18: A new IPCC report says we’re looking at climate catastrophe as early as 2040.

Update 1/14/19: Silent Spring - Why it’s time to think about human extinction  Dr David Suzuki on economic growth

Update 7/1/19:  Scientists are calling for an end to capitalism as we know it.

California May Day!

"Attempts to encourage journeys to be switched to rail from the more carbon dioxide emitting air and car forms of travel have largely failed as the characteristics and attractions of all carbon-based modes – including those claimed to be justified on the grounds that per passenger-kilometre they are more energy efficient – have simply led to more travel, especially in long-distance journeys."

- Mayer Hillman, Senior Fellow Emeritus since 1992 at the Policy Studies Institute, University of Westminster, UK

The traffic planners all understand this problem of adding highway capacity to existing networks - they simply add to traffic problems because more traffic shows up to clog the network. So planning has started to focus on becoming more efficient with automobile transit design and highway expansions. But it hasn't solved the underlying problem of traffic jams and increased pollution; same story. And sadly that's the fundamental, unidentified problem: carbon emissions. Tinkering around the edges with electric engines and trains doesn't solve it.

By the same token, the switching of the physical issue of transport from air travel to rail, or highway to rail, avoids solving the problem itself, which is that moving bodies and cargo around are the basic drivers of energy consumption. This, of course creates more "value" attributable on accounting spreadsheets as an increase in GDP. But it's obviously a false metric if the environmental damages of this human behavior aren't accounted for. Once all the factors are examined vs. the amounts of money required to build and maintain these massive systems, it doesn't actually pay back or even make much sense. Its only "advantage" is that public dollars are used to offset and conceal the actual impact of these systems. It's the equivalent to the old factory stacks that dumped pollution into the air without accounting for its effects because "the commons" was assumed to be free to all for use. And that's the Tragedy. This problem could use some good economists.

"Impressive though recent efficiency gains are, switching to energy renewables and low-carbon developments makesno contribution to reducing the concentrationof emissions. It can only reduce the rate at which the concentration continues to rise." - Mayer Hillman

Part of the UN-level discussion on GHG emissions includes the analysis by Mayer Hillman, which is a very strong position that supposedly more efficient travel systems leads to MORE travel and more emissions, not less. Especially considering that something like the proposed California High Speed Rail (HSR) is in *ADDITION TO* all the other existing systems of travel, all of which continue to dump GHG's into the atmosphere. It's an appeal to the engineering and large infrastructure industry. Hence the discussion of California's completely inadequate HSR concept which spends billions of dollars to basically no effect, except to create more emissions and higher populations and makes the whole problem worse. The concept was politically designed (not engineered) over a decade ago on outdated policy information, as was cap-and-trade.

We're seeing this in California with Governor Brown's pet project, the HSR, a boondoggle if there ever was one. It doesn't even work at a basic engineering level, but the massive AEC firm (Parsons Brinkerhoff) that is running the project has to "feed the monster" to stay in business. It doesn't actually work as High Speed Rail anymore because of this configuration wandering around the Central Valley instead of directly connecting SF and LA. Its inception was a political deal to link together the small cities in the Central Valley to feed growth, of course, and get millions of "housing units" built in the hottest area of California that is currently agricultural. Its water supplies are diminishing, the aquifers are collapsing from overdrafting, and large areas are ruined for agriculture because irrigation and fertilization has rendered the soil unusable from the accumulated salts, particularly on the west side of the Central Valley. Not to mention that the crops are now almond trees and the product is shipped to China in heavily polluting tankers.

It gets better. Governor Brown is using a good portion of the funds from the Cap and Trade program (!!!) to try to pay for this HSR project, since the Federal Government and private industry won't step up to the plate. It doesn't pencil out, and there is massive public objection to this whole thing (for good reason). The fact that this whole HSR doesn't actually have any demand for travel - we have several highways, a metro train and LOTS of air travel between LA and SF - seems to be irrelevant to the politicos who planned this whole fiasco. It's just about populating the Central Valley and getting more GDP out of it now that agriculture seems to have maxed out. Everybody wants revenue and the real estate industry has always been the answer to that in this state, it's very nineteenth century. California is only about 150 years old in terms of its settlement history; it's not like Europe. The plumbing that makes the Central Valley possible is only about 50 years old, it's all imported from the northern part of the state with giant pumps and aqueducts built since about 1960, and we're seeing the immense problems created by only a half century of re-engineering the state. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the "solutions" to the population explosion in the cities of southern California has drastically amplified the potential damages to the environment and to the huge population of people living here; setting itself up for disaster because none of this is really sustainable in a warming planet that's cutting off the rain.

Now let's add the ports of Los Angeles, San Pedro, San Diego and San Francisco, which are the biggest emitters of pollution from cargo transit on the west coast. Air quality in LA is the worst in the nation because of the shipping which depends on oil, and the dirty trucks that are used on the highways to get the stuff to inland warehouses before it's put on rail to the midwest and east coast. Naturally, China has the dirtiest shipping industry on the planet and a big chunk of it comes here, along with all that stuff that's no longer manufactured in this country but ends up in our landfills. Or actually the cars end up in Mexico and South America for the last third of their useful life; Mexico City is swarming with old Volkswagens and used Japanese Hondas.

So the whole thing feeds on itself because more transit and shipping begats more GDP, and therefore the "demand" is the quantifiable metric but not the energy consumption and pollution because its impact is hidden in "the commons". That's why this emissions framework has got to be tied to the equity of the commons, because that's the only benchmark that accounts for the impacts. The political assumptions driving this destructive development and expansion are actually quite delusional, yet it's the basis for public policy in this country, as well as in China, which has been building empty cities connected with high speed rail (which is counted by China as GDP even though nobody's bought the stuff yet).

We're going to drive ourselves to extinction because of our collective insanity, that's all there is to it. We could stop it tomorrow if we could just wake up and recognize the problem we're creating. So a framework for dramatic change has to be implemented, using the carbon tax as a tool. It's the only way we're going to be able to deal with the reality that carbon emissions must stop almost immediately. By itself a carbon tax doesn't work fast enough, it's just a lever. This approach is now under serious discussion at the World Bank and IMF, so there is yet hope that the world can take the steps needed to address climate change, in spite of our proclivity for "growth" at all cost.

Update 5/24/16: A projection of land-use change in California - urbanization will be the primary cause of greater water demand in the state. Precisely what the HSR is designed to do.

Update 1/3/17:  The entire supply on the Colorado River has become less reliable, threatening the water supply

Lead or Follow?

Our profession holds an annual conference, this year in June at the AIA National Convention in Chicago. Ed Mazria, Founder and CEO of Architecture 2030, delivered the keynote address 'Design! Life Depends on It'. The 20-minute video lays out the blueprint for a carbon-free and just built environment by 2050, reviews the progress made in the building sector since issuing the 2030 Challenge in 2006, and outlines the critical role architects and designers must play in securing a livable future.

His organization, Architecture 2030, has the full support and endorsement of the National AIA. His challenge amounts to saying that the buidling industry must assert leadership in rapidly reducing carbon emissions. This position is important because the building and construction industry represents about 70% of urban emissions.This includes the emissions related to building these structures as well as the shipping, hauling, service delivery and maintenance involved in maintaining them, in other words, the local transportation sector and the building management industry.

As one of the myriad strategies available to reduce carbon emissions, it can represent a critical means of moving early and swiftly to make the transition to a clean economy, implementing carbon reduction ahead of global emissions agreements.

Update 8/14/14: From Architecture 2030 - Architects to phase out carbon by 2050 as declared at the 2014 UIA  General Assembly in Durban

A Closer Look at Pork

It's so bad it's painful to look at. I've deconstructed it before, but now it's worse, with our Governor now backing the California High Speed Rail (HSR) as part of his legacy. "Moonbeam" is appropriate for this one as well, it won't give him a "re-do".

The California HSR project is a conceptually flawed design that's basically laid out by "let's make a deal" strategies. Let's look at the pit stops on the first leg, starting at a San Francisco terminus:

SFO
Palo Alto
San Jose
Gilroy
Fresno
Hanford
Bakersfield
Palmdale
Sylmar
Burbank
Los Angeles

This is not a high speed rail design, it's a Metrolink system (choo-choo train) at best; perhaps 4 hours transit under good conditions. This is a gerrymandered design by politicians, not engineers, which won't comply with the bond requirement to make the transit in 2.5 hours. HSR doesn't make pit stops, it's a very large machine that requires intensive engineering and very high maintenance on straight routes. Needless to say, it can't safely share tracks with regular rail, as is now proposed. The land has not been purchased yet, and many lawsuits are brewing over the "taking" of farmland, among many other issues, because the route cuts across acres of farmland, rather than paralleling the I-5.

The bids are questionable and costs are not reliable. The low bidder has not been found to perform on previous projects. Newspaper editorials recommend scuttling the project for these reasons. The Reason Foundation has issued a report for this design citing ballooning subsidies that haven't been financially thought through. It is, overall, a sad example of patronage.

The solution for an HSR system is to build out regional transit in SF area and LA area with light rail and busses, which can be accommodated with existing facilities, stations and routes. This is the more appropriate development of urban transportation systems. They all need to work together at the right scale, and the connection to the big HSR system can happen at the two end points, just as they do in European systems. The route should run adjacent to the I-5 highway which already has clear right-of-ways and grading.

Spare the taxpayers from this pork, the state's already broke.

Update 3/15/16:  Calif. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband wins CA rail contract

Update 10/3/16:  Jerry Brown’s Train Wreck

Update 11/22/17: Another setback for the bullet train

Update 11/24/18: Cost overruns caused by poor planning, contract mismanagement 

Update 9/9/20: Newsom's bullet train faces rising costs, sinking funding

Just a Pixel

The City of Los Angeles has posted its Climate Change portal which examines in detail a study area that is simply one pixel in the large climate models:

The study looked at the years 2041–60 to predict the average temperature change by mid-century. The data covers all of Los Angeles County and 30 to 60 miles beyond, including all of Orange County and parts of Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, and reaching as far as Palm Springs, Bakersfield and Santa Barbara. The study overlaid this entire area with a grid of squares 1.2 miles across and provided unique temperature predictions for each square. This is in contrast to global climate models, which normally use grids 60 to 120 miles across — big enough to include areas as different as Long Beach and Lancaster.

It's a recognition that Los Angeles takes climate change very seriously; it's not a theoretical problem, and is trying to help the businesses and residents of the city prepare for the coming changes. The local Los Angeles Times has covered the issue of climate change denial in its press coverage. For example, the attitude of the climate deniers is challenged, in an interview with E.O. Wilson:

What are the consequences of this attitude on, say, climate change?

I've been asked this numerous times: Are we going to be able to pull this thing out in time? I believe in a dictum I first heard from the [deputy] prime minister of Israel, Abba Eban. He said, when all else fails, men turn to reason. Maybe this will happen in time, but right now we are pouring species and biodiversity down the drain for nothing.

Another LAT article questions the wisdom of ignoring the problem:

Droughts in Texas and Louisiana, melting glaciers in Alaska and wildfires in Arizona -- with combined losses running into the tens of billions of dollars -- might lead some to conclude that fighting climate change would be cheaper than ignoring it. But such logicians probably aren't members of Congress from those states, many of whom have deep ties to the oil and gas industry or are simply philosophically opposed to environmental regulation.

While climate change is really a discussion about carbon emissions and how to drastically reduce them, the conversation in Los Angles has been about local efforts in city planning and the restoration of the LA River. What's not mentioned is the impact of the Ports of Los Angles and Long Beach, the single biggest pollution source for the region, as well as their transportation infrastructure which stretches all across Southern California via the Alameda Corridor and designated highways. This transit corridor issue has reared its ugly head again with a new attempt by Metro to run freight through local cities. The surrounding communities are dead set against a massive, destructive proposed project which will drastically increase truck emissions, the 710 connector.

That issue aside, the approach that the city is taking in its local region is an emphasis on restoration projects, which includes habitat regeneration and the accompanying job creation that results from it. These projects can go far beyond simply restoring ecosystems, as a Volkswagen production facility in Mexico demonstrates.

How to Play Boondoggle

The California State Legislature has settled it: the overpriced political solution to actual high speed rail has been approved for funding, at the moment. It's the kind of design that only a deranged political process can produce. No engineer in their right mind would develop this kind of a project. To begin with, the local regional transit at each end - Bay Area and LA area - must be developed in order to feed the big high speed rail system with the ridership it needs to work. This was sketched out in my earlier 2009 post.

Secondly, the high speed rail route has to go along the Interstate 5 route and zip through without any stops at all in the central valley. That route is the same distance as Paris to Lyon, in two hours. High speed rail also requires straight tracks; anything else is a farce, especially when you consider the impact of high temperatures in the valley which would expand the steel rails into curves and derail the trains. Again, this is an issue I've covered before in 2010.

This project hurtles along relentlessly in spite of extreme budgetary overruns before it's even started, and has lost support among many in the global transportation industry. The Los Angeles Times has even gotten a direct quote from a transportation civil engineer:

"It's like California is trying to design and build a Boeing 747 instead of going out and buying one," said Dan McNamara, a civil engineer who worked for SNCF's U.S. affiliate. "There are lots of questions about the Parsons Brinckerhoff plan. The capital costs are way too high, and the route has been politically gerrymandered."

The biggest mind-blowing fact of the adopted design is SHARED TRACKS with Caltrain, which completely destroys any possibility of true high-speed rail. The requirements for high-speed are NOT compatible with any other kind of rail system, and can't be "shared". This is a complete misrepresentation of what the project will deliver. It's also unsafe. The HSR rails in Europe require nightly robotic inspections on the rails themselves because of the critical nature of maintaining clean, straight sets of rail that are not used by any other system.

While the legislature fiddles in the flames of the boondoggle, residents and businesses in California will be ripped off in taxes to pay for the bonds for decades for this project, particularly since the envisioned private sector participation is not materializing. For very good reason. The only hope now is that other issues facing this thing will bring about its demise. And, it turns out there's a good reason for "crazy".

Update 1/16/17:  California's bullet train is hurtling toward a multibillion-dollar overrun, a confidential federal report warns

Update 9/23/17: Optimism isn't warranted, and it adds significant pollution instead of reducing it.

Update 9/26/17: Progress. Way over budget, far behind schedule, mired in lawsuits

Update 9/30/17: Way over budget on just one segment

Update 4/21/18: High Speed Rail - The Fatally Flawed Centerpiece. It is going to take twice as long to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles via high speed rail vs. an airplane. Plus it's a perpetual financial drain based on a  “Monte Carlo” analysis.

Update 6/29/18: Bridges go up, they come down, they go back up again.

Update 9/10/18: China's HSR system

The Lanzhou-Xinjiang line that Liu traveled is the longest, and most controversial, link in China’s HSR network. Built at a cost of RMB 140 billion, it connects three large north-western provinces inhabited by 53 million people — a relatively low total for China — in a combined land area bigger than Argentina.

This flies in the face of the basic economics of high-speed railways, which work best at relatively short distances through densely populated corridors.

“The sweet-spot distance is 300, 500 kilometers,” (186 - 300 miles) says Jonathan Beard, head of transportation consultancy for Arcadis Asia. “Any shorter and road tends to be more competitive. Any longer and air tends to be more competitive.” (Distance from SF to LA is 520 miles via the HSR route)

Update 2/20/19: Chairman of troubled bullet train project resigns

Update 2/23/19: Time to derail the train to nowhere

Update 4/30/19: The state is on the verge of potentially losing billions in federal grants for unrelated infrastructure projects due to mismanagement of high speed rail.

Update 5/12/19:  How California’s faltering high-speed rail project was ‘captured’ by costly consultants

Update 5/13/19:  There is no credible rationale for this $20 billion boondoggle

Update 5/30/19: Problem with fast rail systems, especially in very hot areas like the Central Valley

Update 6/21/19: The bullet train utterly lacks a rational purpose and is a black financial hole.

Update 7/1/19: Why the US has no high-speed rail (video)

Update 6/14/21:  The gigantic transit project that hasn’t happened 

.

An Epic Win

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is a non-profit thinktank that has been active for over 30 years. Started up by Amory Lovins, it has established a blueprint for a proactive strategy that can actually get the USA to zero GHG emissions by 2050. It's dubbed "Reinventing Fire". In short, their position is summarized as follows:

Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era offers market-based, actionable solutions integrating transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity. Built on Rocky Mountain Institute's 30 years of research and collaboration in all four sectors, Reinventing Fire maps pathways for running a 158%-bigger U.S. economy in 2050 but needing no oil, no coal, no nuclear energy, one-third less natural gas, and no new inventions. This would cost $5 trillion less than business-as-usual—in addition to the value of avoiding fossil fuels' huge but uncounted external costs.

The overarching issues are examined in a global context. For example, Randy Essex of RMI examines the futility of old-think with respect to oil supplies in the Middle East, coupled with military intervention. This perpetuates a destructive cycle which can be dispensed with by moving to renewable electric supplies.

Moving this strategy to the local level of policy boots-on-the-ground, RMI's Smart Garage Initiative partners with major cities to implement an infrastructure for the support of electric vehicle use. This portion of their strategy is the most effective, immediate and profitable action that can be taken by US industries in order to drastically cut auto and truck emissions. It's the easy one that can get the ball rolling into the major reductions necessary for the USA to bring its carbon emissions down into the unalterable lower limits that will contain climate change.

This kind of leadership by the USA could provoke global consensus on emissions levels and carbon capture, particularly if the old extractive practices are brought to a halt. All it takes is for the big guy to step up to the plate.

Roundaboutaboutabout

In recognition of our Independence Day from the British Crown in 1776, I note that a new British invasion is occurring which could potentially tame our suburban traffic nightmares and cure the red light camera syndrome. Wouldn't it be terrific if this "walkability" theme included attractive intersections, much like the issue surrounding Prince Charles' famous "carbuncle" pronouncement to the RIBA in 1984? Which in fact generated a backlash to the imported American strip mall retro-experience (another exchange across the Pond?) and instigated a movement towards even more radical modernism that reflects the changing aesthetic towards creative, energy-conserving minimalism. The humble element in this case is the roundabout.

In this way, a humanized traffic experience as part of the urban fabric is becoming a popular adaptation here in the US, as is covered by an article from BBC news. Unlike the vast, complex autopian circles shown above, these are the small, single circle suburban street intersections that generally host a tree and shrubs that link the allees of street trees with a marker that indisputably creates a "stop!" point for pedestrians. This slows traffic because of the change of scale and the subtraction of the "highway" visuals from many of our suburban arterial streets.

However, to note the cultural differences cited in the BBC article, the Brits have famously learned to navigate these in a rather frightful fashion. I had "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" on a visit to Southampton, with my cousin merrily ripping through the traffic circles as if they didn't exist on the way back from the local pub to the train station. Only in England.

Time Machine

From Planetizen, "Give Yourself the Green Light", about how the American military impacted the kind of sprawling urban form developed in the 1950's. Postwar might and ingenuity were applied to some of the urban problems in order to solve them, and military planning was adopted to develop American cities and suburbs. The means of access to everything became the automobile, and this kind of thinking solved all problems with acres of asphalt and parking lots. An earlier post delves into the reason that auto-based planning is destructive to urban areas as well as suburban and rural landscapes in creating sprawl.

Here in Southern California, it became the norm to "drive 'til you qualify" for the cheap outer suburban mortgages that are now imploding our economy, along with inexpensive gas. Those days are now past, and it's important to look at new paradigms, such as are outlined in this interview with Peter Calthorpe, author of “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change”. As he states, "I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to demonstrate that if you design communities around a car, you’re going to have increased automobile use." No, but the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Highway Administration certainly had their sights fixated on the rigid military formulas for how to develop cities. It was like garrisoning the highways and cities for an industrial invasion; it's Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

The change in urban design approach espoused by New Urbanists involves the desire to implement transit oriented development (TOD), and sometimes this kind of planning puts the cart before the horse, especially when it comes to building projects before the transit linkages exist that provide an alternative to automobile dependence. The shift needs to be made to rail and bus that connect nodes of walkable areas, and reduce the impact of the asphalt and concrete canyons in the urban areas. As Calthorpe points out, landscaped and open areas are a prime feature of urban areas that have escaped the automobile culture. Additionally, some creative arts expression with mass transit has started to enliven the light rail being developed along the old rail right-of-ways in Los Angeles. The precedent being, perhaps, the old Moscow underground stations that made "arriving" somewhere a special experience.

Hence, many cities are beginning to take the first steps to repair the urban fabric by unbuilding freeways in order to open the city up to light, open space and urban forests. This is the new paradigm that will need to ultimately prevail in our revitalized cities. It goes far beyond the historic "city beautiful" precedents and brings the critically necessary element of ecological regeneration into the mix of human habitation.

Unbuild Freeways

Another way of traffic-calming our way to a vibrant and livable community with open space and pedestrian access instead of impassable concrete structures carrying traffic is presented on StreetsBlog. The full post can be read here.

It's a good site for examining the arguments for removing existing highways that have become barriers to central city development and community engagement. It's called "Moving Beyond the Automobile" and presages the coming era of expensive gasoline and far fewer resources to maintain large infrastructure projects. The history of the highway and freeway in the USA is that of a military legacy that was ultimately offloaded to the states and counties to maintain, which is becoming more and more burdensome.

In this presentation, CNU president John Norquist stars in this video from Streetfilms about the problem of inner-city highways and the steps some cities are taking to get rid of theirs.

"If you look at the real estate anywhere near a freeway, almost always its degraded," says Norquist. "You'll get surface parking lots, or buildings that have high-vacancy rates. No walking. Because it's really hard to design a freeway that would look good in a city."

Freeways are a problem of divisively clashing scale in an urban network, which famously isolates parts of cities from each other, creating areas of lower valued real estate that is essentially left to blight. Cities are in the process of undoing freeways, undergrounding their viaducts as in Seattle, the removal of the Embarcadero in San Francisco, or creating lids over existing freeways to connect the fabric of the city together. It's an opportunity to make these locations part of the urban fabric and “lid” the freeway and incorporate parkway (like the High Line in NYC) or water (like the Freeway Park in Seattle). A decent-sized lid can create pedestrian and small commercial opportunities as well – the precedent for that is the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy. Ljubljana, Slovenia is building more pedestrian/shopping bridges to complement its old bridges in newly traffic-free zones around the river and weave the fabric of the city together. Seattle is in the process of replacing its old viaduct with a deep-bore tunnel which will reconnect the waterfront to the city and provide open space as well as opportunities to rehabilitate the areas that are currently down at the heels, facing directly into the viaduct structure.

This new paradigm makes the effort by LA County to ram the 710 freeway extension through South Pasadena to the 210 freeway in Glendale seem to be quite a retrograde and piecemeal project. The highway system is an old answer from another era - a little 710 history here - and it needs to move into our evolving sustainable future. New alternatives have been proposed for this problem, such as the rail extension of the Alameda corridor which would keep freight traffic off the freeways and minimize the impact of a below-grade route for these clusters of impacted cities.This alternative concept originates from a new vision of the Port of Long Beach transformation into a completely green facility that eliminates the need for the 710 tunnel for freight, as presented by David Alba. In addition, a light rail solution to this problem for human transit is proposed at, once again, LAStreetsBlog.

Update: Seven Cities Consider Removing Major Urban Highways, from The Architect's Newspaper Blog.

The Fix

Los Angeles has long been ensnarled in huge traffic jams thanks to the lack of a real transit system, and there have always been numerous plans and strategies developed to deal with it at some point. Initially it started with the Red Line from Union Station over to the west side of downtown, then the Blue Line was finished going down to Long Beach. Later, the Green Line not-quite-reaching-LAX and the Gold Line to Pasadena were completed with the artwork incorporated at each station. Given this, it seems that fixing LA's transit issues has become a real possibility, particularly with the political approval of the Gold Line extension out to Azusa and ultimately Pomona. The system evolved over the old access lines from earlier rail and transitway developments in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles' Mayor Villaraigosa has recently taken the transit issue to a new level by proposing a financing scheme that will allow immediate starts for a light rail transit network in the City of Los Angeles that extends the existing hub of the system out to the various distant regions within 10 years instead of 30. This is done by borrowing from the Federal Government and repaying the monies from the existing Measure R income, which would pay for the construction of the system as is laid out above. The feasibility of this approach is under debate, but the necessity for it is not; it was unanimously approved by the US Conference of Mayors in mid-May in Oklahoma City.

What this will mean for the form of Los Angeles, as the infill grows around the transit lines, is a far more dense urban system with development pressures coming to bear on the old neighborhoods fronting the original traffic ways that formed the backbone for the new and expanded system. With any luck, the City will have guidelines, ordinances and review bodies in place to make sure that the resulting development is done sustainably and preserves the character of old Los Angeles while conserving resources. It will be interesting to see how much influence the neighborhood councils will have on proposals put forward by developers in the future, especially given the new State Green Codes as well as the Low Impact Development ordinance currently being developed by the City.

Anger Rises

One thing I can say for this BP oil spill is that it is finally creating the very urgent, critical national conversation about what our oil addiction really means to us and the world we live in. It's not just the anger, wrathfully portrayed in Stephen Colbert's skit, but the utter destruction and terrible risks to people, their livelihood and the environment that oil drilling and coal mining create. The difference here is that it's not off happening in some jungle in Ecuador, it's right here in our own front yard with the whole world as witness. Kind of an I-told-you-so moment for the environmental groups.

The excellent dialogue this has engendered about how we live and how we build sustainable habitations are taking place among the conservation orgs and the planning and design professions. What kinds of cities should we build? How do we manage traffic and people and the connections from place to place so that we cut way back on our energy demands? The form of the city, and its interconnectedness, is key to solving this problem. And interestingly, it looks like the old township grids that were laid out over 100 years ago at walkable scale, before the automobile forced a dystopian network of highways. These small-scaled blocks and alleys allow even dense city centers to be delightfully habitable. Venice, Italy is always a talked-about example because everyone walks when they're not using the water taxis down the river.

Research with traditional density diagrams shows how the scale of connections is critical for making a place walkable and accessible.

Right now many of our suburban edges and cities sprawling out into the inland empire are nothing but tract homes packed along highways, with no local stores or places to interact, they simply connect to malls with arterials. As this article shows, the scale is far too large for people to walk or even commute with bicycles; they're effectively trapped on huge, isolated expanses of asphalt that absorb and re-radiate heat. This is an utter failure of planning and a lack of understanding of what creates habitable places. There's ways to deal with this that are an intervention of scale and design on these degraded landscapes: break down the scale, unpave the asphalt, integrate the small projects that serve local populations. I remember walking in Venice, to go back to that example, it's a rabbit warren with incredibly interesting architecture and plazas and, of course, the bridges. Up and down, around corners and zigging along the canal pathways. Paris has much the same feel in places, all the small shops and short blocks with trees and landscaping all over the city. Some of our older suburbs here in Los Angeles have the small township style layouts, and they're delightful neighborhoods once you get out of the sea of flat, featureless asphalt. The smaller scale and interesting, sustainable landscapes are the way out of this energy nightmare.

The impact of oil and coal is not only environmental, of course. There's a long-term destructive impact on the economy because of the way that the resulting costs and risks are allocated into financial instruments that poison the markets with toxic assets decades into the future. And this one is Exxon-Valdez on steroids.

You WILL Build

Whether they come or not. Hot off the presses from Housing California:

COMMISSION ADOPTS FINAL GUIDELINES FOR NEW LAND-USE TRANSPORTATION PLANS

On April 8, 2010, the California Transportation Commission adopted the 2010 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) Guidelines. The revised guidelines reflect new requirements imposed by SB 375 (Steinberg, 2008) to link transportation and land-use planning in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Housing California and our partners at Public Advocates, ClimatePlan, and other progressive organizations devoted significant time to ensuring the guidelines accurately reflect the language and spirit of SB 375, especially relating to public participation, housing and transit affordability, and environmental protection. Language added to the guidelines at our urging includes:

• Specific suggestions on how regional planning agencies can effectively engage low-income residents and their representatives (See Chapter 4 RTP Consultation and Coordination).
• Requirements for use of public participation tools, including computer simulations, that clearly demonstrate how various planning scenarios will impact residents' lives (See Chapter 3.2 Sketch Modeling).
• Recommendations for modeling improvements that demonstrate the link between housing affordability, wages, and greenhouse gas emissions and that show how various planning scenarios impact housing affordability (See Chapter 3.2).
• Guidance on estimating the projected housing need for the full RTP planning period (See Section 6.25 Sustainable Communities Strategy Development: Addressing Housing Needs in the SCS)

Housing California is proud to announce that our SB 375 resources are now online! Resources include:

• An SB 375 bill summary.
• A list of Sustainable Communities Strategy acronyms.
• A list of opportunities for addressing home affordability in regional modeling.
• An advocates guide for effectively participating in the regional modeling process.
• Regional implementation timelines for Los Angeles
• The slide presentation from our last SB 375 training

Obviously our state needs to take a lesson from Spain rather than forcing draconian overbuilding that generates tremendous carbon loads and diminishes our resources.

Fixing Transit - Can We Do It?

In an interesting article series in the LA Times, reporter David Lazarus is reporting out on traffic conditions in Los Angeles and highlighting the angst of the commuters trying to negotiate the complex fragments of transit systems in the LA basin in order to get from one side of town to another. Well, you can't get there from here. While the article is based upon interviews, anecdotal experience and some good research, it amounts to a one-person poll with the standard suggestions that are made for all transit issues across the country. But it seems the Mayor wants "professional" advice from someone who is not involved with the transit network design, strategy or maintenance. This is astonishing because it takes a deep understanding of transit networks as well as urban form, and experience with the costs and efforts to keep transportation systems operational. I don't know if this means a complete loss of confidence in the MTA, pushback at LADOT, or if this is simply meant to be a PR exercise, but this seems to be shirking the actual transportation planning responsibility from the top.

There are urban transportation experts out there who understand the structure of transit networks, how the geography of a region is critical to successful transit strategies, and how all the forms of transit form a network of systems that have to be balanced. It's not about throwing various disconnected schemes at an existing dysfunctional urban form and transit network, it has to be about coming to grips with the fundamental geographic issues. One of these folks is Jarrett Walker, a transit planner who has studied many urban transit systems, including Los Angeles. He has a blog up, Human Transit, which is linked to just about every resource of consequence on this subject, including the article linked here which talks about how the form of the city is crucial, and mentions that LA is the extreme example of a sprawled out urban form to the point of dissolution.

However, there is an old backbone that is being built upon by the MTA's light rail system to a large extent, and that drove the development into the areas that we see as subregional centers today. That's the old Red Line system built by Henry Huntington to create land development opportunities all over the region. It followed geographies and linked inland areas to the beaches, and worked well until the population grew out of scale and the highway system replaced it with sprawl-generating freeways out to distant urban fringe areas that became the subdivisions.

In an article on the Transport Politic blog in October of 2008, Yonah Freeman lays out the overall political and funding transit situation in Los Angeles, and asks for voter approval of the County's Measure R, which would fund some of the necessary transportation system expansion. Measure R passed, and is now in the implementation phase. Again, not without significant controversy and required local review of CEQA.

The current transit snarl has created another agenda for development, as well. There's tremendous pressure by the Redevelopment agency in Los Angeles to create the public impression that redevelopment monies should be spent along transitways to take down historic neighborhoods and replace them with high density development. Los Angeles is one city that has a historic legacy along these transitways because of its growth along the old commuter lines. This is a legacy that should not be obliterated by new developments, but rather enhanced and preserved as distinct neighborhoods so that the transit system consists of destinations that people actually want to go to and live in.

It Plays Out

San Francisco is dealing with the impact of SB 375 imposed requirements as are cities all over the state, and shares some of their concerns with how the land use and planning regs associated with this legislation will affect their ability to maintain local character and control, as well as how to pay for the planning work required. Another unfunded mandate, as they say. This BIA-sponsored legislation also creates requirements for high density growth statewide, supposedly to reduce greenhouse gasses.

The Crosscurrents Blog reports on the local Earth Day summit on the subject held in Oakland. Michael Woo, the Dean of Environmental Design at Cal Poly Pomona was there promoting SB 375 as he is with all SCAG events. Local city questions and resistance was met with County Supervisor edicts that communities must not leave the table or be excluded from transit funding. Cities must also rezone to accommodate the new growth being allocated to them. If they don't rezone, any interested person can sue to force a rezoning under SB 375.

Other impacts of SB 375 are brought up in a comments section on LA Streetsblog, which points out that upzoning in land use creates tremendous profits for developers while they continue to deplete resources, add traffic and consume water. The comments are about traffic and zoning. The blog also reports that the League of California Cities met on Earth Day to reinforce their position that the state must pay for the costs of the implementation of this legislation, the first line of defense against its implementation in its current form that requires huge new development numbers in each city.

As the League states on its own site, it does not support AB 32 nor especially SB 375, but rather retains a neutral position. The League also supports the Institute of Local Government site, which provides online planning tools and resource guides for communities as well as some specific local city databases and outreach networking.

Transbay Transit Approval

Note in the inbox today, the approval for the design of the SF Transbay Transit Center has allowed the project to go forward with the $400 million in Federal stimulus funds to complete the project started in 2008. Shovel ready, in other words. Star on the map marks the spot.

This provides the terminus for the High Speed Rail project in California, also a recipient of Federal dollars. I've reviewed the logistics of this HSR concept before, and hope that it actually gets implemented as HSR, and not a stop-everywhere-rail. That doesn't do justice to the scale of the system design, which is intended only to rocket from one major city transportation hub to another.

An interactive map for the project is here, and the timeline can be found on the Transbay Transit Center website.

As I've said before, the public project development and renderings have foreshadowed this development for a long time.

Meantime, action further south has delayed the DEIR on the HSR project until next year, and some of the cities are actively opposing the plans due to the costs of the system and the dislocation and disruption that new tracks and stations will create in their cities. At the state level, the State Auditor has issued a review reflecting the cost concerns of the Planning and Conservation League, which has filed a lawsuit over the dismissal of an alternate route in the Bay area through Sacramento.

Just for fun: a slideshow of transit maps that shows how complex and intricate systems data is viewed over time. Real-time digital information is greatly improving the mapping information, and these are moving onto the iPhone platform, of course. Latest hot app that actually helps people navigate the urban terrain.

Getting a Grip on Sprawl

In an endless debate, local governments are increasingly encouraging or even requiring LEED certification in new high-density development, which is nice, but most continue to require generous minimum parking supply, which contradicts their goals, as this article points out. "Smart Growth" as a cornerstone of anti-sprawl measures doesn't work. Here's a site called "Dumb Growth" that goes into it in detail.

First of all, this means that density isn't cutting down on traffic or emissions; it's the pattern of sprawl built into city and regional codes and also the contingent highway grid in California. It's also based upon an unsustainable model of growth for its own sake, as is taking place in all regions of the US.

The older communities in Los Angeles and Pasadena area are pre-war planning models, which is why they work (township grid) that evolved prior to the highways. After that, we got the Orange County model of development, where many folks ran off to in 1970 when the court-ordered bussing hit. Perfect storm. But it relieved the development pressure in the Pasadena area until about 1980. Then Old Town became the model for slow-growth, with GMI implemented in 1990 to stop growth. The new General Plan adopted in 1992 assigned growth into specific plan areas with design guidelines (the Grey Book). Got condos packed in there anyway, overloading the existing street grid with traffic, even with lower parking ratios in the new developments. Now Pasadena has traffic gridlock, pollution, over development and very unhappy residents who are beginning to leave the community.

Here's a very relevant comment from a planner to an article called "Sprawling Misconceptions":

I find it funny when conservatives defend sprawl, since there is very little that is market-driven about it, except that it is easier to do nowadays. Not only is sprawl mandated, but it has been mandated for about 50 years in most of the country. Long enough that it is ingrained into our developing and financing structures.

Starting in the 1950’s the federal govt issued guidelines that showed how to incorporate cul-de-sacs and very long streets to pack more houses onto a site, discourage pedestrian use, and limit access to neighborhoods from large highways only. Separation of uses was considered an obvious virtue, and the guidelines deliberately prescribed one type of residential development only. These were fairly quickly incorporated into requirements all over the country. This is not even remotely controversial. Anyone studying planning today learns about it and reads the original documents.

It’s amazing how many people think the market determined the look of this country–it did not. As a great example, look at Williamsburg. Now turned into a colonial museum, there are many people who would pay top dollar for a home in a location like that, but developers can’t sell it to them: it would be literally illegal to recreate the same layout in almost every part of this country. So, instead, we Americans visit, walk around, and marvel at it, wondering why we don’t make places like that anymore.

Houston is often listed as a city that shows that sprawl is inevitable. In reality, Houston mainly just doesn’t like the word “zoning,” and uses all of the other land-use regulation tools that other large cities do, especially those that dictate how things are organized into sprawl patterns.

Mexico - New Approaches

I'll never forget the beauty and fragrance of the ancient city of Monte Alban, overlooking the Oaxaca Valley. Its scale of temples, pyramids and ballcourts is very human and walkable, influenced by, but much smaller than, Teotihuacán in Mexico City. These Zapotec, Olmec and Mayan cultures included a very rich and colorful heritage of carvings, sculptures, fabrics and artifacts that express a very different vision of habitation than that of the Europeans.

Looking to our southern neighbor, we see some emergent urban visions that combine the best of these built approaches: a focus on the fabric of urban biodiversity and an integration of scale in the built environment. In Mexico City, the firm of Foster + Partners has proposed a sustainable urban development for a medical facility:

"Foster + Partners has revealed its designs for a 71-hectare teaching and medical facility in Mexico City upon notice of their appointment to the project. Campus Biometropolis masterplan in the south of the city will integrate care facilities with high tech teaching spaces, research institutions and laboratories and feature a vital new nature reserve showcasing the Pedregal lava fields as a highlight of the design.

"The wilderness area, together with enhanced landscaped zones, will account for half of the site and preserve Mexico City’s indigenous plants and animal species whilst creating an attractive landscape for the built areas."

More practial urban strategies for implementing sustainability to counteract the dramatic overconsumption of resources are Mexico City's Plan Verde as well as its plan for water self-sufficiency by 2020.

More Bubbly

To continue my explanation of why the expansionist development model is no longer viable, it's necessary to understand how the housing bubble was expanded by Federal public policy and why housing ownership became deemed a right instead of a privilege. An article by Robert Christiano, part of an excellent series on the causation of many of our current problems, summarizes the process by which we've arrived at our current unsustainable situation.

As a result of this development, SB 375 legislation in California supposedly crafted a form-based code to cut down on commuter driving, for what that's worth, to deal with greenhouse gas emissions as mandated by Federal Law. Proponents cite immense future population growth projections (not possible) and use cities like New York as a model of *form* (very large densities on Manhattan Island, dense suburban ring, exurban nearly rural). Los Angeles basin is flat and dense (thanks to Federal highway program that busted the Red Line), and this model is supposedly to be changed by SB 375 to move towards the NYC model.

Except that these RHNA assigned housing numbers and large transit-exempt projects will just make our current situation worse under SCAG's idea of "fair share" growth everywhere. This socialist effort out of Sacramento - implemented by regional agencies - seeks to spread growth everywhere. A REAL application of the form model concept would assign all the RHNA to LA's city center where there is already transit (light rail/bus) and the ability to develop the "zero energy/water footprint" in the rebuild of large projects that makes this size of population center sustainable.

The communities outside of Los Angeles would logically not need to accommodate any new growth at all under this "form model", and simply build a few good projects that are sustainable, shrink the built footprint (less building mass - not more), and restore open space and natural environment. Infrastructure improvement to return water to the aquifers is crucial, and isn't exactly rocket science. Neither are fuel-efficient hybrid cars and far lower consumption per person (save on storage locker fees, too).

So as far as I'm concerned, the whole thing is an excuse for untrammeled development to make our situation far worse than it is now, given our permanent water shortage and dwindling resources, which diminishes for everyone as population grows.