I often see interesting articles and videos on diverse urban topics that I'd like to share without creating a new thread for each one. Let's do that here.

First off, an article in today's NYT: "Taking parking seriously, as public spaces":

The article focuses on Eran Ben-Joseph's book about parking, Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, which comes out in March. Yes, I think I will actually buy and read a book about parking. ...

Cool idea. I've been posting links on the Rag Twitter page, but I'd like some discussion of them as well.



GUH! I just got back from Metcalf South Mall. What a sad, empty lot that is. There are probably 2-300 spots there that are NEVER occupied. And there certainly isn't the kind of entrepreneurial experiments like the mall in the article - although you'd think there might be. Its a pretty busy area. I wonder if there is more JoCo could do with it.

I'm fascinated by the Dutch planning philosophy of removing signs and markers. The book "Traffic" by Thomas Vanderbilt (which has some great stuff on the psychology of parking and traffic) has a great chapter devoted to Hans Monderman, who developed the movement.

Anyway, good article.

I really like some of his comments about architects considering parking as part of the architecture and starting to look getting rid of old-school zoning laws requiring parking. I wouldn't go so far as call that public spaces. I'd say more about getting out of the way for business and architects to actually think about their parking situation and choosing on their own behalf.

Btw, on a side note, I got an e-mail from work saying that with the next tenant (apparently taking up 4 floors) in Town Pavilion that they expect the Town Pavilion parking garage to be over capacity and to remember the other $5 DT parking lots near by: City Center, Library Lofts and a close by surface lot on Grand.

It got me thinking about the recent food truck craze that's going on here. If you were a vacant/parking lot owner who put in planters to provide some shade and informal seating, and maybe some metered power access, you could easily turn your lot into a great gathering place.

I also loved the Pensacola Parking Syndrome. It's nice to have a term for something I've wondered about for a long time - the where the balance is in the zero sum game of downtown surface lot "creation".

It got me thinking about the recent food truck craze that's going on here. If you were a vacant/parking lot owner who put in planters to provide some shade and informal seating, and maybe some metered power access, you could easily turn your lot into a great gathering place.

I also loved the Pensacola Parking Syndrome. It's nice to have a term for something I've wondered about for a long time - the where the balance is in the zero sum game of downtown surface lot "creation".

Here's the passage in which Andres Duany coined the term, in his book Suburban Nation:

Some guy on Flickr describes the affliction of Troy, NY by PPS:

It's even worse in KC.

But anyway, that passage, and particularly the portion I bolded, point out that PPS is a "tragedy of the anti-commons"; that phrase was coined by Michael Heller, whose book on the subject I read recently. (The book is about the broad phenomenon of diffuse ownership leading to underuse of resources.)

It's also clear that PPS is caused not just by car culture, but is just one of the many inefficiencies created by the "separation of uses" that Jane Jacobs warned against so many years ago. You create "central businesses districts" and zone commercial out of residential areas and you end up with everybody parking one place during business hours and everybody parking another place nights and weekends. You need twice as much parking, and half of it is always empty.

Bingo. PPS has also taught people that parking must be right at the door and that anything more than a block walk is a major hassle.

Nothing shocking here.

What Neighborhoods Need to Succeed at Walkability

The full paper on which the Atlantic Cities and Access articles are based is here [PDF].

On the population needed to support local businesses:

But that should surprise no one. The surrounding areas are heavily residential, so of course the residents of those areas will have to do their shopping in the more commercialized Riviera Village and Torrance Old Town. If you want to promote walking over car travel, this suggests to men that you want a more uniform distribution of residential units and businesses. The trick is that to achieve that, you must condense residential, not spread out businesses.

In other words, I think the idea of "retrofitting the suburbs" for walkability is basically a non-starter. People are just too spread out not to drive. Yes, you can "urbanize" the suburbs by building more high-density housing and end up with more people walking. But the residents of the old, low-density housing stock will still be driving everywhere.

What do you think about an area like midtown KC where you have detached single family housing neighborhoods with corridors of more urban-style streets running through them?

By the way—this has been posted before—there's a neat website called Walk Score that quantifies the number of businesses and attractions within walking distance of any address. (It ties into Yelp's API.) There is a neat feature that draws a heat map of scores over a city—here's KC's.

Kansas City, Mo. overall comes in 43 out of the 50 largest American cities by average Walk Score. And this isn't just because KC has so much mostly empty land. The methodology:

The north-sourth corridor from the downtown loop to the Plaza scores quite well, though.

I like those neighborhoods a lot. They're great places to live. But if many neighborhoods are developed like that, you end up with an unwalkable city.

The problem is that though it's pleasant to live in neighborhoods like those in Midtown, they make the neighborhoods beyond them unwalkable. Hyde Park, Roanoke, the West Plaza, etc. are walkable in the sense that you can comfortably walk from your house there to the shops and restaurants concentrated along 39th Street and in Westport and on the Plaza. You can walk from those neighborhoods to the amenities in adjacent neighborhoods. But they have next to no commercial amenities within their own boundaries. So if you live in a neighborhood yet farther from the center of activity, you have to walk through those "dead" residential neighborhoods to get to where you're going. That makes those more peripheral neighborhoods unwalkable.

In other words, only the closest-in neighborhoods of that sort can be walkable. You can see this very clearly on the Walk Score heat map of KC, by the way. The Midtown neighborhoods are all greenish because they're close to the commercial core of the city. But they don't contribute to it, so the neighborhoods beyond them (farther from Main, basically) are orange and red. The residential surrounding the Main Street corridor is simply too low-density to engender its own amenities, so you end up with neighborhoods that are less walkable the farther you get from Main.

Can you have single-family neighborhoods in an urban area without making everything else unwalkable? Yes, but I think they must either be quite dense (row houses, basically) or else they must be (a) very small in total area and (b) well isolated from one another. Otherwise they spread things out too much for the broader area to remain walkable.

But it can be done. London, for example, has loads of high-density, single-family residential neighborhoods that are connected by "high streets" that are the retail and entertainment centers. That works, but it probably would not if the density were significantly lower or if the transit network were not so well developed. Then you'd have something more like Los Angeles.

London's single-family residential neighborhoods mostly have 20,000–30,000 people per sq. mile. I think you probably need something close to that number if you want self-sustaining neighborhoods. By comparison, Roanoke, Coleman Heights, Volker, North Hyde Park, etc. have between about 5,000 and 6,500 people per sq. mile. South Hyde Park and whatever you call the area just east of Westport, as well as the West Plaza (which has a lot of apartments) and much of the Northeast are a bit denser, at about 8,000–9,000 people per sq. mile. Those neighborhoods are the densest in the city. The bulk of KC's single-family neighborhoods (Brookside, Waldo, and all the rest that were built in the '20s and '30s) have only about 3,500–5,000 people per square mile, and much less on the depopulated East Side.

Truly dense urban areas are much more dense: most of the residential parts of Manhattan have 80,000–120,000 people per square mile, for example.

Even at 43, I feel like KC's ranking is slightly inflated by WalkScore's counting of QuickieMarts as grocery stores and home business (like someone selling Silpada out of their house) as shops. Incidentally, those are the closest two "shopping" options to my house.

My WalkScore in 80....and I live in O.P.

But they do that everywhere. And there are a lot of bodega-style places in big cities that are less well-provisioned than he average QT.

It's easier for someone in Manhattan, NYC, to get fruit and vegetables though than it is for someone living in many parts of the East Side. Most people in NYC don't buy those from chain grocery stores anyway, but the corner bodega. Most convenience stores don't carry them.

A lot of your neighbors sell Silpada out of their homes?

Yeah, good point. In bigger cities the commercial density probably gives some redundancy that we don't have here in KC. I would trade the a QT for the local place at 39th and Troost in a heartbeat.

I call bullshit. That's probably true among a pretty small demographic in a relatively small slice of Manhattan, but that is so patently false in most of the city (especially the boroughs and upper Manhattan), that there are large-scale public health initiatives to try to get fresh produce into bodegas. You might have got your produce there, and it might be common in lower Manhattan, but most bodegas have a very limitted supply of produce or even non-prepackaged goods.

Can't really trust Walkscore. Before all the downtown development, 12th/Main scored 91. A few years later.. after P&L, grocery, movie theatre, bowling, a bit more retail, etc, the Walkscore improved by only one point to 92. Westport area scores a 95.