National Mobility

David Brooks has written an article for the International Herald Tribune advocating a "national mobility project", which, although poorly defined in his article, seems to be based on updating and increasing the United States' highway infrastructure, particularly when he says "Major highway projects take about 13 years from initiation to completion - too long to counteract any recession. But at least they create a legacy that can improve the economic environment for decades to come."

While I am sympathetic to Brooks' idea for an 'mobility project' it is hard for me to agree with his suggestion that the investment be in highway infrastructure and not on public transit or some other eco-friendly infrastructures.

Brooks writes that:

Moreover, an infrastructure resurgence is desperately needed. Americans now spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, a figure expected to double by 2020. The U.S. population is projected to increase by 50 percent over the next 42 years. American residential patterns have radically changed. Workplaces have decentralized.

Commuting patterns are no longer radial, from suburban residences to central cities. Now they are complex weaves across broad megaregions. Yet the infrastructure system hasn't adapted.

What Brooks' fails to mention is that the creation of highway infrastructure, along with post-WWII efforts to decentralize our cities (as much a defense measure as an opportunity to build up the fledgling tract housing and automobile industries), are not merely a symptom of the mutation of commuting patterns but one of the major causes of this mutation.

In Europe many countries, the Netherlands being a prime example, have been able to better control the expansion of cities through the planning of excellent national rail systems. While a system like that in the Netherlands would be difficult to implement in a country the size of the US a series of regional rail systems (maybe those same megaregions mentioned above) might be possible with the type of investment that Mr. Brooks suggests. At least we could invest more in intensifying rail and bus systems in those cities that sorely lack it and decrease the gulf of inequality that mobility, or the lack thereof, creates.

The creation of these regional rail systems could potentially change our current patterns of conurbation as much as the creation of the automobile networks did 50 years ago. This is perhaps overly naive, but it never hurts to dream. And if given the opportunity to dream such dreams this time we can try to learn from our mistakes, make better predictions through increasingly accurate models and simulations, and create a mobility infrastructure that is both more socially and ecologically sustainable than our present one.

Design Sheets

I recently put together some 'design sheets', kind of a mini-portfolio, which I thought I would share with you. This is only a small sampling of the work so it is difficult to get a full picture of each project, but here it goes. Click on each image for an enlarged view.PAGE 1 :: This is from my thesis project which explored strategies for intensifying intermodal exchange points of the public transit system in Atlanta, GA. The project looked at three typical conditions in the transit network, which I called primary, secondary, and tertiary node types depending on the sites geographic location in the metropolis, the transit intensity and territorial scale, and the context's density and programmatic mix. The specific sites were chosen based on current proposals for Atlanta's transit system, including a new downtown multi-modal transit hub, the Beltway light-rail proposal, and a series of BRT suburban shuttles. These images are from the proposal for the downtown site, one of the few primary nodes in the city.

PAGE 2 :: The project at the top is a housing project which developed a series of vertical strata which reacted to the contextual and programmatic contingencies: a landscape/parking/townhouse layer that dealt with the sites extreme topography and housing's need for a layered sequence of private, semi-private, and public spaces; a slab condition which creates the required density and a complex assortment of apartment types; and a series of twisted towers that creates an iconic 'skyline' for the project's lakefront site.
The middle project is a group project with my boys Penn and JJ for a bus station in Zacatecas Mexico. The project explored fabric formed concrete, new forms that could be made with this process and fabrication techniques. For the form we developed a series of hollow-core column types that would perform as both structure and as a sustainable infrastructure support system for the project, such as cisterns, gray water filtration, planters, solar energy collection, lightwells, ventilation etc.
The bottom project is series of ceilings that explore digital fabrication and design.


PAGE 3 :: The top project is a courthouse in Allston, MA.
The middle project is at Sirkeci Station in Istanbul where the new tunnel going under the Bosphorous Strait would connect the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. The design begins by redesigning the highway, creating a roundabout that connects the various transit types (water ferry, train, and car) by taxi for fast connections that forms a large public square in the center of the roundabout. A variety of programs were added to further intensify the site such as theatres, a hotel, restaurants, and a market under the raised highway to mitigate the effects of the road.
The bottom project is for a satellite campus of a junior college in the greater Boston area. The site is a big box retail parking lot and the design again involves redesigning the road network to break down the nebulous site structure into a more manageable geography. A series of hybrid buildings were designed to engage the new road system and develop symbiotic relationships between the academic institution and more public and/or commercial institutions to engage the community and leverage financial investments.

Today's UD News Roundup

Today is an eventful day for urban design news...

Westside Boulevard proposals by Hargreaves/Ten Arquitectos (left) and Work AC (right)

1) New York unveils five design proposals for the new Westside Boulevard--a heavily landscaped thoroughfare that will anchor the West Side Redevelopment (and here too). I have to say that all of them seem like a distraction from the heavy handed corporate development of Related's 'megadevelopment' (curb's word, not mine), alluded to by some of the proposals as the ominous shadowy thing in the background (particularly in Gustafson/Allied Works' proposal which is reminiscent of a Hugh Ferris rendering). From the New York Post:

From fanciful images of hills, trails and plantings to a park filled with enormous evergreen trees and rock outcrops, the proposals from five teams of architects vying to design the park and boulevard will go before the public beginning today.

The project, part of the Hudson Yards redevelopment, will create four acres of park space down the middle of a boulevard stretching from 33rd to 42nd Streets, between 10th and 11th Avenues, and linking up with a massive new office and residential project planned for the West Side rail yard just to the south of the new avenue.

2) Metropolis magazine questions the relative merits of a maglev train proposed to connect Anaheim, CA, with Las Vegas NV, compared with other, more sensible solutions:

Magnetic levitation, which involves running high-speed trains on a cushion of electromagnetic attraction or repulsion (depending on the system), is one of those futuristic ideas that have never quite arrived...While we have been dreaming about floating trains, Europe has been methodically threading its cities together with a sophisticated high-speed rail network.

I don't really understand the big deal--what's wrong with connecting America's biggest playground for children (Walt Disney Land) with America's biggest playground for adults (Vegas) with a train that floats? What's not sensible about that? What, you want to connect "people" and "places" that actually "matter" by so-called "sensible" high speed train systems? sheesh!

3) And, finally, we have an emerging example of OrwellURBanism:

images via World Architecture News

World Architecture News features an interesting short editorial on a new capital city being built in Burma, despite its recent natural disaster, which killed tens of thousands of people, and the ensuing food riots. Here are some excerpts from the original article:

New ‘Orwellian’ capital built on foundations of famine and poverty

Burma is building a new capital. While millions of its inhabitants are still reeling from the after effects of Cyclone Nargis and the ensuing massive rise in food prices, the military government, led by dictator Than Shwe, is building a vast new city. But all is not as it seems.

A new ‘Soviet Style’ city hall will dominate the centre of the new capital which is closed to westerners. The opulent city, founded only in late 2005, will be home mainly to government officials. There are no international flights and foreigners are banned. For good reason: The estimated build cost of £2.7 billion has been funded by trade in ruby, teak and opium and offers its residents untold luxuries (relative) including 24 hour power (unheard of in Burma), exclusive villas, three golf courses and a zoo.

As you approach Naypyidaw, loosely translated as ‘abode of kings’, dusty trails turn into vast, 12 lane highways, all deserted bar the odd horse drawn trailer or a speeding convoy of blacked-out limos heading for the rumoured network of luxury houses built for Than Shwe and his junta of top generals. Reportedly locked in a closely guarded secret quarter, the exclusive villas form an essential part their opulent lifestyle including golf, gambling and much more.

Some 1,500 new blocks of apartments sprawl across the city, and in true Orwellian style, these are colour-coded depending on which government department the residents work for. Blue for health, green for agriculture and irrigation etc.

Some are clearly more equal than others.

It's like Pompidou style color coding at the scale of the city, although with some pretty sinister social-engineering undertones.

NYT - Curious World of the Last Stop

Over the weekend there was a great article in the New York Times which surveys every last stop on all the subway lines in NYC. It is supplemented by a super interesting interactive page featuring maps, photographs, videos, and interviews (see screen shots below). Is it just me or is NYT really taking these interactive features to the next level lately?

Here is some of the text by Andy Newman from the article:

At the city’s often-threadbare fringes, there is an inescapable sense of lonesomeness. There might be a Last Stop Deli, a forlorn bar, a maintenance yard populated mostly by rows of empty trains. There is, surprisingly often, a cemetery.

Yet to visit all the system’s extremities is to see that the last stop is not a single, monolithic place. There are subway lines that end, logically, where the city runs out of land; lines that end, anticlimactically, where builders ran out of money; even a few that fetch up in bustling downtowns of one sort or another. From the marshy lowlands of Tottenville to the lush hills of Riverdale to the ceaseless clangor of Flushing, the end of the line manages to take in the entire breadth of the city beyond Midtown Manhattan.

Photos by Richard Perry via NY Times

I have to mention that some of the photographs remind me of some of the "not last stops" of some of the subway systems in cities like Atlanta, GA, where, particularly on the south side of the city, some of the stations exist in desolation, quarantined from the urban areas they are intended to serve by other infrastructure or vast parking lots catering to that city's culture of auto-mobility.

Below is a diagram I produced last year showing why MARTA stations in the city of Atlanta produce the island effect:

It makes me wonder what Disney could do at these locations?
NY Times article found via Planetizen

Has it finally become time for a little T-O-D?

You cannot escape the rising gas prices these days: either on the real road or here, in what you might consider the safety net of the information superhighway. But media outlets, bloggers, pundits have a never ceasing output regarding OPEC and the rising cost of driving.
Some recent articles posted on Planetizen this past week had me thinking of something I had written last year as part of the text I wrote for my master's thesis. The articles discussed the mass exodus that is, and will continue to, take place from America's streets as gas prices impede on people's self-mobility. The article discusses that the mass exodus will hit the low-income commuters the most:

Over the next four years, we are likely to witness the greatest mass exodus of vehicles off America’s highways in history. By 2012,there should be some 10 million fewer vehicles on American roadways than there are today—a decline that dwarfs all previous adjustments including those during the two OPEC oil shocks (see pages 4-8). Many of those in the exit lane will be low income Americans from households earning less than $25,000 per year. Incredibly, over 10 million of those American households own more than one car.

Soon they won’t own any.

In the development of my thesis, which focused on new prototypes for mass transit interchanges in Atlanta, GA, one of the driving forces behind it were the social inequalities that arose in automobile based urban environments. When I wrote it, and was doing my research two years ago on the subject, the inequalities were severe, but mass transit had an opportunity to reduce them if it became more efficient and more pervasive. At that time gas in Atlanta was below $2/gallon but rising fast--now it's at $3, still rising, with the potential to get as high as $7.
With these types of numbers, is there any doubt to the fact that we need to do something about our public transit? Only a few cities have mass transit systems that really work. Now, I would love it if all of a sudden tons of public money was invested into mass transit systems in order to enlarge and upgrade the systems. But this is unrealistic. Other strategies need to be examined. One problem is that the architecture and urban design around transit stations is undercooked--too low density, not enough imagination. Peter Calthorpe and the TOD contingent offer one potential strategy. But there is still the need for more research, more strategic development, and definitely more implementation.

To conclude, I want to include an excerpt from the text I wrote last year:

For many people, Atlanta is synonymous with the automobile, one of the preeminent poster-children of car culture. From the first automobile show in Atlanta in 1909, the car has been the driving force behind the city’s urban morphology. Historically this was not always the case. Atlanta was founded in 1837 as a railroad town; it was initially called Terminus, because it was the terminating point for the three main railroad companies in the southeast. Due to its lack of natural resources, rail oriented industries such as freight and goods markets were its early sources of economic generation and urban growth. Therefore, since it’s most humble beginnings, Atlanta has maintained a strong focus on the potential of mobility, of both goods and people, as a catalyst for urban growth and change. Historically, the city has benefited from this investment in transportation infrastructure both in terms of its physical expansion and it’s generation of outside investment in the city. It can be inferred from the history of transportation planning policy in Atlanta that this latter benefit has often prompted the city’s most extravagant infrastructural investments. Evidence of this permeates throughout the city’s history, the two most notable examples today being the city’s immense investment in airport infrastructure and in the highly criticized heavy rail mass transit system known as MARTA.

Unfortunately, along with this optimistic view of the blessings bestowed upon the city of Atlanta from its investment in transportation infrastructure run two dark undercurrents. The first is a history of increased marginalization of Atlanta’s lower classes, particularly her African American citizens. This has been caused by two main phenomena, one economic and one spatial. As the city shifted to an emphasis on auto-mobility, the high cost of entry precluded her most destitute citizens from gaining access to jobs as Atlanta’s economic epicenter migrated to the north along with her most affluent citizens. The spatial phenomena was a much more malicious act as Atlanta’s political and business leaders have often utilized transportation infrastructure as a means to sequester, enclave, and dislocate Atlanta’s lower class citizens.

The second negative affect of Atlanta’s transportation policies involves the emerging awareness of the harms placed on both the physical well-being of her citizens and the environment from its overabundant reliance on the automobile. Atlanta consistently ranks among the most polluted cities of the United States—it has failed to meet the EPA’s ozone standards since 1978. In 1996, the EPA threatened to block future federal funding for highway construction if it did not take significant steps to reduce ozone and smog levels. Additionally, Atlanta also ranks high among pedestrian fatalities and obesity. While these two phenomena may be seen as unrelated, research performed at the Center for Disease Control has demonstrated the health impacts of physical environments, sedentary lifestyles, and long commutes.

These two critiques against current transportation practices—one pertaining to social equity, one to environmental and health costs—demand that the hegemony of the automobile in Atlanta’s urban policy and design come to an end. Fortunately, the city has recently taken measures to expand her transit options in ways that operate across the various scales of mobility: local, regional, and global. This thesis explores the opportunities for converting Atlanta’s hierarchical system of transportation into a meshwork of multiple transportation modes by strategically capitalizing on the various modes of transit being introduced into the city. As such, this thesis will attempt to address the two main problems that have historically plagued the city’s typical transportation strategies: the inability to create a seamless integration across various modes of transit, and the missed opportunity of utilizing the city’s investment in mass transit as a catalyst for urban development.