Plannersphere

by Stephen Gyor

“Towers in the Park,” or high-rise residential buildings sited on large lots (often barren parking lots) of open space, usually do not contribute to an active street life. This is despite the fact that these towers are often quite large and usually include hundreds of residential units. The “Towers in the Park,” concept, most famously promoted by Le Corbusier in the mid-20th century, includes towers set back a significant distance from adjacent streets and which often do not include ground floor retail. In fact, many of the towers do not engage the street at all and are elevated above the ground level.

 Planners and urban designers are now attempting to retrofit Le Corbusier’s “Towers in the Park” and other modernist developments into the urban fabric. Instead of tearing down and replacing these large structures, which could be quite expensive, developers are placing townhomes and “lofts” on top of the parking lots and along the street edge. This produces a double-benefit: better urban design through creating an active edge along the street, while allowing developers to maximize their lot’s building potential. A great example of this type of retrofitting exists at the Archstone Lofts 590, located at 15th and Eads Street in Arlington, Virginia. The concept has proven so successful that other such developments are rumored in the vicinity.

The retrofitting trend has positively impacted former big-box sites and shopping malls, and promises to boost exurban sites such as Tysons Corner.  Is this a trend which could continue? What other modernist or otherwise unengaging sites are ripe for this type of redevelopment?

By Alan Cunningham

Last week, Jarret Walker of Portland was in town, barnstorming with several talks in a single day.  One thing that struck me in his energetic talk was the importance of wayfinding in transportation.  I had taken it for granted, because wayfinding in traffic is so well done, and I usually ride rail transit, with idealized station maps.  We are especially good at mapping for traffic. From low weight gray lines through black and red to complex red, green or yellow lines for freeways, we know how to read a road map.  It’s a life skill for most Americans.

Walker’s point was that Transit maps could learn from this and become more successful in the bargain.  Many bus maps show the entire network at the same thick line weight and color with the road map of the traffic hierarchy just beneath and screened back.  Nothing differentiates high service bus corridors with short waits between buses from commuter routes with hour-long waits and rush hour service only.  Bus maps that indicate short headways and fast through routes as thicker, redder lines tell occasional users of the bus system that these are the routes to chose if they want to get somewhere quickly. While lane counts and fewer curb cuts make a major road, short waits and direct routes make a major bus route.

I wasn’t inspired to write this until reviewing Bike Atlanta’s bike map survey. On both map choices, the most prominent feature on the amps was the interstate highway through downtown Atlanta.  The key to each map indicated “Access Controlled Freeway (Bicycles Prohibited)” for the thickest bluest lines on the map.  Of what relevance are freeways to a cyclist, except as a source of dangerous ramp merging areas?

By Alan Cunningham

There has been some recent worry over the place of the Tea Party in opposing any and all planning efforts in the United States.  In their eyes, anything that interferes with the organic growth of the free market is a limit to freedom and must be stopped.  In my home state of Virginia, this has materialized as opposition to the Urban Development Area concept. The Tea Party opposes regional planning in every state in different ways. 

According to the Tea Party, the motivation for all smart growth is Agenda 21 (I want to thank them, because I had never heard of Agenda 21 in my readings about Smart Growth or in graduate school).  Now, for every small step towards smart growth and transportation and walkable choices, the  Tea Party is loudly out front opposing it as the vanguard of a shadow plot to rob them of their freedoms.

Smart Growth’s aim is to make places more walkable and bikable by being transit accessible and linked to other  walkable / bikable places throughout the metro.  Anybody can use these places, but for those who live and work within these areas, car ownership is optional and need infrequent.  This takes cars off the roads, reducing traffic congestion for the rest.  Typical transit oriented development are under one square mile, they don’t take up a lot of the metro’s area, leaving most of the areas as they were.  And, because they have higher densities and diversities than conventional subdivisions, they are likely to yield higher property tax dividends to the county.  That means more revenue for better schools, police, fire and even roads.

Conventional subdivision regulations require so much parking area (40-60% of the site) that it takes decades for the property taxes from the site to recoup the cost of providing water, sewer, stormwater, and road infrastructure to the sites.  Intense mixed-use developments, sited where parking is an option, not a mandate, and transit is a service, not a sop, can recoup their infrastructure costs in under five years.  Even in wealthy Fairfax county, as conventional property values have declined, so have services at the local and state level.

by Stephen Gyor

Washington DC’s proposed 37 mile streetcar system will provide 72,000 additional households with access to rail. This would essentially triple the number of residents living within a quarter mile of this invaluable mode of transportation (accounting for nearly 50% of the District’s population). The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) and the DC Office of Planning selected light rail over Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).

While in many cases light rail spurs increased property values and contributes to the creation of ‘complete streets’, the conventional wisdom that BRT a) requires little to no infrastructure, b) does not attract the same degree of real estate development as light rail, and c) includes ever-changing bus routes (which can be anathema to regular riders and developers alike), is a bit of an oversimplification. Ideally, BRT systems include dedicated lanes and stations. BRT’s infrastructure cost can often be less than light rail (the cost depends on the setup). Furthermore, the degree of real estate development, and hence the Return on Investment (ROI), that would be stimulated by BRT vis-à-vis light rail, is not well understood. Examples in the United States are too recent to draw such conclusions.

According to the District of Columbia Land Use Study:

BRT and other bus alternatives, like the District’s popular Circulator service, have the advantages of much lower capital costs and much faster implementation. Buses also provide broad flexibility in terms of changing routes and can maneuver more readily in heavy traffic. The primary benefit the streetcar offers, evident in shelters at stops and in the rails themselves, is its visible permanence, which can serve as a powerful attraction to private real estate investment. Although highly visible shelters and stations can raise the profile of bus service, the very flexibility of routes and service levels that represents its biggest advantage also dilutes its ability to spur real estate investment (investment decisions require predictability over periods of up to 30 years). Although well-designed BRT systems attract some development, their impacts are typically much less than those for rail—and the BRT systems that have generated the strongest development response operate on exclusive rights of way at all times and not in mixed traffic, as the District streetcar would. In cities without the potential to attract much development investment, implementation costs and other factors give buses a clear advantage. In the District, however, streetcar service appears very likely to attract significant real estate investment.

In the District's case, the property acquisitions needed to provide dedicated bus lanes would more than offset any cost savings achieved by using buses. However, it remains to be seen if the development potential of BRT’s with dedicated lanes and shelters would be less than light rail--there is a lack of data relating to this type of BRT system. A case-by-case approach seems to be the best way to evaluate the merits of each type of system.

Anecdotally, the construction of Cleveland's HealthLine BRT has spurred over $4.3 billion in new development along the city’s Euclid Corridor, including rehabilitations of old buildings into housing and retail centers, as well as major expansions of nearby university, museum, and hospital infrastructure. It should be noted that the HealthLine is both appropriately sited in order to take advantage of adjacent land uses and includes dedicated lanes and stations. Hopefully, this level of development will be indicative of the BRT trend in other cities.

By Alan Cunningham

This article reminded me in simple terms of the development potential of transit.

The author cites a report of 15 billion dollars real estate return on a $1.5 billion streetcar network for the District of Columbia couple of days ago.  Similarly, investments in lightweight , affordable, but still rare bike/ped facilities offer tenfold returns.  A presentation by APA president and Raleigh planning director Mitchell Silver notes that many of Raleigh’s high density mixed use developments paid off their infrastructure with tax revenue within 2-3 years, compared with 20-30 years for conventional drivable residential, industrial or retail subdivisions.

Those were respectable returns before the real estate crash, and they are lucrative today.  So why are we not seeing a headlong rush to transit, bike and pedestrian infrastructure?

What is missing is coordination of land use and transportation. Transit is often seen as a transportation mode and no more.  Buses wind their way fractally through neighborhoods or sit in traffic on arterials, with out any modification to the land use around their service areas.  Rail transit is seen as an invitation to switch from cars to trains, with the requisite parking surrounding the station in surface and structured lots.  Every car needs 1% of an acre for parking, circulation and safe stopping distance.  Bikers and walkers have to walk through all this to get to anything more useful than a newspaper box.

The last thing you want next to a transit station is a parking lot.

But DOTs plan, design, construct and maintain transportation, so every thing looks like a transportation corridor to them.  Since the primary problem for most of them is congestion, they see transit as a way to get cars off the road.  Ergo, the default option for new transit stations at the frontier of service is to enable car parking and little else.  Who would want to live, work or shop there?

The great thing about transit is that passengers didn’t need their cars to get there.  Passengers could walk straight to their homes, workplaces or shopping, without having to worry about where to store their cars.  This intense development could transform the two square miles around each station into the most vibrant, diverse and valuable part of the city, if allowed by zoning and DOT philosophy. 

By Alan Cunningham

The Transportation Research Board is in town this week, and the Congress for the New Urbanism is there, occupying the exhibit floor with its Sustainable Street Network Principles. The need to get bikers and walkers back into our cities has been apparent since the car began to take over the cities in the 1920’s.  Most recently, this movement has gone though the superblock, shared trails, rails-to-trails, bike lanes, complete streets, and now sustainable streets initiatives.  These are all still extant techniques and in use in different jurisdictions, but neglect one fact that impedes their progress.

For people to bike and walk, they need places worth biking and walking to.

For people to take transit, they need transit to go places they want to go.

Complete streets and bike trails operate on a theory of “if they build it they will come”.  The primary problem with biking in a driving suburb is not that bikes need their place on the street.  The main problem to getting around in these places is limited access to destinations.

The average 20 minute walk trip is 1 mile, bike trip is 3 miles, and car trip is 10 miles.  We have zoned and built-up much of America with the assumption of driving for the last century.  Therefore, biking and walking is simply a boring chore of driving past countless curb cuts and parking lots to get to what we need in our days.

by Stephen Gyor

The gargantuan effort by officials in Fairfax County, Virginia to retrofit Tysons Corner from an exurban purgatory into a New Urbanist community demonstrates that even the best intentions of planners and developers can be stifled by stark, entrenched realities.

On the positive side, the plan for Tysons Corner requires that 75% of the new growth (projected to be 50 million square feet of new development), will be clustered around four new Metro stations. The County rightly places few limits on density in these areas. The projected 120 new high-rise buildings will mean thousands of new residents. Urban design guidelines, recently approved by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, stipulate best practices for aesthetically pleasing and environmentally friendly building designs, signage, paint schemes, street furniture and pocket parks.

The plan for Tysons Corner reflects the retrofitting trend seen in several Greater DC exurbs, including Reston, Bethesda, White Flint, Potomac Yard, Eisenhower Avenue, and National Harbor. Driving this trend is increased demand from singles, young-married couples and empty-nesters, plus an increasing number of families with children, all seeking a more urban, less car-dependent lifestyle.

While the County’s effort to alter Tyson’s street grid and colossal super blocks should be a top priority, arterials, including Route 123, Route 7, and International Drive, will remain major obstacles to pedestrian circulation. In fact, the intersection of Route 123 and Route 7 will remain so treacherous that it has been deemed a “fatal flaw” of the plan by more than one urban designer involved with the project. In addition, the Capital Beltway and above-ground Metro tracks and stations further exacerbate the lack of pedestrian connectivity.  

The improved – yet expected, result would be eight isolated “islands” of dense, walkable communities surrounded by major arterials and infrastructure. While this would be a remarkable upgrade over the current chaotic milieu, it is hardly the holistic solution for which New Urbanists initially hoped.

Planners in Fairfax County can hardly be blamed for the current flaws in the plan. The County received little financial commitment from the Commonwealth of Virginia for necessary transportation infrastructure improvements – this despite the fact that Northern Virginia continues to be the Commonwealth’s economic engine.

Source: Jalopnik.com

by Stephen Gyor

The National Capital Planning Commission’s discussion titled “[r]Evolutionary Parks – The Future of Public Space,” held on January 11th 2012 at the National Archives, was a provocative forum. Panelists included John Bela, designer and founder of Rebar (the originator of Park(ing) Day), Theaster Gates (artist and cultural developer), and Tupper Thomas (former President of the Prospect Park Alliance).

Bela is an advocate of “iterative planning”, i.e. the design of spaces which can be temporarily programmed in the short-term as they evolve into designs and uses with more permanence in the long-term. In this sense, spaces can be designed to have an easily modifiable “floorplate,” that, similar to a floorplate in an industrial building, can be altered as conditions and budgets change. Iterative planning is an intriguing concept, (particularly given the current economic climate), in that it allows designers the freedom to experiment with various uses they would not have otherwise considered. Parking Day began as an effort by Bela to experiment with iterative planning. It entails the temporary redesign of parking spaces into attractive mini-parks. Since its inception in 2005, Parking Day has become an international phenomenon.

Parking lots often serve as an impediment to effective placemaking and are certainly a dominant topic in urban design. Innovative approaches to repurposing the vast overabundance of parking lots should be a priority if designers are to create meaningful spaces. As Michael Kimmelman points out in his recent article in the New York Times, "the landscape writer John Brinckerhoff Jackson, years ago pleaded that the parking lot be treated like the city common, with its own community values." Kimmelman points to the temporary repurposing of a vast parking lot in Los Angeles into a beer garden, a recycling facility, a used-car business, a hiking trail entrance where the lot abutted protected wilderness, and a summer stage.

How do we repurpose derelict and barren spaces into attractive gathering places? Certainly enlightened public officials, modified zoning codes, and deep-pocketed developers can help. However, many innovative ideas emerge from the constituents themselves. A prime example of this constituent-driven placemaking is the High Line in New York City, which emerged from the efforts of two engaged residents. As Gates points out, high-minded designers often overlook users (especially those from disadvantaged communities) as a means to derive programming ideas for space. Designers should take advantage of new technologies and techniques to engage residents and harness this potential source of bottom-up creativity.

This bottom-up approach to programming and utilization often produces unexpected results. Bela mentions the Occupy Wall Street protests as demonstrating the public’s right to convene in public spaces, as well as the potential challenges. Protesters were deemed a nuisance by several municipal authorities and forcibly removed from public parks—while at the same time allowed to sleep overnight in privately-owned outdoor space. Ironically, New York City’s codes defining the public’s right to protest in privately-owned outdoor space are less restrictive than those regulating public parks. Protests in public spaces are nothing new–what is (and potentially dangerous) is the trend of cash-strapped municipalities allowing developers to control privately-owned space as a substitute for the traditional public park or plaza.

by Stephen Gyor

The Mark Center saga demonstrates one of the potential perils of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process: poor planning which does not properly take into account the impact that massive military facilities can have on the surrounding civilian community.

The present acrimonious rumpus between the Army and the City of Alexandria, during which the Army blamed Alexandria's planners for giving their Mark Center the green light, would be humorous if it didn't involve so many Federal tax dollars.

It is ironic and sad that one of the main drivers for the Army moving out of nearby Crystal City, security, has been seemingly ignored in the disastrous decision to locate the building practically on top of I-395.

The decision by Army planners to ignore mass transit means that short of a multi-billion dollar metro expansion, (which is highly unlikely), the location of the Mark Center means that I-395's parking lot-like traffic will only become worse.

Photo: www.eweek.com

by Stephen Gyor

“A cluster, as defined by Professor Michael E. Porter of Harvard University, is a geographic concentration of competing and cooperating companies, suppliers, service providers and associated institutions.”1 Apple’s plan for a new headquarters in an isolated, suburban office park begs the question of whether innovation clusters are still relevant in today’s virtual world.  

My technologist friends assure me that the idea that firms need to be in close physical proximity in dense, New Urbanist communities in order to increase productivity is quaint and outdated. I beg to differ. I think that while technology has allowed for many enhancements in the way people communicate, face to face interaction is still the most effective way to achieve innovation.

I’ll focus on the trend of younger workers living in the urban core and commuting to suburban office parks in another post, but for now, the question I am most interested in is whether the location of firms matters or does it depend on the type of industry?

Long Bridge Park, Arlington Virginia

by Stephen Gyor

A former brownfield sandwiched between Old Jefferson Davis Highway, I-395, the Pentagon, and a CSX rail line, will officially open on November 5 as Long Bridge Park. The 18-acre site offers views of the Washington Monument, US Capitol, and Reagan National Airport. The park’s intriguing location is partially the result of a land-swap between Monument Realty LLC and Arlington County.  Long Bridge Park was designed by a team including Hughes Group Architects, LSG Landscape Architects with Hargreaves Associates, and CH2M Hill.

Its $31-million first phase includes a rain garden, esplanade, picnic areas, concession stands, multipurpose athletic fields, and a plaza. The park’s designers wisely take advantage of the adjacent rail line and nearby airport to provide the sights and sounds of trains speeding by and low-flying planes taking off and landing, thrilling children and adults alike. In stark contrast, many other parks in Crystal City, most notably the Crystal City Water Park, seem to turn their backs on their proximity to appealing sensory resources.

The park’s designers could have gone a bit further in embracing the site’s location by including signage to educate visitors about the history and context of the site, as well as, its many sustainable features--CSX should do a better job of clearing away trash and other debris adjacent to the tracks.

The esplanade, while generous in its proportions, is a bit austere. Its contemporary railings and light fixtures are appropriate to modernist Crystal City, but the esplanade’s concrete benches resemble tombstones situated on what seems like acres of bland gray pavers. Once some of the cherry trees mature this area may not seem so desolate, but New York’s High Line (the “gold-standard” for contemporary urban park design), and the new Georgetown Waterfront Park, are much more imaginative in their use of site furnishings and pavers. 

LED lights at the park’s entrance provide a sense of drama. LED’s will also be included in Doug Hollis’ Wave Arbor sculpture, located on the other side of the park, but they could have been used elsewhere in the park for an interesting effect.

The park’s designers make effective use of the site’s topography by including a rain garden at its lowest point. The curvilinear bridge should be fun to walk across after a rain event and the perennials should provide a colorful and lively backdrop.