Friday's bicycle extravaganza

This Friday, Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation (ACCT) is hosting their 1st annual Bike Extravaganza at Cityspace on the downtown mall between 6 -9 PM. Expect bicycles, expect extravagance, expect lots of fun people.

The Daily Progress wrote up an article this weekend on the planned event. It's nice that they are paying attention to this, but I do have to quibble with this sentiment:

"Like motorcycle riders, bicyclists have their own subculture. They dress oddly. They dodge cars. They like to toss parties and talk of two wheels."

Dress oddly? Recreational cyclists may don the spandex from time to time, but bike commuters usually just wear what they are wearing to work. There may be more brightly colored jackets, but that's less of a fashion statement than a method for not getting run over. The whole subculture label is something that, I think, ACCT is trying to counteract. For everyone from adolescents to grandparents, bike commuting is simply a mode of transportation with a variety of positive benefits. It's not a subculture. At least that's how I see it.

ACCT even produced this great video to promote this Friday's event:

In praise of Planning

A little while ago, I wrote a snide post about a particular article I came across in Planning magazine. But now I feel compelled to speak to the magazine as a whole. It really is a remarkable publication, with well-written and substantive articles on many of the topics I chew on here. In the recent issue, APA director, Paul Farmer, kicks things off with an editorial about Obama's stimulus package:

"This is an opportunity for the new team at the Department of Transportation to create a new vision for federal transportation policy, showing the clear link with related priorities such as climate change and infrastructure investment."

The clear link. exactly. He goes into some specifics from there. After this, the bulk of the issue approaches the cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul from a half dozen different angles, giving a holistic glimpse into one major U.S. metropolitan area.

I didn't expect to like Planning magazine. Maybe it's the blogging instincts, but I assumed that any major organization with a wide range of constituencies to please would speak in staid who-could-possibly-disagree platitudes about sustainability or equality. But the articles dive right into the specific ideas and tasks involved in planning good communities. In a trade magazine, I also expected to find plenty of "meta-professional" information on workplace conduct, job searches, lobbying for higher salaries, and so forth, but Planning keeps its focus squarely on the specific tasks planners have been entrusted with. Planning, typically a fairly localized profession, can gain immensely from the sharing of best practices from other regions with similar environments, so we need information-sharing sources like this.

Ok. I realize I'm being effusive, and, really, I don't have anything at stake in this. I just thought I would be non-critical about something - at least this once.

Walking and Thinking

"I can only meditate when I'm walking. When I stop, my mind ceases to think; my mind only works with my legs."

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I came across this quote in Jay Walljasper's The Great Neighborhood Book, and it provoked the realization that there is actually a long-standing connection between walking and thinking in the lineage of Western philosophy.

1. Aristotle, according to legend, would walk around the Lycium Gymnasium in Athens as he espoused his ideas to the followers that had gathered. This group of followers were eventually labeled the Peripatetic school, derived from the Greek Pateo, to walk.


2. Augustine of Hippo was anxiously walking through his garden, wrestling with the tensions between his own life and his neo-platonic ideals, when he famously overheard the children's song, "take up and read." His response was to pick up the Apostle Paul's epistle to the Romans, an act that he would later attribute to his conversion to Christianity.


3. Immanuel Kant, in true Enlightenment fashion, structured his life around a precise routine. Every day, he would wake up early in the morning and go for a walk along a path to a nearby river. His neighbors were said to have set their clocks by the time he strolled by their house.

And these are just the famous stories I can recall off-hand. There seems to be something about walking that hits the perfect balance between peace of mind and energy of movement. Somehow I doubt that the survival instincts generated by a rush-hour drive to the regional SuperStore discount outlet and a lap around the parking lot inspires the same level of contemplation.

The Asphalt Factor

Everyone has been talking about the Obama infrastructure stimulus package in the making. The current plan is to pass money as quickly as possible through existing funding mechanisms into state transportation coffers, where many of the "shovel ready" projects happen to involve road-building. What has received less attention is the fact that road construction invariably requires asphalt, and hundreds of billions of dollars in pave-as-fast-as-you-possibly-can road construction requires a lot of asphalt in a short amount of time.

As it turns out, asphalt doesn't grow on trees. It's a byproduct of crude oil production, typically the heavier substance less easily refined into gasoline. NPR's Marketplace reports that there are already signs of asphalt shortages nationwide. When crude was so expensive over the summer, refineries invested in technology to derive gasoline-grade oil from what used to be only good for asphalt. According to Mike Pesce, owner of an asphalt refinery in New Jersey,

"The U.S. overall has a net shortage of around 20,000 barrels a day of asphalt. If these projects come in as we're seeing them come in, you're looking at a potential of extra demand in the United States of around 250,000 barrels a day."

Those are staggering numbers that I hope somebody important is paying attention to.

Three gut reactions:

1. If the ultimate point is to put people to work, one would think the goal would be to minimize material costs in order to maximize labor salaries. Skyrocketing asphalt prices would only serve to siphon a disproportionate amount of the money away from the U.S. economy altogether.

2. Maybe we could learn a lesson from the whole ethanol/corn debacle. Some commodities are so interconnected that their prices move almost in tandem. Could it be possible that just as the road-building binge reaches full steam this summer, Americans may not be able to afford the gasoline they need to use these nice new roads.

3. A diversified infrastructure stimulus plan would draw from a variety of materials, thus avoiding a shortage within any one industry. A more equitable balance between the steel needed by transit and the asphalt needed by roads makes more sense fiscally.

Plum Creek does the right thing

This is pretty big news, so I just have to indulge myself with a post about Montana.

The ongoing saga between Plum Creek timber company, the United States Forest Service, and the citizens of Montana has apparently come to a (tentative?) conclusion.

Plum Creek owns vast swathes of land in Montana, originally used for logging but now sitting in possession of the holding company. For the last two years, the company has quietly been in negotiation with the U.S. Forest Service in hopes of gaining easements to allow road access for potential residential development in the otherwise undeveloped areas of the state. Local citizens imagined the potential impact of wilderness lodges scattered throughout the open lands of Montana and the inevitable strain on public services they would incur. The prospect of protecting all of these second/third homes from forest fires was daunting enough. With a clear public mandate, the Missoula County Board of Supervisors expressed their disapproval of the plan.

Until recently, the expectation was for Mark Rey, of the department of Agriculture, to push the deal through in the last days of the Bush administration. But Plum Creek unexpectedly pulled out. From a letter sent to the Missoula County Board of Supervisors (and Mark Rey):

"Although we continue to believe that the easement amendment would be beneficial to the general public, given the the lack of receptivity, we have decided not to go forward with the amendment."

At least for a while, some of the pressure to sparsely develop the wild hinterlands of Missoula has abated.

The University of Virginia plan

A couple of months ago the University of Virginia's Office of the Architect released their 2008 Grounds plan (previous Master Plans were 1965, 1973, and 1990). With so much else competing for my attention, I shelved it for a while. This morning, sitting at the downtown mall with an hour or two to spare, I thought I would take a peek at the new plan.

UVA's situation is unique. The center of campus, Jefferson's "academical village," is not only a world heritage site but widely considered to be an original prototype for the classical American university campus. How can the University reclaim the Jeffersonian planning principles, philosophical as well as merely structural, while meeting the pressures faced by a contemporary education institution?

"Responding to changing demands of growth and transportation, UVa development since Jefferson’s time has shifted to common urban and suburban patterns/practices, unable to hold to the intimate relationship of the original campus. As a result, it is difficult today to experience the overall cohesiveness and clarity-of-place so evident in the early campus.

The 2008 Plan was created "in the belief that certain proven qualities of Jefferson’s Academical Village can be transferable to other parts of the Grounds."

Some principles from the plan that piqued my interest:

• A clear boundary to encourage a compact growth pattern. (specifically US29 and 250 bypass)
• Identification of Redevelopment Zones already existing within the campus boundaries as possible infill sites
• End of greenfield expansions entirely. The core grounds is where "all future development for UVa is planned to occur."
  
• New Buildings will be broken into Academic/Mixed-use and Residential/Mixed-use, average 4-5 floors, designed to facilitate interconnection of uses.

"What planners refer to today as “mixed use” remains very close to the original Jeffersonian conception of the Academical Village. The University was modeled after a town or village - an all-inclusive settlement embodying Jeffersonian’s agrarian ideals."

• Overall density of campus, as measured in Floor-to-area ratio (FAR), will be increased without sacrificing existing campus green space. Current FAR of the whole campus is .29, relatively low compared to other campuses in the United States.
  
• Attention will be paid to four separate gateways, to establish a coherent transition into the campus.
• Three central green spaces (including the central lawn) will be established as community centers for each precinct of the campus.
• Even though some of the close-in parking lots are heavily used, there is no plan to augment parking facilities. All parking is appropriately priced.
• Implementation of a Transportation Demand Management (TDM) plan with a number of elements to incentivize walking, biking, and transit. Actually launched in July of 2007
  
• Heavy focus in integrating North Grounds into the rest of campus by increasing connectivity for pedestrians, cyclists, and bus riders.

A trip to Annapolis

This weekend I visited some friends in Annapolis on my way back to Virginia, and I had some time to walk through many of the downtown streets. Witold Rybczynski writes about the the original plan for the town in his book City Life. When the governor of Maryland, Francis Nicholson, needed to found a capital for his colony, he did what many of the educated class in colonial America would have done; he drew his ideas from the baroque designs of the Old World, specifically Paris.

Streets were laid out in a radial pattern, emanating from two major central squares. The plan clearly emphasized public space, with the institutions of civil government and church given the prime locations within the circles. Each street, even many of the alleys, had distinct terminus points providing a clear sense of direction and progress for those walking along it. Thanks to extensive efforts of historic preservationists, the center of town can still be experienced in much the same way today.

As it turned out, Annapolis and Williamsburg (the only other early baroque city in the U.S.) were commercial failures, and this tradition of urban design was thoroughly trumped by the more efficient and egalitarian grid of New York City.

Looking down the commercial Main Street toward the Annapolis harbor. The water is a clear terminus point.

The view from the other direction up Main street concludes with the Church at the top of the hill.

The residential East street points to the State Capitol.

The residential areas are extremely dense by today's standards, yet they are kept up nicely. We came across one average-sized residence on the market for $1.1 million. Even outside a major metropolitan area, it appears as if people are willing to pay an extraordinary premium to live in a walkable urban neighborhood. The rest of us, on the other hand ...