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]]>This argument is based on the assumption that almost anyplace outside Manhattan or brownstone Brooklyn is roughly akin to a suburb where all but the poorest households own cars and drive them everywhere. If this was true, outer borough car ownership rates and car commuting rates would be roughly akin to the rest of the United States.
But in fact, even at the outer edges of Queens and Brooklyn, a large minority of people don’t own cars, and a large majority of people do not use them regularly.
For example, let’s take Forest Hills in central Queens, where I lived for my first two years in New York City. In Forest Hills, about 40 percent of households own no car. (By contrast, in Central Islip, the impoverished suburb Long Island where I teach, about 9 percent of households are car-free- a percentage similar to the national average).
Moreover, most of the car owners in Forest Hills do not drive to work. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), only 28 percent of the neighborhood’s workers drive or carpool to work.
Admittedly, Forest Hills is one of the more transit-oriented outer borough neighborhoods. What about the city’s so-called transit deserts, where workers rely solely on buses?
One such neighborhood, a short ride from Forest Hills, is Kew Gardens Hills. In this middle-class, heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, about 28 percent of households are car-free- not a majority, but again high by American or suburban standards. And even here, less than half of commuters drive or carpool to work (8479 out of 17,822, although the difference between this number and a 50 percent share is within the ACS statistical margin of error).
Even more right-wing parts of the outer boroughs are similar. The council district including Midwood, Sheepshead Bay, and Brighton Beach just elected a Republican (in fact, a former student of mine) with over 60 percent of the vote. In the Brighton Beach zip code, about 46 percent of households own no car even though this neighborhood is at the end of a subway line. Only about 35 percent of workers there drove or carpooled to work- and in Midwood, only 32 percent do so.
Moreover, many of the people who do drive to work may work in the suburbs (like many of my students). So the anti-congestion-pricing argument that a significant number of outer-borough-workers need to drive to Manhattan is not supported by any evidence. As of 2017, only 9 percent* of NYC resident who worked in Manhattan commuted by car, as opposed to 39 percent who commuted to other boroughs, and 68 percent who commuted to suburbs.
*See p.. 67 of relevant document. However, I have not found any documents breaking this data down by borough of residence.
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With the Democrats scrambling to come up with a legislative agenda after their November takeover of the House of Representatives, an old idea is making a comeback: a “Green New Deal.” Once the flagship issue of the Green Party, an environmental stimulus package is now a cause de celebre among the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
While it looks like the party leadership isn’t too receptive to the idea, newly-elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has spearheaded legislation designed to create a “Select Committee for a Green New Deal.” The mandate of the proposed committee is ambitious, possibly to a fault. At times utopian in flavor, the committee would pursue everything from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to labor law enforcement and universal health care.
A recent plan from the progressive think tank Data for Progress is more disciplined, remaining focused on environmental issues, with clearer numerical targets for transitioning to renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet in all the talk about a Green New Deal, there’s a conspicuous omission that could fatally undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: little to no focus is placed on the way we plan urban land use. This is especially strange considering the outsized role that the way we live and travel plays in raising or lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), transportation and electricity account for more than half of the US’ greenhouse gas emissions. As David Owen points out in his book “Green Metropolis,” city dwellers drive less, consume less electricity, and throw out less trash than their rural and suburban peers. This means that if proponents of the Green New Deal are serious about reducing carbon emissions, they will have to help more people move to cities.
One possible reason for this oversight is that urban planning in America isn’t a federal issue: it’s technically handled by states and administered by local governments. But when local urban planning is undermining basic civil liberties or degrading the environment, the federal government can and should step in.
Think of urban planning like education: most people agree that running schools should mostly be a local issue. Yet most people would also agree that federal interventions to desegregate local schools—against the wishes of local governments—were merited. More federal oversight over local land-use planning is wise for similar reasons: policies that enforce segregation and harm the environment don’t deserve federal deference.
So how should a federally-implemented Green New Deal approach land use? For starters, it could take on rules that only serve to reinforce car dependence and drive up the cost of urban housing. For example, take minimum parking requirements, which force developers to build more parking spaces than they otherwise would. In practice, these rules lead to greater dependence on personal automobiles and rising costs for housing in urban neighborhoods where land is scarce, which forces more people out of the city. The combined effect is higher greenhouse gas emissions.
Or take single-family zoning. These zones permit only detached single-family homes, prohibiting denser and more affordable housing types such as townhomes, duplexes, and apartments. Historically a tool of racial and economic segregation, single-family zoning today largely serves to force people into low-density, energy-hungry, auto-dependent neighborhoods. Encouraging cities to scrap these out-of-date policies—like Minneapolis did late last year—as a condition for any federal Green New Deal dollars could go a long way toward reducing carbon emissions.
Whatever your feelings on minimum parking requirements and single-family zoning, the least a Green New Deal could do is take on explicitly anti-environmental local rules. For example, a Green New Deal might require an end to local solar panel and wind turbine prohibitions as a condition for federal deductions and tax credits that mostly help the upper class, such as the mortgage interest deduction or the state and local tax credit. This type of preemption is already common at the state level and would help more people bypass regulatory barriers and transition to renewable energy.
While dismantling harmful local rules should be the priority, a Green New Deal could also help support proactive local environmental planning. Grants to cities interested in rebuilding their zoning ordinance or comprehensive plan to allow for walkable, mixed-use development patterns would do more than any federal infrastructure program to facilitate sustainable development. Getting deeper into the weeds, the federal government could also lend technical assistance to regional planning agencies like Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), as FEMA often does, to ensure that local planning offices are well-equipped to handle issues like wetlands and coastal management, incentivize efficient building standards, and maintain urban sewer and stormwater systems.
A Green New Deal that pours money into green infrastructure will ultimately fail if most Americans still can’t afford to live in a walkable neighborhood or install a solar panel on their roof. And merely ramping up federal environmental enforcement can only go so far while neglecting local governments, the front lines of building, flood, and sewerage regulation. If the Green New Deal can find its way into the busy Democratic agency in 2019, let’s hope it doesn’t forget about cities.
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]]>The post Three Policies for Making Driverless Cars Work for Cities appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>To avoid repeating mistakes of the past, policymakers should create rules that neither subsidize AVs nor give them carte blanche over government-owned rights-of-way. Multiple writers have pointed out that city policymakers should actively be designing policy for the driverless future, but few have spelled out concrete plans for successful driverless policy in cities. Here are three policies that urban policymakers should begin experimenting with right away in anticipation of AVs.
Price Roadways
Perhaps the biggest concern AVs present for urbanists is that they may increase demand for sprawl. AVs may drastically reduce highway commute times over a given distance through platooning, and if people find their trips in AVs to be time well-spent, when they can work, relax, or sleep, they may be willing to accept even more time-consuming commutes than they do today. As the burden of commuting decreases, they reason, people will travel farther to work. However, the looming increase in sprawl would be due in large part to subsidized roads, not AVs themselves. If riders would have to fully internalize the cost of using road space, they would think twice before moving to far flung suburbs.
Now is the time for cities and states to implement congestion pricing policies to manage the demand for scarce road space. Congestion pricing programs in Virginia and London provide potential models. And Singapore provides a model of using congestion pricing not just for highways, but arterial roads as well. Broad-based pricing for road space would encourage a ridesharing model rather than individually-owned AVs, allowing riders to spread the cost of road use over multiple passengers.
In downtown areas, the arrival of AVs will mean a from curbside parking to curbside loading zones. And just as underpriced curbside parking contributes to congestion by causing drivers to cruise for parking, passengers getting in and out of cars will cause traffic if curb space is priced too low. City policymakers should begin exploring options for reallocating curbside parking to loading zones and pricing curb space for short stops. Washington, DC has already started a trial program.
Donald Shoup’s principles for managing curb parking apply to pick ups and drop offs as well; policymakers should set prices high enough so that there’s at least one available pick up/drop-off spot on each block at all times. Since taxis, rideshare vehicles, and delivery trucks are currently the primary users of short-term curb services, cities could begin enforcing prices just for these vehicles using a payment mechanism like EZ-Pass.
Adopt Shared Streets
The adoption of driverless technology presents an opportunity to reform policies designed to support car traffic in dense urban areas at the expense of other road users. Stephen Smith pointed out years ago that AVs will struggle to move in areas that are crowded with pedestrians because walkers will lose their fear of being hit if they step out into slow-moving traffic. Without drastic changes to pedestrian traffic rule enforcement, pedestrians may take over the streets in areas where sidewalks are crowded and in places where there’s a steady stream of people crossing streets. And that’s wonderful! It provides an opportunity to return busy city streets to multi-use spaces that are safe for all types of road users.
Absent policy intervention, driverless cars — or just widespread automatic braking — could turn streets with lots of pedestrians and cyclists into de facto woonerfs. A key promise from AV boosters is that time spent in AVs can be time spent working or doing something fun, so there should be less need to speed AVs through urban areas relative to cars today. AVs are not yet at woonerf-level navigation ability — they would probably come to a complete standstill in a crowded woonerf rather than moving at a walking pace. But testing in San Francisco and Tokyo shows that more difficult environments for navigation may not be far behind.
Cities should ramp up experimentation with shared streets and pedestrian-only streets now to begin determining how to adapt their bus systems to having some streets where traffic moves at a walking pace. Solutions could include grade-separated bus lanes within otherwise shared streets, or rerouting buses to major arterials that have lower pedestrian density.
Most potential woonerfs are in large cities or vacation destinations, and they’re disproportionately in Manhattan. New York policymakers in particular should continue their woonerf and car-free pilots and should plan to adapt public transit accordingly. Places that should begin experimenting with woonerfs outside New York include Georgetown and Chinatown in DC, the French Quarter and Marigny in New Orleans, and State Street in Chicago.
The vast majority of American streets do not have crowded sidewalks or even a steady stream of pedestrians. Without drastic changes to land use, they won’t be reasonable candidates for woonerfs. In these places where pedestrians are sparse, today’s traffic laws may continue working fine even with widespread adoption of driverless cars. Without high pedestrian density, AVs will generally be able to proceed when they have the green light.
Eliminate Parking Requirements and Auction Public Parking
Parking is one of the biggest obstacles to walkabiltity in American cities. With AVs, it will be possible to dramatically reduce car storage in urban areas. Rather than parking when not in use, autonomous ridesharing cars can continuously drop off and pick up passengers. Individuals who own AVs can send them home while they’re at work or to a far flung parking lot that doesn’t take up space in an urban core. Simultaneously eliminating the dead space in parking lots and parking garages and adding more urban residents and destinations would dramatically increase walkability.
Parking requirements — ill-advised at any time — are particularly damaging in a time when it’s foreseeable that parking cars in center cities will continue becoming less important. Now is the time for municipalities to eliminate parking requirements and to sell off city-owned parking for potential redevelopment. Requiring new buildings, with lifespans of several decades, to include space for car storage in places where real estate is valuable is mandating an enormous waste of space and resources as demand for parking decreases.
The private sector is already developing podium parking that is designed to be converted to indoor space once their buildings require fewer parking spaces. Developers are aware that their customers in center cities will increasingly use transportation options other than driving their own cars, and they are building space with the hope of being able to take advantage of reduced parking requirements in the future.
Eliminating parking requirements and selling off government-owned parking lots and garages is the simplest change cities can make right now to for adaptation to a world with less parking and much less center city parking. The introduction of AVs will give policymakers another shot to get this right when they’ll face less constituent pressure for convenient parking.
Driverless Politics
There are a few reasons to believe that the switch to driverless will move politics in a pro-urban direction. The legal system will likely take deaths, injuries, and property damage caused by autonomous vehicles much more seriously than it takes those caused by human drivers. Courts have failed consistently to hold drivers responsible for killing other road users through negligence or reckless driving. Because most judges and jurors drive cars, they can easily imagine themselves in the position of having injured or killed a pedestrian or cyclist. As a consequence, drivers rarely face criminal charges or even traffic tickets for their actions, and victims and their families rarely receive the type of compensation they could expect if their injuries came from a negligent corporation.
While autonomous vehicles are forecast to be much safer than human drivers, some rate of collisions will remain inevitable. But judges, juries and policymakers will be unlikely to show software or car companies anything like the leniency they’ve shown human drivers. After an Uber test car in autonomous mode hit a pedestrian in Phoenix, Arizona state policymakers banned the company from further testing. If a human had been at fault, they likely would have faced no consequences.
Similar politics may help deprioritize the speed of AV traffic in densely populated areas. When drivers are no longer behind the wheel, or even in their own car, politicians and citizens will likely be more open to ideas to level the playing field between cars and other forms of transportation. Cliff Winston and Quentin Karpilow point out that during the period of technological upheaval, when many people will be transitioning from paying for their own car to paying for ridesharing, is a politically opportune time to introduce congestion pricing with the least opposition.
Regardless of the AV industry’s progression, there’s little to now downside risk in pricing roads, trying out woonerfs, and eliminating parking requirements. With these policies in place, AVs present an opportunity to move toward urbanist goals and more walkable cities.
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On August 23rd, a California assembly bill aimed at increasing transit-oriented development, like housing, was passed by the state senate, confirmed by the assembly, and headed to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk for signing. The bill, AB 2923, specifically targets the San Francisco Bay Area—making it easier than ever for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to build housing on the land it owns around its transit stations.
Previously, housing developments on BART-owned land were still subject to local zoning rules, pushing projects through local processes to be approved before building began. This local control led to many delays, and, as a result, housing denials in the midst of an ongoing housing shortage—on that repeatedly spurs news headlines decrying four-plus hour super commutes, median home prices over $1 million, and neighborhoods blocking affordable housing. State bills like AB 2923 are a response to these reports, as well as the local control that led to them. If passed, AB 2923 and other bills like it, will bypass local control’s draconian rules to allow more housing to be built and ease the housing shortage.
Under current law, land owned by BART is often subject to discretionary review in Bay Area cities. This forces BART to become de facto experts in every municipality zoning code, an impossible task that would take away from their focus on improving their transit system. Even attempting to master the zoning codes of every municipality takes time. Ultimately, this causes delays in building housing that’s so sorely needed. But this could easily be avoided if BART could establish their own zoning rules under AB 2923. Housing and transit is intrinsically linked and, just like suburban home developers build the roads to best suit their development, urban transit authorities like BART must utilize their capacity to build the homes best suited for their transit lines.
For instance, in housing-friendly Oakland, a transit-oriented development has taken over a decade to begin its final phase—a 402-home tower nestled in an affordable housing building, along with a five-story parking garage. The MacArthur Transit Village gained approval in July 2008, over two years after a community meeting first discussed the project. By then, the recession hit and financing disappeared. It wasn’t until 2011 that the first phase of construction began. Two more years were required after that for the current 90 affordable homes to be completed. The final phase required a work-around for a neighborhood zoning mandate that capped building heights at 90 feet. Ultimately, it was only through developer concessions, neighborhood action in support of the project, and the lack of major appeals that this project is able to exist.
Aside from a delay in building housing, local control in the form of discretionary review is often at odds with the goals of the BART-owned land—and the transit system as a whole. Transit systems are made to provide not only transit but also ease of use in the form of dependable frequent service and convenient location to work, home, and other lifestyle needs. However, BART is best at providing convenience for drivers and their cars. But this aim is incompatible with the overall goal of efficiently transporting people.
Just up the road from Oakland is another BART station parking lot waiting patiently for a housing makeover. The land BART owns around the North Berkeley Station currently houses up to 822 cars. But, according to BART’s website, there are no current plans to develop this land into much-needed housing for people. It takes a law like AB 2923 to give BART power to develop their own enthusiasm and means of housing planning.
As it stands now, BART is at the mercy of a city council that’s woefully unkind to development. For instance, the council decided to forego over $10 million for their affordable housing trust fund after two city council members filed an appeal against a project approval— one that ultimately ended in the developer soliciting offers in lieu of actually building. But all of that could change soon. AB 2923 could finally transform a high-ridership transit station from housing for cars to housing for Californians.
For too long, cities in the Bay Area have wrested control from the hands of BART in order to meet subjective needs of citizens who make their homes around these transit stations but balk at access for new people through the building of new housing next to stations. If the Bay Area is to meet its social goal of welcoming immigrants to sanctuary cities, their environmental goal of lowering CO2 emissions, and their political goal of showing that progressivism works, more housing near transit is non-negotiable. Turning BART-owned land from housing for cars or dirt pits into housing for people is one step toward reaching the noble goals professed by Bay Area residents.
Martha Ekdahl is a Young Voices Contributor who writes about urban policy. Follow her on Twitter.
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On June 24 in Brooklyn, a driver in an SUV struck and killed four-year-old Luz Gonzalez, with many onlookers claiming the incident was a hit-and-run. The New York Police Department disagrees, and has refused to prosecute the driver, sparking multiple street protests. Beyond seeking justice for Gonzalez, activists demand that the city expand the use of speed cameras in school zones, which they hope could prevent further tragedy. Yet precisely at the moment that the community is most sensitive to the risk that dangerous driving poses to children, the New York state legislature shut off 140 school zone speed cameras. Given their unambiguous success in improving traffic safety in school zones, legislators should act now to renew and expand the program.
While there is rare consensus among Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio on the need to preserve and even expand the traffic camera program to 290 cameras, the expansion faces opposition from some members in the Senate. Opposition to the cameras has been lead by Republican State Senator Martin J. Golden—himself a notorious school zone speeder, having received over 10 tickets since 2015 alone—and Democrat State Senator Simcha Felder, who ineffectively used the cameras as a bargaining chip to install police officers in schools.
Since their implementation in 2014 as part of the broader Vision Zero initiative, school zone speed cameras have already substantially improved pedestrian safety in New York’s school zones. According to one study by the New York City Department of Transportation, the number of people killed or seriously injured in crashes in schools zones has fallen by 21 percent to 142 since the cameras came online. This is due in part to the fact that speeding drivers are getting the message: in the first 14 months following implementation of cameras, speeding violations in school zones fell by 66 percent to 35, and have remained far below historical norms since. Among those who get do get tickets, 81 percent slow down after their first and don’t get any more.
Controlling speed is central to improving safety in these zones. An increase from 20 mph to 30 mph increases the risk of pedestrian fatality from five percent to as much as 45 percent. Increase that speed to 40 mph and the death of the stricken pedestrian is a near certainty. In this sense, the existing speed camera policy in New York City may even be too lenient, contrary to the concerns of critics. The current speed limit in all school zones in the city is set to 25 mph, and tickets aren’t administered until a driver is going 11 mph over this limit, a speed at which a stricken child would likely die.
Speed cameras draw on much of what we have learned from the economics of crime. The field began when future Nobel Laureate Gary Becker faced a natural dilemma: Should he park in an illegal spot that’s convenient or a legal spot that’s inconvenient? In that moment, Becker asked himself two further questions: how likely is it that he would be caught, and if caught, how severe would the fine be? In this moment of human laziness, Becker had an epiphany: criminals are rational actors just like anyone else, and they commit crimes when they believe that the benefits outweigh the costs.
This helps to explain why so many people speed. According to a recent study of drivers in Spain, most drivers think there is next to no risk of punishment. While many cities and states respond to speeding epidemics by cranking up the fines, the more effective solution may simply be to ensure that every single speeder will be caught. For this, speed cameras come in handy. This isn’t to say that increasing fines—and heavily publicizing their increase—won’t help to reduce speeding. But this is a much more complicated analysis: if drivers thinks that the risks of getting ticketed or slim to none, fines must hit astronomical highs before they will change their behavior. Worse yet, in the rare event that they are fined, they will receive an onerous bill that can be especially painful for low-income offenders. Speed cameras cut out all this guesswork by consistently and fairly administering a modest fine. This may help to explain the near universal finding that speed cameras reduce speeds and save lives.
Luz Gonzalez isn’t the only child to have been stricken and killed by a speeding driver this year. In the borough of Brooklyn alone, at least nine children have been killed since January. According to one report by the New York City Department of Health, car crashes are now the number one source of deaths resulting from injury for children under 13. Now simply isn’t the time to scale back traffic camera technology that has been proven to inexpensively, fairly, and efficiently save lives. Albany may be inclined to play games with every issue it handles—but legislators have an obligation to get the cameras back on for the millions of children across the Empire State walking home from school.
For future content and discussion, follow me on Twitter at @mnolangray.
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Suburb: Planning Politics and the Public Interest is a scholarly book about planning politics in Montgomery County, a (mostly) affluent suburb of Washington, D.C. The book contains chapters on redevelopment of inner ring, transit-friendly areas such as Friendship Heights and Silver Spring, but also discusses outer suburbs and the county’s agricultural areas.
From my perspective, the most interesting section of the book was the chapter on Friendship Heights and Bethesda, two inner-ring areas near subway stops. When landowners proposed to redevelop these areas, the planning staff actually downzoned them (p. 56)- and NIMBYs fought the planning board, arguing that even more downzoning was necessary to prevent unwelcome development.
These downzoning decisions were based on the staff’s “transportation capacity analysis”- the idea that an area’s roads can only support X feet of additional development. For example, Hanson writes that Friendship Heights “could support only 1.6 million square feet of additional development.” (p. 62). Similarly, he writes that Bethesda’s “roads and transit could handle only 12 million square feet of new development at an acceptable level of service.” (p. 75)
Thus, planning staff artificially limited development based on “level of service “(LOS) . “Level of service” is a concept used to grade automobile traffic; where traffic is free-flowing the LOS is A. But the idea that development is inappropriate in low-LOS places seems a bit inconsistent with my experience. Bethesda and Friendship Heights zip codes have about 5000-10,000 people per square mile; many places with far more density seem to function adequately. For example, Kew Gardens Hills in central Queens has 27,000 people per square mile, relies on bus service, and yet seems to be a moderately popular area.
Moreover, the use of LOS to cap density has a variety of other negative effects. First, places with free-flowing traffic tend to be dangerous for pedestrians; for example, if an arterial is at LOS A, cars travel over 35 mph and thus create a high risk of injury or death to walkers. Second, when people and jobs are excluded from transit-friendly places such as Bethesda, they do not disappear. Instead, they migrate elsewhere- often to more car-dependent places, increasing regional auto traffic. Third, policies that limit housing anywhere reduce the regional supply of housing, thus affecting regionwide housing costs.
At any rate, this book’s value for market urbanists is to show what planners really do. Sprawl supporters often paint zoning as a reflection of the market, and planners as pro-density ideologues. But in fact, planners often seek to split the difference between developers who seek to create housing and jobs, and nearby homeowners who want less of both.
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]]>During an urbanist twitter free-for-all last week, the thoroughly awesome term “liberty machines” was used to describe the virtues of the car. The claim was made that cars let individuals go wherever they want, whenever they want and are therefore a ‘freedom enhancing’ form of transit.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this argument in libertarian(ish) circles. But it doesn’t tally with my experience and I’m not sure it makes any sense even within its own premise.
A Personal Anecdote and a Couple Thoughts
When I learned to drive way back when, it was in the great state of Texas where driving is basically a necessity. In that context, getting my license (and being economically fortunate enough to have access to a car) was certainly liberating for me after a fashion.
Thinking back, though, I enjoyed far less mobility as a car bound teenager in suburban Houston than I do now living in Oakland, California. I walk to the grocery, take BART to work, bike to the gym, catch a Lyft to go out, and/or drive myself when the occasion demands. Most of my trips are multimodal and the integration of transit modes affords me far more freedom of movement than car use alone ever could.
The biggest reason for this is that single occupancy vehicle use doesn’t scale as a stand alone system. Unpriced roadways are prone to hitting congestion points and, as readers of this blog are probably aware, adding lanes doesn’t help. When roads become clogged, and there are no viable alternatives, a reliance on cars becomes a constraint. And to respond to the idea that mass transit relies on government subsidies and car use does not…the technical term for that would be factually incorrect. Mass transit is more than capable of paying for itself and let’s just say highways don’t exist in the state of nature.
Houston Traffic, aka my personal hell
Returning to this idea of ‘freedom enhancing’ transit, a reliance on cars has got to be the worst of all options. Besides the congestion problems, there are distributional impacts as well. If you’re too young or too old to drive, you’re reliant on those who still can. Not to mention the fixed overhead of car ownership is a regressive burden on the least well off.
So…is there a case for the car as the pro-liberty choice in transit? Not as far as I can see. And while #libertymachines is an incredibly tweetable hashtag, it’ll have to remain ironic for now.
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]]>For the time being, the book is only available in Portuguese, but after giving it a read through, I decided it deserved an english language review all the same. The following are some of the key ideas and recommendations. I hope you enjoy.
GGU sets the stage with a broad overview of the challenges facing Brazilian cities. Rapid urbanization has put pressure on housing prices in the highest productivity areas of the fastest growing cities and car centric transportation systems are unable to scale along with the pace of urban growth. After setting the stage, GGU splits into two sections. The first makes recommendations for the regulation of private spaces, the second for the development and administration of public areas.
Reforming Regulation
Section one will be familiar territory for any regular MU reader. GGU advocates for letting uses intermingle wherever individuals think is best. Criticism of minimum parking requirements gets its own chapter. And there’s a section a piece dedicated to streamlining permitting processes and abolishing height limits. One interesting idea is a proposal to let developers pay municipalities for the right to reduce FAR restrictions. This would allow a wider range of uses to be priced into property values and create the institutional incentives to gradually allow more intensive use of land over time.
Meeting People Where They Are
Particular to the Brazilian experience is a section dedicated to formalizing informal settlements, or favelas. These communities are found in every major urban center in the country and often face persistent, intergenerational poverty along with high rates of crime. GGU frames the challenge as legally and socially reintegrating these marginalized communities into the larger urban fabric. There are a slew of recommendations here, but some of the highlights include formal recognition of land titles and the extension of basic infrastructure into previously unserviced communities. The book citesProject Cantagalo as an example of a successful integration project carried out in Rio de Janeiro.
To provide more context for readers less acquainted with Brazil, favelas can have populations as large as 50,000 people living on what’s technically public land. Some have existed for well over a century. And through that time have received little to no investment in public infrastructure while experiencing near complete exclusion from the formal economy. These communities are in a world apart from the rest of the cities that surround them and the ultimate challenge is bridging that divide.
Brazil’s challenges in this area are somewhat beyond what we face in the U.S. in terms of scale, but the lessons learned are highly instructive as a we think about political enfranchisement and economic development in marginalized communities in our own cities.
Understanding Public Space
The first half of GGU is good, the second half is great. There are a few topics that will be old hat for market urbanists (e.g. congestion pricing, criticism of free parking, and a warning against mega projects), but there are plenty of other topics we don’t cover on a regular basis. Much of it has to do with systems design and thinking about how different elements of urban space interrelate, but the first thing that stood out to me was how the book thinks of ‘public’ space as a concept.
GGU defines ‘public space’ as “…an open space that permits free and unrestricted access to whosoever would like to use it. In this sense, public spaces can be public property, private property, or even jointly owned”. This is significant because it gets us away from more abstract definitions of ownership and focuses us on questions of function. Ultimately, public space is what we all can and must pass through to get from one private space to another. And from that starting point we can begin thinking of how this public sphere stitches together the urban environment as a whole.
Small is Beautiful: Parks, Squares, and Plazas
GGU goes on to advocate for a large number of small parks, squares, or other public spaces throughout an urban environment and recommends a couple considerations for design. It points out the benefits of allowing a wide range of uses (street vendors, ground floor commercial, residential, etc) in terms of public safety. And it offers suggestions for sustainable financing strategies as well (park adoption programs, specifically).
But beyond the specific design recommendations for individual parks or squares, GGU suggests these spaces should be small in size, large in number, and dispersed throughout a city. It points out that one large park or plaza is accessible to fewer people because it becomes a space you have to go to to utilize rather than one of a number spaces you naturally pass through without extra effort in the case of many small parks or plazas.
Cars: Not Everything Is About You
In a similar vein, GGU introduces the concept of ‘shared spaces’. Think of this as placemaking for multi-modal transportation. Recommendations here revolve around rethinking roads such that we create spaces that can be better used by multiple transit modes including walking and biking.
One specific policy example is to level the grade and reduce speed limits for motorized vehicles down to 30km (where the rate of fatal accidents declines dramatically). Importantly, GGU points out design decisions such as using cobblestones instead of asphalt can get drivers to actually reduce their speed instead of relying on updated signage or constant enforcement. Thinking about how individuals will actually interact with the physical environment is an important concept and GGU calls it out well in in this section on rethinking how we relate to roadways.
An example of a shared space from GGU (Brighton, England)
Bike Infrastructure
Moving from the general concept of shared spaces, GGU shifts to talking about bike friendly infrastructure. There’s a detailed discussion regarding different ways to implement bike lanes, even mentioning my favorite implementation (which we have it here in Oakland) where street parking is set away from the sidewalk with bike lanes sitting between the parking spaces and the curb. This keeps cars from having to cross bike traffic to reach street parking and ends up leveraging parked cars as a protective barrier between cyclists and moving traffic.
A protected bike lane in Oakland — Thanks Teresa 
GGU also calls out the need for bike racks or lockers as well as space for bikes on mass transit. The text points out, and I tend to agree, that supporting bicycling is a low cost / high impact way for a municipality to support mobility. It requires a holistic view of how all bike related infrastructure works together across an entire urban area, but doesn’t entail the kinds of capital expenditures that come with other types of transit investment.
Measuring Success
The final chapter I’ll mention is in fact the last one in the book. GGU closes with a list of metrics which it suggests municipalities should be tracking. Data is important as policy makers go about making policy, but deciding what’s even important to measure has to come first and I think this list is a good place to start:
- Housing availability for different income groups
- The number of residents living in informal communities (favelas or slums in the Brazilian context, we might think of this as a measure of the houseless population in the states)
- The vacancy rate for both publicly and privately owned real estate
- The number of jobs that can be reached by mass transit or bicycle from any given point in a city
- Land prices, housing prices, and household income
- Land and housing supply: how much land is developed each year and how many new buildings receive permits for construction
- The length of time it takes to obtain building permits
- Levels of air pollution
- The number of traffic accidents, broken down by the specific modes of transit involved
- Average travel time for commutes
- Percentage of trips made by each mode of transportation (e.g. car, bike, walking, etc)
- Average travel times for commutes
- A walkability index, a measurement of pedestrian street accessibility, and a measurement of pedestrian traffic down to the individual street level
- Average number of transfers per trip (changing buses, switching modes)
- Population growth with separate figures for immigration and reproduction
I’m all for tracking specific metrics to monitor the health of a system and these seem like a great place to start for understanding what’s going on and what needs to change within a city.
…
Overall, a Guide to Urban Development was a great read. It explained a lot of important concepts, it made a lot of great points (many of which I couldn’t even fit into this review), and I only wish there was already an English language version. If specific topics in this review sound interesting, it may be worth your time to copy / paste some text into Google translate to get at some of the meat of the text. Barring that, MU readers will have to live with my second hand account of the book, that is, unless we can get a translation commissioned sometime soon (looking at you, Anthony Ling).
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