[Image courtesy of Streetsblog]

San Francisco has a problem with its roads. Since 1988, the average pavement condition of roads in San Francisco has declined 20%. No longer considered an essential city service to be paid for out of the City’s General Fund, city officials are looking for new ways to pay for street repavement projects. They are also prioritizing street repairs based on how fundamental each road is to the overall system.

With the current average PCI (pavement condition index) of San Francisco roads registering at 63 out of 100, we are in a troubling situation. Our roads are no longer considered “Good” (roads with scores of 70 and above). Instead they are dangerously close to “At risk” (roads at 57 and below).

According to a report prepared by San Francisco’s capital planning program, “San Francisco’s street network as a whole is slightly below the threshold for preventive maintenance. Engineers typically identify a PCI of 64 as a tipping point at which the pavement deterioration rate begins to steeply increase and more expensive treatments are needed for repair.” The report also claims the cost of repair of any San Francisco street will be four times more over the course of 70 years of use, if the proper preventive maintenance does not occur. If new funding sources are not identified, our roads stand to decline at the rate of roughly a point per year.

To get a complete analysis of San Francisco’s roads, and how we can best address this problem click here.

Known for their work in the intersection of design and data, Stamen and SimpleGeo have joined forces in taking an interactive look at this issue. They take the PCI statistics, readily available on DataSF, and overlay them on a map of San Francisco. We look forward to seeing a lot less red in the future. 

Roads with PCI of 0-49 shown in red, 40-69 in yellow [Image courtesy of San Francisco Department of Public Works]

While living in the suburbs often appears less expensive than living in the city, this is often not the case when factoring in transportation costs.  The Center for Neighborhood Technology just released an expanded version of their housing and transportation index which provides a comprehensive view of neighborhood affordability.  Unlike other affordability indices, the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index takes into account transportation costs associated with neighborhood design and location.   Their website allows users to explore neighborhood-level data about housing and transportation prices which include information on auto ownership, transit use, and housing density that can help Americans make more informed decisions about where they want to live.

[Map generated on H + T website comparing affordability in the Bay Area]

The H + T Affordability Index is a product of a collaboration with the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Center for Transit Oriented Development and was developed as a project for the Brookings Institution’s Urban Markets Initiative.  In the works since 2006, the Affordability Index recently expanded its analysis to cover 330 metropolitan areas in the United States, which accounts for more than 80% of the population in the United States and covers more than 161,000 neighborhoods.  

SPUR understands the role that effective and affordable transportation options play in affordability and quality of life.  Check out SPUR’s article on Transit-Oriented Development in the Bay Area as well as our transportation page for more information on how SPUR is working to encourage better transportation options in the Bay Area visit.

 

Sprawl, conformity, car culture, ennui, decay.  These are a few of the themes Arcade Fire tackles in its third album, The Suburbs, released last week. At times nostalgic and at times cautionary, The Suburbs may be most notable (certainly in the realm of SPUR’s blog) as an example of city planning commentary in pop culture.

As an NPR review put it, “the members of Arcade Fire have always been fascinated by the subtle ways geography informs our lives.”  Their newest album weaves a sense of suburban space and place throughout its 16 tracks.  Band front man Win Butler sings of how “First they built the road, then they built the town. / That’s why we’re still driving round and round.”  Much of the inspiration for the album comes from Butler’s youth spent in the suburbs of Houston in the 1980s.  And as with Arcade Fire’s other notable excursions into the memories of childhood on its first album Funeral, the tone is often wistful.  Butler and wife Régine Chassagne sing longingly for the “wasted hours” of adolescence spent staring out the window of a car, riding bikes in the night to the nearest park, and waiting in parking lots under freeway overpasses.  There are also more melancholic references to the impact of growing up in the built environment of suburbia – “all we see are kids in buses longing to be free.”

But The Suburbs is not so much an extended story about suburbia in the ‘80s as it is about returning to those cookie-cutter communities today.  Images of suburban decay ring throughout the album, as “all of the walls that they built in the ‘70s finally fall.”  The few redeeming qualities of growing up in the suburbs seem to be gone.  As Butler sings in the song “City With No Children,” all that remains is “a garden left for ruin by a millionaire inside of a private prison.”  Perhaps the most anthemic song on an album that on the whole is less filled with those big communal choruses for which Arcade Fire is known, comes near the very end with “Sprawl II (Mountains beyond mountains).” Sounding like ABBA or Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Régine Chassagne chants the chorus: “Living in the sprawl / Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / And there’s no end in sight / I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights.”  

Certainly, Arcade Fire is not the first band to sing a cautionary tale about suburban life.  Rush condemned the stifling conformity of suburbia in the ‘80s with “Subdivisions,” Modest Mouse has oft breached the subject on albums like The Lonesome Crowded West and Building Nothing Out of Something, and the Dirty Projectors' “Temecula Sunrise” is supposedly about a hypothetical future in which millionaires in mass move out of their suburban McMansions that then become colonized by bohemian artists. And these are just a few examples. It almost seems a rite of passage in rock music to vilify mainstream suburban culture. Arcade Fire’s melancholic nostalgia probably goes easier on suburbia than most.  

Nor is Arcade Fire the first notable band to breach urban planning issues and sing critically about our built environments.  David Byrne, former front man of the Talking Heads, is a known bike enthusiast and advocate for more livable cities, having recently designed bike rack sculptures around New York City and written Bicycle Diaries about his observations biking in cities throughout the world.  (You can also catch David Byrne’s “Arboretum” series of drawings on exhibit at Electric Works through August 21st.) Perhaps my favorite Talking Heads song about urban space is “Nothing But Flowers” – a satirical inversion of Joni Mitchell’s famous “Big Yellow Taxis.” Rather than paving paradise to put up a parking lot, David Byrne sings in horror as our built environment – parking lots, factories, Pizza Huts, discount stores, and highways – gives way to “nothing but flowers.”

Pop culture has a way of providing insight into our changing desires about the spaces in which we live. In The Option of Urbanism, Christopher Leinberger uses the example of television shows to portray society’s shifting opinion on urbanism versus suburbanism.  He suggests that while TV sitcoms in the baby boomer era (The Brady Bunch, The Dick Van Dyke Show) are set in idyllic suburbia, shows beginning in the 1990’s take place in cities (Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City).  

A recent Slate article from Tom Vanderbilt would suggest that Hollywood itself drives popular opinion associated with car (and car-less) culture. In the article, Vanderbilt gives example after example of movies in which characters without cars are portrayed as “losers.” An exception (and a possible sign of progress) is last year’s 500 Days of Summer – a movie that romanticizes car-less life spent strolling the streets of downtown LA and admiring the prewar architecture. In a memorable scene on a bench in Angel’s Knoll Park, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character Tom “Manhattanizes” the view in front of him, using the arm of Zooey Deschanel’s character Summer to draw an image of handsome old buildings in the place of existing parking lots.  Though the film conveniently ignores downtown’s post-1950’s iconic architecture, it remains an example of shifting ideals in pop culture.  Even beer commercials are starting to highlight other modes of transportation, as Matthew Roth from Streetsblog noted last week in an article about a new Miller High Life commercial in which a blue-collar worker rides his bike through a snowstorm with a six-pack in the front basket.

Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs isn’t as much about suburbanism versus urbanism, or cars versus bicycles, as it is a question of “What now?” The album’s vision of suburbia may not exactly be an ideal place to live – not in the 1980’s and certainly not upon returning to it today.  But the narrator of the album does return, nostalgic for his wasted hours of youth and fearful of what may remain for his children.  If suburbia is no longer necessarily the dream, what is to be made of those communities we built in the 70s?

Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs can be listened to in its entirety on the NPR website.  But true to its theme, it probably sounds best through car speakers while driving on an empty highway.

The California High Speed Rail Authority met yesterday in San Francisco. The agenda was packed with many interesting things including a new station area development policy. But the real controversy was about the section between San Jose and San Francisco. I joined hundreds of people during public comment to weigh in on this one small segment.

Over the past few years, a group of high speed rail opponents has been gathering strength in some of the Peninsula communities such as Atherton and Menlo Park, arguing that the train will impact their views, be too noisy, and otherwise ruin their quality of life.

There is certainly a lot of design work to do as the High Speed Rail Authority and Caltrain explore the peninsula segment and figure out how to make “joint operations” work.

But what some of the residents of the Peninsula seem to be asking for is an impossibly expensive project or no project at all. There cannot be a 60-mile subway up and down the Peninsula.

The Bay Area Council penned a strong letter pointing out the flaws with the “build it right or don’t build it at all” approach. If “building it right” means addressing every local impact of the project to the satisfaction of every local resident, there will not be enough money in the world to build this project.

TransForm pointed out at the hearing that the issues with the Peninsula communities stem from the fact that the High Speed Rail Authority made the fundamentally correct decision in 2004 to choose an alignment that re-uses existing track where possible and goes through existing cities. (This was in contrast to a cheaper alternative that went through agricultural lands and skirted many existing cities, relying instead on “greenfield” stations.) Having made the big decision the right way, the Authority now faces the political and design problem of actually bringing the train through all of these already-developed communities. Even though the Peninsula creates design challenges it is absolutely critical that the project goes all the way to San Francisco, where the highest ridership stations in the entire state will be located.

I tried to put this project into some larger context in my remarks. California is already the most populous state in the nation (by far). It will grow from 38 million people today to 50 million people by 2030. The real reason we need high speed rail is to provide an armature or framework for organizing this massive growth. Where the interstate highway system was the infrastructure that enabled the suburbanization of America, high speed rail can enable a re-centering of growth. It is the necessary supporting infrastructure for walkable communities in California.

The real question we are facing is whether we are still capable as a society of actually getting something like this built. In the age of CEQA, in the age when we seem to believe that more public process is always better, in the age when we seem to believe that nothing should happen unless there is consensus, can we actually create a transformative infrastructure? As America tries to learn how to compete with “single vision” nations that do not share our democratic values, the question of how we learn how to actually get things done under our political system looms larger and larger as a central problem to overcome.

With every infrastructure project that SPUR supports we face the dilemma of how to be supportive against the tide of opponents while still working constructively to improve projects and make them as good as they can be. We could not be happier with the “big moves” that the High Speed Rail Authority has made thus far. They have picked the right alignment, one that will reinforce center-oriented growth. Now the task is to get the small moves right to find that elusive balance between more expensive designs that address community concerns and the need to keep the project affordable enough to actually build it.

This is the most important project in California. It is a naïve and impossible wish to “get it right” if right means the ideal design in every community. We need to get it “right-enough” to attract lots of riders away from the automobile and enable a new pattern of growth in the state.

As California lays the high-speed rail groundwork, SPUR continues its series on international precedents. While France built high-speed rail two decades after Japan and within a different state apparatus, the system had remarkably similar results: growth and concentration.  France teaches us that a state investment in high-speed rail (HSR) can have major impacts on places that are isolated and suffering from lagging economic performance. The examples of Lille, an old industrial and mining center in northern France, and Nantes, south of Paris, are often cited as success stories.

Euralille [Photo Credit: flickr user savourama]

Lille is an important crossroads in the European HSR network with service to London, Paris and Brussels.  Once a quickly depopulating and gritty industrial city, Lille has diversified into knowledge-intensive, service-producing activities.  Euralille, the new retail, business and conference center designed by Dutch powerhouse architect, Rem Koolhaas and OMA, is illustrative of the makeover.  Euralille straddles Lille’s two main railway stations.  A standalone city, it houses productive facilities as well as affordable housing. In 1994, Architectural Review dubbed Euralille the “Instant City.”  

Equally unrecognizable change has befallen Nantes.  An industrial port city in the 19th century, in the past 30 years Nantes has developed into a major service sector hug.  In 2004, Time magazine named Nantes “the most livable city in all of Europe.”  The TGV, France’s high speed rail network, came to Nantes concurrently in 1981.  

The success of the TGV cannot be separated from France’s institutional and planning framework.  The determination and capacity of a strong French state was instrumental. The nation owns and provides operational subsidies to SNCF, the HSR operator. 

[Photo Credit: flickr user Julka2009]

However, this is not to say that localities have no role in high speed rail.  In recent years, local government has played a more important role in France. Vis-à-vis joint development agreements and direct development subsidies, French localities have exerted pressure to densify around TGV stations.  Cities also set the purchase price of land and assemble properties to facilitate development. Lille approached station area development with public private partnerships in mind.  Part of the key to Nantes’ and Lille’s success is the not insignificant recent investment in transit feeder networks that connect high speed rail with outlying areas.  Not including Paris, there are 20 light rail systems in France, most built after HSR.  Of these 20 systems, 18 are in cities with HSR service.  At least in France, the concentration of travel demand thanks to high speed rail and the urban location of most stations have generated a consequent demand for feeder transit, with the usual array of environmental and land use benefits.

All told, the public sector bet that HSR investment would be sufficient to catalyze urban growth and induce private investments.  They were right.   

Takeaways:

• HSR in France is largely a product of the government’s building, operating, maintaining the network.

• Local planning and development incentives can play a huge role in sparking station area development.

• HSR can transform decaying cities into the most livable in Europe.

• HSR ridership increases with robust feeder transit. 

In the coming weeks, we’ll look at “HSR” in the United States and United Kingdom drawing conclusions about what it all means in the California context.

SPUR’s policy paper on high-speed rail is due out this fall.

 

[Photo Credit: flickr user Sam Williams]

Earlier this month, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) unanimously adopted new air quality guidelines related to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and particulate matter (PM 2.5) from land use projects.  The comprehensive new guidelines, among the most stringent in the nation, address the impacts of air pollutants, as well as recent changes in state and federal air quality.  The guidelines also include air quality significance thresholds and mitigation measures local agencies can use when preparing air quality impact analyses under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). 

Some significant changes to the guidelines include:

• Single family housing projects of 56 dwelling units or greater, hotels with more than 83 hotel rooms and general office buildings with more than 53,000 square feet will all be considered to have a significant impact on GHG emissions under CEQA.

• Local governments are encouraged to adopt qualified GHG Reduction Strategies.

• New screening criteria and threshold levels have been set for extremely fine particulate matter emissions and toxic air contaminants.  Projects which fall above these new thresholds will be required determine whether the project will result in a significant impact, including evaluation of emissions within a 1,000 foot radius of the proposed project.

Stricter greenhouse gas and particulate matter guidelines are a good thing, right? Not always, say some who argue that the new guidelines may inadvertently lead to more sprawl by making it harder to develop the denser parts of our region.  Some worry that the new regulatory obstacles will drive up the costs of future affordable housing, infill, and transit-oriented development (TOD) projects.  Developers and cities are concerned that the new guidelines will make compliance with SB 375, the State’s law which requires compact development, more difficult.   

The guidelines do contain a method for local governments to accelerate the CEQA review process for projects that are infill or transit-oriented. To do this, a city can prepare a GHG Reduction Strategy and have it approved by BAAQMD. Projects or plans consistent with these strategies could then be considered less than significant under CEQA, and therefore exempt from full review.  With cities around the region reeling from the budget crisis, and in some cases cutting planning staff, however, resources to develop these strategies are in short supply.

San Francisco has already begun working on a GHG Reduction Strategy, so it is unlikely that the BAAQMD Guidelines will cause significant environmental review process changes for projects in the City; the new air quality standards will likely have more significant impacts on projects and plans in jurisdictions without GHG Reduction Strategies or detailed climate change related policies.

What are the most pressing issues facing California in the next 15 years and how should we deal with them? If only there were one comprehensive PDF document floating around the internet with all the answers.

Policy wonks across the state will now be thrilled to discover the Public Policy Institute of California’s recently released CA2025 report, a “briefing kit” covering California’s most important long-term policy issues. Outlining policies on topics ranging from water to transportation to the economy, the report acts as a kind of handbook for every major policy concern confronting the state today. While one might expect an insufferably dense document, the text is actually quite accessible, the graphics clear and informative. Some might crave more detail and in-depth analysis than CA2025 provides, but the report still serves as an excellent primer for the key issues facing the state, and presents compelling arguments for how our policy makers might tackle them.

[Graph courtesy of PPIC CA2025]

SPUR is pleased to issue a call for applicants for a twelve-week fellowship in the summer of 2010.

The Piero N. Patri Fellowship in Urban Design is a hands-on position for a graduate student or 2010 graduate in landscape architecture, urban design, or architecture giving the Fellow a unique opportunity to gain firsthand experience working in the urban design and planning field on a project that will have a positive impact on the city of San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Projects are intended to provide career-related work experiences that will challenge graduate-level students, contribute to San Francisco, contribute to SPUR's mission and reflect the values of Piero N. Patri. SPUR will cooperate with the Fellow in obtaining academic credit, if his or her institution allows.  The selected fellow will be based in the San Francisco office of AECOM Design + Planning (formerly EDAW), where desk space, computer resources, and professional mentorship will be provided.

Stipend
$6,000

Application
Friday, April 30, 5 p.m., by e-mail to patrifellowship@spur.org
Format: One 8.5x11 PDF file (5 MB max)
Items to include: completed application, 1 page letter of interest, resume, work samples (20 sheet maximum)

Dates
Notification of fellowship winner: May 7th
Start of fellowship: Early June
Conclusion of fellowship: August 30

Work Product
SPUR will publish the work resulting from the Fellow's project, and the Fellow will present the results of the project in a public presentation.

For more information, see spur.org/communityplanning/patri/callforapplicants

This past fall, a group of SPUR board members and staff traveled to Washington DC to learn from the urban-planning successes of our nation's capital; today, three members of that group presented their findings at a lunchtime forum.

SPUR Deputy Director Sarah Karlinsky began the discussion with an overview of the Washington urban planning models from Pierre L'Enfant's plan of 1791 to and James McMillan's Plan of 1901 through modern-day endeavors to enliven the long-neglected Southeast waterfront area along the Anacostia.  Regional Planning Director Egon Terplan expanded the geographical scope of the discussion, demonstrating with satellite photography areas in the region where forward-thinking transit-planning decisions brought about transit-oriented development along major corridors and high public transit use.  Terplan focused on the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in Virginia and Bethesda in Maryland, both tremendous successes in inducing dense development clustered around regional rail service.

Finally, architect and urban historian Rod Freebairn-Smith showed photographs gathered during the trip focused on how security threats affect both civic life and architecture. His photos included many examples of how buildings have been fortified through bollardization and other means, while not marring the storied city or preventing access to national monuments and icons.

Study after study has shown that cities prioritize development that lets visitors and residents walk, bicycle, or take public transit to get around, people are healthier and have far less negative impact on the environment.  Now, a new study by TransForm entitled Windfall for All demonstrates another benefit to developing livable communities: people who do not use cars to get around spend far less money on transportation than people who do.  Citing AAA estimates, the report shows that, on average, it costs $8,097 per year to own, maintain, register, insure, and fuel a vehicle.  In all, individuals in the Bay Area spend $34 billion on private transportation, most of which on owning and operating cars.

Especially in current tough economic conditions, finding ways to cut costs is critical, and that includes money spent on transportation.  Yet many Bay Area towns and cities have prioritized development that not only encourages auto use, but precludes other ways to travel.  As the study asserts, people can only move away from expensive auto use toward more affordable transportation means if cities give them the means to do so by putting housing near transit, ensuring pedestrians and bicyclists can get around safely, and investing in pleasant places that are nicer to be in than to drive past.