Janette is at it again

Not content to rest on her laurels, Janette Sadik Khan, commissioner of the DOT, is breaking new ground on New York City's streets. Since the Times Square, Madison Square, and countless other street redesigns, as well as the 9th Ave, Grand St, and Sand St (leading up to the Brooklyn Bridge) protected bicycle paths to name a few, the DOT has acquired the reputation of being a sleek and effective planning organization. Even a spokesperson for business interests in Midtown, Dan Biederman (president of the 34th St Partnership, the Chelsea Improvement District, and the Bryant Park Corporation) asserts that “This is not your father’s D.O.T. This agency says they do something and they do it.”

And indeed this can-do agency has taken on two more of New York's landmark intersections, handing them over to pedestrians, cyclists, and buses: 34th Street and Union Square. Both plans have been announced recently and will take shape in upcoming months. While the 34th Street redesign should be done by the end of 2012, Union Square may be up and running as soon as Labor Day, which for my non-US readers is a day in early September when you should stop wearing white pants (or better yet you could avoid them altogether). But I digress.

According to the New York Times, rejiggering 34th Street would look something like this: "On the west side of the pedestrian plaza, all car traffic would flow west, toward the Hudson River. On the east side, all car traffic would move east, toward the East River." At the heart of the project are plans for a pedestrian plaza, although buses would be allowed to flow through. This plaza would stretch between 5th and 6th Avenues, connecting hotspots such as Herald Square and the Empire State Building. The plan bears a pricetag of $30 million. That said, according to a study by the city, about 90% of the people traveling along 34th Street are on a bus or on foot (Source). In other words, until now, 10% of people (in cars, including taxis) have been occupying approximately 75% of the street surface (my estimation from google maps satellite). Despite that, it is also one of the most congested corridors in the city, to the point where it is usually faster to walk from one end to the other than to drive.

Union Square, on the other hand, has long been a pedestrian haven, attracting throngs both to the park and the Greenmarket (as well as to a Christmas market in December) - not to mention the Whole Foods at the southern end. The DOT plans to "reshuffle" traffic at a problematic corner of the square. According to the Times: "Under the new plan, all traffic heading south on Broadway toward Union Square would be blocked off at East 18th Street; at that point, cars would be forced to take a left-hand turn. East 17th Street, meanwhile, would become one-way, with only westbound traffic allowed in a single lane. A pedestrian plaza would be installed along the north side of the block between Broadway and Park Avenue South, and a bicycle lane and pedestrian walkway would be built on the south side." (Source). If you didn't understand that, be not alarmed. The map below shows my interpretation of this new and improved corner. The lines represent the redirected flow of car traffic (Eastbound on 18th, Westbound on 17th), and the blue rectangles are the pedestrian zones.

All I can say is that I cannot wait to come back to New York and see these new projects for myself, or at least Union Square since the other one will take a bit longer. The city where I live now, Hamburg, is fantastic as far as public space and pedestrian zones are concerned. In fact many European cities are far ahead of New York in terms of allocating space to pedestrians and cyclists. However, I would wager that the New York City DOT's accomplishments in recent years far surpass most European cities' in sheer number and speed of implementation, and as such are unprecendented. But despite my rave review, I won't give them a pat on the back just yet... As my grandfather always told me as a child, "There's always room for improvement."

Interesting videos on urban planning from around the world

There are several videos. Click on the arrows on the side to browse through them.

Metropolitan and Regional Planning

I ended my last post by pointing out that people no longer just dwell in cities, but rather in large metropolitan areas that encompass several cities and towns. This seems like an obvious point, and yet the next step in the logic, that therefore cities should be managed and planned comprehensively on a regional level, is ignored.

So what do we have? We have planning departments in each of our municipalities. But each metro area is composed of many municipalities. Thus the nightmare we currently have: dozens of tiny planning departments, each out for the best ratio of property taxes to amenities in their own town, and caring little for what happens in the next town over.

In places where there is a regional metropolitan planning agency, such as Minneapolis- Saint Paul, it does not have much power. (Full disclosure: I wrote my thesis about this city so I will probably refer to it often). In MSP, the Met Council, as it is called, is appointed by the governor and has very little power over the planning that gets done in each individual town within its purview. It can review their plans, but not alter or veto them. So what does it do? It plans and manages the transit system for the majority of the region. Several of the richest suburban towns have opted out and run their own bus system, though. Of course it should be fairly obvious to anyone reading this blog by now that planning transportation and land development separately makes for a failing transit system and lots of sprawl.

A directly elected regional government

Enter Stuttgart, the city where I am working and living. Since 1994, the Stuttgart Region has had a directly elected Regional Assembly (Regionalversammlung). Each of the 6 counties selects a number of representatives proportional to its population size. The assembly is at least 80 strong, and composed of members of several of the different German political parties. The most recent assembly was elected just this summer, and its political composition is illustrated below.

The Regional Assembly of Stuttgart is vested with the power to oversee the creation of a Regional Plan every 10 years by the regional planning agency (Verband Region Stuttgart, which from now on I will refer to as VRS). The plan takes years to research and draft, and the Regional Assembly is re-elected every 5 years. So the planners are usually at great pains to get the whole process over with and the plan adopted before the elections change the political landscape.

This is not always easy, and in fact right now, though we have a brand new assembly, the final draft of the plan has not yet been formally adopted and is still vulnerable to last-minute alterations by politicians with an agenda. Naturally the planners I have spoken to are not happy about this prospect, as they have spent years working on it. It is quite a serious-looking document, weighs about the same as a coffee table book, and has a nifty pocket at the back filled with dozens of explanatory maps for the unfolding.

A legally binding regional plan

Despite these minor inconveniences, regional planning here is a reality, which continues to startle me daily, and the effects are far-reaching. Once the plan is adopted, it is legally binding. The staff of the VRS then review all local plans and decide whether they fit within the confines of the Regional Plan. Hundreds of zoning documents pass across their desks. They themselves do not accept or reject a proposal, but they present the proposals along with their verdict to the Planning Committee, which meets every few weeks. The latter is formed by members of the Regional Assembly, and I will be seeing this Committe in action tomorrow, so I will be able to report back what exactly they do there.

The main point is that they have a mandate not only to adopt, but also to implement the Regional Plan, and therefore the decisions they take on planning proposals are binding. As a result, we have the fairly dense radial pattern of development in the Stuttgart Region that you were able to see in the map from the earlier post.

Comparing Modal Splits - Stuttgart and Minneapolis- Saint Paul

It's extraordinary how much regulation and planning Germans put up with compared to Americans, but evidently it pays off. For instance, I can get everywhere I want to go with clean, fast light rail public transit, and yet the entire metropolitan area has 2.7 million people living in it, which is halfway between metro Portland, OR (2.1 million) and metro area Minneapolis-St Paul (3.3 million).

Travel breakdown

To put this into perspective, on average about 4.6% of the MSP population commutes by public transit and 88.5% by car (of which 10% car pool). Less than 3% bike or walk. According to the Stuttgart Regionalverkehrsplan (regional transportation plan), here 58% commute by car and 12.9% by public transport. About 29% of commuters bike or walk! In other words even though it's a smaller city, its transportation system is extensive, fast and reliable, and new land development is channeled along train lines. In MSP, the opposite is true: there is a lot of unguided sprawl and a sub-par public transit system, mainly composed of bus lines (which get stuck in traffic and make frequent stops).

A radial city

The following map shows the development axes along which most of the Stuttgart Region's new development is directed. Existing towns are shown in pink, and believe it or not, development takes up only 20% of the total acreage of the region (click on the image to enlarge it). The black lines represent the axes along which infrastructure is bundled: train lines, gas pipelines, electricity, water, etc. The region is planned comprehensively based on this basic premise. In order to keep open space for agriculture and nature, they acknowledge the necessity to prevent greenfield development through very heavy handed regulations ranging from restrictive zoning to targeted subsidies. I will elaborate on those methods in later posts.

It is important to note that I am talking about metropolitan areas, which include suburbs. The stats are very different for the cities proper, but the reality is that the population of most cities is increasingly located outside of the city limits, and to leave out their footprint is to ignore a large chunk of the population.