Showing posts with label urban planning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban planning. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

City Park Lighting


 Lighting city parkways is critical for the people using the park; however it can be harmful to the fish, wildlife, and vegetation that make the park attractive to those users.  Modern LED lighting can be directed to specifically light certain areas and avoid spillover to other areas.  Modern auto headlights can light the lane ahead of the vehicle without spillover to an adjacent oncoming lane, and with just enough vertical spillover to illuminate overhead reflective signs.  Any lighting design for a city park should be used to control usage to public use areas of the park.  An additional virtue of this kind of lighting plan is that any person not in the lighted areas could be considered suspicious and treated accordingly.

Saturday, July 1, 2017

Hyperloops and the future of suburbs.


 Suburbs will always be suburbs.  Maybe not a bad thing.  With Hyperloops and 150 mph autonomous cars running in pelotons on dedicated freeway lanes one can live in the burbs and work in cities.  The Pittsburgh-Columbus-Chicago Hyperloop demonstration proposal provides a 40 minute commute from Columbus to either Chicago or Pittsburgh.  At 150 MPH Grass Valley-Nevada City is less than an hour from SF.



 Those few that like urban living will have plenty of it at reasonable prices once any burb is less than an hour away from city jobs by hyperloop or 150-200 mph freeway lanes. Ford, General Motors, and their foreign competitors will insure that the US will -always glorify suburban living with the car and the mortgaged house as the primary status symbols. Huge high-rise garages for autonomous cars will grow like weeds at transit centers.  Get out of your car at the transit interface nearest your job, tell the car when you will be back and tell it to go park itself.


 In the burbs the autonomous car will drop you at the garage over the freeway at the regional urban center, probably still low rise and driverless taxis will shuttle you to your entertainment center and community place.

Autonomous Cars and the Future of Cities


 With autonomous or even semi autonomous cars in 120mph+ pelotons on existing freeways and Musk 120mph skates in tunnels in LA, whole metro areas are sprawlsville.  The American life style will not be changed to urban living.  Ford, General Motors, and all the rest will still be around in 2100 promoting sprawl. 

 The car is the most important surviving public status symbol, and Americans at least are not going to give that up.  They will drive less especially locally but providing rides between urban nodes will still be an important status indicator.  Cities, especially new cities, will evolve out of the suburbs with high density urban nodes around regional amenities with complete urban services, restaurants, service establishments and high density housing at all price points for those who choose to live and possibly work in an urban node.   But the majority of the population will still be economically and ethnically segregated in single family homes and low density apartments in the suburbs. The current pattern for office commercial segregated in suburban campuses will continue for the forseeable future. Even working class cars will be high speed semi-autonomous and urban nodes will still require high density autonomous parking for residents and visitors.     


 Freeways will evolve to narrower lanes restricted to autonomous vehicles, with high speed lanes running in pelotons for efficiency and throughput.  Current freeways of three lanes or more with a breakdown lane in the center can in the near future convert to two or more high speed lanes, one transition lane and leave one wide lane with a breakdown lane for non- autonomous cars at existing speed limits and entrance and exit. Transition lanes would have restricted access and egress and would be separated from the conventional lane by a Jersey Barrier those shaped concrete vehicle diverters used in construction zones.  All that would be required to facilitate this transition would be to improve the roadbed in the high speed and transition lanes.  Autonomous cars exist today capable of 120-150 mph and transit vehicles soon will be once the need for them exists.    

 Autonomous cars can park in high density parking lots on floors limited to small SUVs by floor spacing, served by elevators.  Garages for autonomous vehicles only may be constructed over a major intersection with an existing freeway which is already served by transit and close to developed commercial centers.  The garage may be built over the freeway.  The passenger access floor will have bus clearance for larger vehicles also at high density enabled by autonomous control.  Pedestrian and bicycle access is over the existing sidewalk space on the cross street and transit access over a lane of the cross street.  Cars will enter from freeway access ramps to car lanes inside the garage next to the pedestrian/bikeway. Once passengers exit the car for local transportation and tell the car computer their expected departure time the car will join a cue to an elevator, tandem or more, at the far end of the garage to access parking floors. Exiting cars would use the same elevator with circulation on all floors in the same direction.  Driverless autonomous cabs would be available at the freeway nodes for those needing them. 

Infrequent transit nodes using grade separated bike, pedestrian, local transit and transit access car traffic as entry to the transit garage. This would create a local traffic and transit interface with high speed autonomous transit which would use existing on ramps to access the high speed lanes.  These transit nodes would evolve rapidly to high density urban centers.  Cities and suburbs should plan for and encourage these high density urban transit villages. 


 The Upper middle class will commute from their tract mansions to suburban commercial campuses, or to the city for work on the high speed freeways, using the existing freeway access and local streets for last few mile access as necessary.  

  Service workers and others with minimum wage employment will commute from now remote suburbs, car or vanpooling as needed where high speed transit is unavailable.  

  Depending on what happens with UBI and "Medicare for All" the workers displaced by robotics and the existing poor will die or move to now dead rural communities.  Assuming UBI and Medicare, the revived rural communities will become vibrant villages of local commerce and art most of which will generate excess funds for local amenities.  

Merc. 2017/08/06/ Opinion San Jose NeedsTransit on the Creek


The city of San Jose is planning major new development along Stevens Creek Boulevard as part of its Stevens Creek Urban Village Plan, which will come before the City Council on Aug. 8. As elected leaders of the other two cities along the boulevard, we believe the corridor needs significant transit improvements that are lacking in San Jose’s current plan.
Transit follows residential density.  Always has and always will.  Cupertino and Santa Clara have no residential density on Stevens Creek Blvd and have no plans to build any and are blocking the Urban Villages in San Jose.  This call for transit is hollow at best.

We respect San Jose’s interest in economic development and welcome projects that bring new vitality to Stevens Creek. However, we think it would be irresponsible to approve the Stevens Creek Urban Village project without an effective traffic mitigation plan along the Stevens Creek/280 corridor.
 A viable traffic mitigation plan is included in a supplement to the Implementation Section of the Stevens Creek Urban Village Plan which involves signal timing on Stevens Creek to provide a smooth dense traffic flow Eastbound on Stevens Creek from Stern to Saratoga and beyond to I-880.  

 Without the disruption of through right turn traffic from Kiely and Albany trying to get into the left South I-280 turn lanes in less than a quarter mile Saratoga Ave has ample capacity to handle through southbound traffic from Stevens Creek and San Thomas Expressway.  

 Traffic mitigation for the Urban Village will close Urban Village streets including Kiely and Albany to through traffic freeing up the local streets for local vehicles and bikes in shared lanes and pedestrians on improved sidewalks.  Current through traffic from Cupertino on Albany would be handled by the improved signals on Stevens Creek to Saratoga. Current through traffic from Santa Clara now using Kiely will be redirected to Saratoga via Stevens Creek and San Thomas all of which have ample capacity to handle the redirected traffic.   


SCAG Suburban Neighborhood Issues


 The SCAG facade guidelines insure that even the maximum height commercial buildings along Stevens Creek and Saratoga present a varied and architecturally interesting face to the adjacent neighborhoods.  While different from the suburban tract homes the designs are to be attractive to traffic and passersby on the streets as well as providing visual contrast to the low rise look-alike homes and apartment complexes surrounding them.  

 Many suburbanites who are flocking to urban amenities like Santana Row seem to admire the varied urban well designed architecture.  For others who may prefer their familiar suburban context in large part that will be preserved in the surrounding suburbs that are committed to remaining low rise suburbs. They have many square miles of suburbs to frequent if they object to urban amenities. It is important that parochial neighborhood suburban preferences not be given a veto over intelligent urban design. 

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

A City in the Suburbs?

 

  As suburbs evolve eventually one becomes a city built around a government center, an airport, or other regional amenity. The surrounding suburbs while enjoying the suburban life style use the city amenities intensively creating the bulk of the traffic near the city amenities. Valley Fair/Santana Row is fed by the whole suburban south bay.

Suburbanites will always have a personal vehicle and will drive it from home to somewhere.  Good urban planning means that the somewhere is sufficient to meet the needs of the suburbanite for the day however long the day is.  If it is a workday, lunch, coffee breaks, a stroll in the park, and dinner and entertainment if that is part of the day should be in walking distance from the parking.  If it is a weekend day the destination should have the main event for the day, a park, a gathering place (see placemaking) and again dinner and evening entertainment if desired.  In both cases the parking should be remote with a variety of last mile options to the urban center.

  Nevertheless suburbanites resist the city's efforts to deal with traffic and other city issues with the greater density.  The urban spaces must be carefully planned and essentially forced into the suburban spaces.  It is never easy, and "community involvement" is usually dysfunctional as the only community that will bother to go to the meetings will be those with an agenda to put the city somewhere else.   

 With regard to the developments on Stevens Creek one vocal opponent cites traffic on Stevens Creek that prevents her from getting to her city amenity of a Safeway and other stores in the once suburban shopping center that San Jose wants to turn into an urban village.

  Santa Clara objects to our listing a bike route on Pruneridge that they created by modifying traffic lanes on that once important East West thoroughfare further contributing to congestion on Stevens Creek. But no way, no how can we build the density to pay for our own urban bike corridor.    

 Cupertino wants a hotel to support their suburban businesses as long as it won't cast a shadow in someone's back yard.    They like their city amenities and use them intensively, but don't want to give up even a daylight plane to get them.

A vocal group rants about school impact of development but Lynbrook, Miller, and Dilworth in District 1 are considering redistricting due to declining enrollments.  Lynbrook canceled AP Music Theory this year, a critical pre-requisite for top colleges.

  This suburban thinking is the very antithesis of regional planning. We would be happy to add our neighbors to our planning groups and did so.  Their NO WAY, NO HOW interminable rants disrupted our planning meetings and made reasonable planning impossible.

 The solution is unfortunately to ignore the community input, or rather use the community input to cover substantive conversations on the periphery between city officials and developers pursuant to building the necessary density for the project to work.   

Friday, August 19, 2016

The Future of Suburban Living

As the top 20% crowd into the cities, voluntarily as that is where all the good stuff is within walking distance including most of the jobs that support the top 20% what happens to the suburbs that they leave?  Property values crater, and it becomes reasonable for the bottom 80% to achieve the American Dream of suburban living.  Rents in the strip malls and local shopping centers crater along with the property values, and become affordable for bodegas, Dollar stores, and other services catering to the lower income groups.  Assuming existing transit is maintained, (roads don't matter) as travel outside the neighborhood is mainly for jobs serving the 20%.  The 20% will insure it is maintained as they don't use it anyway and they need the service people who are gentrified out of the city.  

The current suburban standard of 4-5 bedrooms and 2-3 baths will serve an extended family of many as well as it serves the current family of 3.  The family room or a big downstairs room will be turned into a dorm for the kids and the adults will occupy the 4-5 bedrooms.  The modern luxury kitchen will easily serve dozens as well or better than it serves 3.

One can expect the current suburban developments to become ethnic enclaves, since once the block is busted and prices crater further, friends and families will join the blockbuster and remake the development to serve their needs.  The fences will come down and the large backyards will connect to be a big playground for the neighborhood.

It is happening as we chat, many suburban neighborhoods and cities connected by transit to the urban core are now ethnic enclaves, and the white homeowners are taking the money and running while the money is still there.  The elderly to "Adult communities" and the working ethnics are blockbusting a new community for their ethnic group.