As many communities around our fair state pursue strategies to become more walkable and transit-oriented, we continue to run into the 600-pound gorilla and what to do about it - cars and parking!
Last Wednesday night, at the Salt Lake City Planning Commission meeting, the issue once again became a hot topic.
First, some background. A few years ago, the mayor and city council took some very progressive steps toward encouraging walking and discouraging car use by generally reducing parking requirements throughout the city. Things such as exempting the first 2,500 square feet of business floor area from any parking requirement at all, and allowing for reductions in the number of required parking spaces for providing pedestrian amenities such as public benches, bike racks and stroller parking areas, were incorporated into the zoning ordinance.
The areas where this could have potentially the most impact were in the smaller neighborhood commericial areas, like 9th & 9th, 15th & 15th, and so on around the city. Being so close to or even a part of residential neighborhoods, the potential impact from cars coming to patronize these businesses was apparent.
But, the feeling among many in the community was that if we really want to be a walkable community, we must start doing things to encourage walking and discourage driving.
As new businesses in these neighborhood commerical areas began to take advantage of these relaxed requirements, complaints began to roll in from nearby residents about the cars now parking on the streets in front of their homes as people came to patronize the businesses.
Wednesday night the entire issue erupted again quite forcefully as a new residential development was proposed in the area of 1300 East 2100 South, near the Dodo Restaurant. Under the city's relaxed parking rules, the new development could count toward its parking requirement up to 9 spaces on adjacent public streets. Residents in the area, however, gave the PC an earful about the difficulties that already exist in the neighborhood because of the overflow parking from the Dodo. How were any more cars going to fit onto those streets, they said, and where were the residents themselves and their guests going to park?
The meeting got somewhat heated as a couple of residents stormed out in mid-discussion, and the planning commission was genuinely conflicted, as it took 4 different motions before the project approval was finally resolved. The commission did instruct the planning staff, however, to come back with presentations and discussion of the city's current parking standards in an effort to try and get some resolution to what has become a very difficult situation. If you'd like to see what occurred at the meeting, click here, click on the July 13 link, and scroll to about the last 45 minutes of the meeting.
As I've talked to some people about what happened at this meeting, I'm generally hearing two trains of thought: first, this is simply what happens as a community is transitioning from one style of development to another. Yes, it is painful for some in this transition as the community transforms and is not fully functional yet for the new style (walkable) that is being sought. Things will get better, but for now its going to be uncomfortable for some.
The second thought I've heard is, see, just goes to show you, our communities in the west are car-oriented and no matter how hard we try, we will never completely wean ourselves off the car culture. Reality suggests that we're trying to pound a square peg into a round hole - accept the fact that a significant portion of the community will always travel by car, and plan accordingly!
Interested in hearing your thoughts out there!
Friday, July 15, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
Are We Planners or Facilitators?
Nice to get things going with some really good comments on the first post! All commentors raised some good stuff (go read 'em), and Matt set things up nicely for one I've wanted to get some feedback on for some time. Take a look at this commentary by Thomas Campanella (it's a bit long, but it'll be good for you!) I am really interested to see your comments on this.
Some interesting quotes from it:
"Thus ensued the well-deserved backlash against superblock urbanism and the authoritarian, we-experts-know-best brand of planning that backed it. And the backlash came, of course, from a bespectacled young journalist named Jane Jacobs. Her 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, much like the paperwork Luther nailed to the Schlosskirche Wittenberg four centuries earlier, sparked a reformation — this time within planning."
"Forced from his lofty perch, the once-mighty planner found himself in a hot and crowded city street. No longer would he twirl a compass above the city like a conductor’s baton, as did the anonymous planner depicted on the 1967 stamp Plan for Better Cities."
"The Jacobsians sought fresh methods of making cities work — from the grassroots and the bottom up. The subaltern was exalted, the master laid low. Drafting tables were tossed for pickets and surveys and spreadsheets. Planners sought new alliances in academe, beyond architecture and design — in political science, law, economics, sociology. But there were problems. First, none of the social sciences were primarily concerned with the city; at best they could be only partial allies. Second, planning was not taken seriously by these fields. The schoolboy crush was not returned, making the relationship unequal from the start. Even today it's rare for a social science department to hire a planning PhD, while planning programs routinely hire academics with doctorates in economics and political science."
"The second legacy of the Jacobsian revolution is related to the first: Privileging the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise meant a loss of professional agency. In rejecting the muscular interventionism of the Burnham-Moses sort, planners in the 1960s identified instead with the victims of urban renewal. New mechanisms were devised to empower ordinary citizens to guide the planning process. This was an extraordinary act of altruism on our part; I can think of no other profession that has done anything like it. Imagine economists at the Federal Reserve holding community meetings to decide the direction of fiscal policy. Imagine public health officials giving equal weight to the nutritional wisdom of teenagers — they are stakeholders, after all! Granted, powering up the grassroots was necessary in the 1970s to stop expressway and renewal schemes that had run amok. But it was power that could not easily be switched off. Tools and processes introduced to ensure popular participation ended up reducing the planner’s role to that of umpire or schoolyard monitor. Instead of setting the terms of debate or charting a course of action, planners now seemed content to be facilitators — "mere absorbers of public opinion," as Alex Krieger put it, "waiting for consensus to build." "
OK, enough teasers. Go read the piece, then let's talk!
Some interesting quotes from it:
"Thus ensued the well-deserved backlash against superblock urbanism and the authoritarian, we-experts-know-best brand of planning that backed it. And the backlash came, of course, from a bespectacled young journalist named Jane Jacobs. Her 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, much like the paperwork Luther nailed to the Schlosskirche Wittenberg four centuries earlier, sparked a reformation — this time within planning."
"Forced from his lofty perch, the once-mighty planner found himself in a hot and crowded city street. No longer would he twirl a compass above the city like a conductor’s baton, as did the anonymous planner depicted on the 1967 stamp Plan for Better Cities."
"The Jacobsians sought fresh methods of making cities work — from the grassroots and the bottom up. The subaltern was exalted, the master laid low. Drafting tables were tossed for pickets and surveys and spreadsheets. Planners sought new alliances in academe, beyond architecture and design — in political science, law, economics, sociology. But there were problems. First, none of the social sciences were primarily concerned with the city; at best they could be only partial allies. Second, planning was not taken seriously by these fields. The schoolboy crush was not returned, making the relationship unequal from the start. Even today it's rare for a social science department to hire a planning PhD, while planning programs routinely hire academics with doctorates in economics and political science."
"The second legacy of the Jacobsian revolution is related to the first: Privileging the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise meant a loss of professional agency. In rejecting the muscular interventionism of the Burnham-Moses sort, planners in the 1960s identified instead with the victims of urban renewal. New mechanisms were devised to empower ordinary citizens to guide the planning process. This was an extraordinary act of altruism on our part; I can think of no other profession that has done anything like it. Imagine economists at the Federal Reserve holding community meetings to decide the direction of fiscal policy. Imagine public health officials giving equal weight to the nutritional wisdom of teenagers — they are stakeholders, after all! Granted, powering up the grassroots was necessary in the 1970s to stop expressway and renewal schemes that had run amok. But it was power that could not easily be switched off. Tools and processes introduced to ensure popular participation ended up reducing the planner’s role to that of umpire or schoolyard monitor. Instead of setting the terms of debate or charting a course of action, planners now seemed content to be facilitators — "mere absorbers of public opinion," as Alex Krieger put it, "waiting for consensus to build." "
OK, enough teasers. Go read the piece, then let's talk!
Friday, July 8, 2011
Do We Really Want that TOD?
OK, time to get this blogging thing off and running again!
Going to start with a short article from Streetsblog.org about how in New York City, with all its emphasis on transit orientation and walking and livability and so on, that even there they have a hard time getting their zoning to actually reflect what their plans are trying to accomplish.
You can read the article here!
A couple of highlights from the story - Indeed, under one representative five-year period of Bloomberg and Burden’s city planning, three-quarters of the lots rezoned for greater density were located within a half-mile of rail transit, but so were two-thirds of the lots where development was further restricted
Why would this happen? Well, here's part of the explanation - Explaining the need for the new restrictions, the department writes on its website that “the residential neighborhoods in the rezoning area have been experiencing development pressure” and that the new rules are needed to “preserve the scale and context of these areas.”
But isn't that the point? When we want an area to change its character, wouldn't that happen most quickly when it is "experiencing development pressure?" Then we can get the new development to be what we want it to be according to the new plan?
I think we have a lot of this very thing going on right here in River City. Everybody talks a big game about how we want new patterns of development, often transit-oriented development. To get that to happen, we need the existing development pattern to change. But - those who live there don't want it to change, and we stay generally with what we've got.
Change is never easy...
Post your comments, let's get some discussion going!
Going to start with a short article from Streetsblog.org about how in New York City, with all its emphasis on transit orientation and walking and livability and so on, that even there they have a hard time getting their zoning to actually reflect what their plans are trying to accomplish.
You can read the article here!
A couple of highlights from the story - Indeed, under one representative five-year period of Bloomberg and Burden’s city planning, three-quarters of the lots rezoned for greater density were located within a half-mile of rail transit, but so were two-thirds of the lots where development was further restricted
Why would this happen? Well, here's part of the explanation - Explaining the need for the new restrictions, the department writes on its website that “the residential neighborhoods in the rezoning area have been experiencing development pressure” and that the new rules are needed to “preserve the scale and context of these areas.”
But isn't that the point? When we want an area to change its character, wouldn't that happen most quickly when it is "experiencing development pressure?" Then we can get the new development to be what we want it to be according to the new plan?
I think we have a lot of this very thing going on right here in River City. Everybody talks a big game about how we want new patterns of development, often transit-oriented development. To get that to happen, we need the existing development pattern to change. But - those who live there don't want it to change, and we stay generally with what we've got.
Change is never easy...
Post your comments, let's get some discussion going!
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