"Urban street grids are more resilient than road systems focused around large highways, because of how they're laid out.
The great thing about interconnected grids is that if one street becomes blocked, there's another perfectly good street one block over. And another one block down. If a wrecked car or fallen tree or whatever blocks the street you're on, you just take a different street. There might be some additional turns involved; it might not be quite as direct. But for the most part 28th Street isn't all the different from 29th Street.
Contrast that with suburban-style systems where all traffic in a particular area funnels onto one big highway. If that one highway becomes impassible, everyone in the area is stuck. Or, at best, they have to drive miles out of their way to find the next big highway."
Amazingly, our "expert" engineers and central planners have spent the last 70 years replacing, naturally rational and resilient street grids with designs prone to massive failure.
That's part of what happened last night. There were a lot of accidents crashes. If they happened on arterial highways with no parallel roads, which a lot of them did, that road would succumb to gridlock.
I apologize for another post not directly related to Pittsburgh, that I think brings up some relevant urban issues.
As many know, I am from NYC and have some knowledge of one of the areas hardest hit by Sandy. My sister, her husband and now my nephew all worked as lifeguards on the same beach in Far Rockaway for many years. For public school teachers this fit in as a fun summer gig. I haven't been there in many years. It's not the most attractive place, dominated by large public housing projects isolated on a long stretch of beach. Far Rockaway, is not just slightly far away from almost anywhere, else in the city- it's really, really far away. Yes, there is a subway, which in theory could take one into Manhattan if one has a spare hour and a half to two hours- if it's running well.
To break the suspense- I always wondered why someone thought concentrating large numbers of poor on a barrier island, exposed to storms, so far a way from jobs, shopping or social opportunities was a good idea.
Blessed with the Atlantic Ocean to the south and Jamaica Bay to the north, the Rockaways became a popular resort area of elegant hotels and fine houses in the 1830s. The coming of the railroad in the 1880s encouraged more intensive development, including playlands, amusement parks and a few apartment buildings. Attractive beachfront communities were developed, such as Belle Harbor, Neponsit, and Arverne. The opening of the Cross Bay Bridge in 1925 and the Marine Parkway Bridge in 1937 made the Rockaways convenient for middle- and working-class households, who bought the bungalows, frequently distributing themselves according to ethnic heritage.
Later, a series of factors related to falling incomes during the depression and the area's long distance from the city sent the Rockaways into decline.
Officials in the Wagner and Lindsay administrations found what they regarded as an answer to decline: build large public housing projects along the gorgeous beach. Today, the old towns of Arverne and Edgemere have some of the highest concentrations of public housing—and crime and unemployment—in New York. The city also used federal and state financing to support the development of dozens of nursing homes.
Um, That's right- city officials thought an isolated island might be a great place to warehouse not just the poor, but also the infirm, elderly.
These days, almost no one regards the Wagner or Lindsay land-use planning decisions favorably. District manager Gaska, for example, calls the Rockaways the Siberia of city government. "For five decades, the city and state governments dumped their problems here," he says. "If you were a problem tenant in public housing, NYCHA sent you here. If you didn't have a job and weren't going to get one, then this was the place for you. When the state government started closing their hospitals, they began placing those with mental disabilities here, but without any services. The Rockaways now has 50 percent of the borough's adult-facility beds. The state just keeps approving new facilities via their sham community approval process. They send us what's called a 60-day letter, telling us they're going to approve a new facility. We say no, and they say, 'Thank you for your opinion; we're going to open it anyway.' One result was that, according to the 1990 Census, one-third of our population was on public assistance.
Yes. and the mentally disabled too- far away from any support system.
What happened seems to have been a cycle, in which any project or population that was unwanted in the rest of Queens was dumped on this secluded stretch of land, few people cared about.
No great shock that big problems developed.
That's on a good day but add a a big Atlantic storm or hurricane and one has the potential for a massive tragedy.
Now the only subway line into Rockaway may be down for months and ocean water has seriously damaged power lines.
While I don't expect government to provide instant perfect responses to all disasters, I wish they would stop creating bad situations like they did in The Rockaways. It's one thing to not help people and another to forcibly create communities in which it's hard for people to help themselves.
Update: As of this posting, most people in Far Rockaway have gone 10 days without power, heat, subway service and other basic needs. Another storm is bearing down on the area.
This video I found on Streetsblog New York about kids who are working together to create a "Bike Bus" to ride safely to High School in Orlando is both moving and sad.
A recent study called "Dangerous By Design", ranked American City's risk level to pedestrians, runners and cyclists. Orlando Wins!
"a recent AARP poll of adults 50 years and older found that 40% reported inadequate sidewalks in their neighborhoods and nearly half of respondents reported that they could not safely cross the main roads close to their home."
The words "by design", tells the story. It took trillions in American city, state and local tax dollars as well as an untold number of eminent domain enabled land grabs, parking mandates, zoning laws and building codes to create the world we have today.
I also have a theory these same policies have helped make the city of Pittsburgh, Insolvent by Design. I'll get back to that later.
Hi, it's John. Many of you might have been wondering about the turn my posts have taken over the past month which since I'm the most active poster, have shifted the direction of the blog.
I have only so much time I'm refocusing my energies on the areas where I think I might be most helpful.
When the blog started there were far fewer blogs and online resources, no blogs giving art announcements or reviews, few blogs about things to do; almost no coverage of grass roots organizations and galleries and virtually no connections or interactions with the wider world outside Pittsburgh.
It's far from perfect, but more of these holes are being filled, making what I'm doing somewhat redundant. I think more and more people are increasingly aware of the many small things that make the city great.
However, in spite of what should be the obvious facts, far too people are thinking about what may be going wrong, that may threaten what's left of our social and economic fabric. You don't have to travel far around the Rust Belt to see how far we can still fall.
I know there's a lot of of optimism out there about the new administration, most of which I don't share. Partly, I'm more than a little concerned about our ability to pay for ambitious new projects and partly aware of how badly misguided previous government efforts, like the national highway system have been.
Anyway, since Obama is from an urban center, a lot of folks are hoping that this round of capital investments is spent wisely. Streetsblog is working to better link bloggers with interests in cities, urban planning, pedestrian issues and transit through it's new Streetsblog network.
Streetsblog Network (streetsblog.net) brings together more than 100 blogs from 31 states — and counting. Its purpose is twofold: to create a place where people who blog on smart growth, livable streets and sustainable transportation issues can come together and learn from each other. And to provide a clearinghouse for information related to the transportation bill, or "TEA," that directs the spending of hundreds of billions of federal dollars. The next such bill is set to come up for reauthorization in 2009.
From yesterday's USA Today (article by Rick Hampson): "Once, this was a city of browns and grays. Railroads owned a third of the land, and trains rumbled night and day to the cacophonous riverfront. Factories belched fumes and leaked chemicals. 'Nobody cared,' says Bob Leach, born here in 1937. 'Smoke meant jobs.'
"And those were the good years. Then, in the 1960s, the railroads went broke. Rail yards were abandoned, piers rotted, factories closed. In the 1970s alone, the city lost 14% of its population and about 9% of its jobs.
"Now Jersey City has come back as its own antithesis: clean, green and growing ....
"Once written off by the rest of the nation as another Rust Belt failure, Jersey City is now seen as instructional."
Our friend Jason was in town from Flint, MI this past weekend, so we brought him by the Digging Pitt to meet John and have a New York diaspora powwow. Here's John, Jason, and Tom passionately discussing downtown Brooklyn and Stuyvesant Town in terms of Jane Jacobs, Le Corbusier, and Frank Gehry.
My recent posts, posts, posts, on Detroit seem important on some deep level I cant explain fully. Pittsburgh and Detroit seem to have huge amount in common. It's not just that they were industrial cities; they were the birth places of huge industries and had built there identities so completly around them that they were the global symbols of those industries. No doubt the size of the industrial complexes made them look like permanent and unmoveable forces that could not be changed. Perhaps, unwisely people built thier lives as if they could not be moved or at least never killed.
Every city is the interaction between a real place and a mythology that people build around it and with these two places the interaction is traumatic. I think that my memories of NY in the late 70's were facing that interaction. On the one hand, you knew that NY was like the greatest city in the world and yet the day to day facts showed you it wasn't that great. But, what happened to places like Pittsburgh and even more so Detroit has to be on a totally different level. New York, somehow found it's greatness again ( to a large extent imigrants came who believed in it ) and for the most part, it never really faced becoming irrelavant. But, both Pittsburgh and Detroit have faced becoming footnotes or even in the case of Detroit epic symbols of America gone wrong.
The other major thing that links the cities is their huge diasporas. So anyway, I am hoping to here from some people in Detroit and people from Detroit and perhaps involve them in my diaspora project. I am particularly interested in hooking up with artist's from Detroit and those that live there now. Please pass this post along. I still am very much looking to develop build my links to the Pittsburgh diaspora.
The Pittsburgh City Paper, found my published my drunk driving challenge piece complete with mispellings and typos. I am somewhat serious about what I wrote and do think the city would be a great place for some kind of suicidal road or bike race. It works for France.
It is funny how, the same nanny state morons who want to dictate all kinds of tiny details in building design and zoning leave little things like transportation out of their thinking. If you have a bar or bunch of bars or night clubs in an area with very few residents around it and no transit link- you must think it's OK to drink and drive. Do you think that all the guys in the bars around the stadiums have designated drivers?
Being an urban planner means never having to say you are sorry, I guess. You just make the map and none of the blood that ends up on it is your fault.
I know this is a highly competitive position but this is an open call competition. In the comments below feel free to nominate your city or town. I do think Pittsburgh's amazingly poor urban layout, insane hills and hard drinking culture mean that we can win this one. The plans for the casino are likely to seal the deal. Drop a casino and all the needed parking right on the lower hill to eliminate any chance of having a residential area there. Right next to a sports stadium.
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