New Features

Google News is integrated into the blog now. If you click on a topic down on the bottom right it will give you the headlines for it. Pretty cool huh?

Tampa Close to Space Race Entrance

The mayor has pledged her second term to transit. Let's hope it doesn't turn into BRT. More from David Pinero.

Crashing Hard Drives

In case folks were wondering why no updates, my laptop died. It's still dead so until it is resurrected there will be limited posting.

Tram Blogging

Malvern #5 in Melbourne. Looks like a Siemens Combino but shorter than the Budapest versions.

What We Should Really Learn From Curitiba

The Candyland blog reminded me why Curitiba has been able to do what people go down there to see. What they see is shiny red buses as a low cost option to real rapid transit. That's also what they bring back to the United States after the trip shows them how great the buses are. But there is a bigger lesson they aren't learning from Curitiba. Starting in 1964 with a military coup, they radically planned for growth management of their city. This included intensive land use planning and a similar idea to our smart growth movement for curbing sprawl. Jamie Lerner, the mastermind behind Curitiba's revitalization was essentially the Brazilian Jane Jacobs and the ideas behind Curitiba would make road warriors and libertarians sulk.

(translated from Portuguese) the managing idea of the project was the creation of a composed infrastructure for a zone of great concentration of activities and of raised habitational density. The concentration of the urban activities had as purpose to revitalize(sic) “the street”, considering it with a primordial function of the life of the community. The proposals for the Structural Axles of Curitiba keep some similarities with this project.

This project in France of Jaime Lerner would show up in Curitiba as the corridors project. In keeping with the allowance of densification in downtown, there needed to be a new place to grow. It would be decided that this would occur on corridors and tie the transport together with the land use.

The same attitude demonstrated in these projects of architecture, with emphasis in the distribution of spaces and its relations with the structure and infrastructure of the buildings, if transposed for urbanism, in the interrelation between zoning and system of collective transport....The main quarrel of the Preliminary Plan was which proposal of growth would have to be adjusted for the future of Curitiba. The idea of city delimited for a green cinturão, seemed impracticable ahead of the possibility of a indeterminate growth. The orientation of development from linear axles, in contraposition to the concentrical city of the Agache Plan, seemed most adequate

Given the ability of cities to extend indefinitely, the corridor system would address this issue allowing corridors to grow up while not sprawling. In 1971 Jaime Lerner became mayor of the city. Trained as an architect and with the help of a dictatorship, he was able to impose his vision on the people for better or worse. After over 40 years of planning, Curitiba is what it is, it's what would happen if an architect and smart growther took over a city. But folks should not come back from that city just thinking, "what a cheap bus, lets do it here". They should be repeating the three premises of the Curitiba plan: use of the ground, collective transport and circulation. And in the United States, you might as well build rail, because that is what developers write checks for and building a busway to Curitiba standards costs the same as rail.

Charlotte News

So the knuckle draggers in Charlotte are fighting (i should say tricking) their way into a referendum on the half cent sales tax. As i have said before, this has serious implications for the space race as well as Charlotte's ability to be a city that attracts high quality work talent. The reason being is that these folks don't understand what this means for the buses. This isn't a light rail issue, this is a public transit issue. It's a fight against people who think that oil is forever, wars are good and creating auto dependent sprawl is the free market at work which we all know is false. Hopefully it will be upheld, right now it looks good, but you never know what kind of lies they'll spread.

The Success of the Hiawatha Line Has Consequences

The Space Race is on and in Minneapolis different parts of the region are expecting more now that the Hiawatha line has proved the success of Light Rail. With planning for the Central Corridor underway and funding secured for the North Star Commuter rail, the first parts of the planning process have started for the Southwest Corridor. But the Northwest doesn't really like that and they want to be treated like everyone else. This is why they've forgone the BRT option and begun to study streetcar and light rail. Not only that, a massive streetcar plan is in the works to replace the heaviest bus lines and spur development. This is why I love following the space race. With only one successful line, the region is quickly planning for an upgrade that will match that of the best transit cities. I hope to see this come to fruition.

Misconceptions of Smart Growth, New Urbanism and TOD

I would consider myself a New Urbanist and a Smart Growth advocate but I'm not sure that i would characterize it as wanting people to live on top of each other or even communism as some have so put it. Just like with rail transit versus the automobile, people like to have choices. And given that the vast majority of new construction are single family homes, this doesn't match up with consumer choices. The reason we know this is because this condo boom is always reviled as a rich boom. There is a huge demand and people will pay premiums to live in urban settings over suburban ones. Building neighborhoods is something that was forgotten between the era of streetcar suburbs and today.

What the New Urbanists are trying to do is bring that neighborhood structure back. You might hate the modernest architecture and the silly color schemes but that isn't what New Urbanism is all about (although its a hot type right now and all builders will want to claim new urbanism in their projects). A lot of projects are on greenfields where people have their own yards and the ability to walk in their neighborhood with interconnected streets and connections to transit. The projects you hear about are the infill projects where developers are fighting to make building density and mixed use legal again since it has been outlawed in many cities by post war zoning codes. That causes quite a rile in newspapers and media but doesn't tell the larger story of the movement.

In New Urbanism there is a strategy for design called the transect. It talks about the densities that should be employed from center city to the rural. You'll rarely see anything but single family homes in the T1 or T2 settings(The transect goes from T1 which is the most rural to the T6 which is New York City type density). So while many might think that New Urbanists and Smart Growth types are all about shoving density down your throats, its really all a misconception of how the movement operates and how it values neighborhood design that goes back to the streetcar suburbs that had grid street patterns and good transit options. If more people had the choice of walking, biking or taking transit we would have less of an issue with peak oil or oil at all.

Seattle Streetcars

I'm not sure how i missed this but Seattle has been having workshops on future streetcar networks in the city. There are some good suggestions. Check it out here.

The Forbidden Railyard

Telstar Logistics has an excellent post about some streetcars that have been stored in the woods of Tahoe. Great Pictures too. Check it out.