April 25, 2008

‘Pedestrians will be given priority over parking spaces’

"Pedestrians will be given priority over parking spaces as part of a facelift for Praia do Carvoeiro," starts a newspaper report on renovation plans for a village in Portugal.

"We want to make this an area of beauty for people and not cars," a spokesman for the area told The Online Resident. Adds the article:
"Parking spaces next to the square and beach are to be removed to make the entire area more pleasant for residents and visitors to walk about."

Do you know of  many American towns where traffic flow and parking don't take priority in planning discussions over streetscape aesthetics? And pedestrian appeal suffers.

One way to gauge whether a place has aesthetic appeal for people, as opposed to cars alone, is simply to see whether a lot of people are out walking around. If a place is walkable - it feels safe, attractive and inviting - and the weather's good, people should be out. If they're not, something's wrong.

Former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist has been credited with another simple method: the "Postcard Test." Would people want to buy a postcard of a neighborhood scene?

By the way, here's an overview picture of Praia do Carvoeiro. However, you don't need stunning oceanfront to pass the postcard test, as places like Concord, Mass. clearly demonstrate.

April 22, 2008

Cheap energy, and community

Cheap energy has had a profound impact on our communities, and I'm not talking about pollution/greenhouse/Earth Day issues. As many (including me) have written, designing our communities around the automobile has led to the pedestrian-hostile streetscapes that give us Rte. 9 aesthetic urban blight, and the need to drive our cars less than half a mile from one strip mall to another, because the walking environment is so unpleasant and unsafe. However, an article in yesterday's New York Times magazine notes that cheap energy has had other effects on our sense of community:

Now, I don't want to go back to the days when all we were able to buy or use came from within a day's horse and carriage ride away. But author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) makes an interesting point. It is cheap energy that allows us to buy food grown in South America and toys/electronics/clothing made in China, more affordable than if they were grown or manufactured close to home; just as it's cheap energy that's encouraged suburban sprawl by making housing more affordable 30, 40, 50 or more miles from urban job centers.

What can we do about it?

Plant gardens and grow some of our own food, Pollan urges! Sound like a small, inconsequential response? He argues passionately that "it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind. . . . You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support."

There's nothing quite like the sense of satisfaction I get picking our home-grown tomatoes and basil for a summer salad, even if I've got to add slices of Vermont-produced cheese and a drizzle of Spanish olive oil to the plate. Not to mention, little matches the incredible sweet, juicy taste of a tomato picked fresh from the vine. It's a completely different foodstuff from that which has been been transported thousands of miles out of season.

Being outside in the garden on a daily basis, I also see my neighbors, I notice my local environment, and I feel more connected with my neighborhood. Much moreso than if I get in the car and drive to my local super Stop & Shop, even if I run into my neighbors there.

April 4, 2008

Suburban New York vs Boston Rail Service: Ours is worse in every way

My parents live 3 miles farther away from Manhattan's Penn Station than I do from Boston's South Station, so comparing commuter rail service from each home is a reasonable endeavor. Of course, New York is a much larger city, so suburbs there are more densely populated 20 miles out than they are here. So, I expect that trains run more frequently on Long Island, especially off peak  (33% more into the city between 9 am and 5 pm). And, that stations are more convenient to more people on Long Island than they are here (by the time I drive the 6 miles south to get to the Framingham commuter rail station, I could be close to one-third of the way into Boston if I headed east instead.)

However, I do expect it to take a shorter amount of time to get from Framingham to Boston by rail than it would to travel the longer distance between my parents' home and New York City, especially since they need more stations to serve a more densely populated area. Yet it's just a 40-minute trip on Long Island, while most trains on the Framingham line are slated at just under an hour (56 minutes).

In other words: It usually takes about 50% longer to travel a shorter distance by commuter rail in Boston's western suburbs than on Long Island.