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Sure, but it's functionally the same urban system. Oakland from SF is comparable to Newark from NY (and quicker on BART). The urban core of the Bay Area includes both SF and Oakland/Berkeley. I agree it's not the same thing as the other cities but I think it'd be ridiculous to not count the East Bay as part of the SF urban core. There's no strolling across Boston Harbor either but people instinctively include East Boston and Chelsea in the Boston urban core.
Agreed. I walked across the Charles a few times but I'd never say it was a "stroll"; it was more of a sweaty/frigid mission. That being said, it is possible to walk across the Charles or Hudson and not possible to walk across the Bay Bridge.
Of course those places are connected with decent transit, and it's probably less expensive than a BART ride across the Bay.
In LA, it is difficult to get people to cross the Harbor Freeway into City West from downtown.
I think pedestrian activity is just about the most important factor in determining percieved urbanity, and that makes transit extremely important as well because they're so related. Even an extremely un-urban place like the Las Vegas Strip feels relatively "urban" in a sense because of how crowded the sidewalks are. More often than not density basically aligns with pedestrian activity though, and since there's no statistics for measuring liveliness, i'd say density is the best stand-in we have
In reality, I think that walkable environments tend to attract people from elsewhere because they are so rare in the U.S. So in Adams-Morgan, it's not *just* the people who live there, but also people who come there because the neighborhood is an attraction in and of itself. That's one reason why population density is often not a good gauge for pedestrian intensity.
The one stats that bears more directly on the question, I think, is the # of transit riders and car free households. With density, you have to assume people are walking. If someone doesn't have a car, how the hell else are they getting around?
Of course walkable nabes attract people who don't live there, but the reason they're walkable in the first place is because they're dense. That's just adding on to the affect of density
I do agree density isn't perfect, but it ain't so far off. Transit isn't perfect either (e.g. all the DC Metro riders who just park-and-ride) and car-free households skews towards the poor. If only someone could come up with some sort of fivethirtyeight-esque metric that combines density, transit usage, and maybe a few other things to measure density pure and simple
That said, I think the way a place is built influences this perception more than anything else. I think the level of pedestrian activity is equally important. And I think transit use and accessibility is a big factor as well. For people who don't dig into data at the Census tract level, which is 99.997% of the American population, that's probably what they're looking at.
Should transit count separately? If somehow, there's as many pedestrians in two neighborhoods but out of neighborhood trips are done mostly by car in one and a mix of car and transit in the other, should transit still matter? Or is transit really just a factor that correlates well with pedestrian activity and that's the only reason we're interested in it.
The downside of looking at transit, IMO, is it often reflects the job distribution of the region rather than much local about the neighborhood. On the other hand, the existence of a well-used transit system encourages businesses to be less auto-oriented and maybe makes easier to be a "walking city".
So I ask once again, where does transit fit into the discussion? That's as objective a metric as population density.
The one annoying thing about these threads is that people harp on the strengths of the cities they boost and completely ignore the weaknesses. So each thread becomes RaymondChandlerLives calculating the density of taco stands per acre or MDAllStar taking about the square footage of Class A commercial space DC has in the pipeline.
Central Los Angeles is on par with Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia density-wise, but it loses against these cities on transit/walking rates. So I don't see any objective way to rank it above these cities. There's Walkscore, but that doesn't tell us much about actual behavior whereas the Census stats on commuting and car ownership do (even if they are limited).
So the real battle royale comes down to LA and DC. L.A. is denser by a significant margin. But it also has fewer transit riders, walk commuters and bikers than DC by a healthy margin, and has a significantly higher SOV commuting share. It also has a much smaller CBD that's not nearly anywhere as transit-oriented as DC's. Yet nobody's really bothering to weigh the relative strengths and weakness of these places. It's simply "more people equals more urban."
It's an interesting matchup because L.A. is an underperfomer of sorts on more objective metrics. It has neighborhoods that are as dense as Ft. Greene, Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights but function nothing like these neighborhoods. DC, on the flipside, is nowhere as dense as Brooklyn, but has non-auto commuting and car ownership rates that aren't far off from Brooklyn's. It punches above its weight.
Yes, because your education has taught you that when someone highlights something, they are really deemphasizing it.
I was responding to the poster JMBX who didn't know how many units D.C. delivered the last year. You're something else, but you already know that I'm sure.
We know, we saw that post. No one's saying it isn't true, just that individual statistics don't on their own put one city above another, given that you can find statistics that put each of the second-tier cities above the other five
Sure, but it's functionally the same urban system. Oakland from SF is comparable to Newark from NY (and quicker on BART). The urban core of the Bay Area includes both SF and Oakland/Berkeley. I agree it's not the same thing as the other cities but I think it'd be ridiculous to not count the East Bay as part of the SF urban core. There's no strolling across Boston Harbor either but people instinctively include East Boston and Chelsea in the Boston urban core.
I would agree Oakland/Berkeley are "functionally the same urban system" as SF but disagree that they're "part of the SF urban core".
Newark is 8 miles from Times Square; Oakland is 10 miles from Market Street. Berkeley is further still.
And the NYC area is obviously vastly bigger and more urban, so relative distances aren't the same. You can get more urbanity 15 miles out in Paterson or Passaic than you get walking distance to downtown SF. 10 miles from downtown SF is more or less the equivalent of 25 miles from core Manhattan, adjusting for size and urbanity.
No one in NYC would say that Newark is an extension of Manhattan or an extension of the regional core. Adjacent areas of Brooklyn, Queens, and waterfront Jersey, perhaps, but not Newark. Similarly, no one in Boston would say that Everett or Quincy are extensions of downtown, but Cambridge, possibly yes. In DC, no one would say Bethesda is in the regional core, but Arlington, maybe. I don't see how Oakland/Berkeley could reasonably be seen as a natural extension of downtown SF.
^^^That's why I think wealth is an important metric. If you have wealthy people in a high density area with strong walk/transit stats, that takes the ballgame out of the "poor court". And if you have census tracts that aren't extremely affluent, but are obviously filled with people making 6 figures (not necessarily millionaires living in doormen buildings, but young professionals living in decent apartments and filling tables at good restaurants), then you can assume they are choosing to ride/walk, and the poor argument goes out the door.
However, that's complicated by parking costs, which go up dramatically in very structurally dense areas. LA's density on paper is high, but it doesn't have that structural density that makes providing parking so difficult. Its neighbor to the north has parking spots that sell for 6 figures, easy, and rent even miles and miles outside of the core for $300+/mo. Whereas I believe in LA the situation is a bit different. In the so-called Top 5 cities and even DC, so many young professionals are actually priced out of parking/owning a car with the choice between expensive rental in a better location or having a car. In LA, it's never really a choice - do you want a decent apartment or to have a car? It's a combo deal.
Lots of variables when it comes to urbanity. I always look at size and prominence of city/region, too. Something to be said for "punching above or below weight". That's why cities like NOLA and Charleston impress me. Cities like LA have grown on me, but for me it's not about the "urbanity" in LA, it's about the lifestyle I want that you can't get anywhere else (like in WeHo, or Venice, or Malibu). In many ways, I think LA is like Jacksonville FL, which will *always* have a hard time redeveloping its urban core when it competes with its own beach communities. People don't move to Jacksonville FL (much at all) for urban living/downtown, they move for a whole bunch of reasons, and people young and old want to live as close to the beach as possible. Thus, the southside of that town is really the epicenter, like the westside is for LA.
Of course walkable nabes attract people who don't live there, but the reason they're walkable in the first place is because they're dense. That's just adding on to the affect of density
Population density and highly walkable aren't the same thing. Georgetown is not very dense from a population standpoint, but it is a highly walkable urban environment, and people come from all over the region to walk around there. Its population density is not suggestive of the actual pedestrian volume one observes there.
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I do agree density isn't perfect, but it ain't so far off. Transit isn't perfect either (e.g. all the DC Metro riders who just park-and-ride) and car-free households skews towards the poor. If only someone could come up with some sort of fivethirtyeight-esque metric that combines density, transit usage, and maybe a few other things to measure density pure and simple
But DC residents aren't parking and riding. You should go back and look at the transit/walk/bike rates I put together for Columbia Heights, Koreatown and Bed-Stuy.
We know, we saw that post. No one's saying it isn't true, just that individual statistics don't on their own put one city above another, given that you can find statistics that put each of the second-tier cities above the other five
The reality of this thread is nobody has defined urbanity. That's the biggest problem with these threads on city-data.com. The definition that should be used to rank cities based on urbanity needs to be clearly stated in the beginning of the thread so people don't waste their time looking at hundreds of thread posts going in circles.
L.A. posters are arguing urbanity is based solely on population density which can't even be seen by the naked eye walking on the street.
Most Philly, DC, Boston, Chicago, SF, and Seattle posters are arguing that population density, structural density, and transit share are the deciding factors.
The reality is that:
-you don't even need transit to be urban. Cities have been extremely urban for 1,000's of years and have managed to function.
-most cities are a product of the commodity they were trying to promote be it walking or driving.
-transit is something that came along with the modernization of cities to move workers more efficiently.
Having said all of that, the only true measure of urbanity is in the built form because buildings come before people arrive. Buildings are built for people to use. Concepts for buildings are conceived with people in mind to allow them to work or live in a space that meets their needs. A building is considered urban before the first person arrives.
Everything else is qualified after that. If you don't even begin with the base of having an urban space with best practices in urban design, you don't even have a seat at the table to discuss urban form. After an urban form is established, then factors such as the use of the space and vibrancy on the street factor in.
Last edited by MDAllstar; 06-26-2015 at 11:42 AM..
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