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San Francisco. Isn't Chicago more built on subways than streetcars? I thought LA had such an extensive streetcar network at the time to accommodate the low density.
Accommodate low density or a lack of private automobiles? The first suburbs did come about with streetcar lines, but all of this happened back when few people owned cars. Today streetcars, buses and subways cannot survive in a low density setting for the simple fact that personal cars that made the modern suburb possible deprive mass transit systems of customers. I have read that you need a density of at least 7 households per acre to make any kind of mass-transit system profitable. This means you need 4480 households per square mile to have mass-transit. A typical U.S. household has something like 2.6 people so you need a population density of 11,648 people per square mile to support mass-transit.
I didn't notice many parking lots or garages in San Francisco. Isn't Chicago more built on subways than streetcars? I thought LA had such an extensive streetcar network at the time to accommodate the low density. I wonder what the population density of those neighborhoods were back then.
Maybe less in San Francisco than other cities, but there are parking structures and parking lots in San Francisco, wedged in with everything else--in some cases, old buildings were hollowed out and turned into parking structures.
About Los Angeles: I should clarify the difference between streetcars and interurbans. Streetcars are short-distance vehicles that operate mostly on city streets, moving people within neighborhoods in a city. Interurbans are larger, faster medium-distance vehicles that can operate on city streets but mostly run between cities on private right-of-way. They generally had restrooms, some had dining and parlor cars and one interurban even offered sleeper service.
The Los Angeles region had two systems, both owned by the same guy, Henry Huntington: the Los Angeles Railway (LARY) and Pacific Electric (PE.) LARY was a streetcar line, running on narrow 3'6" gauge tracks (it was originally a cable-car line, cable cars use 3'6" gauge.) LARY ran within the city limits, serving the dense inner neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
PE was an interurban, running on standard gauge tracks, whose trains ran from Santa Monica to San Bernardino, radiating from the central hub in downtown Los Angeles. PE also ran express and freight trains, in addition to passenger traffic.
Streetcars allow more "sprawl" than pre-streetcar walking cities, but sprawl is a matter of degree. Pre-streetcar American cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York were spectacularly dense, at a level that we don't even see in those cities today, because the only people who didn't walk to work were those wealthy enough to afford a house in the country, horses and carriage, and a driver to drive them.
Horse-drawn streetcars move passengers at 3-5 miles an hour, allowing the kind of development you see in Boston's inner suburbs--multi-story row houses, closely set. Steam dummies and cable cars could run at 10 mph, doubling or tripling the distance one could travel in the same time, allowing development to spread out a bit more into the tall, narrow Italianate, Gothic and Stick row houses one sees in mid-19th century cities. Electric streetcars can travel at 20-30 MPH, letting homes spread out a bit more. Home styles became a bit boxier, in the form of Colonial and Classical Revival styles and the classic foursquare, and there is now enough room between homes for some trees and landscaping, following "Garden City" and "City Beautiful" fashions. After 1900, interurbans could zip between cities at 60-70 miles per hour. And home styles changed too: Prairie and Craftsman (and in the west, desert-inspired Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival)homes grew broader, 1 or 1-1/2 stories, with more emphasis on landscape design and open space. Many of these lots even had enough room for a driveway, porte-cochere or garage for the new toy of the middle class, the automobile.
Streetcar and inteurban lines in a downtown core typically ran on multiple parallel grids, but as they headed out into the suburbs, the lines ran outward like spokes on a wheel. Close to the core, the spokes are close together, but as you get farther out, the spokes are farther apart. The land between those "spokes," farther than a quarter-mile or so from the car line, are cheaper because of the inconvenience. But if the streets are paved (and the "good roads" movement and federal policy made this more and more common) you can buy that cheap lot, build a house, and have enough left over for an automobile! You can then drive your Tin Lizzy past your neighbor waiting for the streetcar on your way to work.
It's a complex series of events that led to the demise of streetcar systems: part was consumer choice, part was public opposition to private transportation companies, part was public subsidy for paved roads, part was outright conspiratorial efforts to put streetcars out of business. But we end up in a mostly post-streetcar world after the Depression and World War II.
After the war, the automobile allows untold levels of horizontality. Even the Craftsman bungalow is too crowded in--the new style is the profoundly horizontal ranch house, the Cape Cod, the neo-Colonial split-level. Instead of narrow, deep lots and small front yards that allow maximum numbers of houses with street frontage, these houses have breadth, with big front and back yards, with driveways and garages that don't just accommodate the automobile but showcase and pamper them.
In each case, architecture and urban form is driven by the mode of transportation. I only covered residential architecture for the sake of simplicity, but the same physical relationships can be shown for workplaces, commercial spaces, and public space.
About Chicago: They had streetcars before they had subways, and remember the El! Elevated railways generally started out as steam railroads. But remember that Chicago, like Los Angeles, is not just its dense downtown but the greater "Chicagoland" of railroad suburbs: clusters of little villages that all have their downtown centered around the old steam railroad commuter lines (now served by Metra.) They all have a little downtown station, a main street that faces the railroad with a frontage road, other main streets that run tangent to the railroad line, and residential neighborhoods within an easy walk of the line. Like Los Angeles, when paved roads and the automobile came along, the space between the "spokes" filled up with auto-centric suburbs.
Maybe less in San Francisco than other cities, but there are parking structures and parking lots in San Francisco, wedged in with everything else--in some cases, old buildings were hollowed out and turned into parking structures.
About Los Angeles: I should clarify the difference between streetcars and interurbans. Streetcars are short-distance vehicles that operate mostly on city streets, moving people within neighborhoods in a city. Interurbans are larger, faster medium-distance vehicles that can operate on city streets but mostly run between cities on private right-of-way. They generally had restrooms, some had dining and parlor cars and one interurban even offered sleeper service.
The Los Angeles region had two systems, both owned by the same guy, Henry Huntington: the Los Angeles Railway (LARY) and Pacific Electric (PE.) LARY was a streetcar line, running on narrow 3'6" gauge tracks (it was originally a cable-car line, cable cars use 3'6" gauge.) LARY ran within the city limits, serving the dense inner neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
PE was an interurban, running on standard gauge tracks, whose trains ran from Santa Monica to San Bernardino, radiating from the central hub in downtown Los Angeles. PE also ran express and freight trains, in addition to passenger traffic.
Streetcars allow more "sprawl" than pre-streetcar walking cities, but sprawl is a matter of degree. Pre-streetcar American cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York were spectacularly dense, at a level that we don't even see in those cities today, because the only people who didn't walk to work were those wealthy enough to afford a house in the country, horses and carriage, and a driver to drive them.
Horse-drawn streetcars move passengers at 3-5 miles an hour, allowing the kind of development you see in Boston's inner suburbs--multi-story row houses, closely set. Steam dummies and cable cars could run at 10 mph, doubling or tripling the distance one could travel in the same time, allowing development to spread out a bit more into the tall, narrow Italianate, Gothic and Stick row houses one sees in mid-19th century cities. Electric streetcars can travel at 20-30 MPH, letting homes spread out a bit more. Home styles became a bit boxier, in the form of Colonial and Classical Revival styles and the classic foursquare, and there is now enough room between homes for some trees and landscaping, following "Garden City" and "City Beautiful" fashions. After 1900, interurbans could zip between cities at 60-70 miles per hour. And home styles changed too: Prairie and Craftsman (and in the west, desert-inspired Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival)homes grew broader, 1 or 1-1/2 stories, with more emphasis on landscape design and open space. Many of these lots even had enough room for a driveway, porte-cochere or garage for the new toy of the middle class, the automobile.
Streetcar and inteurban lines in a downtown core typically ran on multiple parallel grids, but as they headed out into the suburbs, the lines ran outward like spokes on a wheel. Close to the core, the spokes are close together, but as you get farther out, the spokes are farther apart. The land between those "spokes," farther than a quarter-mile or so from the car line, are cheaper because of the inconvenience. But if the streets are paved (and the "good roads" movement and federal policy made this more and more common) you can buy that cheap lot, build a house, and have enough left over for an automobile! You can then drive your Tin Lizzy past your neighbor waiting for the streetcar on your way to work.
It's a complex series of events that led to the demise of streetcar systems: part was consumer choice, part was public opposition to private transportation companies, part was public subsidy for paved roads, part was outright conspiratorial efforts to put streetcars out of business. But we end up in a mostly post-streetcar world after the Depression and World War II.
After the war, the automobile allows untold levels of horizontality. Even the Craftsman bungalow is too crowded in--the new style is the profoundly horizontal ranch house, the Cape Cod, the neo-Colonial split-level. Instead of narrow, deep lots and small front yards that allow maximum numbers of houses with street frontage, these houses have breadth, with big front and back yards, with driveways and garages that don't just accommodate the automobile but showcase and pamper them.
In each case, architecture and urban form is driven by the mode of transportation. I only covered residential architecture for the sake of simplicity, but the same physical relationships can be shown for workplaces, commercial spaces, and public space.
About Chicago: They had streetcars before they had subways, and remember the El! Elevated railways generally started out as steam railroads. But remember that Chicago, like Los Angeles, is not just its dense downtown but the greater "Chicagoland" of railroad suburbs: clusters of little villages that all have their downtown centered around the old steam railroad commuter lines (now served by Metra.) They all have a little downtown station, a main street that faces the railroad with a frontage road, other main streets that run tangent to the railroad line, and residential neighborhoods within an easy walk of the line. Like Los Angeles, when paved roads and the automobile came along, the space between the "spokes" filled up with auto-centric suburbs.
Is it possible to reverse the damage that was done to some cities in this country by implementing walkable urban fabric such as making bike lanes more available, widening sidewalks, and of course better PT? I remember seeing a program on PBS (I forget what city but I think it was Zurich) where this city in Europe had major traffic issues on this one particular street and so the city planners decided to make the most congested stretch closed to auto's and instead made it a pedestrian and bike only street; anyways people thought this would create a traffic nightmare but instead it made traffic flow easier.
Is it possible to reverse the damage that was done to some cities in this country by implementing walkable urban fabric such as making bike lanes more available, widening sidewalks, and of course better PT? I remember seeing a program on PBS (I forget what city but I think it was Zurich) where this city in Europe had major traffic issues on this one particular street and so the city planners decided to make the most congested stretch closed to auto's and instead made it a pedestrian and bike only street; anyways people thought this would create a traffic nightmare but instead it made traffic flow easier.
Of course it is. There are two routes we can take to ease traffic congestion. One option is expanding the roads, which requires a lot of very expensive infrastructure, acquiring (often by eminent domain) and demolishing buildings to make room for roads and street parking, and making it harder for pedestrians to walk near roadways. This is kind of like deciding that you're going to go on a diet, but instead of eating less, you just buy bigger clothes. The problem with this solution is that traffic will continue to increase under these conditions--making driving easier promotes more horizontal development. It also rips at the fabric of cities, makes life harder for anyone who can't (or just doesn't want to) drive, and makes air quality worse (apparently even if cars get more efficient.)
The other option is to make the same places easier to walk, or to bike, and to divert some of those public funds to transit. If you make those other options more attractive and more practical, more people use them, which means fewer people in cars on the road in the first place. This is a benefit for drivers on the roads, because it reduces the number of other drivers. This is how dieting actually works: reduce your calorie intake, and you lose weight. Put your roads on a diet, and they'll get slimmer and healthier.
Of course, this is a bit of an oversimplification: it ties in to mixed-use neighborhoods (which means doing away with single-use zoning) and encouraging re-localization and connection of transit planning with land use (to discourage the need for lots of long-distance commuting.) It means at least making provision for those who would like (or wouldn't mind) living without a car. But it does not mean banning cars, or no longer subsidizing roads, especially in rural places. It means making cars and roads part of a bigger transportation network, not its dominant foundation.
Of course it is. There are two routes we can take to ease traffic congestion. One option is expanding the roads, which requires a lot of very expensive infrastructure, acquiring (often by eminent domain) and demolishing buildings to make room for roads and street parking, and making it harder for pedestrians to walk near roadways. This is kind of like deciding that you're going to go on a diet, but instead of eating less, you just buy bigger clothes. The problem with this solution is that traffic will continue to increase under these conditions--making driving easier promotes more horizontal development. It also rips at the fabric of cities, makes life harder for anyone who can't (or just doesn't want to) drive, and makes air quality worse (apparently even if cars get more efficient.)
The other option is to make the same places easier to walk, or to bike, and to divert some of those public funds to transit. If you make those other options more attractive and more practical, more people use them, which means fewer people in cars on the road in the first place. This is a benefit for drivers on the roads, because it reduces the number of other drivers. This is how dieting actually works: reduce your calorie intake, and you lose weight. Put your roads on a diet, and they'll get slimmer and healthier.
Of course, this is a bit of an oversimplification: it ties in to mixed-use neighborhoods (which means doing away with single-use zoning) and encouraging re-localization and connection of transit planning with land use (to discourage the need for lots of long-distance commuting.)
Quote:
It means at least making provision for those who would like (or wouldn't mind) living without a car.
For those of us in car dependant cities that is the main factor as to why it is so hard to catch up to other less car dependant cities, convincing people to live without a car is like pulling teeth especially in sunbelt cities.
But it does not mean banning cars, or no longer subsidizing roads, especially in rural places. It means making cars and roads part of a bigger transportation network, not its dominant foundation.
I believe every city in the U.S. for the exception of NYC has the car as its dominant foundation.
You can get around most if not all of older cities like Boston and Philly without a car.
I lived in Boston for 3 years so I know what you're talking about, however there is no denying that most people drive in Boston which is what I meant by that post.
garages that don't just accommodate the automobile but showcase and pamper them.
Where can I get one of these??
Quote:
Originally Posted by dtownboogie
I remember seeing a program on PBS (I forget what city but I think it was Zurich) where this city in Europe had major traffic issues on this one particular street and so the city planners decided to make the most congested stretch closed to auto's and instead made it a pedestrian and bike only street; anyways people thought this would create a traffic nightmare but instead it made traffic flow easier.
That idea, or similar ideas, were attempted in many US cities in the 60s and 70s, failing miserably. It sure was swell to be able to cross the downtown streets without worrying about getting mowed down by speeding cars, but the auto-free downtown didn't create a traffic nightmare; it caused businesses to move out of downtown.
Not to say a refined plan wouldn't work now, but it's not like it hasn't been tried before.
You can get around Denver without a car. You can even get to the mountains and to a ski resort on public transportation.
Boston has a "ski train" too; they added a connecting bus to a ski resort to a commuter rail station nearby. I doubt anyone from Colorado would think the skiing there any good. There might be a few bus companies that offer somewhat less frequent rides to larger mountains in Vermont or New Hampshire.
And while I'm sure people can manage without a car in Denver, it's probably much easier (and more common) in Boston. Much of the city was built denser and things are closer together. For example, it's more common to be walking distance to a grocery store in Boston than it sounds like it is in Denver. And the train (light rail, subway and commuter) is much more extensive. And the city is laid out in a more pedestrian friendly way. For example, that area near Boston posted by pear and you thought pear posted as an example of a European neighborhood; (I'm not sure if you did, but that's what it sounded like to me) seems like it's laid differently from a typical Denver neighborhood (no strip malls, lots more stores close together), or at least the ones I could find on streetview, especially the one near the university you mentioned. Though it seemed like Denver might be rather bike-friendly.
On the other hand, driving and parking in Boston is annoying; but the car is unnecessary to get around makes up for it.
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Where can I get one of these??
