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Cambridge is basically suburban looking Arlington with high-rise's and a "cheap looking wood/shingle siding version" of old town Alexandria in the neighborhoods all mixed together.
I guess there aren't too many URBAN places in the nation without auto-oriented formats then
Commuting transit share is unrelated to relative urbanity, so no.
There are woodsy suburbs that have 30% transit share, and there are hard core urban neighborhoods that have 10% transit share.
Arlington has high transit share because employment centers in the DC area are concentrated around transit, and because employers (especially feds) strongly incentivize their workers to take transit.
Not dynamic retail that would attract pedestrians. You clearly don't get it. You have to build destination retail. That is the kind of retail major cities have.
There are no pedestrians. There isn't such retail because people don't shop that way in the U.S., and especially not in suburbia.
Commuting transit share is unrelated to relative urbanity, so no.
There are woodsy suburbs that have 30% transit share, and there are hard core urban neighborhoods that have 10% transit share.
Arlington has high transit share because employment centers in the DC area are concentrated around transit, and because employers (especially feds) strongly incentivize their workers to take transit.
I've seen the point raised before that the best statistic to use to determine if an area is walkable isn't the percentage of workers using transit, but the percentage of workers not driving. This can be a big difference, because in the most urban cities something like 15%-20% of the population can walk or bike to work. Certainly it's true in NYC that transit utilization is lower in the core of Manhattan than the outer boroughs - more people can just walk to work, and thus choose to do so.
Like seriously I come at you people with numbers and all I hear back from you is theories.
Why do you keep posting this statistic when it keeps damaging your argument? Unless my eyes are deceiving me, Arlington and DC are significantly behind Boston, SF, Philadelphia, Jersey City and NYC in transit user percentage. If anything, given this list and DC's annual ranking as either the #1 or #2 most congested city for auto-oriented traffic, your claims for DC being the best city for this criteria are getting blown to smithereens.
LOL, no. You have obviously never been to Arlington if you think the TODs are missing retail.
There are already millions of square feet of retail in Arlington right on top of metro stations. Pentagon City, Ballston, Crystal City, Clarendon, all have major retail concentrations right in the middle of the TODs, and they've been there for decades.
As I see it, the 2 big problems with Arlington/Bathesda/Silver Spring are: 1) Cookie cutter feel/lack of older urban feel- this is pretty hard to change. You can't create pre-auto urban architecture. But, you can have better modern architecture. I think we are slowly seeing the quality of architecure in these urban zones improve. The streetlevel interaction is getting better and the parking less obtrusive. It will never have the old charm and character like Dupont/Back Bay/Rittenhouse, but it could be a decent modern urban zone (toronto/vancouver) 2) The relatively small size/quick transition back to typical suburb- these zones quickly transition from "downtown-style" mid-rises to generic streetcar suburbs in a block or two. In an ideal world these zones would have an intermediate buffer zones with townhomes and low rise apartments to make the areas feel a little less " island of urbanism is a see of suburbs." Given the political and financial difficulties of redeveloping SFH neighbrhoods, I don't know that this problem can be realistically solved. But, hopefully as the zones build out a little more they will lose some of that "micro-urbanism" feel.
We can read fine; that's why we're asking you to stop posting garbage and give us a plausible reason why DC's suburbs are comparable to pre-auto suburbs.
This is what we should be using if we are judging walkability of an area. This is pretty much the industry standard.
Ten Steps of Walkability
Useful walk – most aspects of daily life are located nearby and organized in a way that is served well by walking
1. Put cars in their place
-The automobile is the servant and the pedestrian is the master. For the last 80 years, the automobile has been the dominant factor in shaping communities. Relegating the car to its proper role is necessary to reclaim urban areas for pedestrians.
2. Mix the uses
-Walking must be for some purpose and placing the proper balance of a mixture of uses encourages that.
3. Get the parking right
-Don’t plan parking for the busiest shopping day of the year. Share parking among uses to reduce the excess capacity of parking. Park on streets and in the rear of buildings to reduce the impact of parking.
4. Get transit to work
-Create a variety of efficient, transit options including car share and bike share programs.
Safe walk – pedestrian has a fighting chance with the car and must feel safe and be safe
5. Protect the pedestrian
-Slow the car, create short blocks, narrow intersections, and provide short turning radius for corners and other placemaking actions to promote walkability.
6. Welcome bikes
-Good biking reduces car use and promotes walkability. Create an interconnected system of on street and off street trails and lanes.
Comfortable walk – shape street into outdoor living rooms with small blocks and many options
7. Shape the space
-Streets should be outdoor rooms for people. People should feel enclosed and protected. Edges of streets matter.
8. Plant trees
-Trees provide safety from cars, clean air, shade, and habitat among the benefits they offer.
Interesting walk – unique and attractive building and spaces with signs of humanity abound
9. Make friendly and unique spaces
-Use rhythm to vary the facades, windows should be large, eliminate repetitive buildings, and the architecture should be human scaled.
10. Pick your winners
-Even the most walkable cities are not walkable everywhere. Make conscious decisions on where special gathering spaces are located. Avoid squandering resources on streets and in areas that will never attract or invite pedestrians.
The question was not whether Cambridge was urban, it was whether it was interesting compared to cities like Boston, DC, NYC, San Fran, Philly, and Chicago which the answer is NO. You should probably go back and read the context of that reply.
Evaluating the quality of DC's suburbs really comes down to "consistant urbanism" vs "peak urbanism." The vernacular/ general built environment of DC's suburbs are pretty bad from an urbanism standpoint. It is basically your typical disjointed cul-de-sacs, with huge strip malls set way back from the street. It lacks the tight prewar inner-suburb urbanism of Bos/Philly/NYC. (Old Town Alexandria being the notable exception). Even the tightly packed grided sprawl of the LA basin or South Florida is more consistently dense and quasi-walkable than much of DC's suburbs.
But among the auto-centric post-war sprawly vernacular, the area has been redeveloping areas near it's metro stops. The further out town centers feel like either reconfigured stip malls or isolated suburban downtowns (Reston/Rockville). But, the close in "urban centers" of Arlington's R-B corridor, DT Silver Spring, DT Bathesda and Old Town Alexandria have reached the critical mass where they feel like genuinly walkable (if a little cookie cutter) urban nodes. The older NorthEast inner-suburbs might have a better overall built environment with their pre-war desings, but they could certainly take some pointers from DC's suburbs on how to infill.
I really disagree with this, at least the LA part. I've lived in DC and currently live in LA and I think that the walkable DC suburbs are more walkable than LA suburbs. Even in the "walkable" LA suburbs they are only walkable in short strips which usually only consist of areas in their small downtown or historic district.
I've seen the point raised before that the best statistic to use to determine if an area is walkable isn't the percentage of workers using transit, but the percentage of workers not driving. This can be a big difference, because in the most urban cities something like 15%-20% of the population can walk or bike to work. Certainly it's true in NYC that transit utilization is lower in the core of Manhattan than the outer boroughs - more people can just walk to work, and thus choose to do so.
Quoting myself here to note that I found a study which computes the percentage of workers who walk/bike to work. Check out page 140 of this PDF (page 122 as labeled). Boston and DC are #1 and #2 in the country respectively for walking to work (14.8% and 12.6% respectively). DC's bike commute share is much higher than Boston's (4% versus 1.9%) which doesn't surprise me.
Unfortunately, Cambridge, or Arlington were not looked at by this study. According to the ACS data however, 24.5% walk in Cambridge, and 6.9% ride a bike - not surprising given the large number of college students. In Arlington 5.1% walked to work, and 1.9% used a bike. This only tracks work commutes, of course, but still, Arlington is clearly less walkable than Cambridge.
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