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I find it amusing that European examples are constantly being pushed as "how the US should be."
Most of the US is not at a density to support bicycling as a primary mode of transportation for all ages. Bikes have their place, and the niche is growing, but... in most of the US, cycling is not a realistic form of transportation outside of university towns and flat places with mild climes (like Sacramento) where cycling is practical year round.
We have trillions - perhaps quadrillions - invested in existing infrastructure - roads and housing, etc. Its highly likely the American of 30-40 years from now will look like - gasp - the America of today, except with more people, with gasp - cars - although more efficient and powered by alternatives to fossil fuels - and - gasp - suburbs.
Will there be more density? Probably. Will all of America be living in highly dense urban villages? Probably not. I would argue that if you really want to reduce the demand on the transportation system, vastly increasing telecommuting is the biggest bang for your buck vs. trying to remake a land use pattern and commuting habits that is approaching 100 years old in some cases.
And all we have to do to increase telecommuting is retrofit existing dwellings with fiber optic and lay the cables from the streets (where it already is) to the houses.
Since I am probably the person here who point out the most examples from Europe, let me explain why I do so. Mostly its to show alternative counter examples.
First there are assumptions that people have about bikes that have been proven overseas to not be true. So when you argue that bikes only work in small university towns with good weather it is relevant to point out that Copenhagen and Amsterdam are at the latitude of Manitoba, Canada. These areas get snow in the wintertime and its rains like it does in the Pacific Northwest. These areas are also really big cities like Portland and Seattle. In these cities you have 40% of all trips by bike. So when someone like you makes the argument that bikes only work in small university towns with good weather, the overseas examples are relevant to show that this assumption need not be the case. Merely because no large us city (except very recently Portland) in the US has adopted the policy on a widescale basis doesn't mean that it can't work on widescale basis even in big cities with crappy weather.
If I used examples of bike use in China, people might try to dismiss those examples as a consequence of the relative poverty of people in China vs in the US, not specific policy choices of countries that have incomes wealthy enough for autos. Essentially arguing that the primary reason that bike use is so high in China is that the country is so poor. Denmark and the Netherlands have per capita incomes much closer to the US. These countries got wealthy like the US did, but didn't become as car dependent as the US did. This makes explicit that the difference in outcomes isn't a difference in incomes but a difference in policy choices. The US widely embraced cars, the Dutch and the Danish did not.
The big difference between the US and Europe was how both regions responded to the 1970's energy crisis when the real price of gasoline went up.
In the 1970's the US still produced most of the oil it used, so we were far less dependent on foreign oil than Europe was. In the 1970's leaders in both the US and Europe said they wanted to break there countries dependence on foreign oil. This is when we cut freeway speeds down to 55 mph, when we introduced mileage requirements for passenger cars etc.
But in the 1980's the US sort of lost its enthusiasm for making the US independent on foreign oil. We got rid of the 55 mph speed limit, we stopped increasing average fuel economy in vehicle fleet. In Europe they did a better job of following through on the goal of breaking free from foreign oil. France built a huge system of nukes, the Dutch and Danish went for wind and bikes. Countries in Europe kept raising gas prices.
For the past 25 years in many respects, the US arguably had the better policy vs Europe. In real terms gas prices were as cheap as they were in the 1950's. If people want to drive a SUV why shouldn't they?
The big difference between the gas spike of 2005 and 1972 was the cause. In 1972, it was political gas prices went up because the Arabs were mad about wars in the mideast. Prices spiked several times in the 70s because of various conflicts in the mideast as OPEC reduced production to punish the US and Europe for failing to back the arabs.
In 2005, gas prices went up for economic reasons, world demand is going up dramatically because countries that previous were too poor to own cars, like China and India suddenly have substantial numbers of people wealthy enough to buy cars and the cost of cars got cheap enough to greatly expand the market for cars. Oil production wasn't slowed down by political reasons, oil prices went up because OPEC, Russia and the oil companies couldn't keep up.
Now once the housing market imploded the US went into a recession and that temporarily relieved pressure on gas prices, but when the economy pulls out of the recession, I really do think the fact that there is a 2000 dollar car for sale in the third world means that the era of cheap oil is probably behind us unless we respond. That this oil is found mostly in countries that want to screw us over like Venezuela, Russia and the mideast so that every time we drive, we are funding the people who funding Al Queda is just one of many reasons that I am opposed to US oil dependence.
The question is how will we respond?
I assume that higher gas prices will mean that people will want to live closer to where they work. I suspect this is why Majin thinks downtown turns into Manhattan in the next 30 years as people crowd downtown to live closer to work. But I think its as likely if not more likely that employers will move closer to where people live. Housing is a long duration asset. The housing in Lincoln and Elk Grove is brand new. I don't see those buildings going away anytime soon. One way of reducing the commute for your Elk Grove or Lincoln employees is to just open a satelite office in Elk Grove or Lincoln. Given that office space in Elk Grove and Lincoln is cheaper than office space in Sacramento or Roseville, I think that will tend to make the Manhattanization scenario much less likely. But I could be wrong.
So you have the issue of how do you get people to get around, what do you do about poor people, if gas is 6 dollars a gallon, are you going to want some alternatives to cars? In a place as dense as Manhattan, you can afford to cover most of the island with rail that runs frequently at all hours of the day and night. But if we are ending up with a region that mostly has a density of say Citrus Heights today, we are going to end up with mass transit in most of the region like what Citrus Heights has today.
In this world, I would rather have the Davis bike network than the Citrus Heights transit system.
But even if we head toward Manhattanization a decent bike network dramatically increases the catchment basin for your rail network. The average person walks at about 3 mph. The average person comfortably bikes at about 9-12 mph. One of the things that makes the rail system in Manhattan work so well is the express trains in the subway. On the express trains, you skip a lot of the stops so you can get to your destination faster. Because the subways in Manhattan are quadrupled tracked, they can run express trains and run the trains very frequently. In Sacramento light rail is only double tracked. If the region wants to run express trains from Folsom, it can do so, but only by having the trains pass on the opposite rail. There is trade off between how many express trains you can run and how frequently you have trains run. If the region sustains the density it has now, the current set up is good enough, but if the region does Manhattanize, the dual tracks are slowing you down.
The Dutch still run trains on dual tracks, but instead of having the 25 stations between downtown Folsom and 8 and Capitol, they would have about a third of that number. By having fewer stops, that speeds up your trains and every train acts like an express train.
I used to be more excited about the entire telecommuting option. But the argument that I found more persuasive over time was that any job that could be done by telecommuting is a job that probably could be done much more cheaply overseas.
Now I could be wrong and I hope I am wrong. I'd like to believe that there is substantial fraction of these jobs that can be handled electronically that don't require face to face interaction that still will be done domestically, but I really don't have any idea how large that potential market is. I agree the infrastructure savings are huge if your economy can create lots of them. But how many of these jobs are going to stay in the US vs creating jobs in abroad? I have no idea.
Unfortunately, you are not wrong. U.S. workers should take a hard look at their job and ask themselves if it can be done at home. If it can, maybe it's time to start training in your free time for another career that can't be outsourced (while you still have the time).
I'm not sure these folks who are talking about Manhattan levels of transit are...I sure ain't! Personally I'd like to see a mixed network of light rail, local streetcars in the old streetcar-suburb neighborhoods, as well as buses and limited use of BRT...along with more bike infrastructure and walking paths. Not like Manhattan...more like, well, like Sacramento in the 1920s, when that is exactly what we had.
Typically, it is rail infrastructure that promotes density, not the other way around. Car-centric neighborhoods with car-only transportation don't "densify" because there is utterly no reason to do so, they simply remain car-centric neighborhoods. But neighborhoods with transit alternatives (including bikes!) can grow dense more quickly because there is less need for costly, bulky automobile infrastructure.
I'm not so impressed by the idea of telecommuting. It just seems like another step on the road towards retreating into our own rear-ends that we started on in the postwar era. Everything from living spaces to transportation to shopping to entertainment seemed centered on isolating people from each other, and from the outside world--individuals each in their own car on the road instead of sharing transit or the sidewalk, individual womb-like houses instead of denser multi-unit housing, the inside-out enclosed shopping mall instead of an outdoor shopping street, isolated entertainment via TV instead of going to a public movie theater.
Life as a telecommuter seems like a lonely, solitary existence--spend all day at home alone working, then spend all day at home alone after work. In order to interact with the rest of the world, you have to hop in a car and drive to someplace else. Not sure if you are familiar with a trend called "coworking," but there are quite a few small offices that are being shared by individuals or small businesses that aren't big enough to justify their own office space. These are people that could work from home--but they would rather share a space with other small businesses to create a collaborative work environment. The ones I have seen in Midtown are often occupied by people who live in the central city, and walk or bike to work. One coworking space down the street is home to a local bicycle-advocacy nonprofit! Coworking seems like a more interesting wave than telecommuting--instead of isolating yourself but still being an employee, these businesspeople are sharing space to make a community and do business.
I really like my neighborhood the way it is right now. I have great neighbors, my kids love there friends and my kids show the age appropiate love and stylized hatred of public school. Since my kids have been about two and half, I have never had any problems with them playing outside. I have never felt like crime is an issue. I have no desire to see any of that screwed up by new development. I moved to an established neighborhood because it is established and I didn't want to see others come in and change or screw around with it. I moved to this area because I really like it the way it is right now.
I am sure that there are other people who love Manhattan or Copenhagen or where ever the hell on earth other people like and want to turn there own neighborhoods into that or maybe into some throwback of how there neighborhood was a hundred years ago. But I really like Sacramento and my part of Carmichael just the way it is right now. If there are people who like parallel parking, feeding parking meters, parking tickets, noise and traffic, well bless there hearts. I hope they find some place that offers all that for them. But its not for me.
About the only change I would like to see for my neighborhood is a really strong anti-growth provision. Maybe any land use change to the neighborhood has to be approved by 2/3 of a neighborhood design review board.
Actually, very little "throwback" is necessary--my neighborhood is pretty much the way it was a hundred years ago. Nor is it all that noisy, and I'll take the level of traffic on 21st Street or J Street over that on Watt, Madison, Arden or Fair Oaks any day. I can live with parallel parking and even feeding the occasional meter if it means I only have to fill my gas tank once every month or two. Nobody in their right mind would mistake Midtown for Manhattan. Much of my advocacy is because I like my neighborhood the way it is too, and resent the insinuation that living in a walkable city is somehow wrong or un-American. I also highly resent the efforts made by those who want to make the central city more amenable to the automobile and suburban visitors, to the detriment of the well-being of central city residents. So, really, we're both trying to protect something we like. The idea is to take the best from positive models and apply them to places that need the help, not to destroy healthy neighborhoods (in the city or the suburbs) in the name of progress.
Nobody is suggesting that we turn everyplace into some kind of high-density skyscraper-laden megacity (except maybe Majin.) What folks like kim racer and I are talking about is places with more bikes, more people walking on the street instead of driving, and roads that are slower and safer and less likely to hurt kids and other pedestrians. The examples Kim shows from Europe, and I show from the past, are proof for the people who claim that such things simply can't exist.
Your neighborhood doesn't have any city government at all, just the county, so you're pretty much subject to their whims with regards to zoning and new development. So far, Carmichael has fared pretty well: I lived there when I was a kid, and yeah, it is pretty nice, and not too different from how it looked in the mid-seventies. But don't think that won't change if the wrong economic winds blow in your neighborhood's direction.
I really like my neighborhood the way it is right now. I have great neighbors, my kids love there friends and my kids show the age appropiate love and stylized hatred of public school. Since my kids have been about two and half, I have never had any problems with them playing outside. I have never felt like crime is an issue. I have no desire to see any of that screwed up by new development. I moved to an established neighborhood because it is established and I didn't want to see others come in and change or screw around with it. I moved to this area because I really like it the way it is right now.
I am sure that there are other people who love Manhattan or Copenhagen or where ever the hell on earth other people like and want to turn there own neighborhoods into that or maybe into some throwback of how there neighborhood was a hundred years ago. But I really like Sacramento and my part of Carmichael just the way it is right now. If there are people who like parallel parking, feeding parking meters, parking tickets, noise and traffic, well bless there hearts. I hope they find some place that offers all that for them. But its not for me.
About the only change I would like to see for my neighborhood is a really strong anti-growth provision. Maybe any land use change to the neighborhood has to be approved by 2/3 of a neighborhood design review board.
I don't intend this flippantly, but whether you like it or not, growth is coming to Carmichael. In order to reduce global warming state law now requires that all local governments provide a certain amount of infill development. One of the places the County of Sacramento has targeted for infill is in Carmichael, along Fair Oaks Blvd.
Commercial Corridors, Municipal Services Agency, County of Sacramento, California, USA (http://corridors.saccounty.net/fairOaksPlan.asp - broken link)
If you read the report the issue as far as the County was concerned was the number of vacancies and under utilized space along Fair Oaks. The county hopes to turn that part of Carmichael into a more pedestrianized urban village. It would be more of mixed use area with new housing mixed in with the retail and office space. But the other problem the report identified is that traffic down Fair Oaks Blvd is expected to get much more congested.
At the public hearings, the local planners and planning consultant framed the issue that if Fair Oaks Blvd in this area wasn't widen from four lanes to six lanes, traffic would start spilling over into California Avenue and Garfield Avenue (through streets running north and south roughly parallel to Fair Oaks Blvd). The problem with this plan is that few people like walking next to six lane throughfares where posted speed limits are 40-45 mph and traffic is actually moving through the area at up to 60 mph. As currently concieved, I don't think this plan will turn Carmichael in the smart growth urban village, nor do I think it will do much to revitalize the corridor.
But the alternative not considered was to just turn California Avenue and Garfield Avenues into bike blvds. The basic idea of a bike blvd is to put in a bunch of traffic calming impediments so that through traffic is discouraged from using California Ave or Garfield Avenuesas an alternative to Fair Oaks Blvd. You make it a bit more of a hassle for residents of Carmichael Colony to get to there homes, but you dramatically reduce the amount of auto traffic on California Ave. People prefer living on quieter streets, so the traffic calming effects of bike blvds tend to raise property values on those streets. If you still aren't following the idea of a bike blvd, watch this video here.
Once you install the Bike Blvd on California Avenue and Garfield Avenue, you also take away the objection to actually traffic calming Fair Oaks Blvd. Carmichael is mostly built out. The primary driver of increasing traffic congestion along Fair Oaks Blvd is people in Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks, Orangevale and some residents of Folsom using Fair Oaks Blvd as a surface street alternative to avoiding increasing traffic congestion on 50 or 80. If it takes longer for people to commute down Fair Oaks Blvd than to use 50 or 80, you will divert that traffic back to the freeways. On the other hand if you widen Fair Oaks Blvd, basically you just reduce the commute time Fair Oaks Blvd for these commuters encouraging even more of them to use Fair Oaks Blvd as an alternative to 50 or 80. So widening streets here isn't going to solve the traffic congestion problem its going to make it worse.
As you slow down traffic on Fair Oaks Blvd, you also make it much more likely that the urban village concept for the Fair Oaks Blvd actually works. When speed limits are 45 mph pedestrians don't feel safe crossing Fair Oaks Blvd, so Fair Oaks Blvd functions as a huge barrier to pedestrians. So few pedestrians are willing to walk from say the East Side of Fair Oaks Blvd across the street to West Side of Fair Oaks Blvd.
But once traffic speeds fall below 30 mph, people will still walk across streets even with several lanes of traffic. Champs-Elysees has 8 lanes of traffic but its one of the best walking streets in Paris. Closer to home (for people who don't like my European references), the Las Vegas Strip is the biggest pedestrianised space in Vegas and one of the bigger ones on the West Coast, it has as many as 10 lanes of traffic, but again because the traffic is below 30 mph, millions of people love walking alongside it.
A traffic calmed Fair Oaks Blvd will still serve as the primary retail corridor for the Carmichael area. People who live in the region was still shop and play in the region. What traffic calming does it just discourage commuters from using Fair Oaks Blvd as a freeway substitute.
One of the things you can do to slow down traffic along Fair Oaks Blvd is expand the bike blvd network further. Perhaps create a couple at Stanley, Robertson, Grant or Kenneth. At these intersections you can give priority at these intersections to pedestrians and bikes, either with loop detectors or by creating a bike/pedestrian scramble phase on the lights.
You can also redo the parking along Fair Oaks Blvd, maybe add some diaganol or backward diaganol on street parking. When you add this type of parking, you do a couple of things, you slow down traffic on the street with the diaganol parking and you energize the retail along the the sidewalks. Street parking tends to be shared parking by all of the retail in the area, so you also don't need to provide as much parking.
Now the bike blvds do a couple of different things, first they turn say California Avenue into a local recreational amenity. If you live in Carmichael Colony, you have a real safe route to get to Ancil Hoffman Park on your bike. Second if you extend the bike blvd past California to Oak and then to Sara Ct, Shelfield, Camelo and Arden Way, you connect that bike route to the American River Parkway bike route system. If you build a bike Blvd at Grant to Whitney to Garfield and then another one down Vahalla Drive across Walnut, with the addition of two small bike bridge across Arcade Creek, you can tie your bike network into the existing trail in the Arcade Creek Nature area and you can provide bike access to all of these areas to ARC and provide access to Arcade Creek Park and from there Hackleberry. You are creating recreational amenities and you creating a way for people to safely get where they want on bikes. You are also going past most of the parks in the region. If people on bikes want to stop and use the bathroom or the drinking fountain, you are driving past public parks where they are free to do so Carmichael Park, Shelfield Park, Ancil Hoffman Park. Sara Cout access.
You are also opening up retail along Fair Oaks Blvd to bike based consumers. If you want to ride your bike to the gyms at Fair Oaks and Palm or Fair Oaks and El Camino, you are creating safe ways to get there.
I really think a lot of this minor collector avenues like California, Whitney, Lincoln, Pope, Cypress, Engle, Mission, Hurley, Wyda, Bell could be turned into the basis of really good safe bike network. The public already owns the rights of way here. Its just requires the changing of some traffic signals and maybe adding some traffic diverting devices.
That type of back-in directional parking is in use in the Newton Booth neighborhood in Sacramento--the city is trying it out and may extend it into other neighborhoods.
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