Evanston: A Suburb That Actively Discourages Cars | Hacker News Reader

Evanston: A Suburb That Actively Discourages Cars

politico.com

41 pointsakg_6722 comments

The article implies that Evanston is an archetypal suburb, but that's misleading. Both the Metra (Chicago's commuter rail system) and the El (the subway) have stops in Evanston. Metra trains leave every 15 minutes during the morning rush hour and get you to the Loop in under 30. Pre-car era suburbs radiate out from cities like Chicago and New York, connected to their core cities via rail infrastructure built a century ago. They have long-had appropriately-zoned downtowns to facilitate mixed residential/commercial development close to transit.

Most suburbs in the U.S. are entirely unlike Evanston. They have little to no rail infrastructure. Even when they do, the area around the rail stations is inappropriately zoned. For example, the new stops on D.C.'s Silver Line will require decades of aggressive redevelopment before they are comparable to the walkable commuter suburbs of Chicago or New York. The Tysons Corner metro station is in the median of a giant highway with 4-lanes in each direction. There is a single high-rise apartment building within a convenient walk, and even that requires traversing huge un-pedestrian-scale skybridges over the highway.

E.g. here is the area around the Scarsdale commuter line (a town in Westchester County, NY): https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/46/96/3b/46963b601....

Here is the area around the Mclean metro station (a similar suburb in Fairfax County, NY): http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/mclean-metro-station-tysons-c....

Totally agree here. Evanston is a "suburb" only in the sense that it's a separate municipality. In all other respects, it might as well be just another neighborhood within the Chicago city limits.

Which is not to say that Evanston shouldn't be applauded for a transit-focused development policy. But it's silly to suggest that it could / should be modeled by other suburban municipalities that don't have similar existing infrastructure and proximity to the urban core.

This article must have been paid for by the Evanston Chamber of Commerce.

There's no part of Evanston that is more than a 45 minute walk from Chicago, and it's been serviced by CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) buses and trains, PACE (Suburban Chicago) buses and trains, and Metra (Regional) trains long (decades) before the high rises and the property speculators moved in.

There were exactly the same services as were there during the period in which the article insists that Evanston (known as a pleasant, generally affluent town wrapped around a major university at least since I was born there 40 years ago) was somehow failed or depressed as there are now, except night service was a little better then.

I totally agree... Very few residents choose to live in Evanston for any reason other than proximity to Northwestern. It's unpleasant and overpriced to live in, and there's nothing magical about their development beyond affluence and train service...

New fantastic development idea for communities! Build a famous university 100 years ago... profit.

Evanston is definitely a suburb. There is a walkable area near the train and university, and some apartments, but there is a lot of single family housing on much larger lots than you'd find in the city. People have big yards, multi-car garages, 1000s of square feet in living space. It's denser than more rural suburbs like Lake Forest or Highland Park, but not very similar to Chicago proper. Even in well-off Chicago neighborhoods with a lot of large houses like Lincoln Park, most are townhouses or rowhomes, and there is a larger mix of condos/apartments.

It's a suburb, but nobody who's ever been to Elgin could say with a straight face that Evanston is the "archetypical" suburb. If Chicago were organized the same way NYC was, OP/RF/FP and Evanston would be boroughs.

The better way to frame this, without getting into the special-case trouble of Philadelphia, NYC, and Chicago, is that the overwhelming majority of suburbs are not like Evanston, and are not hooked up to the arterial public transit connections of their major metro areas.

The conclusion being that we should not dare make suburbs more pedestrian-friendly when it so happens that they didn't evolve in a very specific way?

Or, in other words, please no change?

The conclusion being that if you want to live in a pedestrian-friendly suburb in your lifetime, move to Chicago or New York because redeveloping post-car era suburbs will be far more difficult than the article makes it out to be.

'Suburb' is a tricky word, with meanings that vary from 'residential neighborhood' to 'cul-de-sacs and freeways'. But most pre-WWII cities do have a belt of railroad/streetcar suburbs to which many of these lessons would apply, though they might need new rail service to truly act on them— Pasadena, Palo Alto, Lakewood, Shaker Heights, Wauwatosa, Columbia Heights, Beaverton, Edmonds, Englewood CO, etc. Places like this are easy to identify— they're basically anywhere outside city limits where the streets are laid out on a regular grid.

Places like this in growing cities will probably see a lot of development pressure in the coming decades, as young people who desire urban living but who are unable or unwilling to deal with American urban problems seek them out. And many of them were originally built out in 20 years, from 1910-1930, so if zoning is right they could once again rapidly urbanize.

Don't most cities on the East coast have suburbs like this? Philadelphia's Main Line, towns in Boston like Winchester on the Commuter Rail lines. Maybe it is less common in newer cities.

The only problem is towns like this are usually very expensive. They tend to be associated with "Old Money" who used the rail lines to commute from their summer "Country Home" to their city brownstone. The North Shore towns in Chicago like Evanston have very basic single family homes starting close to a million dollars even though some are very old and need expensive maintenance. That may not sound like much to people from the Bay Area, but you can get a 3BR condo in Chicago for under 500 that's large enough for a typical family. It's not really an option for all but the top 10% of earners. I'd rather not have all my cash tied up in real estate, so I'm enjoying city life for now even with 2 kids. Most of my peers are doing the same.

Yeah, Philly does. Don't know about Boston, probably does. Baltimore doesn't, really, and neither does DC or points south.

This is basically a puff piece. Evanston has a cute little downtown area that's great for walking, but like most suburbs, lots of streets don't have sidewalks, the main route north through it (ridge) is banned to bicycles, forcing awkward navigation of one way streets, etc.

We need to stop judging and talking about cities by what their small flashy city-centers are, and start thinking about how people live in and around them. Don't mistake "Actively encouraging retail shopping" with "actively discouraging cars". There are 3 massive parking lots that dump you downtown and all but force you to walk through the outdoor mall there.

Not to mention that outside the dense downtown area, it's hard to get around Evanston efficiently without a car.

I'll grant that it's way better than the outer suburbs, and even better than most independent cities. But it's not any better than other suburbs that are served by CTA. It's been a while since I've been to Oak Park, but as I recall it was even more bike and pedestrian friendly than Evanston is.

The major streets in Oak Park all have bike lanes, the minor streets are narrow enough to make bicycling in the street safe for minors (possibly excepting the streets just off Harlem, North, and Austin, which get abused for traffic bypass), and it's hard to live in Oak Park and be more than a 10-15 minute walk from one or sometimes two CTA train lines.

Evanston is about twice as big as Oak Park is. If you combine Oak Park and adjacent Forest Park, capturing the end of the CTA blue line, I think you get a more reasonable comparison, in which both suburbs fare about equally.

But Oak Park is also very car friendly: residential lots mostly have garages, there are lots every few blocks downtown, and the streets all have convenient metered parking. And, Oak Park's downtown area is far less developed than Evanston's.

It's really tough drawing conclusions about suburbs in Chicago from Oak Park; it's barely a suburb at all. Beverly, on the south side of Chicago, is far more suburban than Oak Park is.

Fact check: That picture with the caption "This Is What Carless Suburbia Looks Like" was not taken in Evanston. It was taken in Logan Square, a neighborhood well inside Chicago.

Source: I walk past that mural regularly (it's located along Milwaukee), and the destination signs on the train in the background are blue. The Blue Line doesn't go anywhere near Evanston.

Evanston is home to Northwestern. Most cities/towns in the Midwest that are home to large universities happen to be more pedestrian friendly than average.

(I'm surprised the articles skips that observation)

My thoughts exactly. 20,000 students and most of them aren't using cars every day, if they brought them to campus at all. You could say the same thing about downtown Madison, Wisconsin.

Did you read all 5 pages of the article? It does mention Northwestern and its 20,000 student population. Based on most of the HN comments, my guess is not many people realizing article is spread over multiple pages.

Yeah, I missed the paging.

I live one block north of the northern Evanston border. I bike through Evanston frequently to ride into Chicago. For a biker, the connections from Evanston to Chicago are not great. They feel risky, especially at busy times. Specifically, you either ride around Calvary Cemetery, https://www.google.com/maps/place/Evanston,+IL/@42.0244529,-..., on the sidewalk, along the lake. Beautiful but the sidewalk is narrow and there are pedestrians, people walking their dogs. Or you ride in the street. Too scary for me. There's no bike lane and traffic travels fast, maybe 40 mph? Or you ride on the west side of the cemetery which has a bike line that disappears and reappears, and also the traffic there too travels fast. Here, btw, is Evanston's bike plan: http://www.cityofevanston.org/assets/Evanston%20Bike%20Plan%...

The plan notes that the percentage of people who commute by car is about 51%. By bike, about 2.5%.

Just FYI, this article is spread over multiple pages. It has 5 pages. Based on reading HN comments, my guess is that most HN readers might be making comments only after reading page 1. The article is about Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and not just about Evanston though it uses Evanston as case study. The article also touches other area of Chicago, a city in Brazil, a research study in King County, Washington, etc.

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