Narrowing a residential street – McAllister
narrowstreetssf.com
narrowstreetssf.com
But living in an English market town myself and being heavily involved in community life and discussion, I know the cramped confines of many older English towns and villages are a total nut-ache for a sizeable share of residents and people are endlessly campaigning for more parking, better traffic management, and more spacious estates.
Weekends in the city with our toddler are awesome. We have brunch at one of the dozen restaurants we can get to within a few blocks' walk. We can walk to the park, walk to the drugstore to get the diaper cream we forgot to buy. We can have impromptu, unscheduled social events just by running in to the 3-4 other couples with kids our age who live in our apartment building. And narrow little pedestrian-oriented streets, which we don't have where we live but would love to, are a whole lot more toddler friendly than ones primarily designed for cars.
If anything, the advantages of city living are magnified for people with kids. When I was single, I thought nothing of driving 15-20 minutes on a weeknight to meet some friends for dinner. That's a non-starter with kids. These days, 70-80% of our social interaction is hanging out with people from our building.
Other supermarkets do this a lot cheaper. Or free.
So, yeah, in theory you can get your groceries delivered to you, but none of those services are intended for cash-strapped families and/or conscientious shoppers.
The prospect of lugging 4 bags of groceries plus 3 kids on a late, crowded MUNI bus is just sooooo inviting...
I realize this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem but we have seen how quickly startups or even technology being implemented by existing players can respond to increased demand.
However it's also not that common for people here to carry lots of groceries at a time, unless you're planning a party. It's a lot more common to just pick up a few things each day: instead of one "big" shopping trip a week, most people make a short 10-minute stop every day or two, often on the way home from work. Partly for convenience, but partly also because that way your food is fresher. If you're shopping in that style, your groceries will fit in a regular bike's cargo basket.
Are narrow streets really toddler friendly in practice? Cars are less frequent and slower, but when they do come through the spacing is much much tighter and more dangerous. You are basically sharing a sidewalk with a car. If you're lucky there's a few stubby bollards separating you from traffic -- which are meaningless to a toddler. If you have a squirmy/dashy toddler I would be very concerned about them breaking loose and dashing into traffic.
This doesn't strictly require a city; a compact town where kids can walk/bike everywhere would also be fine. But it does serve as a disincentive to raising kids in areas that are very car-oriented.
An article about how walking speed predicts life expectancy: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-surv...
If we thought a bit harder about what we actually want from life, beyond consumption of glamourized objects, we might find that our old Eurotowns are actually much more liveable than we assume.
Here is a random Victorian residential street (in a very expensive part of London) that I think has a good scale and width. The road is not too wide, but not too narrow either. Cars are parked on the street rather than in garages; and the houses are of fairly high density too.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.556208,-0.165162,3a,75y,36...
Moreover the simpler solution would be to build up. The article just dismisses that in one sentence saying "nobody wants" it, but do people want entire new microblocks built in the middle of streets?
Plus, narrowing streets would come at a significant cost to the city to reconfigure the roads and infrastructure. Not only tearing up sidewalks and paving new roads, but also burying all the wires on those telephone poles and lord knows whether the gas and sewer lines under the street could support construction on top of them (and how would you service them after?). We'd also lose/downsize trees. On the other hand, building taller is entirely privately funded and quite economical in comparison.
It's literally a pipe dream.
However, I think it makes two subjective assumptions:
- Empty space is useless. "Useless greenery (not a park, but landscaping where nobody goes), Areas around buildings which are not “destinations,” and often have no real purpose". As in web design, I think that empty space is important. It allows a city and its inhabitant to breathe. It gives buffer space to avoid living with your neighbors (eg. seeing, hearing everything that happens in their apartment). It reduces noise reverberation.
- Narrower streets are nicer. Granted, the pictures there look good. I have lived in the US for a while and I'm now in Paris, France. I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded. Also I don't think that SF is a good example of a city that doesn't look good. A lot of Europeans would want to live there because it looks amazing.
This can be solved by technical means (employing the needed construction materials).
"I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded."
If by "crowded" you're not referring to the actual amount of people on the streets but rather to the ambient feeling, then this is solved by requirements on the building architecture level. On narrow streets each floor higher then the 2nd should take a little bit less space than the one underneath it. This allows more light and gives a spacious feeling on the street level, even if the space there stays the same.
Am I wrong? I don't know, look at the dense cities. Paris, NYC, London, etc. are any of those the expected cheap meccas you would have predicted? Look at Austin, TX the more is built the more people are attracted and the more people drive into town and drive every single price up up up. Humans are kind of stupid and make nothing even remotely close to rational decisions that economics would like you to believe we make, otherwise the market would function and companies would not be starting in cities, people would not be moving to cities. Hell, we wouldn't really be co-locating in offices in specific cities and limiting our talent pool by geographic location.
What you can do, however, is help create and sustain conditions where prices don't rise, thus giving inflation a chance to do its work while property owners hold and wait. You do this by upzoning, which makes formerly unattractive properties become possibilities for profitable development, and by loosening restrictions on the kinds of properties that may be developed. (Dropping parking minimums, FAR limits, setback requirements, etc.)
When new houses are popping up all over the place, owners of older houses will have difficulty competing if they raise prices, so prices of existing buildings will tend to stagnate. This is about as close as you can get to dropping housing costs.
Wow! That's amazing. Add that to the 425 x 425 square feet of the block, which is 180,625 square feet and you'd really have some more square footage! Why, it's...
8% more.
I don't think you're going to solve SF's housing crisis by raising the amount of square footage on a few select streets where this works by 8%. The math on this doesn't work when put in proper context. 15,000 square feet isn't anywhere near as much as it sounds.
You need to solve the core problem, which is probably something more like politically-mandated stasis because everybody's really excited about somebody else solving the problem but doesn't want anything they interact with to change moreso than "the streets are just too darned big".
Also, does anyone know why we don't have more- interconnected skyscrapers or underground connections? I see that on rare occasion. I know there are some city regulations which ban it in order to generate street travel but those must be rare. Is it a structural-stability and hard-to-long-term-plan-several-buildings thing?
Of course, that's a bit exaggerated (there are skyscrapers going up downtown and some neighborhoods have the occasional modern-looking condo). Still, the problem is fairly untractable in the current climate. There's an endless stream of people ready to wait in line to bitch at every one of the multi-year stretch of town hall meetings needed to do anything that meanders away from the well-established status quo. (For reference, see all the FUD spread about Polk Street that led to the eventual neutering of that project).
You'd also need public transit, which is something cities built prior to the car have generally invested in, but is virtually absent in the US, as part of the equation is getting people out of their cars. You could always have the new buildings over the street comprise a mix of commercial and residential, so that people don't have to drive to the nearest WalMart to buy everything, instead they can nip across the street to the butcher, the baker, and even the chandler.
I've not owned a car in over a decade (with the exception of the odd banger I buy to drive take on a rally), as I simply don't need one here. Every service I need, including my place of work, is in walking distance.
Oh, one last benefit of this that the OP missed - Urban Heat Island removal. City temperatures are usually higher than the surrounding countryside as black asphalt absorbs and radiates heat like nobody's business, and narrower streets tend to be better shaded, and even on a hot summer's day, hold nothing fiercer than a cool breeze. The upshot here being both a nicer environment in which to live and work, and lower energy requirements, as without a noisy street outside, and with cool air outside... shock, horror, one could open a window rather than running the AC!
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its...
Fine, I'll call them out. Is there a culturally significant rate of immigration from American Sprawl Cities to ancient Euro Cities, or for that matter a culturally significant immigration from american sprawl cities to non-sprawl cities? Culturally significant means property values are imploding in emptying sprawl areas, not five guys on HN echo chamber each other's love for that style.
This extends even to cities that aren't traditionally very urbanized, like Houston: in the past 15 years, inside-610 property has been a much hotter market than outside-610 property.
I don't understand this phobia against building up. The only city in the US that seems to have actually embraced building higher is New York, and they seem to be doing alright. With a bit of planning you can build mixed use Shops / Restaurant / Office / Residential and make far better use of the space. A big part of the reason cities like SF and Boston are suffering a housing crisis is because of the zoning committees and entrenched residents, and their misguided belief that medium-density semi-cities are somehow nicer than real cities. I would prefer if we let the cities be cities, and let those who want to live in a big house move to the suburbs.
Policy probably hasn't quite caught up with modern architectural realities, but it isn't just based on desire for medium density.
This isn't unique to North America, look at the downtown core of Lisbon, for example.
The problem is building up is expensive. So the cost of building up has to be lower than just building sideways.
London has narrow and wide streets, but you can get to anywhere by public transport, at a reasonable cost, within 1 hour more or less.
Holland has segregated roads for cycles and cars, and brilliant public transport
There's something of a stereotype of public transportation being almost universally absent in US cities and being some sort of nirvana that rapidly whisks you anywhere in western Europe. In general, European public transit does tend to be better than in the US--especially compared to newer and more spread out US cities away from the coasts--but the contrast can also be exaggerated.
Manhattan has a great metro, but buses for the last mile are non existent. However they are not as critical as say in london.
Among various complaints: SF Muni is rarely on time and very slow, especially if you need to go east/west. The two main crosstown routes, the N-Judah streetcar and 38-Geary bus, travel just slightly faster than a brisk walk, and are badly overcrowded. The connections to even nearby areas outside of SF proper are fairly spotty also; BART and Caltrain (and to a lesser extent, ACE and Amtrak) combine to make something halfway between a subway and a commuter-rail network, but not one sufficient for ~8 million people. A lack of integrated tickets between all the systems is an annoyance. On the Valley side of things, the lack of success of the Santa Clara VTA Light Rail hampers overall ability for people to commute to/from SF and the Valley without cars—the VTA built 42 miles of track but much of it on a very odd choice of alignment that makes it not useful to that many people.
Sharing space is not a "good thing" even though it seems to be the the thing that architects seem to be advocating at the moment. I'm still not convinced that a blind person and a bus can share space. Just like the tower blocks of the 1960's, I see shared space becoming the architectural white elephant of the 2010's.
What you should be considering is creating great living spaces where the road design "slows" down the speed at which cars travel through the space. Where priority is given to walking and cycling. Where each mode of transport is segregated from each other.
You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car.
In this sense, shared spaces force drivers to actually slow down and think about what they are doing. This is what even most motorists advocate, btw: less obstacles forcing cars to slow down, and more publicity of what a driver could expect from the area they are passing through.
> You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car.
You can easily do that by removing all parking space at hotspot destinations. Job done. Businesses will scream blue murder though, so you need a plan for that.
Bikes usually have a small lane on both sides of the road and don't really bother anyone.
I can't recall the name of a famous architect who was working on street dynamics and security but it is basically the opposite of what big names did in cities built for cars like Brasilia, Washington etc... The moral being that if you concentrate people in the streets you will need a much smaller police force because you're always "close" to other people.
https://letzterkunstgriff.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/harrow...
The section for cars to drive down looks to be about 15' vs 24'. Even that is fairly big, in a lot of cases there is only room for one car to drive at a time or only one side is parking. The pavement is a lot narrower too, around 6' vs 15'.
Think about this. Your ability to venture out to the Big Box store in the suburbs is what keeps pressure on local prices. Once lack of mobility isolates you, guess who will raise prices.
Regarding pricing, much of the good pricing is due to manufacturing scale, which you would still have with a distributor or a cartel consolidating orders. I don't see how big box stores are the only way to have low prices.
On pricing, manufacturing does help a lot. But retail is part of the cost (always >10% of it) and the restriction of movement will apply to people going out or goods coming in.
Unless there's raised or multi-level paths. That's honestly the real solution here; building up.
An interesting question is why we build up without interconnection? Purely ownership reasons? Structural stability reasons?
In California, among other places, seismic safety may be a concern.
You still need to drive fire trucks and ambulances...
When your city is transit-locked so no cars can get in, retailers will up their convenience charge, because they'll know that you have to spend 3 hours on the bus, and rent a ZipCar to get to Costco. And they'll also know you will only be able to bring home as much as you can fit in your fold up grocery cart. You really need to look no further than Manhattan, and one of the suburbs in Bergen County, NJ to see this effect in action.
In other words, it's probably OK for side streets, but you probably don't want to do this for major thoroughfares.
Essentially, you have a big shared car park at one of the "entrances", and lots of narrow streets otherwise. It works pretty well, really.
edit: Some bigger blocks also have their own underground car park.
A better solution is not to have cars in the first place.
And that is the problem that is choking US cities. All of the pictures in the article show cities built around the concept of walking, cycling, and bus/train-ing to where people need and want to go. Private car ownership is lower and is far less useful.
It does not (and, IMO, should not) follow that building more residences requires more legally-mandated turning over of public right-of-way to store private automobiles. Even forcing parking minimums on private lots drives the cost of housing ever skyward because those spaces take up space that could be used for housing or are located underground and, thus, even more expensive to build.
For people to walk/bus to work, shops, friends, they'll need much higher density housing, with workplaces mixed in and new public transport. So this single change won't help that.
1) Have to go somewhere that's both out of the city and out of public transit range
2) Have to get something heavy and/or bulky that can't be easily shipped to the apartment
The car gets pulled out of the nearby parking garage once a month, on average.
If parking wasn't such a nightmare, the car would probably get used more often. The only way to improve the parking situation is to either level housing for more parking lots (ha!), or to install more parking garages. The only palatable way to make more garages is to make the garages underground. I don't see that happening anytime soon. :)
So very, very many people in SF walk, bike, bus, or Lyft/Uber to work. Very few residents drive to work if their place of work is actually in the city.
I have a car and dont drive it to work, but use it daily for transporting my child. I'd say people who use a car only once a month are definitely a tiny minority. Regardless of whether that is a better way to live, it's not enough people to support eliminating as much parking as the article suggests.
I agree that folks who go to destinations in the Bay Area that are outside of SF often will use a car to make the trip. Public transit in the Bay Area is shitloads better than in most of the rest of the country, but -for medium-length-to-long trips- it's still not nearly as good as renting or owning a car.
I also agree that many folks drive to work if they commute in from outside the city. [1] I don't see what that has to do with parking space allocation policy inside the city. We can always set aside space on the outskirts for Park N' Rides for inbound commuters. There's no need to clutter up the streets with cars of non-residents.
The Census Bureau indicates that 13.4% of SF's workers walk or bike to work. [2] That's nearly the same fraction of the city's population that has and lives with children. I wonder what the numbers would look like if it removed folks who work outside of the city.[3]
If Muni went more places more frequently and more quickly [4], it's pretty obvious that even more folks would choose it over their private car. Compare New York's numbers to SF's [5]. (SF is on the left half of the table, and NYC is on the right.) Note both the percentage that choose transit over auto, and the percentages of households that don't have cars.
[0] http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....
[1] I guess I didn't make it sufficiently clear that I was speaking as an SF resident, as opposed to an inbound SF commuter. :)
[2] http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-r09....
[3] If you check the link after the text "View more commuting statistics for San Francisco online:", you see that ~23% of the workers surveyed work outside of SF. I wonder if cutting out 23% of the workers who travel by car would give us a reasonable look at the commute habits of those who both live and work in SF. If it does, then ~21% of SF resident workers commute by car, ~32% bus, and ~13% walk or bike.
[4] For some routes (e.g. Caltrain -> Polk Gulch), if you miss a bus, it's often faster to just walk the couple of miles to your destination. This is complete horseshit.
[5] http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/13_5YR/S0... (I hope that this link lasts for a long time. I'm not totally confident that this will be a permanent link.) (Also, note that the "How do we adjust the car-commute numbers to account for city residents that have jobs out of the city?" game gets harder here, as NYC is made up of like five counties or something, and I'm not sure how that's reflected in the Census Bureau's numbers.)
My point is there are not enough people who live identical lifestyles as you to make removing substantial amounts of parking feasible. It would be great if there were, but that's just not the case at the moment. Most people in SF need a car. I lived in New York for a while and when I moved back to SF one of my big disappointments was needing to get a car again. It was a bummer, but it definitely was a necessity.
Yes, IF the city (and surrounding region) made sweeping policy and infrastructure changes to improve muni, bart, park-and-ride etc, then less people would need to drive. But I've lived in SF most of my life, and I guess that's made me pessimistic about the ability of the city to ever make those kinds of changes. It's not going to happen on any reasonable time scale.
http://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2015/03/16/condo...
http://www.thestar.com/life/homes/2014/11/14/no_parking_cond...
There has been talk of what to do with unused parking spaces in other buildings (e.g., turning them in to work spaces for artists, etc.).
Here's an article saying Vancouver has unused parking spaces:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/unused-...