City Comforts, the blog

My Duany/Alexander "speculation"

Preface:

It should be obvious but I will state it explcitly that personalities are secondary. This post is about ideas and ways of viewing urban change. "Duany" and "Alexander" are simply justly-renowned figures who act as stand-ins for two differing ways of seeing.

•••

I don't think it's a speculation much longer. In a recent blog post (The Smart Growth Manual) I had mentioned in passing that after reading The Smart Growth Manual I could understand why Alexander is not, so far as I understand, a New Urbanist luminary (that's Large-Caps as in CNU) becxause of differing political sensibilities. 

After reading the post, a friend of mine asked: 

I didn't follow your final comments re Alexander. I do know that he received a Seaside Prize one year (I was there), and that he is generally held in high regard by the new urbanists I've met.  

My response:

Oh I am sure Duany respects Alexander. How could he not?
And vice verse.
My speculation is about differing views of design process. Alexander cares for the process by which places are built. 
Duany cares about the result. 
(Of course I am sure both care about both so it is a matter of emphasis and priority.)
There are huge political implications in those two views.

Surely they value similar towns and cities. So, as I was wondering whether to include this Duany/Alexander speculation in a blog post, (and an admittedly somewhat irrelevant speculation), I ran across this interview with Alexander at  http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/library/battle-for.pdf

I think it confirms my sense — nails it in Alexander's own words:

The system of planning, regulation, design, and production that we have inherited from the relatively early part of the 20th century makes all of that impossible. CNU is a  strongly motivated and in part highly sensible way of addressing this problem. It has  arisen from highly sensible people, architects, who are  now in a panic because they see  the problem, want to do something about it, don’t really know what to do about it,  and so  they try to hark back to history and historical forms. Their motive is completely  understandable, but their means cannot succeed, because they hope to do this within the  same technical means of production that are producing the most far-out and absurd  postmodern concoctions. Harmonious order cannot be produced by copying the shapes of  the past, although I suppose it might be mildly better than indulging in the very horrific  architectural fantasies that are deliberately intended to shock. But at root it is the system of production and the processes of production which are at fault. Until these are changed,  architecture cannot get better. (emphasis added)

When I read The Smart Growth Manual,  the differences in attitude (between Duany and, say, Alexander) on political authority just popped out. I hadn't realized how much Duany likes authority and telling people what to do but it certainly comes through very clearly in the book. Duany is a man of the establishment — he likes, or at least acknowledges, the importance of social authority and for him, the only problem with the way we do things today is in the final result i.e. auto-dominated sprawl. The political process is fine — results matter. Alexander, however sees the two are one: good product cannot come from bad, flawed top-down process.

If you can link to public writings from both men to either support or destroy my musing, please hack away.  Perhaps I have it all wrong and I will eat my words. 

It's all about the headways. Period.

Went out last night to Town Hall Seattle (the always-interesting, worthy and thank-god-we-have-it-here-in-Seattle, — thank you founder David Brewster!) to hear Darrin Nordahl and Jarrett Walker: Perspectives on Public Transit. Very stimulating discussion. To boil it down crudely, my take-away in Nordahl v. Walker (and grossly-simplified so I can bring out my point) is sexed-up transit vehicles versus frequency — frequency yields "headways" — how often a vehicle (whether it is car, bus, train or spaceship) passes a stop and thus the amount of time you are waiting to board. 

While I agree completely with Darrin Nordahl's call (and it was a very well-preseented call — I look at technique since I do public presentations and so always interested in how to do it better)  for better customer service and nicer vehicles (clean, safe, attractive -- maybe comfortable?) I believe that Jarret Walker's emphasis on frequency carried the evening. To me it's no issue. I don't use transit because I don't like to plan; my trips are somewhat spontaneous and I like life that way. The buses in Seattle are physically acceptable; they simply don't run often enough.

(Personal example slightly off the point: Last night I went from my house (Maple Leaf) to quick dinner with friends (Montlake) to Townhall (First Hill) to Queen Anne (dropped off friend and a drink) to home again. Elapsed travel time door-to-door (which is the test) on those 4 legs? Maybe 45 minutes. I can't imagine that I could have done it in less that 3 hours because of the numbers of stops, the need for transfers and time of day. Yes, I should go to Metro link and add up the actual legs in real time at the times I used and of course it's not completely fair as without a car I simply wouldn't have made such a routing — and would life have been very much diminished? Probably not really. Just different. Nevertheless, we middle-class North Americans are attuned to going wherever and whenever and that such psychological state has to be considered as a genuine political constraint.)

Do bear in mind that it is precisely those off-peaks are especially efficient for cars (no traffic) and especially ineffecient for transit. The last leg of my trip at 10:30 PM from Queen Anne to Cloud City Coffee (nearby) would take 60 minutes by bus while in the empty streets it was less than 15. Driving safely. Huge difference.

• My basic problem with American transit is that I don't want to plan nor wait. Ideally, the operational test for good transit, so far as I can see, is that if I have to use a bus schedule, I won't use transit. 

• So if frequency/headways are the issue — why doesn't every transit system have high frequency/low headways? Money. Pure and simple. Just not enough money. And here's the out-of-control downward spin. "Enough money" for public transit is purely a political issue. Period. Triple stop. Poorly-funded transit is purely a function of lack of political will.

• So why so little political will? Because people don't use transit, so politicians don't feel on-going pulse-pounding pressure to spend more money on transit.

• Part of the conventional wisdom about transit which prevents spending real money on quick headways is that "There's no market. People aren't using that route. Why should we be running empty buses?"

• My quick answer to that old saw is that just as with roads, with transit, supply induces demand. If you offer a rich 'connection pipe" (to garble Walker's terminolgy) then people will use it and people will get used to the service and presto you have political support. People support things (politically) that they use.

• So here is my advice/suggestion to managers of transit systems: experiment. Goose-up the frequency of headways and see what happens. Choose one route (and choose it astutely) and run buses at a level which are not now justified by current traffic. Then make sure people know about it, that they can ride without using a schedule. Is there political risk? Of course. You have to choose your route wisely. You have to understand how long it will take for potential users to realize that they don't have to plan to use transit. You have to budget for running that route at a deep deficit. Your board will look at you and your job is on the line. (Obviously easy for me to say.) But if you are serious about getting people to use your system, people using it as a matter of choice and not because they are poor and without a car, then it's pedal to the metal to show (not cajole through marketing) that the key to system use is frequency.

• Show me all the greatest marketing for a transit system etc etc and if you don't have great headways, I won't use it. 

 

Btw, I think that I once spoke to Walker about this political experiment approach and while we agree on frequency, he thought my suggestion wrong, or impossible or something like that. 

Comment on The SGM at Better Cities

My comment on Finding fault with the Smart Growth Manual

We must be reading different chapters. :) The section you reference is "Urban Triage." It clearly states that "Even the best neighborhoods"  (italics added, such snobby language? -- David's note) "must accomodate elements that are intrinsically hostile to pedestrian life. Among these are drive-throughs, gas stations, blank walls, and car lots, all of which should be located in districts beyond the neighborhood edge."

How much clearer can it be? The authors state that bad things should be in someone else's neighborhood, if you can get away with it to a greenfield New Urbanist (where's the TMsymbol?) development.

It is only in rehab, where you must stay, then you develop an A-B street network, where A is ped oriented and B for all the bad but necessary stuff. That makes sense and is somewhat like the actual response in cities, though the authors suggest using a more-sophisticated method.

My point stands -- the authors call to segregate undesirable uses if you can and place them "in districts beyond the neighborhood edge." That's what the words say. I didn't make up the phrase "...drive-throughs, gas stations, blank walls, and car lots, all of which should belocated in districts beyond the neighborhood edge."

The book is seriously flawed and if there is demand for such a book to place new urbanism as the core of smart growth -- which is btw a very fair claim -- then the book should be redone.

And as I wrote privately, I will be happy to help Duany, Speck and Lydon in the revision of a second edition. The book has good bones but the authors must insert some rigor and retraint. If they wish to add more speculative ideas -- e.g. that "long-distance food sourcing will become increasingly untenable" -- then such ideas should be clearly marked as "speculative" and not a part of settled wisdom. And I do want to specifically highlight that point. Placing peak oil as the driver (no pun) of smart growth (a term I actually detest with it implied de haut en bas) is both intellectually arguable and bad politics. 

The Smart Growth Manual — Duany, Speck, Lydon

Some 18 months ago I was asked by one of the editors at Landscape Architecture Magazine to write a review of The Smart Growth Manual; Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, Mike Lydon. When I was asked about the assignment I had not even heard of the title, which surprised me, considering Duany's justified renown. 

The review was never published by LAM — there's a fascinating backstory and I will post it another day — so I am offering the review here.

One very personal note: when I received (from the LAM editor) my copy of The SGM and saw its style, I was absolutely delighted that Duany and company had adopted the format of my book City Comforts. (Which format, of course, I had been inspired by or even copied from A Pattern Language.) No doubt Andres had forgotten my little book when The SMG was created. But when he first read City Comforts in 1995 it he focussed on its layout and told me that it was a "great delivery system." So my immediate response to seeing the Smart Growth Manual was a sense of "I've-come-home-familiarity," friendliness, enthusiasm and total bias in the book's favor. Unfortunately my enthusiasm did not last a thorough reading.

My review below, unedited from first writing in August 2010:

The Smart Growth Manual

It may be an odd way to start a book review by saying that “I look forward to future editions of The Smart Growth Manual (The SMG)” before I even review it, but in its first edition the book cannot be considered a “manual,” a “handbook,” a work of settled professional practices.