Get paid to ride your bike …

 

 

I met this cyclist on a pedestrian bridge in Utah. At first what caught my eye  was the number of instruments on his handlebars. Getting closer, the abundance of gear became more visible. Why so many cellphones?

 

Turns out he worked for AT&T. His job was to cycle through the city according to a map, stopping every 100′ to take readings as to cell phone signal strength. Was the download speed what was promised and what customers’ expected?

 

In the back panier was a battery and stuff to power his phones. It had enough power to keep him (stopped) on the road all day.

He didn’t get much cycling in with all those frequent stops.

But it could have been worse: what if they had equipped him with a Kmart grocery cart of stuff?

Lonely house on the parking lot

The area along the O-Train corridor has undergone lots of changes from its original industrial beginnings. Occasionally, an old building survives.

Notice that it has a real slate roof, there are few houses or buildings left in our neighborhood with slate roofs. In this case, it probably was to provide additional fire proofing from the sparks that flew out of the many steam engines in the area.

David Jeanes tells me this may have been the home of Ottawa Stair Works. Probably built right after the Great Fire in 1902, the building then faced Somerset Street which was not yet elevated up on the viaduct as it is now. The area behind it, now the City Centre parking lot, was first the D Kemp Edwards Lumber Yards, later the Argue Coal Company yards. In this 1912 fire insurance map the building was located, but not shown on the map, immediately right of the blue building labelled “planing mill”.

Somerset Street runs across the bottom of the pic; the blue building is approximately where the south end of the City Centre warehouses now is. The building is shown in its correct location in earlier maps, just not the 1912 version.

It was later used by fashion apparel establishments, and for hobby, toy, and picture framing businesses. It now appears to be empty.

All this is a long way around to saying that the community association has suggested to the Bayview CDP planning team that this old structure should be kept or relocated on the site when the area is redeveloped for the three planned condo towers and commercial development. It would make a pleasant contrast to the modern towers that will surround it, and could function as a coffee shop, bike dealer (it would be right on the new O-train north-south bike route being constructed this summer, as it could be just north of the new Somerset bike underpass).

What do you think? Should it be saved and incorporated into the new project?

Over arching concern

As land values increase and it becomes more urgent to maximize development potential. This necessarily causes architects and developers to focus on the space above driveways.

The result has been a spate of “carriageways” or porticos.

Sometimes these are on large buildings, such as Claridge has built on the Flats

and is proposing for the project at Richmond/Kirkwood. Recall too that Ashcroft is proposing two pedestrian porticos from Richmond into the Our Lady of the Condos site.

Here is a simple driveway entering a tiny courtyard with six or so garages. The “flatiron” rooms above it are interesting. It is on Gladstone:

And there is another development coming, this time on Booth, designed by Hobin, where the carriageway entrance goes into a mews with another row of townhouses in the back. Simple, neat, attractive. And the laneway is only one storey high.

But just a block away, on Rochester, the developer there insists that he could not ever possibly build carriageway entrances to his project because… Well, because they would have to be at least 16′ high, be fire-proof, be big enough for fire trucks, be very wide, and all sorts of other too-expensive provisions. Thus the site layout could not be improved as the community association suggested. I wonder why Fotenn chose to take this “can’t be done” route when it is becoming so popular for others?

Sometimes small minds are found in the largest developer agencies; and the neighborhood misses out.

And here is the grand-daddy arch of them all, Rowe’s Wharf in Boston. It is big enough to span a whole street. Speaking of which, when will we see something like that in Ottawa?

Signs of the times

 

NCC skateway street sign as seen from the Corktown Bridge

The City ascribes geographic omniscience as a characteristic of cyclists. How else could one explain the total lack of street signs or directional signs along the City’s multi-user paths (usually called “bike paths”).

In contrast, vehicular motorists are considered by the City to be geographical ignoramuses. How else could one explain the provision of street signs on every corner of every street, no matter how minor the street or how few places (if any) there are on the street?

Sarcasm aside, there should be street signs along pedestrian and cycling paths. They should be installed using similar criteria to regular street signs, ie at every corner.

Some destination signs would be useful too. These California format signs are pretty nifty:

As is usual in Ottawa, we are “considering” the issue of pedestrian and cyclist wayfinding. This requires some serious study. Should routes be numbered or named? How many signs, how big, and where to install them. Will they obstruct motorist sight lines? Who will pay for them as bike paths are not city roads?

I fear this will take us into the land of the parking-meter-to-bike-posts fiasco, where thousands of parking meter posts were removed instead of being converted to bike posts because we set up criteria so detailed that it is difficult to find spots to put bike posts.

This is a familiar problem when dealing with traffic issues. Existing conditions, even if rebuilt, are grandfathered and don’t have to be changed. Any changes wanted by the community have to pass the most stringent new standards designed for unconstrained suburban environments. That’s why the engineers always win.

But in Ottawa we are blessed with the NCC. They installed cyclist wayfinding signs on their paths several years ago, and have been improving them. And now they have installed them on the canal, for ice skaters. Yup, motorists can know where they are, skaters can know where they are, but cyclists on city streets …

Infill that works

Complain, complain, complain. It’s too bi-i-i-g. It’s too ta-a-a-a-ll.  It’s not the same as now. It’s not compatible. We hear those whines every day when the subject of infill or new development comes up.

It’s not always that way. It’s just that good projects that are welcome in the neighborhood don’t get good press.

So here’s a good news story.

On Booth Street there is a blight that has cursed residents for years, Cousin Eddy’s Garage and Uncle Chado’s body shop. The city trees in front of the garages mysteriously died so we could all admire their ugliness and garbage-strewn grounds.

 

But redevelopment is in the winds. Barry Hobin is carrying the file, and for once there is no worry about gross overdevelopment. No highrise in the middle of a low-rise neighborhood. No walls of windows four feet from the lot lines. Nothing weird at all. Just 20 townhouses, affordably priced, nicely situated on the street and a mews.

Here’s the aerial shot:

St Anthony school and Church are off to the top right, split by Gladstone Avenue. Booth Street runs right-left through the shot, with the new townhouses superimposed mid-block.

Here’s the view from the front:

Immediately noticeable is that is not a bird’s-eye view. Hobin doesn’t assume we are all flying helicopters. It’s a genuine sidewalk-level view. And here’s the view from across the street, although I think the townhouses are drawn a bit too big:

It’s a bit hard to see at first glance, but there’s a portico driveway through the ground floor at the centre, beyond the near side thick wooden pole that protects pedestrians from marauding cars. The row of houses quickly closes up above the discrete driveway. Note once again that the architect is happy to show what his project looks like from the positions we will normally see it, ground level.

Here is the site plan:

 

And while celebrating this well-done infill project, it is worth noting his Planning Rationale submission (available at www.ottawa.ca/devapps). Most other rationales are thick documents that parse through relevant planning and zoning documents with a fine tooth comb, selecting out of context quotes to justify whatever new, larger, more wonderful project they are promoting. But this time, a simple two pager, written by the architect, no fancy planning firm required. It’s almost the good ole’ days.

Urban Forum on Urban Fianance

The speaker last night for the Urban Forum lecture series was Peter Katz, from various places in the US. His focus is on New Urbanism. Not the fake new urban stuff of an isolated subdivision built with cute porches and picket fences, that still functions as part of a car-focussed larger environment, but on New Urbanism on a larger scale.

He’s had a book out for a number of years: New Urbanism which may predate his new focus on the larger scale. 

His topic last night was city finance. Whilst working for Sarasota in Florida, a city hard hit by falling property values, abandoned properties, and plummeting tax revenue, he and his colleagues did a study on how much the County-level of government made from various types of urban development. (The County in this case is a larger geographical area that would be akin to our former regional government two-tier model).

First they looked at house types, eg the small ’40′s to 60′s bungalow, larger suburban singles, and towns/stacked towns/walk-ups. They then looked the tax revenue per acre for a Walmart-type big box store on a large lot; and various shopping malls. Finally, they looked at some downtown-ish mixed use buildings in the 7 to 17 storey range.

The urban mixed use developments generated a wildly disproportionately large share of taxes. In terms of payback, it takes a new suburban area about 43 years to pay back, in taxes, the costs of servicing the development (when new). It took the mixed use development only three years.

O-la-la, that’s a huge difference. Proof that pay-as-you-go Nepean et al were really Mayor Bernie Madoff Ponzi schemes? Not so fast.

It was very tempting to draw conclusions from his talk about the desirability of fostering mixed use urban developments as a better payoff financially for the government. And that is what he was definitely encouraging us to conclude.

But I found myself very mistrustful of his numbers. There was a distressing lack of detail. For a guy going around speaking to councils, planning teams, urban enthusiasts, planning students (a bus load of Queen’s U planners were there) I expected a bit more than generalities. Detail. Not hundreds of pages of detail, but enough supporting detail to be confident he was talking about relevant things.

Like, what does Sarasota provide those new developments? In Ottawa, local development roads are charged back to the developers; do they do this in Sarasota or does the County provide those roads? Without knowing something about the County INPUTS to the development, it is risky to generalize conclusions about the payback period that was such a big feature of his spiel. And he was totally silent on the inputs (costs) side.

I also found myself wondering about measurement. It’s easy to compute tax revenue per acre; not unexpectedly it will show low density uses generate less revenue than high density uses.* When calculating the big box mall site, did the acreage include the surrounding roads necessary to service it? Did the six-houses-per-acre suburb include or exclude local roads (which are about 35% of the area)? And did those two big mixed use projects in the downtown include only their block, measured inside the sidewalk perimeter, or did it include some of those space-gobbling freeways that service the high density downtown? All those things were skipped over, so I would like to have had just a few words about methodology.

Speaking of methodology, I wondered about a few other things. Was it the high density mixed use itself that generated the revenue, or was it because it was located downtown?

Would a suburban mixed use development have had a three-year payback?

And it is always very dangerous to extrapolate generalities from a small sample size And Mr Katz’s sample size was small. Very small. Two buildings. In one town. Both of which consisted of condos selling in the million dollar range. Ouch. The suburban developments on the other hand were not identified as to their selling value. Maybe, just maybe, the high tax revenue came from the value of the housing units themselves? In which case, let’s rule out the poor (something municipalities used to be good at; Nepean and other suburbs, when indie, used to have numerous ways of doing this, like minimum lot sizes, minimum house sizes, requirements for brick frontages, etc).

Now the focus of his talk was on municipal finance per se. I outlined some of my misgivings on generalizing from his sample size, possible confusion by property location, and value of the house units. But there were some other concealed messages. It’s all very well for a municipality to rah-rah mixed use buildings in the downtown, but these case study ones  were affordable only to households earning $350,000 a year and up. Those stick built bungalows and towns that didn’t generate so much revenue were sellable to households with incomes of $30,000 and up. Hmm. Back to the 50′s and exclusionary planning…

And I haven’t covered things like builder oligopoly, because larger buildings (such as those mixed use downtown high rises) are buildable primarily by larger builders, and new builders start with the small projects. Restrict those, and you’ve landed in the smart growth=unaffordability trap by virtue of a highly constrained market.

Despite these quibbles, Mr Katz’s very worthwhile message to municipalities was to know what your land uses generate in tax revenue, and what the payback period for each type is. You’d better know your costs too, but he didn’t cover that.

As for Sarasota, I wonder if it will change its ways, and become a downtown of high rise mixed use buildings of very expensive condos, with a narrow surround of low rises interspersed with mega-malls (these are profitable for the municipality), and no industry because industrial parks don’t pay back fast enough. Would I want to live there? Is Bean Counting the new Urban planning model?  You read it here first.

In the meantime, I’m hoping that some bright beanie at City Hall finance dept is calculating right now the real return from different types of municipal growth.

 

*Back in my days at Transport Canada I had long running battles with guys about transportation safety and efficiency. Airlines love to use safety per passenger mile; not coincidentially, that one measure is the one that most naturally favours airlines. And they excluded short haul flights, because those had more take off and landings per trip, which are the dangerous parts. Include those and their stats go into the dumper. Auto safety would be much more attractive if we excluded short trips, since most accidents occur with 5 miles of home. You get the idea. Since then, I always ask myself why a particular unit of measurement was chosen for a comparison. Is it fixed?

Crowdsourcing an Urbanist Trip

A faithful reader of WSA is heading off to the American southwest next week, for a ten hour tour  ten day car trip. She was wondering what nifty — or really horrible — urban thingys she should look for in the following places. Dear Readers, you know the stuff that interests fellow readers: nifty neighborhoods, old or new; traffic calming and streetscaping;  transit; architecture; the weird and wacky.

Her list is already started, and includes these obvious things:

Las Vegas - the new Starchitect hotel megaplex near the Bellagio, includes the Ghery building that focuses the sun’s rays onto a hot spot at the pool. She’s been to Vegas before, and will revisit old favorites like the Bellagio and ride the Deuce double decker transit. Did the “new” monorail ever open?

Sedona – the church high on the hillside sponsored by Barry Goldwater

Prescott - for the old Victorian neighborhoods

Phoenix - ride the LRT; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West; new downtown waterfront (?) project.

She’s starting to look things up on the ‘net, so don’t go to any special effort. You are not travel agents. Really, it’s just an exercise in finding out what fellow readers know of that would be nifty and interesting. Let ‘er rip. 

PS: having travelled before, she has already been the Canyon, Meteorite Hole, Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, etc. Think URBAN.