planning Archives - Page 3 of 6

Cities as the environmental solution, not the problem

A series of posts from the NRDC on how good, human friendly cities are actually the most sustainable places for people to live, in contrast to our fond fantasies about the country, and especially the suburbs.

Location Efficiency More Important than Home Energy Efficiency

How important is Location Efficiency? Median US home price: $175k. With a traditional 20% down 30 year mortgage, total loan payments amount to about $350k. Utilities over the same timeframe are around $75k. And the cost of commuting from suburbia? Roughly $300k! This is in general agreement with the energy (as opposed to financial) analysis recently published by the EPA.

Major developer to build car-free micro-homes in Portland

DR Horton, which has built nearly 20,000 mostly suburban homes across the US, is now pitching cozily downsized car-free living in SE Portland. It’s a development called Division 43, made up of 29 units, in 2-3 story buildings, on one third of an acre, with no on-site parking, and shared outdoor spaces including a garden plot. 350-700 square feet, 1-2 bedrooms and 1-2.5 baths, open floor plans, energy efficient, $120-180k. Sounds pretty awesome. Would be great to see similar stuff available in Boulder.

Bicycles, Transit, and the Last Mile

Transit agencies have a problem called the Last Mile. It’s especially problematic in lower density communities, where convenient, high frequency local feeder bus, light rail, and trolley lines are unlikely to be economically viable. Many US communities have this problem. The most common solution is the Park-n-Ride — a gigantic surface lot or parking structure adjacent to a regional mass transit line. People drive their cars a few of miles and park them all day — usually at very low cost to the driver, and often for free (though of course, parking isn’t actually free). There are lots of problems with this model. Parking lots take up a lot of space. Structures are very expensive ($10k-$25k per parking spot). What do you do when you get where you’re going? If the transit line doesn’t come within easy walking distance (500 meters?) of your ultimate destination, this model probably isn’t attractive. It also assumes that you’re going to own or have access to a car, even though you’re taking transit, which precludes you from reaping most of the economic benefits of not driving, as they only accrue when you get rid of the car completely.

I bring the Last Mile problem up because I just came across a study entitled Bicycling Access and Egress to Transit: Informing the Possibilities. Combining bicycles and transit instead of cars and transit can help with a lot of the above issues. The cost per bike parking space is at most a couple of hundred dollars, not $10,000 or more, and for a given area, you can park ten times as may bikes as cars, making a bicycle park-n-ride much more economical in both dollars and space. It’s also possible to take at least a few bicycles along on transit vehicles, which can solve the problem of getting to one’s final destination on the other end, though not generally for everyone since bicycle capacity tends to be limited, especially on buses.

Continue reading Bicycles, Transit, and the Last Mile

Location Efficiency and Housing Type

According to this EPA study, regardless of the type of housing, living in an area with good transit access saves more energy than building a “green home”. Of course, living in a mixed use, transit accessible apartment that’s also energy efficient uses the least energy, but it’s important to realize how limited the potential for cost-effective energy efficiency is in a sprawling suburban context.

The Selfish Automobile

A good overview of the cost of cars in terms of money, space, and time at Planetizen. Transportation costs are already unaffordable (>20% of household income) for the lowest income 40% of the US, and drivers only pay a minority of automotive costs directly. Over the last half of the 20th century, the proportion of household income dedicated to transportation doubled. Cars use ~20x as much spacetime (s*m^2) as bikes for the same commute, and ~200x as much as a pedestrian. Interestingly the direct car costs mentioned are only about half what AAA estimates ($4100 vs. $8500 per year).

Human Powered Comments on the Boulder County Transportation Master Plan

I went to one of the inaugural Boulder County Transportation Master Planning meetings… on January 13th. I took notes, but never wrote them up (bad blogger!). The process will probably take most of the year, and it’s looking out 25 years or so into the future, so really 6 weeks isn’t too big a deal, right? If you haven’t already, please do take the Boulder County TMP survey.

Before the meeting there was a mingling session with a bunch of poster board presentations (available here as PDFs), mostly maps showing a bunch of different current and projected data. Where people are, where jobs are, where trips go, both today and our imagining of 2035. I talked briefly to George Gerstle (whose bicycle parking spot is pictured above) about the current and projected population centers in the region.

Boulder County 2010: Blue=Households, Red=Jobs

The expectation is that there will be a lot of sprawling, suburban, car dependent development just beyond the southeast corner of Boulder County around Broomfield, in Jeffco, and also in the southwest corner of Weld County (which does not participate in RTD). Also, growth is projected along the I-25 corridor, and along US 36. By and large, what happens beyond the county’s borders is out of our control. There’s a little bit of open space out there that we own, and we can control what kind of infrastructure exists within the county, but barring sudden and sustained increases in gas prices, it seems unlikely that these communities are going to embrace transit oriented development and compact urban design. We’ve got sprawl at the gates, and we have to decide what to do about it. These bodies politic are apparently not interested in planning around the possibility of significantly higher fuel costs in the future.

Continue reading Human Powered Comments on the Boulder County Transportation Master Plan

Bicycle infrastructure progress along Goose Creek

I’ve been biking along the Goose Creek bike path a lot over the last few months. Boulder Aikikai is out there, and so is Community Cycles, and I’ll go for a short triangular on the Boulder Creek path, 13th St. and Goose Creek when I just need to get out in the sun for a little while. Throughout the summer I was repeatedly reminded that there’s no good way to get from the path up to the east side of 30th St, and crossing 30th kind of sucks, especially when there’s any traffic. A couple of times I went so far as to go under it and the nearby railroad tracks, and then up into the parking lot, and back over the railroad tracks and through another parking lot. I’m sure this involved trespassing. And I wasn’t the only one doing it either, there was a trail worn in the grass and the gravel.

So I was stoked to hear that a ramp connecting Goose Creek to the east side of 30th was in the works, and this fall the heavy equipment came out and started making it a reality. I’ve been taking pictures as it progresses:

Continue reading Bicycle infrastructure progress along Goose Creek

Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World

The Boulder Blue Line has a short post entitled This Law Cannot Be Repealed by Albert Bartlett, who is an emeritus professor of Physics at CU, and who is most well known for speaking about the absurdity of “sustainable” growth and what exponential growth really means. He’s also one of the original architects of Boulder’s “Blue Line”, which has limited growth beyond certain boundaries within the city and county.

I agree with Bartlett on a lot. Unconstrained population growth is undoubtedly, in a global context, an epic disaster. In his collection of essays Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley noted of overpopulation that “Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems.” Similarly, the unconstrained geographic growth of towns and cities is a catastrophe, resulting in very low-density, car-dependent development which exacerbates the consequences of population growth by increasing the amount of resources that each individual consumes, in terms of land and energy and material goods.