Monday Morning Traffic

Some observations.

For this morning's dog walk I had to wait a few minutes to cross Lake Ave by McCough's. There were five cars waiting to turn right at the stop sign.

Taking the kids to daycare at 8:15 I had to wait to be let out of the alley between Eighth and Ninth St. Of about 10 cars that were heading north on Cass eight continued downtown (including me).

Last night at 10 PM there were no cars on Cass, Eighth, or Lake Ave. I know because I stood in the middle of the street waiting a few minutes for the dog to finish sniffing whatever it was he was sniffing.

So... is a lot of traffic a couple times per day, and only on weekdays (not weekends) in need of a $5+ million solution?

Isn't Lake Ave already used as a bypass for Cass and Union streets, making it easier for 80% of the cars using Cass to go downtown?

Thoughts On The Proposed Boardman Lake Avenue

[this is the email I sent to Traverse City officials]

Dear City Officials,

I live in Old Town, on Ninth St between Lake Ave and Cass St, and I strongly oppose building Boardman Lake Avenue.

My opposition is based on the fact that the proposed street will only create the problem it is seeking to solve. As a daily pedestrian I see a traffic speed problem, especially on Lake Ave, but not a traffic volume problem. Building a new road will only exacerbate the speed problem and cause traffic congestion.

Because building more roads will always lead to more traffic by definition - this is why traffic gets modeled as a gas - it expands to fill the space given to it.
Does the city want to build roads or fix the traffic issues? - you can't do both.

The neighbors I talk to want to fix traffic issues, not build more roads.

I understand things have been said to long-time residents of Old Town about the traffic in our neighborhood. But that was before Tom Vanderbilt wrote 'Traffic' in 2008. Before the Braess paradox (i.e., "in a network in which all the moving entities rationally seek the most efficient route, adding extra capacity can actually reduce the network’s overall efficiency") was understood to apply to traffic models. And in the last 10 years many communities tried to build their way out of traffic congestion only to fail; while communities that have closed streets have improved the flow of traffic.

Why would Traverse City try the failed road building solutions of the past?

Here are my questions for everyone to consider before Boardman Lake Avenue is built:

- Has a traffic study ever been done to indicate that this new road would work as intended? Or does the preponderance of traffic use Cass St as a north-south corridor into and out of downtown. How much traffic is related to St. Francis school pick-ups and drop-offs?

- Is there an example anywhere, of any town, ever successfully decreasing in-town traffic by building a new road? The answer I have found is No, more roads always create more traffic within five years. The lesson other cities have learned is you cannot build your way out of traffic problems and more streets always lead to more traffic.

- Does Traverse City want to spend so much money on a new road without trying much less expensive traffic calming measures first?

- What would be the environmental impact on Boardman Lake from more road salt and sediment?

- How will pedestrians safely access the Boardman Lake trail? I heard a person say at an Old Town neighborhood meeting that the Boardman Trail bridge was built so pedestrians could avoid walking next to busy Eighth St. But now we might put a new high-volume street between the neighborhood and Boardman Lake? So instead of having to walk next to a busy street we'll have to cross one?!

- Wouldn't this road simply move the traffic problem elsewhere such as...

- Would Boardman Lake Ave cause dangerous backups on Eighth St as vehicles attempted to turn south?

- Would Tenth St become a favored east-west route?

- How much more traffic would all of Old Town see?

Finally, as conditions exist now it is almost like being caught in a perceptual three-sided box. What I mean by that is that there are three boundaries that are perceptually hard to cross as a pedestrian- 14th Street, 8th Street, and Division Ave. Let's not complete the box with a high speed cut through that will not solve anyone's problems.

Thanks for your consideration.

Additional reading:

'Traffic: why we drive the way we do'
http://tomvanderbilt.com/traffic/

Removing Roads and Traffic Lights Speeds Urban Travel
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=removing-roads-and-traffic-lights

Braess Paradox
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

Walk Score In The Wall Street Journal

It doesn't get much more mainstream than this - walkability is covered in the WSJ's Real Estate section: A Walker's Guide to Home Buying

Still, the more emphasis on walking distance, the better, say many home-buyers. Gary Howe, a photographer and writer in Traverse City, Mich., has been working with his city's planning department to get, among other things, pedestrian-enhanced crosswalks at a busy intersection—a crossing so dangerous, he says, that many neighbors drive less than a block to a pharmacy just to avoid that street. "When I was looking for a house four years ago, lots of real-estate agents didn't even mention walkability," Mr. Howe says. "Now I see it everywhere, which is great."

More In The Theme Of 'Streets Are For People'

IPR reports that Garland St in the warehouse district may be turned into a Woonerf.

Woonerf in Asheville, NC


See IPR: Warehouse District Ready To Boom


And Cairo is the latest city to ban cars in the downtown. See: CoolTownStudios: Cairo to go pedestrian-only in downtown

New York Found Closing Broadway Was A Success

A year ago I posted: To Speed Up Traffic New York City Is Closing Broadway Avenue

NYC is making this a permanent change and looking to expand the concept.

See: Broadway Pedestrian Plazas in New York City Made Permanent

Make The Cities Walkable

If the Grand Vision plan of investment in the cities and town centers is carried out then one benefit is that a more walkable community makes for higher home values.

See: Good.is: How a Neighborhood’s Walkability Can Increase Property Values

People who love cities have known for years what the rest of the country is just starting to figure out: urban life is a beautiful thing. But even city lovers may be surprised at the premium home buyers place on urban living.

Another Argument For Urban Density

Better health obviously. See PhysOrg: People who bike or walk to work are more fit, less fat than drivers

Tap, Tap, Blink

A clever pedestrian crossing in Seattle.

Via Streetfilms: Seattle Crosswalk: Tap foot, Lights blink, Cross street

To Speed Up Traffic New York City Is Closing Broadway Avenue

USAToday: Broadway to kick cars to the curb

To speed traffic and give pedestrians more elbow room, New York City will close five blocks of Broadway around Times Square to traffic. The famed Great White Way between 42nd and 47th streets will become a pedestrian zone with benches, tables and landscaping.

I think Traverse City should close Lake Avenue between 8th and Union as this cut-through is pedestrian un-friendly and causes traffic to back-up.

Making this section of Lake Avenue would greatly benefit the Loading Dock, Midtown, Hagerty, Patisserie Amie, etc. I also think the old cannery and other buildings between the Loading Dock and Patisserie Amie could be like a mini-version of the warehouse district if only traffic volume were decreased and this area became walkable.

The Best Cities - Smart People And Lots Of Fun Things To Do

Update 1/16/2009
And let's not forget great places to live need great places to relax.
Boston.com: How the city hurts your brain ...And what you can do about it

Traverse City has a good start in being a great small town. But it is not all the way there yet. Living here "feels" as though we're on the verge of either becoming a great place to live and an economic engine or a touristy follower-town.

What makes a place a nice place to visit usually makes it a nice place to live.

There have been some recent articles regarding what makes some cities always attractive and what a place needs to do to be more than a nice place to visit. What is comes down to is put together a lot of smart people and give them fun things to do.

Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia released a research paper titled City Beautiful (PDF).

...past studies have provided only indirect evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban development. In this paper we propose and validate the number of leisure trips to metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) as a measure of consumers' revealed preferences for local leisure-oriented amenities. Population and employment growth in the 1990s was about 2 percent higher in an MSA with twice as many leisure visits: the third most important predictor of recent population growth in standardized terms. Moreover, this variable does a good job of forecasting out-of-sample growth for the period 2000-2006. “Beautiful cities” disproportionally attracted highly educated individuals and experienced faster housing price appreciation, especially in supply-inelastic markets. Investment by local government in new public recreational areas within an MSA was positively associated with higher subsequent city attractiveness. In contrast to the generally declining trends in the American central city, neighborhoods that were close to “central recreational districts” have experienced economic growth, albeit at the cost of minority displacement.

The researchers studied 15 variables to come to their conclusions:

Log Total

Employment in Tourism-Related Activities(1990)

Log Population

Log Number of Colleges

Poverty Rate

Log January Average Temperature (Average 1941-1970)

Log Average Annual Precipitation (1961-1990)

Share with Bachelors Degree

Share Workers in Manufacturing

Share Workers in Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate

Average Block-Group Distance to Park

Average Block-Group Distance to Recreation Sites

Log Historic Places per Capita

Coastal Share within a 10 km Radius

Mountain Land Share within a 10 km Radius

Boston.com has more on this research: Urban playground: As politicians weigh economic stimulus for cities, research suggests a surprising way to succeed: make it fun

In their paper, Carlino and Saiz found a statistical correlation between the number of leisure visits to a metropolitan area and the growth of factors like population and housing values. They controlled to determine that the tourism itself wasn't causing the growth, and argue in their paper that people move to the cities for the same reason they visit as tourists. They also demonstrate that investment by local governments in such "recreational capital" - spending on parks, cultural institutions, sports facilities, and other public-private spaces - has succeeded in making cities like Charlotte and San Antonio more attractive to tourists. They compute that a 10 percent boost in such spending yields a 2.3 percent increase in leisure visits, and, if the correlation holds, will also increase growth.
"If you have things that attract high-skilled, high-income individuals, they are more productive," said Carlino, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. "They are the ones who are likely to start up new companies."

And in the NYT Exonmix blog an entry on why NYC continues to thrive: New York, New York: America’s Resilient City

Homo sapiens are a social species; almost all of what we know we learn from each other. Dense cities, like New York, succeed when they take advantage of this fundamental aspect of our humanity. They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people.

The formula for a great city seems clear: create a city with a temperate climate near a coastline and with museums, colleges, parks, and downtown magnets -> create dense housing in an urban core -> smart people will come to the city -> human capital will make the city great.

Car Free Streets

Traverse City does a great job with street events in the summer (e.g., Friday Night Live, Cherry Festival parades, and summer street fairs), but there are large cities that are doing even more.

See this CS Monitor story: Traffic Stoppers

Imagine if Traverse City turned Lake Ave between Seventh and Eight Streets into a pedestrian only path? I think that could be a real winner.

Boardman Lake Is A Jewel

I am always surprised by how little activity Boardman Lake gets. But I have had tourist compliment me on how nice the east Boardman Lake trail is (as if I had anything to do with it) but they also lament that the trail does not circle the lake. I tell them, "not yet, but it will". And when Traverse City does get a complete Boardman Lake trail it is going to see a lot of use and love.

And when TACS finishes building a boathouse, boardwalk and a dock at the north end I wouldn't be surprised to see the combination of library, children's garden, boathouse, and urban trail get statewide and even national attention.

See the RE: Sailing group breaks ground

The Walk And Toast

Found via BoingBoing - Won’t You Be My Drinking Buddy Neighbor?