Liberal Landscape

I spent a few days earlier this month in Calgary. It was my first visit to the city since 1991. I had also been there in 1975.

Calgary has been a pioneer in three areas of concern to this blog—[1] light-rail transit; [2] off-road trails; and [3] central-city densification—and I tried on this trip to take a close look at recent developments. I ended up being quite impressed.

[1] Light-rail transit. Calgary was apparently the first North American city since World War II to put light-rail transit on surface streets downtown. The initial line opened on 25 May 1981. Many other North American cities were thinking of establishing rail lines in this period but hesitated for many reasons, among them a sense that subway lines cost too much and that surface lines would degrade the environment. Planners were (perhaps inevitably) thinking of the noisy elevated lines in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. To avoid this problem, Edmonton, Alberta’s capital, had built an elaborate (and expensive) downtown subway for what is now known as the Capital Line; it opened on 22 April 1978, three years before Calgary’s CTrain. The suburban portion of Edmonton’s line was also sited to cause minimal offense. It ran almost exclusively along CN tracks (which meant that it did not serve the most densely populated suburbs). The suburban parts of Calgary’s first line were similarly located along a lightly used Canadian Pacific branch line that was mostly bordered by industrial buildings. But Calgary boldly saved a huge amount of money by running its CTrain downtown along 7th Avenue, closing the street to most motor vehicles. Such an act was nearly unprecedented at the time.

It’s true that trains on 7th Avenue cannot run very fast. Train drivers have to watch out for pedestrians and stop for red lights. But, far from degrading the environment, the addition of surface rail to Calgary’s downtown seemed to add a certain charm to a district that in the 1980s was mostly devoted to office buildings. It also brought more people to downtown sidewalks. The stations (all improved greatly since they were first built) have become major activity centers.

Very few people in Calgary have regretted the installation of light rail, and the system has continued to grow in the years since its inception. It’s now up to 60 km in length.¹ Here’s a map showing the extent of the current system:

More than twenty North American cities have added light-rail or streetcar lines to their downtown streets since Calgary did. Some of these lines are quite short, perhaps designed more to please tourists and to suggest a city’s status as a place with rail transit than to move people where they might want to go. But several cities—San Diego, Portland, Dallas, Denver, and Salt Lake City—have built quite elaborate systems that are now larger than Calgary’s.²

None, however, has attracted more riders than Calgary’s light-rail transit system, which appears to have higher passenger loads than any other light-rail system in North America.³ Pre-Pandemic, the CTrain was carrying something like 313,000 passengers every weekday (in an urban area of something like 1.6 million). Not only was this more than twice as many riders as on the larger systems in the larger urban areas of Portland, San Diego, Dallas, and Denver. It’s also more riders than are carried on the older (and at this point smaller) light-rail systems in densely-populated Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia (all of which of course also have heavy rail, whose ridership is larger). Cynics have argued that Calgary’s high ridership is a function in large part of the fact that downtown parking has been made scarce and expensive. That suggests to me that the government agencies that have had some role in determining the availability and price of parking in downtown Calgary have been doing their work well. But, in fact, it looked when I was in Calgary as though there was no shortage of downtown parking. There are huge, mostly empty lots on the eastern edge of Downtown.

I made a point of riding on all Calgary’s CTrain lines on this trip. The three lines (to the northwest, northeast, and south) that were in existence when I was last there in 1991 have all been extended, and a new line has opened to the west. I was particularly impressed by the latter, which includes a substantial elevated portion (created in part because Calgary’s western neighborhoods are up on a kind of plateau), a short subway (with the CTrain’s only subway station), and a long section in a culvert. As a result of all this grade separation, Calgary’s new line to the west may be a little faster than the three initial lines.

All the trains, even those I rode on a Sunday afternoon, were at least moderately full. There were numerous standees on some rush-hour trips. It could be argued that, given the passenger loads, the 15-minute off-peak headways are not very generous.

In so far as I can tell, passengers included people from many social strata.

Calgary’s success in attracting riders is particularly noteworthy given that, like other cities in North America’s Great Plains and Prairies, it isn’t very densely populated. Most of the stations on the three newer lines are located in the middle of or next to major suburban arterials in parts of the urban area that were built to be moved around in by automobile. Some riders arrive by car; there are park-and-ride facilities at many stations. But numerous riders get to the stations by bus or on foot. Many stations come with bridges over nearby busy roads, but, once over the bridges, passengers face a pedestrian-unfriendly environment. The fact that Calgary’s CTrain has as many riders as it does is the best proof that there is that rail transit really can play an important role in a low-density North American city.

[2] Off-road trails. Calgary has also created a substantial off-road trail system. This system is rooted at least in part in the city’s favorable geography. Calgary is more or less bisected by the Bow River. Three affluents of the Bow—the Elbow River in the city’s southwest, Nose Creek in its north, and Fish Creek in the south—also cut across substantial parts of the city. In addition, there are several smaller streams in the area. Much of the water in the Bow and certain of its affluents comes from the Rocky Mountains, whose foothills lie just west of the city. Flow is quite irregular. During periods of substantial snowmelt (which occurs especially in the late spring) and after thunderstorms (which mostly occur in the summer), watercourses in Calgary can contain huge amounts of water. There have been several damaging floods in Calgary’s brief history. Settlers learned early to avoid building in the rivers’ floodplains. Some of this land was used for parks as long ago as the 1920s. But there were also places where railroad lines and industries were constructed close to the rivers. Most of these were abandoned or moved in the years after World War II, as the desire to rationalize railroad networks and modernize industry worked together with a preference for avoiding risk. This change in land use freed up a great deal of additional space that in many cases was acquired by the city government for additional parks.

Trails through these parklands were probably first established informally. In the 1960s and 1970s, as more and more people took up walking, running, and bicycling, the city started to pave long-established trails, with a considerable amount of support from the local Devonian Foundation and other non-government bodies. The Bow River Pathway was officially instituted in 1974 as a Centennial project.  By the early 1990s, Calgary had come to have one of North America’s most elaborate off-road trail networks, which has grown considerably in the years since, in part along the lines suggested by the Urban Park Master Plan (1994). The latter (220-page!) document was probably one of the first detailed plans for an off-road trail network compiled by a North American city.

Some sources claim that Calgary now has 900 km of off-road paths. I don’t know exactly how this figure was computed. I suspect it’s a bit high. It probably incorporates some sidewalk segments that fill gaps in the off-road trail system. The map above shows the approximate extent of Calgary’s trail network.⁴

These days, official Calgary seems quite proud of its trails. Tourist literature mentions them. The trails have become important to many of Calgary’s residents, who use them on quite a large scale, at least when the weather cooperates.

One thing that struck me was the variety of people on the trails. Calgary, like other big Canadian cities, has a substantial immigrant population, and it’s clear that immigrants make up a notable portion of trail users.

Calgary’s trail system is still being developed. One of changes in recent years has been the creation of separate pedestrian and bicycling paths along a substantial portion of the Bow River Pathway as it passes through the central city.

Maintaining these trails is now definitely felt to be an important government responsibility. I was struck as I walked along various trails at the number of places where improvements were under way.

Trails are not limited to the river valleys. In recent years, government agencies have been building short trails in parks, along highway rights-of-way, and on odd bits of vacant land throughout the city. Unlike the river trails, these don’t necessarily form part of a coherent network, but I’ll bet they are nonetheless useful to local dog walkers, runners, and others.

Calgary’s off-road trails are not perfect. Even in the Bow Valley, there are places where users are diverted onto neighborhood sidewalks for short distances. There are also many areas where the trails run uncomfortably close to major highways.

Most other North American cities have also been building off-road trails over the last several decades. Several of them—Ottawa, Washington, and Denver—have developed networks of trails that, in proportion to city size, are roughly as impressive as Calgary’s. Others—Atlanta and Boston, for example, which do not have conveniently available floodplains or canals or large numbers of abandoned rail lines to build along—have not done as much. But there has been some effort everywhere to build such facilities. Calgary was a pioneer in this effort, and its trail network remains one of the most substantial anywhere.

[3] Central-city densification. Calgary has managed to turn more of its inner-city neighborhoods into dense, bustling places than any other essentially 20th-century city in North America.

It’s important to remember how young a city Calgary is. It wasn’t incorporated until 1884, and it remained a miniscule place until well into the 20th century (its population in 1901 was 4,091). The 1946 census was the first to report a population of 100,000. Calgary’s urban-area population today is more than 1.6 million. In other words, more than 90% of Calgary’s population growth has occurred since World War II.⁵

The fact that so much of Calgary’s growth occurred so late had a direct effect on the nature of its built environment. Except—perhaps—for a small area around Downtown, virtually all of Calgary was constructed to fit the automobile. Most of Calgary’s land area is made up of post-World-War-II subdivisions of detached houses. In 2016 58.3% of its housing units consisted of such structures. Among Canada’s larger cities, only Winnipeg had a higher percentage. Although Calgary has had an active city-planning apparatus since World War II, until fairly recently there was little resistance to the pattern of private firms adding subdivisions to the city’s edge.⁶

Attitudes did begin to change as long ago as the late 1970s when the CTrain was being designed. Even then, plans called for higher density close to Downtown.⁷ But, over the last twenty or thirty years, Calgary’s planners—and, to some extent, public opinion—underwent the same kind of changes seen in urban areas throughout the Western world.⁸ Automobile-dependent subdivisions at the urban edge, which had been thought of as places where “normal” people aspired to live, started to be associated among a substantial part of the population with air pollution, overcrowded highways, long commutes, the blandness and anomie of suburban life, and “sprawl” (a word with a vague meaning that was never a complement). Denser, more “urban” places to live began to seem more desirable.

The result in Calgary was a very slow change in what got built where. Numerous new and often tall apartment buildings were constructed around Downtown, and the places where they were thick on the ground came to be referred to with neighborhood names that had a strongly positive connotation. Examples include the East Village, Eau Claire, and the West End, which surround Downtown proper on its eastern, northern, and western sides respectively. These days, the downtown skyline has nearly as many residential towers as commercial ones (most are, I’ll admit, shorter).

South of Downtown, that is, south of the Canadian Pacific tracks, a substantial area traditionally called Beltline, which was somewhat ragged and poor as late as the early 1990s, has undergone a slow process of gentrification. Of course, there were no genuinely old buildings to renovate, but some buildings from the 1920s were fixed up, and there was a huge amount of new residential construction.

Certain streets in Beltline—17th Avenue SW and 4th Street SW—that had sidewalk-adjacent commercial frontages dating from the streetcar era acquired restaurants and shops that came to be visited by people from the entire urban area.

The area also became known for its street festivals.

Across the Bow, areas like Kensington, Sunnyside, and Rosedale, which had never really undergone downward filtration,⁹ experienced less extreme gentrification and densification processes.

Here’s a map that suggests some of the shifts in Calgary’s population over the twenty-five years between 1996 and 2021:

Population density in 2021 was as high as 17,901 people per square kilometer in a small part of western Beltline. That’s an enormous figure for a city of the Great Plains. Here’s a map:

I was struck as I walked around Calgary’s inner-city neighborhoods at the extent to which pedestrian life was thriving. Of course, on a world scale, healthy pedestrian life in close-to-downtown neighborhoods is not exactly rare, but, in U.S. cities whose growth occurred mostly in the second half of the 20th century, it’s actually not usual at all. Consider that the Calgary area has approximately the same population and age as Oklahoma City, a place where pedestrians are pretty scarce. I’m sure that the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Calgary have a much more active pedestrian life than comparable neighborhoods even in much larger urban areas like Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. It’s possible that there were more pedestrians on the most crowded blocks of 17th Avenue SW on the late Saturday afternoon when I was there than there normally are in the entire downtowns of Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta combined. Of course, I acknowledge that Canadian cities, despite their similarity to cities south of the border, have some widely discussed structural advantages when it comes to their ability to support what might be called traditional urban life. These include: (1) the near-absence in Canadian cities of neighborhoods (and population groups) that are widely felt to be dangerous; (2) the fact that city-planning agencies in Canadian cities have generally had more power than their counterparts in the United States and have sometimes used this power to nudge the built environment in the direction of greater density; (3) the fact that Canadians have generally been a little poorer than Americans (and hence more likely to live in apartments than in usually pricier detached houses);  (4) the fact that interest on mortgage loans is not tax-deductible in Canada (this lowers the incentive to spend as much on real estate); and (5) the higher proportion of recent immigrants in Canada’s urban populations (many of whom seem to lack the North American preference for living as far as possible from neighbors).

I don’t want to overstate my case here. Calgary’s inner-city, “walkable” neighborhoods occupy only a tiny fraction (maybe 2%) of the region’s area. The ten contiguous tracts around downtown with densities of more than 5000 people per square kilometer had a population in 2021 of 49,828, a little more than 3% of the region’s total. Only 6.3% of Calgary’s housing units were in apartment buildings of five stories or more in 2016, and 21.1% were in apartment buildings of any height, and—this is Canada—many of the apartment buildings are in not-so-walkable neighborhoods in the outer city.¹¹

Still, a small but substantial part of inner-city Calgary has become an agreeable place for people who prefer to live in dense urban environments. Many low-density U.S. cities—Dallas and Phoenix, for example—have wanted to create such neighborhoods, hoping that they would be attract younger, well-educated people, but they haven’t found it easy to do so for all sorts of reasons. Calgary has actually to some extent succeeded.

The cities of the Canadian Prairie Provinces—with their extreme temperatures and relative remoteness from established cosmopolitan places—have tended not to have a very positive reputation. Calgary has been seen by some as an exception to this generalization at least since the Winter Olympics were held in the Calgary region in 1988. The city’s agreeable inner-city neighborhoods—and its reasonably good public transportation and its abundant off-road trails—have been widely noted. These features have been at least indirectly responsible for the city’s being deemed to be among the most “liveable” cities in the world according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index. In 2023, Calgary ended up in 7th place, ranking between Geneva and Zürich, ahead of Toronto and of several other urban areas that typically do well in this kind of poll. In earlier years it had done even better.¹² I’m not sure how easily any of Calgary’s attractive features could be replicated in the United States, but this is surely a possibility that’s worth thinking about.

I spent several days last month in Delhi, an urban area I’d visited a number of times over the years, most recently in 2014.

I’ve written about Delhi on this blog before and admitted that it’s one of my least favorite places. The problem is the extreme difficulty of walking pretty much anywhere. The city’s hostility to pedestrians is perhaps most striking in central New Delhi, which was laid out in part under the direction of British architect Edwin Lutyens in the years after 1911 when Delhi was named India’s capital. I can’t claim to be an expert on Lutyens, but it’s pretty clear that he and his colleagues thought that most travel in New Delhi (or anyway travel by officials and important civil servants) would be by motor car. Major streets are wide, and they often meet at roundabouts (traffic circles). There are sidewalks (although they typically haven’t been maintained over the years), but there is usually no provision at all for pedestrians to cross streets. There are few traffic lights and none at all at the roundabouts. The general pattern is that drivers in central Delhi are not made to feel that they ever need to accommodate pedestrians even when they’re making a turn. Many drivers even tend to be rather casual about red lights. As a result, although there are few pedestrians in most of Delhi, hundreds are killed in road accidents every year.¹

Delhi has, of course, grown enormously since the Raj ended 75 years ago. The Delhi area now has a population of more than 32 million, according to the 2022 edition of Demographia world urban areas, which makes it the third largest urban agglomeration in the world. As Delhi has grown outward, autocentric planning has continued with a vengeance. Outer Delhi has hundreds of kilometers of busy, wide roads that could hardly be more pedestrian-unfriendly. This is a problem in part because car ownership even now is limited to fewer than 20% of Delhi’s households.² As in much of the Third World, car ownership is associated with wealth and status, which inevitably bring certain privileges. These are arguably exacerbated in a society like that of India that tends to be extraordinarily hierarchical. Privileging automobiles implies a certain amount of contempt for the region’s very large number of poorer inhabitants—or for anyone (including eccentric foreigners) who prefers to get around on foot.

As is true just about everywhere, Delhi’s dependence on car travel has had many unfortunate consequences other than the frequent killing of pedestrians and the discouragement of any kind of pedestrian life. The area’s air quality is appalling. Traffic jams are frequent. And the vast majority of the population that does not have easy access to automobiles cannot participate fully in the life of the city.

In a major attempt to mitigate some of these problems, Delhi has been constructing a Metro system. No city (with the spectacular exception of half a dozen or so in China!) has built more kilometers of rail rapid transit track in the 21st century. The system is now up to 348 km, and several new lines are under construction. Delhi will soon have a longer Metro system than New York or London (although, unlike the latter cities, it doesn’t have a network of frequent suburban trains).

Here’s a map.

The Delhi Metro is generally considered an enormous success. On most days more than 2.5 million passengers use the system, and trains are much more likely to be uncomfortably crowded than embarrassingly empty.³ There is a consensus that the coming of the Metro has altered the city in many complicated and generally healthy ways. It’s made it easier for millions of people to move about the urban area. It’s forced people of many social classes to learn to share limited spaces. And, as a huge project built to international standards, it’s provided a kind of model of what Indian urbanism could look like.⁴ The limitation, of course, is that in many cases it’s not very easy for potential riders to get to the stations. The responsibility of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation ends at station entrances. Once you’ve left the station, there is sometimes no sidewalk to walk on, and many streets cannot be crossed safely on foot. Inside the Metro system, pedestrians are treated with respect. There are escalators and elevators in most stations. Many lines have platform gates or doors. Directional signage is abundant. Outside the Metro, pedestrians are treated with contempt. The relationship of Delhi’s Metro to the urban area in which it’s located is, well, pretty strange.

This is not exactly a secret. Many Delhiites are painfully aware of the extent to which automobile hegemony has determined the character of the city’s urban landscape (although they might not put it that way). Public discussion has sometimes centered on driver “impunity.”⁵ There have been numerous proposals to improve conditions for pedestrians, and there have been a number of local projects that attempt to alter the car/pedestrian balance. I’ll be the first to say that I haven’t been in Delhi often enough or followed events closely enough to be able to claim any real expertise on this subject, but I’d heard about some of steps that have been taken, and I tried, when I was in Delhi, to see for myself how some of these have worked.

The “pedestrianization” of Chandni Chowk is one manifestation of the new interest in reining in the automobile. Chandni Chowk is a rare straight street in “Old Delhi” (a.k.a. Shahjahanabad), a densely built-up section of Delhi whose basic morphology dates back to 17th-century Mughal India.⁶ Chandni Chowk has long been known as the major commercial street in Old Delhi. It’s one of the relatively few places in Delhi with a large number of pedestrians. The problem not so many years ago was that the area had become so overwhelmingly crowded as to be barely functional. Merchants’ shops and individual vendors had so encroached on the sidewalk that pedestrians had to walk in the street, which was crowded with motor vehicles, cycle and auto rickshaws, porters carrying supplies to and from shops, and (of course) occasional cows. It could easily take an uncomfortable forty minutes to walk the street’s 1.3 km length even if one didn’t stop to shop. And that may have been faster than a motor vehicle could expect to make the trip. Here’s a map showing the location of Chandni Chowk.

Over the last decade an attempt to “pedestrianize” the street has taken shape. The goal was to help people not in cars by removing motor vehicles. There was also the hope that Chandni Chowk could be turned into a tourist attraction that was, well, charming instead of appalling. The project’s first phase was largely finished in September 2021; additional work is ongoing and planned. It turns out that “pedestrianization”—the term used in newspaper stories and government documents—does not quite mean in India what it means in the rest of the world. The chief change that has been made in the street has been to ban motor vehicles between 9 in the morning and 9 at night. In addition, sidewalks and the main roadway have been repaved. A barrier with some seating areas down the street’s center has been installed. Cleanish toilets have been made available. Pedestrian-oriented directional signs have been put up. An agreement was also reached to clean the street and remove trash more regularly.⁷

Chandni Chowk has indeed changed, but the street has not been pedestrianized in the usual Western sense. Most pedestrians keep to the sidewalk, which may be just about the most pristine in India; there are few if any cracks or missing pieces. (Sidewalks in Indian cities are rarely maintained.) The catch is that merchants are still encroaching on the pedestrian right of way to some degree. There are also hundreds of individual vendors who spread their wares out on the sidewalk. An additional complication is that dozens of dogs spend their day sleeping where people are supposed to be walking. You do not want to step on these creatures. (And I did see one cow on the sidewalk.) It’s still not easy to walk the length of the street efficiently, but it’s definitely become a lot easier than it used to be.

As for the roadway, the ban on motor vehicles is clearly not enforced very assiduously if at all. Numerous motorcyclists (whose presence is specifically forbidden) ply the street, as do a few cars. Most vehicles are cycle rickshaws, as was intended. The catch is that many more cycle rickshaw drivers have been attracted to the street than there are possible riders, and they line up at the ends of the street hoping to be hired. They take up a lot of space.

A major complication is that, perhaps in part because deliveries by motor vehicle during the day are not allowed, there are still numerous people carrying things to shops. These porters can be hazardous to pedestrians.

Chandni Chowk these days doesn’t look anything like the idyllic, half-empty street shown in the photoshopped publicity photos that were released while it was being rebuilt. It’s still a crowded, bustling, and, well, very Indian place. But the street’s “pedestrianization” is one of Delhi’s first attempts at reining in motor vehicles, and the changes really have made it a more comfortable place for visitors who want to move about on foot. It doesn’t feel the least bit like a pedestrianized street in, say, the centro storico of an Italian hill town, but, then again, would we really want it to? (Let me add that motorcyclists can be a problem in pedestrianized parts of European cities too.)

In conjunction with the “pedestrianization” of Chandni Chowk, there have been a few other changes in Old Delhi that seem to favor pedestrians. Large parts of Old Delhi have “streets” that are too narrow for automobiles and so have always been pedestrian-oriented (even if they aren’t classified that way in the OpenStreetMap database I’ve been using for maps). There have been a few additions to this de facto pedestrianization. For example, a well-marked pathway—with a roof in places!—has been constructed from the Chandni Chowk Metro station to Chandni Chowk proper.

Just beyond the eastern end of the street, a shiny new traffic light has been installed that’s designed to facilitate pedestrian access to the Red Fort. This seems like the most trivial of changes, but the installation of a serious traffic light at a key intersection is such an event in Delhi that there have been substantial newspaper stories about it.⁸ I don’t know, however, the extent to which it’s been possible to get drivers to pay attention when the light turns red.

As noted above, one of the problems with the Metro has been that it’s so painful to walk to the stations. Not far away from Chandni Chowk, patrons who wanted to travel between the New Delhi railway station and the two Metro stations built to serve the station formerly had to cross a major roadway and a space where taxis and cycle and auto rickshaws waited for train passengers. A bridge has just been built here to make the transfer a little easier (2022). It comes with escalators and elevators.

There have also been several additional pedestrian-oriented changes in Delhi’s urban landscape, and I believe that there are others. Examples include an expensive 1.2 km (!) elevated walkway between the Durgabai Deshmukh South Campus station on the Metro’s Pink Line and the Dhaula Khan station on the Orange Line in southern Delhi (2019); a pedestrian bridge over several highways at the Pragati Maidan Metro station (2021); improvements in the “Central Vista” including the Kartavya Path (Rajpath) in Delhi’s central Washington-Mall-like linear parkland (2021-ongoing); and the construction of Aerocity (2011-ongoing), one of the few places in Delhi where pedestrians have been quite self-consciously accommodated from the first day.

It’s hard, however, not to be cynical about some of these “improvements.” When government officials in Delhi (and other Third-World cities) build elaborate bridges and tunnels for people on foot, they no doubt congratulate themselves, thinking that they’re doing something for pedestrians. But in cities in what we call the developed world—in North America, Western Europe, and parts of eastern Asia and Oceania—pedestrians in business districts and major residential areas are hardly ever made to trudge up and down stairways to cross streets. To facilitate pedestrian street-crossing, the authorities install traffic lights that everyone expects drivers to obey, and pedestrians are able to traverse roadways without having to think about it very much. It could be argued that the construction of pedestrian bridges and tunnels in Delhi reflects the unquestioned belief that the free movement of traffic is more important than the needs of mere pedestrians and that pedestrians who can’t or who’d rather not have to use stairways to cross streets are just out of luck. These facilities can be viewed as (rather expensive!) ways to put pedestrians in their place, to establish a hierarchy of urban residents in which drivers of automobiles are at the top. They do not really change automobile hegemony in any way even if they’re making life a little easier for people who are walking (as long, that is, as they can manage stairways).

Delhi remains for the most part a difficult city for pedestrians. I’ll admit that, when I’ve shared my thoughts on this subject with certain middle-class Indians, they’ve expressed some puzzlement. They don’t really understand why anyone would want to walk anywhere in a polluted place like Delhi (perhaps overlooking the fact that some people have no choice, including many potential Metro passengers). They don’t in any case see why urban walking should be prioritized in any way. I acknowledge that I may be trying to impose an obsessive urban walker’s preferences on a culture that has quite different values. But, clearly, some people in Delhi do recognize that there’s a problem, and, little by little, people in a position to make changes have been trying to do so.

I spent several days in the Lille area in early March. I had been in the city numerous times over the years but had never previously spent a night there.

Lille occupies a peculiar place in the French urban hierarchy. The city itself, with a population in 2020 of 236,234, is not particularly big. It ranked eleventh in France in 2020. But Lille is the largest municipality in a “functional urban area” (aire d’attraction d’une ville) of more than two million if its Belgian catchment area is included; only Paris and (just barely) Lyon are larger. Even if its Belgian part is omitted, the Lille functional urban area had a population of 1,515,061 in 2020, making it the fourth largest in France; it ranked behind not only Paris and Lyon but also Marseille. However one defines it, the Lille urban area is definitely one of France’s largest.¹

It’s probably fair to say, however, that Lille’s, well, visibility does not quite match its size. Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, and Marseille—and even many smaller cities like Grenoble, Nice, Cannes, and Montpellier—are surely all better known. Among the French themselves, the Nord region—and its major city—are often thought of as poverty-stricken and backward, in part because they are still associated with declining industries like coal mining and textile manufacture—and perhaps in part too because they get colder in winter than most of the rest of France. An exceptionally amusing 2008 movie, Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, satirized this feeling but certainly didn’t end it. The Lille area has suffered from its region’s reputation in a way that’s roughly comparable to the way that Midwestern cities in the United States have been branded with the problems of the Rust Belt.

In many ways, Lille’s response to its declining industrial base has resembled the response of certain American Midwestern cities, notably Chicago. Its powers-that-be decided in roughly the 1980s that its future lay in office work, convention-hosting, and tourism.

One of the results was Euralille, Lille’s singular attempt to get beyond its industrial past.² Euralille was created in part because SNCF, the French national railroad, (reluctantly) agreed to build a new TGV station in central Lille for Eurostar trains to London. It would have preferred to put a station in the suburbs but was dissuaded by the city’s strong lobbying. There was a problem, however. Fast trains couldn’t be routed through the old Gare de Flandres, a stub-end station with no easy way to provide speedy through service. The need for a new station and Lille’s interest in creating modern office buildings and a new convention center worked together to support the building of Euralille, a completely new district constructed on available land that lay near the border of the old city, not far from Lille’s central Grand’Place. Paris at this point was building La Défense, a major new office center on its western edge, and Lyon, at the southern end of the original TGV line, had created Part Dieu for comparable reasons. All these new districts were just what you’d expect of office complexes conceived between the 1960s and 1980s and built (mostly) between the 1970s and 1990s. They consisted in large part of tall buildings that lacked any kind of ornamentation. They were accessible by freeway. They came with plenty of parking. Areas for pedestrians consisted of empty concrete spaces. None of these districts as they were originally built inspired much love.

But Euralille did bring offices and conventions to Lille, and, these days, thirty years later, with its concrete spaces modified to some extent and with the addition of new housing, Euralille seems to be functioning pretty well, even for pedestrians.³ A huge Westfield shopping center between the two stations was so jammed this month that, still nervous about Covid, I wondered if it was safe to go inside (hardly anyone in Lille was using a mask when I was there).

During roughly the years that Euralille was being created, Lille, just like other cities in France (as well as numerous cities elsewhere in the Western world), was changing its planning strategy from an emphasis on catering to the automobile to a focus on supporting alternatives to the automobile. Modernity in effect was taking on a new set of meanings.

The most expensive and original manifestation of this change in emphasis in Lille was Line 1 of its Métro system, which opened in 1983. This line used locally developed “VAL” technology.⁴ It was the world’s second driverless metro line, and trains are exceptionally narrow and short. Two-car trains are standard (Line 1 used one-car “trains” until recently).⁵

Also in 1983, Lille’s surviving tram line, the Mongy, was extended underground to the Gare de Flandres, and, in 1989, a second metro line was added. Lille’s rail transit system now covers a substantial part of the region (and is supplemented by French and Belgian suburban trains and buses). Here are maps.

Like many other places, Lille also began to encourage “active transportation” in the 21st century.

For example, it instituted a bike-share system, in Lille’s case run by its transit agency, Ilévia. V’Lille (as it’s now known) opened in 2011. It’s probably fair to say, however, that Lille has done less than, say, Paris or Bordeaux to make the city bikeable. Still, there are a few protected bicycle lanes, and bicycle riders in the old city of Lille are common.⁶

Lille has also done a great deal to help pedestrians, though, again, probably less, in proportion to its size, than Paris, Bordeaux, or Lyon.

It pedestrianized several streets in the central city, or at least semi-pedestrianized them, beginning in the 1990s. Its major central square, the Grand’Place, now allows one-way car traffic on a single lane, where pedestrians have priority.

Several completely pedestrianized streets were established in more or less the same years.

In the central city, even streets that allow car traffic now typically have wide sidewalks that are jammed with people for much of the day. Central Lille these days seems like an extraordinarily healthy place. It’s hard to imagine the run-down industrial city of forty and fifty years ago.

There has also been a considerable amount of pedestrianization in the Citadelle, a major city park created from Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s 17th-century fortifications at the northern edge of the city. There are a couple of huge parking lots in the Citadelle, but, other than these, the place is now set up exclusively for walking, running, and bicycling.

Lille’s major long-distance pedestrian (and bicycling) paths run along the Deûle, a canal that was long ago carved out of small streams. The Deûle now runs along Lille’s northern edge and connects with waterways throughout northern France and the Low Countries. There’s also a branch enclosing most of the Citadelle. It’s possible, at least in theory, to walk, run, or bicycle for hundreds of kilometers along the Deûle and connecting waterways.

There are also plans to create what’s being called “Grand Euralille”: a corridor connecting the Deûle with Euralille. This corridor is now blighted by Lille’s Périphérique highway, but there are a series of parks along the corridor that could, with a great deal of work, be connected in a useful and attractive way. Grand Euralille is being touted as a 21st-century project comparable in scale to the original Euralille of thirty and more years ago.

There are also pedestrian facilities in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, a community dating from the 1960s and 1970s that’s said to be France’s first “new town.” Villeneuve-d’Ascq is located at the eastern end of Line 1 of the Métro. As in many of the “new towns” of the English-speaking world, pedestrians are to some extent separated from motor-vehicle traffic in Villeneuve-d’Ascq. The catch is that pedestrians have to cross roads on bridges that require climbing stairs or moving up and down steep slopes. I regret that a cold drizzle—and the absence of any sign of actual pedestrians—discouraged me from exploring Villeneuve-d’Ascq very deeply when I was there.

The old city of Lille—the triangular (or maybe pear-shaped) ten or so square kilometers that once lay inside the city’s walls—is, like many older European cities, an excellent place for walking, running, and bicycling, even where there has been only modest recent government intervention. Most blocks in this area are quite fully built up with 19th- (or very early 20th-)century housing, which consists to a large extent of row houses of one sort or another, often containing ground-floor commerce. (There are a modest number of government buildings—and older and newer structures—mixed in.)

Because Lille’s older quarters constitute an unusually substantial area of architecturally consistent traditional urban structures, walking around many parts of Lille is an extraordinarily pleasurable activity for someone who loves cities. It’s worth remembering that we probably owe the preservation of these quarters in part to the fact that, as late as the 1980s, few people thought it was worth replacing dilapidated older buildings in a declining industrial city—and that the building of Euralille probably reduced the pressure to redevelop central Lille until the modern era when the area came to be appreciated more or less as it was as an appropriate place for middle-class resettlement.⁷

Even if Lille hasn’t done quite as much to create alternatives to the automobile as, say, Bordeaux or Paris, it has definitely become a modern European city in the 21st-century sense of the phrase, with thriving pedestrian life, good public transit, and a healthy inner city, whose older buildings have mostly been preserved.

I spent several days in Lisbon in late January. This was my first trip to Lisbon since 2014. (I had also visited in 1998.)

I particularly wanted to take a look at the recreational paths along the Tagus (Tejo) that the city has been—very slowly—creating. I had walked along the path between Belém and the old CBD in 2014 and had been deeply impressed by it. There are very few urban walks in the world that are as aesthetically pleasing, at least to me. I had also been bothered by the path’s incompleteness.

Lisbon’s waterside recreational paths are (like those in other Western cities) in part a product of a movement in recent decades to focus infrastructure work on non-automobile transportation.

But the pattern of this effort has been somewhat different in Lisbon than in, say, northern Europe.

One difference is that governments in Lisbon have simply not had the resources to do as much as has been possible in, say, London or Paris. Funds were particularly short in the years after the 2007-2009 fiscal crisis.¹

There is also the issue that in some ways Lisbon became a “modern” city later than its counterparts in northern Europe, and this has had major consequences for its urban form. The city’s greatest period of rural-to-urban population growth took place in the 1970s rather than in, say, the 19th century. Most of this growth thus occurred during an era when travel by automobile (or bus) was available. It’s likely that a large proportion of newcomers to the city ended up living in apartment buildings not too far from suburban railroad lines, but most post-1960 residential and commercial buildings in Lisbon have accommodated automobiles in one way or another. The fact that governments kept building new automobile infrastructure through the 1990s also encouraged automobile dependence.

As a result, even though parts of Lisbon’s inner city (especially the “Seven Hills” area where tourists tend to spend their time) are pretty dense and the urban area now has a population of something like three million, Lisbon’s “modal split” is more automobile-centric than in the larger cities of northern Europe.² In the Lisbon area, more people get to work by car than by public transport. In similarly-sized Vienna (as well as in most other substantial places in northern Europe), the opposite is true. There are all the usual consequences. Traffic jams are common. Air quality isn’t as good as one would expect it to be in a city near the ocean. The city depends to an uncomfortable extent on imported fossil fuels. And, of course, there are numerous deaths and injuries.

Lisbon’s governments did change course in small ways long before the current century. The city’s modest Metro (first line: 1959) has been enlarged slowly (it’s now up to 44 km in length), and there are plans to keep adding new segments. Numerous improvements in the city’s suburban rail system have also been made over the years, and its annual ridership—159 million—approaches that of the Metro—174 million.³

Emphasis shifted much more substantially in the 21st century. Lisbon’s planning apparatus is now fully on board with the idea that one should focus at least a little bit more than in the past on non-automotive transportation. A recent general statement on the city’s goals can be found on a website of the Câmara Municipal (city government) devoted to “mobility.” Just about all the goals listed are connected with making things easier for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users.⁴ A recent article in Diário de Notícias⁵ (probably Portugal’s major “serious” newspaper) describes the accomplishments that current mayor Carlos Moedas is most proud of. The majority of these involve making Lisbon a more pedestrian-friendly place.⁶ Among the projects listed are the extension of tram line 15 (the major east-west tram route); enlarged pedestrian spaces in Sete Rios (where elevated freeways and railroad lines and a major arterial make life difficult for those on foot); increased green space in the Praça de Espanha (which, at present, is not much of a plaza); and a better pedestrian connection along the Tagus between the two main railway stations, Santa Apolónia and Cais do Sodré.

An example of a major transformation that goes back several years has been the creation of a fairly coherent network of bicycle lanes and paths (ciclovias). Many arterials, especially in the outer city, are now bordered by such paths. I wouldn’t say that the bike paths seem very crowded, however, and many of those using them are driving scooters. Lisbon may have pleasanter weather than northern European cities, but it’s a hilly place and, as such, perhaps not an ideal city for cycling. Bicycle commuting is rare in Lisbon. The city’s crowded and mountainous inner-city neighborhoods must be particularly difficult places for cyclists, and there are few bicycle lanes there.

Government actions have not been limited to the creation of bicycle paths. Another major change: numerous streets in the Baixa (Chiado), the old central business district, have been pedestrianized. (Some street closings in the Baixa go back many years.)

There have also been several cases where completely new pedestrian infrastructure has been built. An example is the 1.2-km walking and cycling path between Edward VII Park—the largest inner-city traditional park—and Monsanto—a long-existing mountainous park just northwest of the older part of the city. The two bridges on this path—the Ponte Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and the Ponte Monsanto—are especially impressive. The former, which passes over the Avenida Calouste Gulbenkian, provides quite striking views down the Alcântara Valley. Like Lisbon’s other new pedestrian routes, the path between Edward VII Park and Monsanto does not seem to have a formal name (a major missed branding opportunity—more on this below).

The largest-scale new pedestrian infrastructure in Lisbon consists of three new or newish recreational paths along the Tagus. These paths in some ways resemble many of the world’s other urban waterfront paths. They take advantage of the distinctive views and near-absence of cross streets close to a major body of water. Establishing these paths has involved overcoming some of the same problems encountered in building their counterparts elsewhere. Lisbon’s Tagus waterfront has been the site of the city’s port for centuries. Much of the city’s waterfront has also been the region’s main industrial zone. While there has been some consolidation of port activities and some movement of industrial activities to the city’s suburbs (and to China), these developments appear to be at an earlier stage than in other European cities, and the construction of a huge container port just upstream from the 25 of April Bridge guarantees that the port isn’t going to move far. A great deal of the Lisbon waterfront is still a busy port and industrial zone and hence an awkward place for new pedestrian and bicycling paths. Here are maps showing how this works.

The longest of the three new paths runs approximately 7 km between Belém and Cais do Sodré, the train station on the southwestern edge of Lisbon’s old central business district, the Baixa.⁷ This path has been around to some extent for at least a couple of decades, but it’s never acquired a name or (so far as I can tell) been administered by an entity with the power to close remaining gaps or to finish it.

The stretch west (downstream) from the 25 of April Bridge is the most elaborate and most heavily used segment. Parts of the path here are wide, with clearly separated pedestrian and bicycle lanes (that users tend to ignore). The path provides exceptionally pleasing views of the Tagus, of the 25 of April Bridge, and of several important buildings and monuments in Belém. Users are constantly reminded that they are in Lisbon. This segment would be a good candidate for any list of the world’s most distinctive and pleasant urban recreational paths. Here’s a photograph made from the roof of the newish (2016) Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT), which is right on the path.

There are other parts of this path that are a bit more awkward. At one point, for example, it runs through a gas station.

East of (upstream from) the 25 of April Bridge the path runs mostly through industrial areas and in places is quite difficult to follow. Sometimes there is only a bicycle lane and no obvious place for pedestrians. I’m pretty sure that there has been no significant improvement since I last walked the path in 2014. There are signs of gentrification. In a few places, restaurants have been built into old factories. It needs to be said that even in the path’s most awkward stretches users are rewarded with views of the river on the south and of some of Lisbon’s most distinctive neighborhoods on the north.

The second of Lisbon’s three newish waterfront recreational paths is in eastern Lisbon in a formerly industrial zone that’s almost completely lost its industrial function. It’s in the Parque das Nações, an entity that in effect replaced Lisbon’s Expo 98 when the latter closed after a season. The Parque das Nações is one of the least park-like parks in the world. One reason is that many of the Expo buildings were left in place. Some were repurposed; others remain on site waiting for a new use. The park now contains an oceanarium, a science museum, a concert hall, a marina, a casino, numerous restaurants, and a great deal of housing. It abuts a major shopping center and Metro and suburban-rail stations.

The park also contains a nearly 5-km-long path along the river that attracts a fair number of users.

The path, like the Belém-to-Cais-do-Sodré path, doesn’t have a name. It has several. Signs refer users variously to the Passeio do Tejo, the Caminho do Tejo, and the Caminho dos Pinheiros, and parts of the path are identified as segments of the Caminhos de Fátima e de Santiago. I don’t know why Lisbon paths aren’t branded more consistently!

Whatever its name, the path provides wonderful views of the Tagus Estuary, which is more than 10 km wide at this point, as well as of the 17-km-long Vasco da Gama Bridge. At its northern end, the path is unpaved. It takes users up to the Rio Trancão, where a freeway discourages further movement. Most of the path is paved, but the paved sections are definitely showing signs of wear after twenty-five years of intensive use. 

The third new waterfront path is even further north, outside Lisbon proper and partly off the map that accompanies this post. This path has a semi-official name. It’s the Caminhada na Zona Ribeirinha do Tejo, and it runs through the Parque Linear Ribeirinho Estuário do Tejo, the catch being that the signage you see along the trail only mentions the names of its components including, for example, the Trilho Averca/Póvoa de Santa Iria, the Trilho da Estaçao, and (simply) the Trilho do Tejo. Because there are several places along Caminhada where there are variant paths and because there’s a northern extension that’s just a painted lane along a road, it’s a little hard to say how long it is, but the length of what appears to be the main off-road path is a little more than 5 km.

The creation of the Caminhada is part of an attempt to restore at least some of the wetlands in the Tagus Estuary. Much of the right-of-way consists of low bridges with wooden planks.

Elsewhere the path follows old dikes, again across wetlands.

The northern two-thirds of the path takes users through very open, apparently “natural” landscapes, but much of what appears as open land was once used for industry or agriculture.⁸ The path doesn’t look it, but it came to be the way it is through careful landscape manipulation. It’s definitely an urban (or at least suburban) path. Users are never out of sight of substantial buildings, and the Azambuja suburban railroad line provides easy access with reasonably frequent service. 

It would seem like a good idea to join the three paths along the Tagus, but, except for the stretch between Cais do Sodré and Santa Apolónia, I don’t believe that there are serious plans to deal with this issue in the near future.⁹ Much of the intervening land is still used for industry, and major highways make some of this area unattractive for pedestrian use. There are bicycle lanes (mostly protected) almost all the way between the Baixa and the Parque das Nações, and the parallel highway here does have a sidewalk, but the latter is a discouraging place to walk, with long distances, huge amounts of nearby traffic, and not much to see (I tried). 

The key point though is that Lisbon has joined northern European cities in attempting to push back in at least small ways against automobile hegemony. It hasn’t had the resources to do this on a large scale, and it hasn’t been very successful at finishing projects—or branding them in ways that clearly advertise their existence–but it has nonetheless created some impressive new pedestrian and bicycling facilities that attract numerous users.

I visited Tempe, Arizona, last week. I wanted to take a look at Tempe’s new streetcar line, which opened in May of this year. I also wanted to explore some other recent urban projects there.

The context is important. Tempe is part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Phoenix is arguably the most automobile-oriented of America’s major urban regions. The chief reason for this is surely that Phoenix was a relatively small city as late as the 1950s. Nearly its entire growth—it now has something like five million people—has occurred on the assumption that virtually all travel would be by automobile. As a result, the Phoenix region is spread out over an enormous area. Only tiny parts of the urban area would be considered “walkable” by any definition. (See my earlier post.)

As in other American urban areas of the automobile age, numerous residents of Phoenix—including many people in a position of power—have come to regret the absence of alternatives to automobile travel and have been trying to change course in certain small ways. For example, Phoenix has developed a light-rail system that now has nearly 42 route-kilometers. Pre-Pandemic, Valley Metro’s light-rail line was attracting a reasonable 50,000 riders a day and enjoyed enough support so that extensions, now under construction, have been widely supported. There has also been an effort to revitalize Phoenix’s central business district and to add denser housing stock in certain areas.

Changes in Tempe have been part of this process. Tempe has an advantage over the rest of the Phoenix area. The city is the site of Arizona State University, which, with its 60,000 on-campus students, is one of America’s largest universities. If only because at least some of ASU’s students do not have access to a motor vehicle, Tempe probably has more pedestrians and cyclists than just about any other part of the Phoenix region. A small area along Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe is the site of several student-oriented restaurants, and there are often modest crowds there.

Tempe’s public officials have been trying to build on this base and to transform the city into a somewhat less automobile-oriented place. A small number of semi-high-rise hotels and apartment buildings have been added to central Tempe in the 21st century without eliciting too strong a NIMBY reaction. Bicycle lanes have been painted on several major streets (but most cyclists still use sidewalks). And, just north of the CBD, Town Lake and the surrounding Rio Salado and Beach Park were created in the 1990s and have been undergoing continuous development in the years since. The park includes recreational paths that connect with trails in much larger Papago Park across a freeway to the north. There is even a pedestrian bridge across the lake. Town Lake and Rio Salado and Beach Park incorporate the bed of the Salt River, an intermittent stream flowing east to west. Several other intermittent streams and canals in the Phoenix area also have paths alongside that are used for walking, running, and bicycling, but most of these paths are pretty bare-boned, while the paths in Tempe are surrounded by developed parkland.¹ Let me add that, despite the presence of all those students, I was struck by the fact that the Town Lake trails were not at all crowded when I was there. I wondered whether the presence of substantial numbers of homeless people in the park, or near it, might have been discouraging use.

Tempe’s streetcar line is an additional product of the attempt to create alternatives to the automobile in Tempe. Like the parks along Town Lake, it is the work of many years. Planning took something like a decade, and the line was under construction for five or six years. It’s now providing service along a route approximately 4.3 km long northbound and 4.8 km southbound, connecting twice with Valley Metro’s light-rail line.²

Tempe’s streetcar really is a streetcar. Except at the two end-stops, its right-of-way is shared with automobile traffic. And, like most other new American streetcar lines, the Tempe streetcar does not provide particularly frequent or fast service. When I was in Tempe last week, the online timetable said the streetcar was running with fifteen-minute headways on weekdays and twenty-minute headways on Sundays. The schedule now shows twenty-minute headways every day. There are no countdown clocks or posted timetables in the stations. Nor is there signal preëmption. The streetcar spends a noticeable proportion of every journey stopped at red lights. Trips are supposed to take nineteen minutes northbound and twenty-four minutes southbound, which means that the streetcar is running at an average speed of something like 12.7 km/h (7.9 mph). The nicest thing you can say about this is that it’s definitely faster than walking speed.

It’s easy to be cynical about the short streetcar lines that many American cities have installed over the last decade or so. They often have such infrequent and unpredictable service that many patrons would do better to walk. As a result, they typically attract only a small number of customers. Their customer base seems to consist mostly of tourists interested in riding a streetcar rather than of local people who need to get to a particular place at a particular time. Many of these systems appear to have been built largely because decision-makers have felt that their cities needed to have some kind of rail line to be attractive to tourists and investors.

Tempe’s streetcar may be more justifiable than the short lines in certain other cities. It’s been built to be, at least in part, a feeder line for Valley Metro’s light-rail line, whose Tempe stops all lie north of the great bulk of ASU’s spread-out campus. The streetcar runs instead along ASU’s western and southern edges, and its route includes the most heavily built-up parts of Tempe’s downtown as well as newish corporate buildings and residential structures along Town Lake and several mid-rise apartment buildings south of the main campus. Its southeastern terminus is close to Culdesac Tempe, a residential development that’s designed to be car-free: residents will not be allowed to keep cars anywhere nearby.³ It’s easy to imagine that there would be a reasonably large customer base for the streetcar. The fact that it’s quite hot for much of the year in Tempe may also encourage use. It was over 100⁰ F. every day I was there—in late September! The air-conditioning was working quite well on all the streetcars I was on.

The streetcar line’s been averaging something like 750 riders a day,⁴ somewhat fewer than the expected thousand or more. It may or may not be significant that the daytime trips I was on all had something like fifteen riders, which suggests a higher overall ridership figure.⁵  Rides are now free (and may thus be hard to count). It’s not clear whether requiring a fare would cut into ridership (especially if students, who seem to make up at least half the streetcars’ ridership, got free passes).

A network of fairly well-patronized free bus routes (the “Orbit” system) between Valley Metro’s Downtown Tempe light-rail station and various Tempe destinations has been operating for several years. Orbit serves many more destinations than the streetcar and does so with slightly shorter headways (fifteen minutes on weekdays). The streetcar line has an awkward relationship with the Orbit lines, which (to say the obvious) didn’t cost $200,000,000 to set up.

Tempe’s streetcar line certainly seems at the very least an interesting experiment. It may be a model for the many places where campuses (and other major destinations) are just missed by rail lines. Will it change the balance between automobiles and other transportation modes in Tempe? It’s hard to imagine. Like the rest of the Phoenix region, Tempe remains an extraordinarily automobile-oriented place. It may have taken some steps to create alternatives to the automobile, but there’s not much evidence that these have had a significant impact. Automobiles outnumber streetcars, pedestrians, and cyclists on the streets of Tempe by something like a hundred to one.

When I found myself on a corner standing next to a young cyclist one morning waiting for a slow-to-change red light, I pointed out to her that all the sidewalk bicycling seemed a bit strange to a visitor. She responded with a strongly worded statement on the dangers of cycling in the streets of Tempe. I suspect she had a better sense of how things work in Tempe than, say, a visiting transit enthusiast who might have been inclined to see the opening of the Tempe streetcar as a major event.

I’ve been in London twice this summer, in early July and then just last week.

In London, as in just about every other big city in the Western world, there has been a serious effort over the last fifty or sixty years to reduce the role of the automobile in urban transportation, and I wanted to see some of the results of this effort for myself. I’d been in London numerous times over the years but hadn’t been there (except to change planes) since 2013.

Some of what’s been accomplished has been widely publicized and requires little comment.

[1] Congestion charging. London has had a congestion charge on most vehicles entering central London since 2003. The charge is now a steep £15. Its effect is somewhat uncertain. There has been only a modest reduction in the amount of traffic in central London, and it’s not clear that this is due to the congestion charge.¹ Still, the congestion charge has brought some income to Transport for London (TfL) that’s been used for transit and for various projects that benefit pedestrians and cyclists. More recently, London has instituted an ultra-low emissions zone (the “ULEZ”) in its central city and has begun charging highly-polluting vehicles that enter the area.

[2] New bicycle infrastructure. Government agencies have created a substantial network of bicycle routes throughout the urban area. Some of these were labeled “bicycle superhighways” for a period. This label is no longer used, which is just as well, because the bike routes, impressive as they are, are not all protected and include numerous traffic lights and awkward street crossings; they are not much like superhighways at all. Some of them are quite heavily used nonetheless.²

[3] Constant improvement of rail transit. London, of course, had the world’s first subway lines (1863), and it supplemented the original just-below-the-surface lines from the 1860s and 1870s with new, deep “tube” lines in the 1890s and early in the 20th century. What is most striking to a New Yorker is the energy with which London (like Paris) went back to extending its subway system in the 1960s and continued to add lines in the following decades.³

One of the results is that London’s system, overtaken in length by New York’s in the 1920s, is now, with at least 402 route-kilometers, once again longer than New York’s system and is, in fact, probably the largest system in the Western world.⁴ Ridership before the Pandemic was rising faster than in New York too (although it remains much lower).

Here’s a map of the London Region, showing, among other things, cycleways and TfL rail routes:

And here’s a similar map for central London:

Pedestrian infrastructure improvement. Governments in London have also put a great deal of energy into an activity that’s received much less publicity: the improvement of the city’s pedestrian infrastructure including its recreational trail network. I acknowledge that, by its very nature, improving pedestrian infrastructure does not require the same kind of effort—or the same monetary resources—as some of the other activities noted above. It also may not have the same potential decarbonization consequences. The chief effect of building better pedestrian infrastructure is the creation of a more congenial environment for pedestrians. But there are presumably some decarbonization effects. Every trip made on foot rather than by a vehicle of any sort (including a train or bus) eliminates carbon use almost completely. And it’s a little hard to see how London’s transit systems could operate as they’re supposed to without good pedestrian access. In urban areas (like many in the United States) where walking is difficult, there are firm limits on how much decarbonization is even possible.

Improved pedestrian infrastructure has had the backing of London’s governments for the last several decades. The Walking action plan (2018) from the Mayor’s Office and Transport for London is the most recent of several official statements on the subject. Few other cities have taken pedestrian infrastructure quite so seriously (Singapore is one of them).

London, of course, was an excellent place for walking long before governments started talking about “pedestrian infrastructure.” London has been a walkable city at least since the streets were mostly paved and a proper sewer system was installed late in the 19th century. In most of London, sidewalks these days are in adequate shape and likely to be busy. Density is substantial enough so that walking is practical for many tasks. More often than not, drivers are reasonably respectful of pedestrians (there are exceptions; you’ve got to be careful about turning vehicles). And, in general, in London, there do not seem to be the kinds of cultural barriers to getting places on foot that many Americans face. Walking has been seen in a positive light in Britain among a substantial proportion of the population for many decades.⁵

The problem is that, at least since World War II, London, like most cities, has allowed cars to play a larger and larger role in urban transportation, and this has had all the usual effects. Noise and air pollution can reach astounding levels. Traffic deaths and injuries are common. Large parts of the outer city are so automobile-oriented that walking isn’t easy and doesn’t take you to where you might want to go. Even in the inner city, some arterials (Euston Road, for example⁶) are so choked by traffic that they repel those on foot and make access to certain areas a chore.

Government action to improve pedestrian infrastructure has taken several forms. Some of what’s been done has been easy and cheap. Installing pedestrian-oriented directional signage is tremendously useful and costs practically nothing. Changing traffic signals to reduce pedestrian wait times and to give pedestrians more seconds to cross is a no-brainer (but still needs doing in many places). Adding additional patches of sidewalk and closing streets, at least part-time, is also not difficult. This can engender opposition, but London is now full of newly pedestrianized spaces nonetheless, and there has been a very active discussion in public media about what more could be done in this area.⁷

London has also constructed new pedestrian facilities, some of which are only cheap when compared with the cost of building, say, subways. Among these are two (or maybe three) new pedestrian bridges across the Thames: the Millennium Footbridge (the “wobbly bridge”) between (roughly) the Tate Modern and St. Paul’s (2002) and the twin Golden Jubilee Bridges, which flank the Hungerford Railway Bridge between Charing Cross and Southbank Centre (also 2002).

London has also made an effort in recent years to maintain and improve its long-standing off-road pedestrian facilities on land. There are hundreds of parks in the city that contain walking paths. There are also a small number of longer-distance walking trails, most along water courses, that go back a long time. Examples include the towpaths that line the Regent’s and Grand Union Canals. (The towpath along the Grand Union Canal will take you most of the way to Birmingham.) These older off-road paths have been improved in various ways over the last few decades. Irregular surfaces have in some cases been smoothed or even paved, and the paths have acquired much better signage.

Completely (or mostly) new paths have been built as well. An example is the Lea Valley Walk, a path along the once highly polluted Lea River in East London that was radically upgraded as part of preparations for the 2012 Olympics.

There has also been an effort over the last twenty-five or so years to construct a continuous walking path along the Thames. The Thames Path (as it’s called) is an urban continuation of a path that extends for nearly 300 km from the river’s source to London. The rural portions of this trail (which I’ve never been on) are apparently like Britain’s many other long-distance footpaths, an elaborate concatenation of various rights-of-way that include narrow muddy segments, occasional busy roads, and just about everything in between. Since much of the Upper Thames, like the canals, was used for navigation before the age of steam, the Thames Path often has a towpath to follow. The Thames Path outside London was officially inaugurated as a national trail in 1996, and maps showing a finished route appeared soon afterward (there have been some minor route alterations in the years since).

Most of the Thames Path in London is of necessity quite different. The Thames is tidal below Teddington Lock in western London, and, as it heads to the Channel, it generally gets wider and wider. As a consequence, there never was a towpath along the lower parts of the Thames, east of Putney. In other words, there was often no obvious place for most of the urban continuation of the Thames Path to be sited. An additional complication is that a decision was made to build the Thames Path on both the North and the South Banks of the river between Teddington Lock and the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.⁸ (Upstream from Teddington Lock and downstream from the O2 more or less, only one bank has a path.) The Thames Path in London thus covers a substantial distance, something like 80 km. Including the paths along both banks, the Thames Path in London is approximately 130 km long. (It may be the world’s longest urban recreational path.) I walked very nearly its entire length during the course of my two trips to London this summer, and much of the rest of this post is based on this experience.

The only part of London’s Thames Path that was somewhat straightforward to build was that along the South Bank from Greater London’s western boundary down to the Putney Bridge, which generally just follows the right-of-way of the ancient towpath. Much of this part of the Thames Path has been left unpaved.

In the few places along the river where there was already parkland (for example, Battersea and Wandsworth Parks), park walkways have been declared to be part of the Thames Path.

There are also several stretches where the Thames Path alternates between having its own right-of-way and following lightly-used or pedestrianized roads through old medium-density suburban areas.

Much of the Thames in central London (especially on the North Bank) has long had major roads parallel to the river with a narrow stretch of sidewalk along the river embankment. In these areas, the sidewalk has been declared to be part of the Thames Path. This isn’t ideal, since users are always aware of traffic, but at least there’s often a busy bicycle path between the riverbank sidewalk and the road. The parts of the city where the Thames Path follows a sidewalk along the river are generally high-prestige residential or commercial neighborhoods (like Westminster, Pimlico, and Chelsea), and there are interesting buildings to look at across the highway.

Much of the Thames riverbank in London has, however, been the site well into the 20th century of docks, warehouses, and factories. This is especially true of the lower Thames, downstream from (roughly) the City. But, starting something like sixty years ago, with containerization and an enormous increase in the size of ocean-going ships, major port activities moved eastward, to points many kilometers beyond inner London. At roughly the same time, manufacturing activities in London fell into a radical decline. Land uses in cities don’t change overnight, however, and it’s taken many decades for this process to occur, and, in a few places, it’s still not complete. And there’s an additional complication. Over the last decade, the Thames Tideway Tunnel, a gigantic new sewer line that roughly follows the Thames, has been under construction. Work on this project has required substantial above-ground construction space, which blocks access to the river just as completely as factories and warehouses once did. The Thames Tideway Tunnel is scheduled to be complete, however, in two or three years.

There is now a different competitor for space along the Thames. In the same years that port activities were disappearing, middle- and upper-class residents were finding the idea of inner-city life more and more appealing, especially when it came with views of the cleaned-up river. There has been massive gentrification of much of inner London, including once industrial and/or working-class areas along the river. As in many other cities, this has led both to new construction and to the conversion of older buildings into expensive housing. It turns out that 19th-century warehouses make pretty good apartment buildings. Floors are strong, ceilings are high, and walls are often thick.

Most boroughs have been requiring new construction by the river to include space for the Thames Path. This hasn’t always worked, however, in part because new residents have sometimes been unenthusiastic about having a public right-of-way as a component of their expensive river views. A 2015 article in The Guardian suggested that real estate interests have not complied very well with rules requiring public access.⁹

There has nonetheless been a huge amount of progress. When I tried to follow the then newly declared Thames Path from central London to the still new Canary Wharf along the North Bank (and to came back via the Greenwich Tunnel and the South Bank) in 2001, very little of the path actually existed. It was necessary to use streets parallel to the river most of the way, and signage was not particularly helpful. These days, there are many more sections of continuous path, and the signage is a little better (although still imperfect).

While there are still plenty of places where pedestrians are directed to leave the riverfront, there are now many more areas where a newly built Thames Path passes along the river, often next to brand new developments, which occasionally come with ground-floor amenities.

This transformation is continuing. New segments of riverfront Thames Path are being added every year.

One of the difficulties of building the Thames Path along the river is that many “docks” along the Thames are actually man-made inlets rather than piers. Expensive bridging is thus needed to avoid substantial detours. Older buildings also often require analogous structures, built over the river.

Users of the Thames Path get to see views of a London that’s changed enormously. It’s arguable that the new developments along the Thames make up the largest urban renewal project anywhere in the Global North over the last few decades. It’s no longer correct to view residential London as made up almost entirely of low-rise, “terraced” houses. Many of the new apartment buildings in, for example, Chelsea, the Vauxhall-Nine Elms-Battersea area, and East London are very tall. The view of London from the Thames Path would hardly be recognizable as London to a traveler from, say, the 1980s.

Diversions from the river remain a problem, however. Some of these have a certain charm. There’s no great hardship in having to walk (or run) along a lightly-trafficked road lined with 19th-century warehouses.

Elsewhere, though, you have to walk through areas that only the most dedicated urban pedestrian would feel completely comfortable in on foot. Thames Path diversions in central Brentford, Mortlake, and Woolwich, for example, run on sidewalks right next to crowded arterials. Downstream from Greenwich, the Path often passes between active factories. And detours in Deptford take walkers through decidedly ungentrified neighborhoods.

The South Bank between (roughly) the Tower and Lambeth Bridges (with one gap) is a special case. In the years after World War II, the government began a long-term project to develop the riverfront of the not-so-prestigious South Bank as a cultural center. One consequence of the 1951 Festival of Britain was the construction of the Royal Festival Hall next to the Hungerford Bridge and the development of riverside public space that (radically) ignored the grid of streets. This new space proved enormously popular and was gradually expanded over the next decades. Tourist attractions like the Shakespeare Globe (1997) and the London Eye (2000) enhanced its appeal.¹⁰

One byproduct of the construction of new office buildings for the Greater London Authority headquarters near Potters Fields Park in 2002 was still more South Bank public space. This area has come to function to some extent the way that Times Square functions in New York: it’s a place for tourists to sit and simply enjoy being in a distinctive place. Of course, it’s not very likely that most of the crowds on this part of London’s South Bank realize that they’re on something called the Thames Path. (The government offices recently moved; rent on this high-use space had become too expensive.)

Walkers along the Thames Path will encounter even larger throngs across the river at the Tower of London. And there are more modest crowds in the central parts of Greenwich and (45 km away) Richmond. These business districts, of course, offer places to eat and drink. They also have bathrooms and easy access to public transit.

I acknowledge the risk of overstating the case, but I’m still inclined to argue that the construction of the Thames Path has fundamentally changed the pedestrian geography of London. It’s provided access to the Thames in many places where it simply didn’t exist during the years when most of London’s riverbanks were used for factories and port activities, and it’s provided a new facility for long- and medium-distance urban walking (or running) in parts of the city where no such facility existed. The outer parts of the Thames Path work for cycling too.

Although the Thames Path hasn’t made it yet onto most travelers’ bucket lists of things to see in London, it’s not exactly a secret. There’s an excellent TfL website that provides a detailed guide to the trail. There’s also a published guidebook on the Path’s London portions.¹¹ And the Path now appears on most tourist maps of London.

The Thames Path remains a work in progress, however. Except where the Path follows an old towpath, if you want to go more than a short way, you still have to keep shifting between more or less finished sections and temporary passages along streets, some much more attractive for pedestrians than others.

In this respect, the Thames Path is very much like comparable new facilities in many of the cities with which London competes—and in numerous smaller cities too. Examples include New York’s Hudson River Greenway, Tokyo’s Sumida River Terrace, Hong Kong’s harbourfront “promenades,” and Shanghai’s Huangpu Riverside Greenway. All of these waterfront paths were created partly to provide recreational space for local residents and partly to leverage an urban landscape made newly attractive by the disappearance of industry and docks and the construction of striking new residential and office buildings. These paths have mostly been imposed on complex areas with long-standing if somewhat moribund land uses. Thus, it’s not surprising that their installation has encountered roughly speaking a similar set of problems although to radically different extents. Remaining fragmentary port and industrial establishments often just couldn’t, for the moment, easily be moved. And, just about everywhere, there has been some opposition from local residents. As a result, all of these facilities have been under construction for many years and remain (to different extents) unfinished.¹² But they’re all now usable nonetheless.

I wouldn’t be inclined to argue that encouraging a shift away from automobile use is the chief reason for building new waterfront paths anywhere, but it’s certainly an appreciated byproduct. The addition of the Thames Path (and other new walkways) to London’s repertoire of pedestrian spaces can be seen as one of the results of the city’s turn over the last several decades toward focusing on the creation of alternatives to the automobile.

I spent a few days in Ottawa this month. I’d been in the Ottawa area several times over the years, most recently in 2015. Ottawa is not a huge, complicated metropolis in the way that Toronto, for example, is, but it has seemed to me an exceptionally agreeable place. The aesthetically pleasing and walkable gentrified neighborhoods just south of downtown—for example, Centretown and the Glebe—are particularly noteworthy. A comparison with U.S. urban areas like Raleigh and Oklahoma City that have similar populations (approximately 1.5 million) is revealing. The U.S. places are much more automobile-oriented.

In terms of the themes emphasized in this blog, Ottawa’s most distinctive feature is perhaps its large number of pedestrian and bicycle paths (sometimes collectively called the Capital Pathway). There are several hundred kilometers of these. It’s possible that, in proportion to its population, no substantial urban area in North America has a larger number of such features.

The paths are enormously varied. A few (for example, parts of the path along the Ontario side of the Ottawa River) take users far from roads. Others (for example, the path along the Rideau Canal south of the Queensway) are essentially sidewalks along busy highways. Some paths are wide, others uncomfortably narrow. Most are striped; a few are not. Most are for both pedestrians and cyclists, but some of the green lines on the map below represent protected bicycle lanes where pedestrians would be unwelcome.

Ottawa owes its extensive network of pedestrian and bicycle paths mostly to the efforts of the National Capital Commission (NCC) and its pre-1959 predecessor, the Federal District Commission (FDC), which, in the years after World War II, worked hard to improve Ottawa’s amenities.¹ The goal of the FDC and NCC was to transform Ottawa so that the city’s physical form would reflect its status as the capital city of a major country. The work of these commissions was somewhat handicapped by the fact that little money was put at their disposal. In addition, they had an awkward relationship with the Ottawa area’s city governments. But they did at least have federal backing and ended up accomplishing a great deal. They created parkland along Ottawa’s major watercourses: the Ottawa, Rideau, and Gatineau Rivers and the Rideau Canal. They also established a greenbelt around the older parts of the city of Ottawa and took steps to construct recreational spaces in numerous suburban areas as well. As more and more people took up walking, running, and bicycling in the 1970s, the NCC did what it could to improve the then still rather informal network of pathways by filling gaps and paving trails. There have been numerous additions and improvements in the years since, but the basic network was in the place by the early 1980s.²

Perhaps partly as a result of its pathways, Ottawa had the second highest proportion of workers (8.7%) who got to work by bicycle or on foot among large Canadian urban areas according to the 2016 census (Vancouver was first, with 9.1%). Among large U.S. urban areas, the highest comparable figure was 6.6%, in both New York and San Francisco.³

The open spaces reserved by the FDC and NCC came in handy when a decision was made to improve Ottawa’s transit system in the early 1980s. The Ottawa area by this time had become highly suburbanized and traffic-ridden, but there was still a substantial demand for public transport. The region didn’t seem to have enough people to justify an investment in rail transit. Instead, North America’s largest system of off-road busways (collectively called the Transitway) was created. There were, eventually, east-west corridors in the eastern and western suburbs and north-south corridors on both sides of downtown.⁴ Bus lanes, considered part of the Transitway system, were built in the CBD. I’d been on the Transitway on earlier trips to Ottawa and found it quite impressive. Unlike some other North American BRT lines, Ottawa’s Transitway (except for the downtown bus lanes) was almost entirely grade-separated, and the stops provided some protection from Ottawa’s often harsh weather.

Very likely in part as a result of the pretty good service on the Transitway, public transit has been used by a fairly large proportion of Ottawa’s commuters (18.3% in 2016 in the census metropolitan area). In the second half of the 2010s, among North American urban areas, only New York, Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, and (barely) San Francisco (all much more populous—and probably denser—places) had a higher proportion of transit users.⁵

A very odd digression in Ottawa’s transit history was the addition of the (original) O-Train (now known as the Trillium Line) in 2001. This was an 8-km, mostly single-track “LRT” line between the southern suburbs and an area approximately two kilometers west of downtown in the middle of the NCC’s greenbelt, but at least on the Transitway. The O-Train’s rolling stock consisted of self-propelled diesel cars. Despite its peculiar geography, the Trillium Line did a respectable amount of business (20,000 passengers a day according to one source),⁶ and it could be said to have whetted the appetite of those in Ottawa who thought that only rail transit would do for the city. (The Trillium Line is now temporarily closed for a major renovation.)

Proponents of a more comprehensive rail line eventually got their way, arguing in part that the downtown bus lanes were not working very well. They were used by too many buses, at least in rush hour, and delays were common. Early in the 2010s, a decision was made to build a more conventional urban rail line, the Confederation Line (now sometimes called Line 1), running east-west.

This new 12.5-km O-Train opened in September 2019. It runs through downtown in a 3-km tunnel and mostly replaces the east-west Transitway elsewhere. The surface portions of the O-Train’s alignment still have a few sharp curves that were easier for buses to manage than they are for a train, but you would otherwise hardly know that the route had once been a busway. The old busway has been almost entirely obliterated, and the busway’s stations have all been replaced by much more elaborate structures.

Bus routes have been rethought completely. Many bus riders who once could ride all the way downtown now must change to the train. They’re able to do so fairly easily since there are no fare gates between the bus stops and the train line at the three main transfer stations. But there has still been some grumbling about the inconvenience of a change of vehicle.

The O-Train has had its share of well-publicized problems.⁸ A downtown cave-in during construction slowed work for months. And the Alstom Citadis rolling stock has not been very reliable. Heating hasn’t always worked; the doors have sometimes gotten stuck; and there have been derailments. But (I’m told) things have settled down over the last year or so.

I was quite impressed by the system, especially by the fact that there are trains every five minutes during the day and early evening.  This is more frequent service than is found on most North American heavy-rail lines. One could argue that the O-Train is providing better service than it has to, since the trains are usually not all that crowded, but it’s likely that Covid-19 is a factor here. The system is certainly in most ways state-of-the-art. It’s fully grade-separated (although it’s still called a “light rail” line by its builders). There are accurate countdown clocks in the elaborate stations (but no platform doors). The trains in use when I was there consisted of two very long cars (48 m each), each divided into four modules. They seemed quite comfortable to me. Announcements about coming stations (and mask policy) are provided in English and French, both orally and on digital signs. The large windows offer pleasant views, often of the pathways that run along much of the line.

There are now serious plans (with funding mostly in place) to extend the Confederation Line east and west and the Trillium Line south. The east-west extensions will mostly bypass the existing transitways. The eastern extension will run in part down the middle of a freeway, and the western extension will include a substantial tunnel. A branch of the southern extension will reach the Airport via an elevated segment. An additional extension to Gatineau, across the Ottawa River in Québec, has been discussed, but there are no firm plans actually to build it. A constant lament of some of the literature on Ottawa’s planning efforts has been the lack of cooperation across the provincial boundary.⁹

Even more than elsewhere, ridership has plummeted during the Pandemic. OC Transpo, Ottawa’s transit agency, argues credibly that ridership is down more in Ottawa than in other Canadian urban areas because remote work is more prevalent in an overwhelmingly white-collar city. Passenger loads are recovering. Overall ridership (including buses) reached 3.8 million in April 2022, up 73% from April 2021 totals but still less than half of pre-Pandemic levels. Ottawa’s O-Train is not, of course, the only radial public transit line suffering from diminished ridership these days.

Even if commuting—and rail ridership—remain lower than expected, Ottawa, especially after the extensions are finished, seems set to end up with an impressive rail line to go with its excellent pathway system. It will be able to provide much more non-automobile-oriented transportation than most North American cities.

High-density, pedestrian-oriented residential urban neighborhoods in the United States are rare. If one sets the criteria tightly enough—substantial population density and crowded sidewalks being the most important—the majority of such places are in New York, and even there largely in Manhattan and in certain parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. There are only a few statistically comparable areas in smallish parts of a few other cities—especially San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago—and even these are generally characterized by higher levels of automobile ownership than in New York.

In the great majority of existing high-density, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods, many aspects of the built environment were created in the 19th century or earlier. The street patterns, the lot-covering building footprints, and arguably cultural expectations about how daily life is to be led often date back a long time.

It’s been argued that the association of high density with older places is basically a function of the fact that developers shifted to building more spread-out environments the minute that the advent of motorized transportation made it possible to do so. They did this because Americans preferred to live at lower densities. No doubt there is much truth in this idea. But it’s pretty clear that, even in the United States, there has often been a substantial minority of people who found the idea of living in compact urban spaces appealing and that this minority has been growing in size over, well, something like the last hundred years (admittedly with a bit of backsliding during certain periods). Interest in high-density urban living seems to have been growing at an especially fast pace over the last forty years or so, as cities have become cleaner and safer, as families have become smaller, and as many people have come to look less favorably on certain aspects of suburban living. This growing interest has run into a supply problem. There isn’t enough high-density housing to meet the demand. Thus, costs have skyrocketed in places that are felt to be desirable. Builders have responded to some extent by building where they could, but it’s not easy to construct high-density housing in the United States.  Zoning codes sometimes forbid it completely, or prohibit the mixing of commerce and residential structures, or insist that new buildings have parking spaces even where there is little demand for them. Then there is NIMBYism. These factors have often been most significant in cities and suburban areas where the majority of growth occurred in the 20th century. There has been serious resistance to adding density to these places.

Recent travels have reminded me that there are actually a number of admittedly relatively small areas where new, high-density neighborhoods have come into being in mostly low-density urban areas during the 20th and 21st centuries. I’m not talking about the inevitably tiny “new urbanist” projects that now dot American suburbs but of actual, complicated urban neighborhoods. The salient characteristic of these areas is that, unlike most American urban spaces of the last century and a quarter, they are to some degree pedestrian-oriented: their sidewalks are often crowded.

It isn’t an accident that many of these neighborhoods function in part as recreational areas. I can’t prove it, but I’m willing to hypothesize an “ideal-typical” history of these places. Because tourists even in the United States often don’t have access to cars when they visit large cities (and in any case may not be in any particular hurry when they’re on vacation), they’re willing to do more walking than when they’re at home. Over time, many visitors to such places find the bustle (along with the tourist attractions) appealing and decide to move in, at least temporarily, perhaps by acquiring a pied-à-terre or even a permanent housing unit in the community. Developers respond by building more residential structures. Because there are few long-term residents (at least at first), there is not the kind of NIMBYism that occurs in established communities, and much of the new housing ends up being high-rise. The fact that the spatial trope of the high-rise urban recreational community (especially along a waterfront) is a positive one even in the United States is a factor here. The result after perhaps several decades is a complicated, dense, walkable, and “vibrant” residential community, with a mix of condominiums, rental apartments, single-family houses, and hotels. There is, obviously, not quite the same mix in such places that you might find in the dense neighborhoods of older cities (in midtown Manhattan, for example). There isn’t likely to be much if any industry. In some cases, there will be few office buildings. In some, but not all, examples, poor people are priced out even more than in older cities, since there is unlikely to be rent control, and there certainly aren’t going to be public housing projects.¹ You do nonetheless have enough density to discourage automobile use—and this in American communities that date from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Consider two quite different examples: Waikiki in Honolulu and Brickell in Miami. I recently spent a week in Waikiki (my only trip there except for an earlier brief visit in 2000 on my way home from China), and I’ve been in Brickell several times over the years, most recently in February 2022. My comments below are based on census data, informal fieldwork, and a modest amount of reading.

Waikiki’s status as a resort may date back to the late 19th century, but it was only after the construction of the Ala Wai Canal on its western and northern edges in the 1920s helped drain the once swampy land that large-scale development began. Tall hotels along the beach began to be added in the 1950s, and, over the decades since, much (but not all) of Waikiki’s once low-rise building stock has been replaced by taller hotels and apartment buildings. The process has been gradual, but the result is quite an impressive skyline despite the fact that the Honolulu urban area has barely a million people.²

Of the tall buildings in Waikiki, the hotels tend to be located along the beach, the apartments (and especially the condos) along the Ala Wai Canal, to the north and west, but there are plenty of exceptions to this generalization.

Brickell has a very different history.³ Its distinctive character dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, as Miami came to take on its modern role as a Latin-America-oriented financial center. Miami’s old, mostly low-rise downtown seemed rather grubby to the sort of people who were making decisions about where to build new skyscrapers for banks, and, Brickell, a high-prestige residential neighborhood across the Miami River from the traditional downtown, was an obvious alternative. (CBDs inevitably move in the direction of wealth when there are no obstacles to doing so.) As elsewhere in North America, many people were increasingly attracted in (roughly) the 1980s to the idea of living in a high-density environment and were willing to pay extra to do so. Thus, developers aiming to build residential buildings began to find that they could profitably outbid developers of office buildings in Brickell (as well as in certain close-to-CBD areas). A factor more important in Miami than anywhere else was the desire of some well-off Latin Americans to own residential real estate in the United States; in no other urban area of the United States can one so easily get by in Spanish alone. The result was that tall apartment buildings began to be built in Brickell (and elsewhere around downtown Miami). Brickell now includes one of the most impressive high-rise residential clusters in the United States. Its tallest apartment building (868 feet/265 m) comes close to being a “super-tall,” and larger buildings are planned (heights until recently were limited by the FAA since Brickell lies close to one of the corridors used by planes landing at Miami International Airport).

Note that, while Brickell has never been a tourist center in the way that Waikiki is, plenty of tourists do come to the Miami area, and some of them have always chosen to stay in or near downtown Miami instead of in Miami Beach or another beach town, so Brickell came to acquire a number of hotels at roughly the same time as office and apartment buildings were being built. The hotels, of course, also house business visitors.

In 2020, Waikiki had a population of 20,470 in an area of 2.00 square kilometers. Its population density was thus 10,235 people per square kilometer (26,452 per square mile). This is high for the United States but way below, say, Manhattan’s population density of 28,873 per square kilometer. Consider, however, that hotels make up a substantial part of Waikiki’s area and that their guests would not have been counted in the census. Note in the map below how much lower in density the hotel district along the beach is, although building density is generally highest there.

Brickell had a population of 42,692 on 2.05 square kilometers in 2020. Its population density was therefore 20,835 per square kilometer, two-thirds of Manhattan’s. Note that, as in Waikiki (and of course Manhattan too), the people staying in hotels weren’t counted in the census figures, so the effective population density at any time is higher than indicated by the Census. Brickell’s still significant office function, of course, makes its high population density even more impressive.

It’s important to note that many apartments in both Waikiki and Brickell are pieds-à-terre only occupied part-time. In 2020, 6,833 of Waikiki’s 18,786 housing units—36.37%—were “vacant.” The Census tries very hard not to double-count, and it considers apartments whose inhabitants’ chief places of residence are elsewhere as “vacant.” Note on the map below how Waikiki’s unoccupied apartments (like its major hotels) tend to be concentrated along its southern, beachfront edge.⁴ In Brickell too (but to a lesser extent) some housing units—17.8%—are occupied only part-time. Their inhabitants’ permanent homes are elsewhere, presumably mostly either in northern United States or in Latin America. (Other parts of the downtown Miami area have an even higher proportion of such units.)⁵

In other words, it’s a safe assumption that, when Waikiki’s and Brickell’s hotels come close to being full and when a substantial number of its temporary inhabitants are using their apartments, the effective population density of these neighborhoods would be much higher than the official figures suggest. Their high density is of course the chief reason that these are bustling places. Everything is close together, and there is not much parking available. It would be ridiculous to try to move around within these areas by automobile, although I don’t doubt that some people do so.

Both of these neighborhoods, reflecting their urban areas’ population makeup, are ethnically diverse places; their diversity is more or less by definition one of the things that makes them seem so intensely urban. Waikiki’s permanent population, when classed into standard Census Bureau racial and ethnic categories, was more non-Hispanic Asian than anything else in 2020⁶; there were also a large number of non-Hispanic white people.

Hispanic                                         1479       (7.2%)
Non-Hispanic white                     7690     (37.6%)
Non-Hispanic Black                       526       (2.6%)
Non-Hispanic Asian                      7727     (37.7%)
Non-Hispanic Pacific Islander      641       (3.1%)

Brickell’s 2020 population, just like the Miami area’s, had a large proportion of people of Hispanic descent:

Hispanic                                          24106   (56.5%)
Non-Hispanic white                      13846   (32.4%)
Non-Hispanic Black                          950     (2.2%)
Non-Hispanic Asian                        1304      (3.1%)
Non-Hispanic Pacific Islander             3     (0.0%)

Note how, in both neighborhoods, the locally dominant “racial” category makes up the largest share of the population while non-Hispanic whites are second. The latter, compared to their proportion of the general population, are overrepresented in these generally prosperous neighborhoods, while minority groups that are on average poorer (Pacific Islanders in Waikiki and non-Hispanic Blacks in both neighborhoods) are underrepresented.

The small representation of some minority groups in Waikiki and Brickell reflects the fact that these are expensive neighborhoods. When you consider, however, that condo and rental prices in both Waikiki and Brickell are high, Waikiki’s permanent residents are (somewhat surprisingly) not uniformly well-off. Per capita income was $45,392 in 2014/2018 (as reported in the 2015/2019 American Community Survey). Income was highest along the beachfront where “vacancy” levels were highest and much lower (although hardly low) on its northern edge. I suspect that many of the poorer inhabitants of Waikiki are living in one of the several dozen lower-rise buildings with external corridors that still make up a substantial part of the neighborhood’s housing stock. It’s possible that many of these people work in the tourist industry.⁷

Per capita income in Brickell is consistently higher than in Waikiki (and in most other parts of Miami). But, because the census tract boundaries changed in 2020, it’s impossible to calculate an income figure for the area defined as Brickell on the maps. The per capita income of central Brickell in the 2014/2018 period (from the 2015/2019 American Community Survey) was $86,742; the per capita for what might be called Greater Brickell (including two tracts that spill over the borders of 2020 Brickell) was $68,931.

Car ownership among permanent residents in Waikiki and Brickell is not the 99% typical of American suburbs, but it’s still fairly high. In Waikiki, 16.6% of occupied housing units were carfree in 2015/2019. Still, plenty of residents did walk or take transit to work. (Honolulu has a pretty good bus system and, one of these years, the Honolulu Area Transit Authority may start operating trains to Ala Moana.⁸) Car ownership among permanent residents in Brickell is higher than in Waikiki but, again, not universal. Occupied units in the central tracts of Brickell were 9.0% carfree in 2015/2019. The figure for a slightly broader definition of Brickell, including two tracts that extend beyond the borders of Brickell as defined on the maps, was 12.5%. But here too many people did walk or take transit to work. Note though that more than 80% of the inhabitants of Brickell Key—the triangular island that is one of Brickell’s densest tracts—drove to work, and (somewhat unbelievably) no one used public transit (the recreational trail around the perimeter of Brickell Key is full of people during both day and evening, however). Their substantial level of car ownership is one of the ways that these neighborhoods differ most obviously from neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Both neighborhoods have an oddly unbalanced pattern of retailing. In Waikiki, there are numerous upscale stores (Prada, Gucci, and the like) on Kalakaua Avenue, and it almost seems as though there’s a tourist-oriented ABC Store selling sunglasses, bathing suits, packaged sandwiches, and the like on every block, but there are no full-service supermarkets. To find a supermarket you have to go to Ala Moana Center, said to be the world’s largest open-air shopping center, which lies just northwest of Waikiki, and what you get there is a branch of the upscale Foodland Farms. At least Ala Moana is easily reached by foot, bus, or car. Brickell has fewer street-level shops than Waikiki, but it’s arguable that, perhaps because tourism doesn’t color the retail sector quite so much, it has a less peculiar pattern of retailing than Waikiki but not by much. It’s easier to find an upscale restaurant or a gym on one of Brickell’s few streets zoned for commerce than a grocery store (and then you’d be stuck with a 7-Eleven). But there’s an enormous shopping center in the middle of Brickell (called, not surprisingly, Brickell City Centre) that sells all sorts of mostly expensive things. And there’s a large Publix supermarket just across the Metrorail tracks from southwestern Brickell and a Whole Foods just across the Miami River. I’d estimate that in the early evening maybe a quarter of the many pedestrians crossing the Brickell Avenue Bridge in a southerly direction are carrying Whole Foods bags. (My New Yorker’s instinct is that you can define a pedestrian-oriented neighborhood as one in which most people shlep groceries home by hand.)

Waikiki and Brickell are most certainly not the only places in Honolulu and Miami with newish big apartment buildings. It’s possible to argue that the success—along with the limited availability of spaces to build—in these neighborhoods has, in fact, led to the proliferation of high-rise apartment buildings elsewhere. Developers have constructed high-rise residential buildings all around All Moana Center, as well as in Kaka’ako, the neighborhood just to the northwest of Ala Moana, and even around Honolulu’s somewhat forlorn downtown.⁹ The view of these buildings from, say, Ala Moana Beach is quite impressive.

But I was struck in walking around these often huge buildings at how few pedestrians they generate. One project quite close to Ala Moana—Ward Village—has released a great deal of publicity about its walkability and has included some pedestrian facilities in its plans, but, so far (the development is far from finished), sidewalks in Ward Village are fairly (although not completely) empty. Could it be that carless tourists are absolutely necessary for high building density to generate high pedestrian density in American urban neighborhoods of the 20th and 21st centuries?

Maybe even more than in Waikiki, Brickell’s apparent success has encouraged the construction of high-rise apartment towers in other parts of Miami. It generally hasn’t been possible to build such structures just south(west) of Brickell, since the area is largely zoned for single-family housing (and its well-off inhabitants have mostly been uninterested in selling), but new and sometimes huge high-end apartment buildings have been built north of Brickell along Biscayne Bay from downtown almost to the city limits. Just as is true of high-rise buildings built in Honolulu outside Waikiki, I’ve been struck in walking among these enormous buildings by how few pedestrians they generate. Again, one can hypothesize that perhaps you need Brickell’s office workers and tourists to have enough pedestrians so that high-rise apartment dwellers feel comfortable about leaving their buildings on foot. There is also the fact that, while Brickell is a completely respectable place and not bordered by any dubious neighborhoods, numerous poor people frequent parts of downtown and live in neighborhoods of North Miami just inland from Biscayne Bay. I’m not justifying this, but I do wonder whether the presence of relatively poor people in these areas may make relatively well-off apartment dwellers a bit nervous about going out on foot.

Waikiki and Brickell are distinctive neighborhoods—that’s part of their appeal—but there are still some roughly comparable places.

There are, for example, several other high-density urban beachfront neighborhoods in the U.S. that welcome numerous tourists and that also serve as residential areas for substantial numbers of both permanent and temporary residents—and that are comfortable places for pedestrians. Obvious examples are the first few blocks in from the beach in Santa Monica and the southern half or so of Miami Beach (up through Mid-Beach).  Santa Monica beachfront neighborhoods may have more pedestrians than any other well-off part of the Los Angeles area, and Miami Beach is even more pedestrian-oriented than Brickell (it’s larger too). Note that neither beachfront Santa Monica nor Miami Beach is quite as high-rise as Waikiki. NIMBYism and zoning restrictions make it hard to build high in Santa Monica, and Miami Beach has (wisely) chosen to protect its art deco inheritance rather than to allow developers to replace it, but, despite the often modest height of buildings, density is pretty high by U.S. standards, and pedestrians in these places are numerous.

It’s a little harder to identify places completely comparable to Brickell, but all the many new high-rise apartment districts on the edge of the CBDs of even low-density U.S. cities are obvious candidates. The area north/northwest of downtown Denver including much of LoDo as well as Lower Highland is a good example. Residential structures in this area are mostly either completely new or else carved out of industrial buildings (the Highland end of the area is also the site of traditional gentrification of older residential structures). The area’s sidewalks are full of people, some of them presumably tourists (including many local tourists). There are also office workers in the area. There’s even a Whole Foods that attracts numerous walk-in customers. The substantial amount of new high-rise residential construction in the southwestern part of downtown Los Angeles also seems to be on its way to becoming a healthy, well-off, walkable neighborhood (it has many other functions too, and its pedestrians include a shocking number of homeless people). Belltown, northwest of downtown Seattle, is another close-to-CBD area that has acquired pedestrians as apartment buildings have been added. And, of course, all the newly residential, at least partly high-rise neighborhoods in once-industrial districts near the CBDs of Chicago (the West Loop), Boston (the Seaport area), and New York (Hudson Yards and Long Island City) are at least vaguely comparable too, although not as surprising as the new neighborhoods in once completely car-oriented places.

There is a general consensus that the United States could mitigate both its contribution to global warming and its lack of affordable-housing by building large amounts of high-density housing, especially in areas where housing is particularly expensive. There is also a widespread sense that the obstacles to moving in this direction are so overwhelming that not much has been or maybe ever could be accomplished. It looks to me as though, in fact, there are some places where there are relatively recent, successful, high-density neighborhoods. They’re not very numerous; they’re not very big; they’re expensive places to live; they tend to be rather distinct places, attractive both to tourists and to potential well-off residents; and some of them (for example, Waikiki) are more oriented to tourists than permanent residents might want. Because these neighborhoods are so special, it might be difficult to increase their size and number, and it must be admitted that the diffusion of high-rise apartment buildings away from the distinctive core neighborhoods hasn’t always resulted in places with large numbers of pedestrians. But it’s certainly worth remembering that relatively recent high-density, pedestrian-oriented places in the United States are at least possible.

I spent some time on Miami Beach Walk this week for the first time in a couple of years. It was interesting to see that the replacement of the old wooden boardwalk sections with pavers that I mentioned in an earlier post has now been completed.

I was especially delighted by the new signs forbidding motor vehicles on the path (see above). One could quibble with the English (what are “electric rides”?; the editor in me wants to substitute “vehicles” for “rides”). But the meaning of the signs is clear, and they appear to have been somewhat effective. In the course of a six-mile walk, I saw only three or four violators.

I know my thoughts on this subject will seem crabby to some, but it’s my sense that it’s quite dangerous to allow personal mobility devices with electric motors to be used in spaces that are supposed to be exclusively for people moving under their own power. Scooter and e-bicycle riders typically move at a higher speed than all but the fastest traditional cyclists, and riders of motorized unicycles and even many scooters can’t stop quickly. It’s also aesthetically distasteful when motorized vehicles enter pedestrian/bicycling spaces—especially crowded ones like Miami Beach Walk. When you’re in one of the few places in an American city where motor vehicles are banned, who wants to have to dodge scooters? They just degrade the environment. From my perhaps eccentric point-of-view, it would be wonderful if all the world’s recreational paths installed signs like those on Miami Beach Walk—and enforced them.

Note added 23 December 2022. I found myself on Miami Beach Walk this week and was, well, amused to discover that the authorities have been adding new signs with language that’s perhaps a bit less snappy than on the old signs but a little more likely to please a fussy editor. The prohibition on using non-human-powered transport modes is currently phrased: “No motorized means of transportation.”

Unfortunately, there seemed to be more violators than there were ten months ago. Scooter and e-bike riders were using the Walk with impunity, typically riding as fast as their vehicles would let them and endangering and annoying pedestrians and traditional cyclists. I acknowledge that my concern about this issue will seem uncalled-for to many.

I visited the new Underline trail when I was in Miami last week.

The Underline is supposed to replace and to be a big improvement over the M-Path, the simple trail that was created under or next to the southern branch of Metrorail when the train line was built in the early 1980s. The plan is that the new trail will separate pedestrians and cyclists and be surrounded by high-quality recreational spaces. It’s being paid for by both government agencies and private funds.

Only the first four-tenths of a mile (700 m) of the Underline trail has been completed. This segment lies entirely in Brickell, a high-density, generally upscale residential and commercial area just south of Miami’s traditional downtown. Brickell has a surprisingly large number of pedestrians on just about all of its sidewalks, and the trail here seems in some ways like a continuation of the surrounding bustling neighborhood. It’s often full of people, although I believe it’s reasonable to hypothesize that probably most users of the Underline’s initial segment are barely aware that they’re on a recreational trail.

One of the characteristics of the trail in Brickell is that the rail line is raised quite a bit above the street level in order not to impede boat traffic on the Miami River.

The enormous Metrorail columns provide plenty of room for huge distance markers and identifying and directional texts. Markers showing northbound distances, however, are aspirational. The finished Underline Trail ends just south of the point shown in the photograph below. Note that one of the dogwalkers in this photo is on the bicycle path. When I was there, no one seemed to be paying any attention at all to the distinction between walking and cycling paths.

South of Southwest 13th Street, the old M-Path has been left in place for approximately six-tenths of a mile (1 km). It runs under the tracks for a short distance and then alongside them. There is no separation of pedestrians and cyclists, but there really doesn’t need to be, since there are few users.

Between the first two stations south of Brickell—Vizcaya and Coconut Grove—the old M-Path is closed and is being turned into a continuation of the Underline (phase 2). An alternate route on local streets through low-density, more or less middle-class neighborhoods has been marked, but I saw very few people using it.

South of Coconut Grove, the old M-Path has for the moment been left in place. It continues to the end of the Metrorail line at downtown Dadeland (at the Dadeland South station), a distance of about six miles (10 km).

I walked this path when I was in Miami. It’s probably fair to say that, in its current state, the M-Path is not a very enticing trail. The trains overhead, despite being supported by concrete columns, are noisy, and (far worse) users are almost always right next (or very close) to South Dixie Highway (U.S. 1), a major arterial (with Ponce de Leon, another heavily-trafficked road, on the other side of the train line for much of the way).

There are numerous street crossings. In some cases, pedestrians and cyclists are aided only by a crosswalk; in others, there’s a traffic light to help, but users must sometimes wait a couple of minutes for a walk light to appear.

Since Miami-area drivers can’t be trusted to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks or when they’re making a turn, none of the street crossings seems very safe, except for the one where Snapper Creek Expressway joins the South Dixie Highway, where a bright red bridge has been installed.

The trail for the most part passes through what might be called an ordinary American suburban arterial commercial landscape. Automobile-oriented businesses and occasional residential structures line the parallel streets. Near certain stations, the trail consists of a narrow corridor through linear parking lots. The overhead Metrorail line is the trail’s chief distinguishing feature. There are also some new, tall apartment buildings in several places that are sometimes considered to be TOD projects.

For the moment, the M-Path seems to attract very few users. I saw perhaps five or six people during the couple of hours I was on the trail.

This remaining segment of the M-Path is supposed to be transformed into a continuation of the Underline trail in phase 3. It’s a little hard to see how the trail could be improved enough to make it a really attractive place, but perhaps I’m wrong. The literature on the Underline has alluring images of large groups of people walking, cycling, sitting, or playing in the midst of native vegetation, but of course no one has plans to get rid of the Metrorail tracks or the South Dixie Highway or all the level crossings.

Still, recreational trails in many car-oriented parts of the United States (for example, Dallas) attract a surprisingly large number of users. The city of Miami really has no other long-distance hiking/running/biking trail. The fact that the short paths near the junction of the Miami River and Biscayne Bay get quite a lot of use suggests that there is a market for a facility like the Underline. But the trails near downtown don’t border highways; they don’t have level street crossings; and they provide stunning views of Miami’s impressive new skyscrapers and of traffic on its busy waterways.

The views from most of the right-of-way of the projected Underline are of an ordinary American carscape. The designers of the phases 2 and 3 of the Underline have a difficult assignment.

Map revised 23 February 2022.