Liberal Landscape

I recently spent a week in Miami Beach, where I was delighted to discover that, since my last visit there two years ago, what is now known at Miami Beach Walk had been more or less completed. This is a path for pedestrians and (in most places) cyclists that runs from South Pointe, at the southern end of Miami Beach Island, to the northern edge of Bal Harbour, at the northern end of the island, a distance of approximately 16 km (ten miles). There are extensions along Biscayne Bay at its southern end and to the bridge to Haulover Park at its northern end.

Map of Miami Beach and vicinity. The dark green lines represent “pedestrian facilities.” The dark green line along the Atlantic shows Miami Beach Walk. GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve modified the data quite a lot.

Two years ago, there were still major gaps, for example, in southern South Beach and north of Mid-Beach between 47th Street and roughly 64th Street, where the path disappeared and pedestrians had to walk either through loose sand on the beach or else along sidewalks a block or so to the west. For those walking or running, the sidewalk route was not a major hardship. Miami Beach probably has more pedestrians over a larger area than any other place in the whole American South, and while many sidewalks are rather narrow, they are generally in good shape. Still, it’s nicer to have a dedicated path (and the 47th-to-64th segment, between Mid-Beach and North Beach, is in the least pedestrian-friendly part of Miami Beach).

The new sections of path are all surfaced with ornamental tiles (“pavers”) and are mostly quite wide. There are almost always sand dunes followed by beach to the east, and there’s often an impressive row of substantial apartment buildings or hotels just to the west, interspersed in a few spots by classic art deco structures. Like many of the world’s other successful new urban recreational paths, Miami Beach Walk provides an intense view of a distinctive landscape. There are constant reminders that you are where you are.

One of the newer sections of Miami Beach Walk.

The Walk’s new sections appear to be attracting quite a lot of users of whom more than half were walking when I was there; the rest were running or cycling. Many users are clearly visitors. There may be no recreational path in North America where so many foreign languages can be heard.

I say “more or less completed” above, because the boardwalk that’s run through much of South Beach for several decades is slowly being replaced by a surface path that, like the new sections, is covered by ornamental tile. Many people love the boardwalk—it has a nice old-timey feel and, since it mostly runs on stilts through heavily vegetated sand dunes, it interferes less with dune flora and fauna than a solid surface would.

Miami Beach Boardwalk.

But a boardwalk requires constant maintenance to replace broken slats, hammer in loose nails, and remove splinters, which are a major hazard in a place where many people go barefoot or would like to ride a bicycle. (Bicycles have been forbidden on the boardwalk for years.) Thus, two sections of Miami Beach Walk were closed when I was there for boardwalk replacement. In both cases there are reasonable alternate routes.

Area where the old boardwalk is being replaced by ornamental tiles that rest on the surface.

There are also some detours in North Beach for construction work, notably between 79th and 87th Street, where it’s necessary to divert through North Shore Open Space Park.

The city of Miami Beach ends at approximately 87th Street. North of there, you’re first in Surfside and then in Bal Harbour, where there are parallel bicycling and walking paths surfaced with crushed gravel to the end of the island. Some people prefer these to the paver paths—except when it rains. The Surfside and Bal Harbour segments feel like an extension of Miami Beach Walk, but it may not be correct to label them that.

Miami Beach Walk in Surfside, where the surface is made of crushed gravel.

It’s not surprising of course that a well-off city that depends heavily on tourism would build a high-quality path for pedestrians and cyclists. But Miami Beach really is a city, and many conflicting points-of-view have to be accommodated by its government. In the case of Miami Beach Walk, some owners of apartments just inland from the beach were not pleased to have a public path at their doorstep, and it wasn’t easy to persuade them to get on board. Most apartment buildings and hotels along the Walk now have private, locked entrances on their eastern (Walk) side that have mollified their residents. But these buildings are still creating a problem. Miami Beach Walk includes three stretches where it’s quite a distance from one connection between the Walk and the nearest street to the next. Private property gets in the way.

Miami Beach Walk, despite its imperfections, seems to me one of the United States’ most distinctive and attractive pedestrian and cycling spaces.

I rode three new rail transit lines while in Bangkok last month: the extension of the MRT Blue Line west to Lak Song; the MRT Blue Line connection between Tao Poon and Tha Phra; and the BTS Light Green Line extensions to Kheha and Kasetsart University. Except for the relatively short part of the MRT line that extends from Hua Lamphong through Chinatown and Rattanakosin then under the Chao Phraya River, these lines are all elevated, so it’s easy to get at least a rough sense of what the areas they pass through are like.

Rail transit lines and pedestrian facilities in the Bangkok area. “U/C” = under construction. The lines labeled “U/C I” are scheduled to open over roughly the next year. The lines labeled “U/C II” are supposed to open in two or three years. Base GIS data from the Geofabrik versions of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat.

What struck me most about all three lines was that the territories they traverse have fairly modest densities. The built environment along the lines consists mostly of smallish apartment buildings, row houses, factories, and ground-floor automobile-oriented retail establishments. There are a few taller apartment buildings, but they are in the minority. There are also a couple of shopping malls, but most commerce along the lines is pretty small-scale. There is a huge amount of traffic almost everywhere. Here’s a photo looking west from the Lak Song Station.

Looking west from the Lak Song station on the westernmost station on the MRT Blue Line, Bangkok.

Because the stations themselves tend to be located in pedestrian-unfriendly territory at some distance from the places passengers are actually coming from or going to, the rail lines need some help. There are always taxis, motorcycle taxis, buses, and vans waiting at the stations for passengers.

Looking north from the Kheha station on the BTS Light Green Line. Note the modest height of most buildings and the waiting taxis on the right.

The stations in these modest environments can seem overwhelmingly large-scale.

The Kheha terminus station on the BTS Light Green Line. The station (like most elevated stations in Bangkok) includes an elaborate mezzanine with a few shops.

When you consider that the new lines all use heavy-rail equipment and have frequent service, the routes chosen seemed in some respects a little odd. It wasn’t surprising that, for the several kilometers nearest their terminals, the trains I was in were all rather empty even during rush hour.

Passengers waiting for a signal to enter an MRT Blue Line train at the terminus station, Lak Song.

Of course, rail transit lines are often emptier near their endpoints than in the central city, but Bangkok’s lines—jammed near the new CBD around Siam Square and along Silom and Sukhumvit Roads—are an extreme example of this tendency.

It’s pretty clear that the lines’ apparently odd geography is rooted in the distinctive urban geography of Bangkok. The Bangkok Metropolitan Area is huge. The most recent (2019) edition of Demographia World Urban Areas puts its population at 16,045,000. But Bangkok is not a particularly dense place by Asian standards. Demographia World Urban Areas says that Bangkok covered 3043 square kilometers.¹ That means that it had a population density of 5,300 per square kilometer. In other words, it was a tenth as dense as Hong Kong, a fifth as dense as Singapore, and a third as dense as Jakarta.²

There are any number of reasons for Bangkok’s relatively modest population density. The city, of course, has few topographic or political barriers to expansion. Then there is the fact that most Thais if they can tend to prefer living in single-family houses or row houses, although many end up in smallish apartment buildings. Just as in the United States, only a minority prefer (or can afford) to live in inner-city high-rise apartments.³ Another reason for Bangkok’s diffuseness may be the fact that Bangkok came rather late to rail transit. Much of its growth occurred during a period when the assumption was that most movement would occur by private motor vehicle, and residential and commercial buildings outside the central city (and even informal settlements) tend to include space for parking. Finally, less of the city has been built or planned by the government than is the case with many Asian cities, notably Singapore and Hong Kong. There is only a modest public-housing program, and the government has not been very authoritarian about what should go where. It has also had a pretty laissez-faire attitude toward automobile ownership. Curiously, it has not been very energetic about building roads either, except perhaps freeways, which makes Bangkok’s sprawl an even more difficult problem than it might otherwise have been. There just isn’t enough space on Bangkok’s highways for all the vehicles that Bangkok’s residents own.

One of the consequences of Bangkok’s car-centric development is that not only its housing but also its higher-order commercial and administrative functions are quite spread out. The city doesn’t appear to have a very clearly articulated hierarchy of sub-centers, and its newish central business district, maybe 5 km east of the old center of Rattanokosin on the Chao Phraya River, is also rather diffuse, although perhaps no more so than central business districts in places like Manhattan, London, or Tokyo. As in New York and London, the major CBD functions of high-end retailing, office work, and entertainment are scattered over a dozen or more square kilometers. Its CBD, in other words, is big enough so that movement within it often requires mechanical transport of some sort.

Bangkok’s diffuseness obviously presents a problem if you’re planning a rail system. Rail systems work best when they can focus on important nodes. If nodes are dispersed or not all that important to begin with, rail systems are going to fit the urban landscape awkwardly at best.

Bangkok reluctantly started work on a modern rail transit system only when the problems of its car-centric development became obvious to all. By the 1980s its freeways and—even more—its arterial highways were so overburdened that traffic at certain times of day could hardly move. Furthermore, air pollution levels were absurdly high. The development of urban rail transit seemed the only way out. An additional push in this direction was given by the fact that visitors to the city increasingly found the absence of any serious modern rail system strange.⁴ And what visitors say has increasingly mattered as Bangkok has become an ever more important tourist destination (it’s been claiming in recent years to be the most visited city in the world).

The early years of rail development were not very happy ones (see my earlier post), and the result was a bit haphazard, but, after the two Green Lines opened in 1999 and the Blue Line followed in 2004, Bangkok at least had rail transit stations over much of its new CBD, and even had a rail connection to Suvarnabhumi Airport when the Airport Rail Link opened in 2010, although the absence of fare integration or easy connections among its three separate systems was clearly a barrier to their full use.

In recent years, the government has become a much more important force in planning rail transit. Most of the conversations on the subject of where the lines should go, and most of the documents about this are quite reasonably in Thai only. Unfortunately, I don’t read Thai, but I’ve been able infer the general outlines of these plans from talking with people and reading news stories in the Bangkok Post.

The overriding goal of transit planning in recent years has been to bring rail transit to as much of the city as possible. Because subways are so expensive to build, especially given Bangkok’s high water table, most of the new lines are elevated railways, and the critical thing has thus been finding corridors wide enough to run them along. This alone explains the distinctive patterns of the recently opened extensions of the Light Green and Blue Lines. They were built over fairly straight roads that take them a long way from the central city. This is especially true of southern Light Green Line extension, which runs 23 stops—and 45 minutes—from Siam Square. Its terminus is near the point where unambiguously urban structures peter out.

Additional construction on a very large scale is now under way (see map above). One of its distinctive characteristics is that none of the new lines will serve the central city at all. All the new lines are being built along corridors where construction of elevated rail lines is fairly straightforward. The Light and Dark Red Lines that may open this year run along railroad corridors and will terminate at Bang Sue. An impressive new railroad station is under construction here, several kilometers north of the new CBD, but it’s not a major destination yet. Bang Sue does have connecting Blue Line service. The Dark Red Line passes near the old Don Mueang Airport and is supposed to reach Thammasat University eventually, but it generally traverses a corridor whose most distinctive characteristic may be that massive amounts of stop-and-go traffic run through it. The Orange, Yellow, and Pink Lines on which construction has begun but that probably won’t be functional for two or three (or more) years serve a vast area in eastern and northern Bangkok and also completely miss the central city. They are described as “feeder lines” in some of the official literature.⁵

When these lines are finished, northern and eastern Bangkok will have a thin grid of rail lines, built for the most part over major highways and railroads in territory where traffic is heavy, sidewalks are irregular, and walking is difficult. But, even aside from the pedestrian-unfriendly territory through which these lines are being built, there is the issue that most passengers bound for central-city destinations like Siam Square or Silom Road will have to change trains. Thus, many of the journeys will take quite some time, especially as all of the trains will make stops fairly frequently. (The distance between stations will vary but seems to average something like a kilometer.) Because there will not be any new lines in the CBD, it’s likely that trains on the existing Blue and Green Lines will become even more crowded during the middle parts of their runs than they are now. (There is a possibility of using longer trains on these lines and running some trains over only part of the right-of-way, something already done on the Light Green Line.) An outsider like me, used to rail lines in dense, walkable neighborhoods, can’t help but wonder how many passengers will actually make their way to the stations on these new lines. Let me add, however, that the Airport Rail Link, which runs through similar territory, has had no trouble attracting riders. Its builders thought of it as a line that would mostly serve airport passengers. Plenty of airport passengers do use it, but it turns out that the vast majority of riders are commuters going to and from destinations in eastern Bangkok other than the Airport. Bangkok’s residents are used to difficult commutes.

I’m fascinated by the seriousness with which Bangkok’s planners have moved toward adding rail to a city that until the last couple of decades did not have modern rail lines at all. Due to the absence of such rail lines and a determinedly laissez-faire attitude to development and motor-vehicle ownership, Bangkok (like Jakarta and Manila and many other big cities in middle-income countries) has become a diffuse and sprawling place that rail lines arguably are destined to fit awkwardly. I have no idea whether the result of the new rail construction will be (as some are certainly hoping) to nudge Bangkok in the direction of becoming a denser and less automobile-dependent (and “greener” and less polluted) city. Rising property values along the rail lines and substantial amounts of new construction around the new CBD might suggest that the city is indeed becoming more concentrated, at least to a limited extent, but these changes may be connected with displacement of poor people to the periphery and their replacement by a smaller number of the wealthy. That is, rail construction could (as in some other places) be encouraging sprawl as much as greater concentration. I haven’t seen figures but suspect that much (and maybe most) new construction in Bangkok is far from the CBD and not necessarily anywhere near the new rail lines. I don’t in any case see much sign that an autocentric culture is being tamed in any way.

Most of the conversation on the new rail lines focuses on their theoretical ability to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution. But it’s not lost on anyone who thinks about these things that Bangkok, a hot city much of which is barely above sea level, is one of the places likely to suffer most acutely from climate change. There isn’t much that Thailand can do on its own to stop sea-level rise, but the national government is quite aware that it needs to do something. It’s signed the Paris Agreement, and it’s taken numerous steps to implement it. For example, it’s converted some coal-burning power plants to natural gas. The new rail lines are supposed to be laying the groundwork for a substantial modal shift away from the automobile and hence an additional reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Only time will tell whether this is a pious hope or a realistic scenario.

I spent the third week of January in Doha, Qatar. I’d been there only once before, on a one-day trip from Dubai in 2010.

On the earlier trip, I’d been extremely impressed by the Corniche—and wasn’t much taken by anything else. The little bit of Doha I saw then seemed as spread-out and automobile-oriented as any city in the world.

West Bay’s impressive skyline in 2010, viewed from the southeastern end of the Corniche. There has been a considerable amount of infill since then, but Doha has resisted the construction of any new skyscraper that towers over its neighbors, an approach that I think makes the skyline as a whole more imposing.

The current, much longer trip confirmed some of my earlier impressions, but I was fascinated by the government’s efforts over the last decade and a half to make Doha a more “sustainable” city.

Let me explain.¹

The Corniche is a pedestrian path between the old downtown (and the I.M.-Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art) at its southeast end and Doha’s stunning business district, West Bay, at its northeast end. The path curves around a bay, so that, at any point on the path, you can see the whole length of the Corniche.

Map of Doha and vicinity, focusing on rail lines and pedestrian facilities. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve had to modify the data quite a lot.

Map of central Doha, focusing  on rail lines and pedestrian facilities. Data sources as in previous map.

The central part of the path is approximately 5 km long, but there are formal and informal extensions at both ends, and the Corniche’s length is usually given as 7 km. If you include the paths in the gardens behind the Museum of Islamic Art in the southeast and in the Hotel Park in the northeast, the distance you can walk along the bay is actually longer than 7 km.

Fishermen and others on one of the piers that jut out from the Corniche.

The Corniche attracts quite a number of users, apparently from all of Qatar’s ethnic groups and economic strata, although, as is the case with many pedestrian paths, the composition of people using it changes over the course of a day. Early in the morning and at midday, runners and more or less serious walkers are common, and Western expatriates and tourists seem to be represented out of all proportion to their share of the population. Later in the afternoon and on weekends, many more people use the path simply for sitting around and socializing, and the proportion of native Qataris as well as of ethnic South Asians, Filipinos, and others (many of whom are service and construction workers) rises. The Corniche appears to be an enormously successful place.

The Corniche in the afternoon.

The Corniche is not, however, perfect. There is little shade, especially in its middle reaches, and it’s awfully close to a busy highway, which isn’t easy to cross. There’s a single tunnel at Suq Waqif, near the southeast end; elsewhere, you need to find one of the few traffic lights and will likely have to wait a long time for it to change.

But, still, there is something about the openness of the Corniche and the views of the Gulf and of West Bay’s skyscrapers and of the much more modest skyline of the old downtown that is deeply attractive. I’d go so far as to say that Doha’s Corniche is one of the world’s most distinctive—and appealing—urban pedestrian paths.

The rest of the city is not quite so special. As is the case with the other big cities of the Gulf, Doha’s speedy growth from the 1970s on has until recently been based more or less completely on the assumption that everyone would get around by automobile, even though few members of the subaltern labor force have access to a car. The environment for pedestrians is hostile. Major roads away from the old city center tend to be wide. Traffic moves quickly. The most desirable housing has traditionally consisted in large measure of single-family structures surrounded by walls. It’s not much fun to walk in neighborhoods consisting of such houses, even when sidewalks are available, which they’re often not. Sidewalks that do exist are fair game for parking, even in West Bay.

Parking on a sidewalk in West Bay. West Bay’s cluster of skyscrapers is generally quite automobile-oriented. There are generally not very many pedestrians.

Walking any kind of distance in the city is difficult, even aside from the problems caused by summer heat. Many intersections feature roundabouts, just about the most pedestrian-hostile of all non-limited-access road forms. There are occasional traffic lights, and they’re usually obeyed, but they just about never provide a moment when pedestrians have priority. Since drivers do not feel they ever have to cede to pedestrians, even when making turns, it can be quite difficult to cross streets safely. There are crosswalks here and there, but they appear to have no effect at all on drivers.

Of course, it’s not surprising that a country whose wealth is based almost entirely on the export of oil and natural gas would become car-dependent, especially when its only large city did not begin to grow substantially until the 1970s. Gas is cheap and is never likely to run out. Pollution is not a major problem in a city consisting of a narrow strip of settlement between the Gulf and mostly flat, nearly uninhabited desert. It’s also certainly the case that the automobile fits Doha and the other new cities of the Gulf very well. Cars are just about always air-conditioned, thus providing some shelter from summer heat. They’re also an important consumer item in a society where shopping and owning things are important both in themselves and as a way to establish status. And, of course, since just about everything in the city was built to accommodate the automobile, doing without one creates constant problems.

But, as is the case with all the states of the Gulf, elite decision-makers have undergone a major change of heart over the last fifteen or so years. The car-centric city no longer  seems an unalloyed good thing, for a number of familiar overlapping reasons. The realization that the automobile-oriented city causes health problems for its inhabitants may have more resonance on the Gulf than anywhere else; native Gulf residents have higher BMIs and are more likely to have diabetes than any of the world’s other well-off peoples. Arguments that invoke climate change have also seemed particularly strong given that major parts of all the Gulf’s newly substantial cities lie only a few meters above sea level. There is also concern about the area’s future and a strong sense that one must diversify the economy. Thus, all the Gulf countries have done what they could to build tourist and financial-services industries. To do this, they’ve had to become attractive to tourists and skilled expatriates, which has involved becoming less car-oriented. Closely related to this is a desire on the part of essentially defenseless states to be well thought of. The fact that Qatar sends more carbon into the atmosphere per capita than any other country in the world now seems rather embarrassing. The result of these and other factors is that there’s been a push in the direction of at least reducing the role of oil-based transportation everywhere. One component of this turn has been an effort to rethink the design of cities. (See my earlier posts on Dubai and Abu Dhabi.)²

Doha has arguably been in a better position than any other Gulf city to remake itself. Its chief advantage is its wealth. Qatar by many measures has a per capita income higher than that of any other country in the world. Its wealth is of course not distributed equally. Its expatriate manual and service workers live financially precarious lives, while its citizens (who constitute only something like twelve percent of the population) receive a huge amount of official support. Much of Qatar’s wealth goes to its government, which, even after putting a large portion of its revenues into a sovereign wealth fund, has enormous resources to invest in urban infrastructure—and the political power to spend as it sees fit.

The government has used some of its wealth to make Qatar a more “sustainable” place. Its urban geography has been altered in two major ways: [1] Dense neighborhoods have been created in several places; and [2] New rail infrastructure has been built.

[1] Dense new neighborhoods that encourage walking.

Suq Waqif. When I was in Doha in 2010, I found its old downtown a somewhat unappealing place. There wasn’t much there that was very “downtown”-like. There were few major businesses or government offices. There didn’t appear to be any older buildings. Most of the generally low- or medium-rise structures in the old downtown were post-World-War-II apartment blocks whose inhabitants appeared to be mostly South Asian workers.

I didn’t realize it then, but there had been a major fire at Suq Waqif (properly Sūq Wāqif سوق واقف), an old downtown commercial district, in 2003. I was seeing this area at its nadir.

In the years since the fire—and especially in the years after 2010—the government has completely rebuilt Suq Waqif and has chosen to do so in a kind of traditional Arabian style.

A street of restaurants and souvenir shops that bisects Suq Waqif. Much narrower (and sometimes covered) side streets feature shops.

Hardly any of the buildings, however, include genuinely old components. Most were constructed from scratch, using modern materials reworked to look old. Why use mud brick that you’d have to keep repairing when you can make concrete look like mud brick? The result, comparable to, say, Qianmen Pedestrian Street in Beijing, could be ridiculed for being a Disneyfied simulacrum of a traditional city. But I found it all surprisingly appealing. And so do many Qataris and tourists. The restaurants on its main street are full of people from all over the world, including (it appears) numerous local folk. And the shops on the narrow side streets are clearly patronized to a very large extent by Qataris. It’s not likely that tourists would want to buy, say, live rabbits or falcons, or kitchenware, or traditional unrevealing women’s clothing.

The new Suq Waqif has apparently been enormously successful, and it’s been growing continuously. Note that walking is practically the only way you can move around the central part of Suq Waqif. Most of its paths are too narrow for motor vehicles. In this respect, it’s completely different from most of post-1970 Doha.

Msheireb. Msheireb (the spelling approximates the Gulf Arabic pronunciation of Mushayrib مشيرب) is an area just to the west of Suq Waqif. In English it’s sometimes called “Downtown Doha,” and its location indeed corresponds more or less to the center of the old central business district. But this is not a CBD that’s evolved slowly over many decades. It’s essentially a contemporary real-estate development that replaces most of what was there before. It consists largely of medium-sized, more or less modern buildings on narrow streets (sometimes there are some Arab decorative motifs). The buildings mostly house offices of various sorts. The National Archives and some additional government buildings are also part of the mix. In addition, housing is planned.

Street scene in Msheireb.

The claim is that Msheireb is a “sustainable” development. Many buildings are LEED-certified. It’s said to be built in a style that’s appropriate for the climate, and, indeed, because of the narrow streets, there is plenty of shade. One of the streets—Sikkat al-Wadi Msheireb—has some water features that, thanks to evaporation, are supposed to help keep the street cool during the hot season. This is also one of the streets on which a 2.1 km tram line loop runs (more on this below).

I was struck in walking around Msheireb at how many of the people you see there seem to be native Qatari, at least if one can determine ethnicity on the basis of people’s clothing and facial features.

One of the characteristics of Msheireb is that it is walkable. There are several pedestrian-only streets, and there are good sidewalks (sometimes in arcades that provide shade). It is not at all like the areas of Doha that grew up between, roughly, 1970 and 2010.

The Pearl. The Pearl is a real-estate development on made land in northern Doha that was designed in part to appeal to Western expatriates. (It’s one of the only parts of the city where foreign ownership of real estate is allowed.) Much of it is on narrow C- or O-shaped land segments that feature a road on the spine, bordered by buildings that are flush with well-maintained sidewalks. A pedestrian path runs along the water side of the buildings. The ground floor of buildings along the pedestrian path typically contains restaurants and high-end shops. The Pearl is divided into a number of sub-neighborhoods each of which is supposed to be built in a particular theoretically Mediterranean architectural style, Venetian, for example. The Pearl, on the whole, seems designed to suggest a modernized version of a large Mediterranean village, although it’s hard to imagine a real Mediterranean village with expensive Japanese, Indian, and French restaurants and boutiques selling high-end women’s clothing, all side by side.

The pedestrian path in The Pearl.

What is perhaps most striking about The Pearl in the context of Doha is that it’s so pedestrian-oriented. The waterside pedestrian path gets crowded in the evening, and it’s certainly not rare to see pedestrians walking on the sidewalks along the neighborhood’s main roads, where the more utilitarian shops (like a large Monoprix) tend to be located. In many ways, the Pearl is comparable to (although not nearly so high-rise as) the Dubai Marina development in Jumeirah. If you want to appeal to Westerners (or at least Western Europeans) these days, you have to build neighborhoods where walking is possible.

Those who are cynical might say that creating a few islands of walkability in a sea of car-centric urbanism has a limited value, but it’s certainly a beginning.

[2] New non-automotive infrastructure.

Doha Metro. The most expensive and impressive new infrastructure in Doha is its Metro, all three lines of which opened in 2019 (although one station isn’t finished yet). The Metro has approximately 76 km of lines—it’s not a small system—and approximately 85% of the routes are underground—it isn’t a cheaply-built system either. Trains are driverless, and, as is the case with many of the world’s other driverless metros, trains run often (as frequently as every two minutes) and are short, three cars long.

Doha Metro train leaving the Qatar University station in northern Doha, one of the few places where the tracks are outside.

As in the Dubai Metro, one car is divided into an expensive “gold class” compartment and a larger area for women and “families.” The stations have been built so that longer trains (I think five cars) are possible, but, for the moment, longer trains are probably not necessary. Most of the trains I rode were fairly but not extremely full. Few people had to stand.

Inside a Metro car.

The stations all have attractive consistent design that’s supposed to suggest the inside of a Bedouin tent. They also have escalators and elevators; excellent signage; platform doors; next-train arrival information; and an amazingly large number of helpful staff members.

Msheireb station, where all three Metro lines come together.

Because the last of the three lines only opened in December, it’s too early to get a sense of how many passengers the system is attracting on a “normal” day. Last summer, when only one line was open, there were about 16,000 passengers/day (the population of the Doha Metropolitan area may be something like two and a half million), but on National Day (December 18) there were 333,000.

There has got to be a question, at least in the short term, of how useful a metro system could possibly be in a generally diffuse and low-density city. A few stations—Msheireb, for example; the stations in West Bay; and some suburban stations at shopping malls, for example, al Riffa’—are in locations where it’s possible to walk to significant destinations, but many stations appear to be, well, in the middle of nowhere, although most of these do have bus and van service. The powers-that-be are certainly aware of the problem. At least a couple of new pedestrian bridges between the Metro and useful destinations have been built, and parts of West Bay have received new and better sidewalks.

Near the DECC Metro station, West Bay. Note the wide sidewalk (and the even wider street).

The system has only 37 stations. That is, it’s on average approximately 2 km between stations, a larger distance than on the majority of older metro systems. The trains can, and, it appears, often do move at 100 km/h, and even the longest rides in the system last well under an hour, but I suspect that car travel is still faster most of the time to most destinations.

The government is serious about moving as much transportation to the Metro as possible, and fares are set quite low, especially considering that Qatar is not, on the whole, a cheap place to live. Fares are 2 QAR (0.55 USD) a ride. It’s 6 QAR (1.65 USD) for a day pass. It’s also possible to get a free connecting bus or van in some places—or to take a 3-km taxi ride for 8 QAR. Bus fares—variable but 5 QAR if you buy two tickets to be used on one day—have been more expensive.

I found the Doha Metro a pretty impressive operation.

Trams. The Metro is not the only rail system in Qatar. One tram system has opened, and two others are under construction.

The open system is the Downtown Doha/Msheireb tram mentioned above, a short (2.1 km) hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered line that’s been making a one-way loop around Msheireb since the beginning of January of this year. It runs on weekdays between 9 to 12 in the morning and 4 to 9 in the evening and on Fridays between 4 and 9. There are nine stations; in other words, it stops frequently. There is no cost to ride. Nonetheless, none of the trams I saw had more than two or three passengers. The trouble with a 2.1 km loop line is that it’s never going to take you further than something like 600 m from your starting point. It’s likely to be faster to walk just about anywhere in Msheireb than to risk waiting six minutes for a tram (the next-tram information at the stops wasn’t working when I was there). Perhaps the Msheireb tram will become a more attractive option during the hot season.

No doubt I’m being a bit cynical, but, for the moment, it seems that the chief advantage of the tram may be that it gives the Msheireb Properties’ some ability to boast about its sustainable tram line. Plenty of publicity about the tram is available on the Internet.

Two larger tram systems are under construction, at Education City and at Lusail.

Education City includes Qatar’s impressive National Library, specialized branches of several American universities, and some Qatari educational institutions as well. I was struck when I visited at the extent to which Education City is laid out like certain American outer suburban university campuses. Buildings are far apart, and there are large surface parking lots. There are few trees. Those uncomfortable in the extreme heat of summer must find getting around a problem, although there are free vans. The tram system is supposed to supplement these.

Lusail is Qatar’s enormous (and enormously ambitious) “sustainable” northern extension. In so far as I could tell looking from the Metro, only a little has actually been built there yet, except for the Metro itself. A huge stadium for the 2022 World Cup games is under construction, as are some parts of a substantial (19 km) network of tram lines, but as yet there is little housing. The goal is that Lusail will not be a car-dependent place. Some of the Gulf Region’s other “sustainable” urban additions (for example, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi) have been the object of a huge amount of publicity but have not gotten very far. It’s too early though to be cynical about Lusail. Doha has a pretty good track record of getting built what it’s set out to build.

Bicycle paths. You don’t see many cyclists in Doha, except along the Corniche (where bicycles are theoretically illegal). But the government has built a few bicycle paths along major highways in the outer city, and the publicity for Msheireb/Downtown Doha suggests that bicycles are welcome there.

I was in general quite struck by Doha’s elaborate plans to transform itself into a less car-dependent city. I have no idea how successful it will be at reaching its goals. Has any car-centric place has ever actually managed to become significantly less so? But I certainly was impressed by the scale of Doha’s efforts.

Standard three-part sign, Coast-to-Coast Trail, Ang Mo Kio. The trail’s path is marked PCN for “park connector network.”

I’ve written about Singapore’s “park connectors” before.¹ These are paths for pedestrians and cyclists that are generally separate from the city’s conventional sidewalks. The park connectors often follow Singapore’s coasts or its abundant watercourses. Sometimes they pass through parkland as well. By early 2019 there were said to be 300 km of park connectors in Singapore. In other words, they covered a greater distance than Singapore’s impressive—and growing—rail transit system. I don’t believe that there’s ever been a count of park connector users, but you don’t have to spend too much time on Singapore’s park connectors to realize that they’ve been quite successful in encouraging a fair number of Singaporeans to get out and move around.

Singapore’s older park connectors were joined in late March 2019 by a new kind of path for pedestrians and cyclists: the Coast-to-Coast Trail. The C2C Trail (as it’s often called) is 36 km long. It takes you from Jurong Lake Gardens in southwest Singapore all the way to Coney Island in the extreme northeast. Despite the trail’s name, it doesn’t quite reach the southwest coast, which is dominated by industry and port facilities and would make an odd location for a hiking trail.

Map showing route of Coast-to-Coast Trail as well as older park connectors, the Rail Corridor, and rail transit lines. The Rail Connector is a path for pedestrians and cyclists that follows the right-of-way of the old railroad line to Kuala Lumpur. Most of it for the moment is closed (or semi-closed), but it should reopen within a couple of years. MRT lines are heavy-rail lines. LRT lines would be called people movers in much of the world. “U/C” = “under construction.” Base GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and from the government of Singapore. I’ve had to modify them quite a lot.

I walked essentially the whole trail a couple of times in the course of a mid-November trip to Singapore, and the following comments are largely based on what I observed. Of course, I did look at relevant websites and articles in the Singapore press.²

The literature on the C2C Trail talks about it as being a “curated” trail. I think that what’s meant here is that the trail takes you close to some of Singapore’s more interesting, but not obviously urban, features. Thus, it starts at the attractive park surrounding Jurong Lake, which includes Japanese and Chinese gardens, a pagoda, and a Science Centre. It passes by Bukit Batok and Bukit Timah, two parks centering on substantial hills that are covered by dense tropical forest. It also comes close to MacRitchie Reservoir, a large water body in the middle of the island. It then takes you through Ang Mo Kio, a new town that contains three appealing parks: Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, Ang Mo Kio Town Garden West, and Ang Mo Kio Linear Park. The trail’s last ten or so kilometers are along watercourses and reservoirs in Sengkang and Punggol (which I wrote about in an earlier post). Coney Island, at the trail’s end, is a forested island in Johor Straits that is kept semi-wild.

Much of the trail follows already existing park connectors. That’s especially true at its two ends. (You can identify these on the map by looking for green lines under the black dashes.)

The Coast-to-Coast Trail in Jurong Lake Gardens. Note the light-pole banner. Similar banners can be found all along the trail. In the background is an MRT train.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail along Sungei Punggol, Sengkang. Here the trail follows a pre-existing park connector that hugs the edge of a river that’s been turned into a reservoir.

A few of the existing park connectors used by the C2C Trail seem to have been created essentially to connect park connectors. An example is an elaborate set of paths under and over the Pan Island Expressway between Jurong East and Bukit Batok.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail’s elaborate tunnel-plus-bridge route under then over the Pan Island Expressway.

Where the C2C Trail doesn’t follow existing park connectors, it often runs along busy roads, following long-existing (but often improved) sidewalks. Sometimes, there’s a substantial strip of thick tropical vegetation between trail users and the highway, but sometimes there really isn’t. In one place the trail runs briefly as a sidewalk next to the Lornie Highway, a freeway!

View from the bridge used by the Coast-to-Coast Trail to get over Lornie Highway. Note the familiar three-part sign near the center of the photo.

Most of the busy highways aren’t freeways, but they generally aren’t little-used side streets either. Examples of major highways followed by the trail are Bukit Timah, Adam, and Marymount Roads.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail along Bukit Timah Road. The trail follows the covered walkway and passes through the bus stop at left. The fencing along the sidewalk is typical.

Short of passing through Singapore’s green central area (which includes space set aside for the military), it’s a little hard to see how the trail’s creators could have avoided the problem of following major highways. Central Singapore is somewhat hilly. Thus, it doesn’t have the kinds of lazy tropical rivers and canals that many of the older park connectors follow. Its human geography created some issues for trail placement too. Some (not all) of the area more or less northwest of the central business district developed during the colonial period as a neighborhood of substantial houses for well-off colonists. The area maintained its prestige after independence and became the kind of place that wealthy Singaporeans gravitated to. Here and there institutions (like schools) moved in as well. Many of the single-family houses and institutions acquired walls around their property at one point. The area became quite automobile-oriented by (I think) the 1960s. Commercial establishments often have substantial parking lots. Even when apartment buildings were added to the mix, they included parking and in most cases are surrounded by walls. As in other suburban areas all over the world, minor roads tend not to take you very far. You need to follow crowded arterials to get anywhere. This is the kind of country that the C2C Trail takes you through for something like a third of its length. You have to be a pretty dedicated urban walker to find the idea of walking along busy suburban highways very attractive. It’s arguable that the C2C Trail’s routing along highways, inevitable as it may have been, is a something of a defect.

Another distinctive characteristic of the C2C Trail is that, except at its beginning and end, it does not really lead you through most of the places it brings you to; instead it takes you by them. Thus, instead of going through Bukit Batok and Bukit Timah Parks, for example, it follows major roads at the edge of these parks. Going through Bukit Batok Nature Park would have required only a short detour (Bukit Timah, Singapore’s highest point, would have required a much longer detour, and some real climbing).

Here the Coast-to-Coast Trail follows heavily-trafficked Old Jurong Road at left rather than cutting through forested Bukit Batok Nature Park at right.

The same thing happens at MacRitchie Reservoir, which you can only see through some trees from Lornie Road. Similarly, Ang Mo Kio’s three parks would have made easy diversions. Ang Mo Kio Linear Park runs parallel to the C2C Trail for 1200 m, but those who stick to the trail never do get to see the park, which is up on a mild rise above busy Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail in the center, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5 at left, Ang Mo Kio Linear Park at right.

Diverting through these and other parks along with the way would have reduced the amount of time that trail users spend along busy highways.

The trail also takes you through Bukit Batok and Ang Mo Kio, successful new towns. In Bukit Batok, it mostly follows drainage canals that parallel highways that aren’t particularly crowded. In Ang Mo Ko, the C2C Trail stays on main highways, bypassing the thriving city center. Those walking on the trail through new towns will find that they’re sharing the trail with local people who, I’m sure, in most cases have no idea that they’re on the Coast-to-Coast Trail. The new-town segments are generally pleasant and interesting places to walk.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail in Bukit Batong.

An oddity of the trail is that it encounters numerous construction sites. That reflects the fact that Singapore is still growing quickly. Detours around construction areas are typically not marked, for example in Ang Mo Kio Town Garden West.

Construction along Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5.

Detours are especially numerous along Marymount Avenue, which is the site of construction of the North-South Corridor, an underground freeway that will some day take drivers from Woodlands in northern Singapore all the way to the central business district. (I can’t resist adding that Singapore’s desire to become a “car-lite” society is somewhat at odds with the support being given to this expensive project, which at least will contain bus lanes.)

The trail is generally well-marked. There are standard three-part signs every few dozen meters and (at least for now) banners posted on light poles as well. A few turns, however, are not well marked at all. I found myself completely confused, for example, where, going northeast, you’re supposed to turn left from Bukit Batok East Avenue 6 to Bukit Batok East Avenue 3. I’ll admit that the problem would have been solved by consulting the excellent app available from the National Parks Board.

I was struck by the fact that, while most of the parts of the C2C Trail that follow existing park connectors—for example, the trails along watercourses in Punggol at its northern end—were pleasantly but not overwhelmingly busy, the segments along major roads had few pedestrians. Because these areas are just inherently less attractive for walking, running, or bicycling, that really isn’t very surprising.

I did, however, meet a few people who were in the process of walking or running the whole trail, or a large part of it. Doing this in a day has actually become a distinctive challenge for a certain sort of Singaporean. Weekends are when you’re most likely to meet people covering the whole trail. (I suspect there were many more such people when the trail first opened last March.)

Of course, walking the Singapore’s entire C2C Trail in a day isn’t quite the challenge that, say, walking the whole Appalachian or Pacific Coast Trail over a couple of months (or much longer) is, but it has an analogous kind of goofy appeal for some of us. I acknowledge that, if you’re not bothered by heat and humidity, doing the C2C in a day is a pretty low-risk project. If you get hungry, there are plenty of excellent and/or cheap eating places along the way. If you get tired, there’s likely to be a bus stop within a few dozen meters no matter where you are, and the C2C Trail even intersects with train lines at several points. There is of course virtually no street crime in Singapore, so the human geography poses no dangers. Car drivers are likely to defer to pedestrians as long as they cross streets where and when they’re supposed to. There are even friendly signs from the government telling you what to do if you encounter a stray dog or a wild monkey. Singapore’s a pretty benign place (except maybe for the risk of contracting dengue fever).

Sign telling you what to do if you encounter wild monkeys.

It appears that walking and running pedestrians are intended to be the main users of the C2C Trail. But most of the Trail can also be traversed by bicycle. I also came across quite a few users of what in acronym-mad Singapore are called PMDs (personal mobility devices), that is, scooters and electric bicycles, even though these were recently banned from using pedestrian paths after a series of serious accidents. These devices have of course become a problem for pedestrians all over the world.

Singapore’s National Parks planners are working on a still more ambitious trail: the 150 km Round Island Route (RIR). Like the C2C Trail, the RIR will use existing park connectors and existing road sidewalks for part of the way, but it will of necessity have to include substantial new sections, including several quite long stretches through parts of western and northern Singapore that are now hard to access by any means. The RIR is not expected to be completed until 2035, but a short (120 km) version of the trail, including a long stretch on the Rail Corridor, is supposed to be open in a couple of years.

In the last few years, Singapore has been putting as much energy into creating pedestrian infrastructure as any city in the world. I found the Coast-to-Coast Trail quite an impressive example of this effort.

I recently spent nearly a week in Bordeaux, a city I had previously been in only briefly.

I was particularly interested in looking at all the ways that Bordeaux has been attempting to push back against the hegemony of the automobile. It’s developed a reputation for having gone as far in this direction as any city in France.

The context is that, during the 1960s and 1970s—an era some French writers have characterized by the phrase “le tout automobile”—Bordeaux did as much as any French city to adapt itself to the car. It sprawled enormously, and ended up with the lowest density of any major French urban area.¹ According to INSEE, Bordeaux also had the largest proportion of households with two or more cars of any large French metropolitan area.² To accommodate these cars, Bordeaux built France’s largest beltway (the Rocade), 45 km long, which of course encouraged further sprawl. It didn’t quite succeed in a plan to run freeways through the inner city, but it did improve its major north-south surface road enough so that 100,000 vehicles used it every day, passing right by its central business district.

It’s worth remembering that Bordeaux, thanks in part to its soggy soils and in part to local traditions, never was a particularly dense place. Much of the inner city consisted (and still consists) mostly of smaller, predominantly two-story buildings, and until quite recently there were hardly any structures other than church steeples higher than something like five stories in the whole metropolitan area. A partial exception demonstrates one of the ways that Bordeaux tried to adapt itself to the automobile. In the 1960s, an urban renewal project in Mériadeck, which adjoined the old CBD, replaced a working-class quarter of one- and two-story buildings with six-or-so-story offices and apartments. These were connected by a Corbusier-style platform designed to separate pedestrians from car traffic. These days the office buildings are mostly used by government agencies—a sure sign that they were difficult to rent—and the concrete platforms are generally empty. Except for a shopping mall that was built along with the project, this area is now by far the emptiest part of central Bordeaux.

Near-empty platform above street level at Mériadeck, the result of a 1960s urban-renewal scheme in which pedestrians were separated from the street.

In most French cities, there was a fairly radical change of emphasis by the 1980s. There was a widespread realization that “le tout automobile” was something of a dead end. Following it to its logical conclusion would have destroyed existing cities. Most cities stopped investing in new freeways and started improving public transport and adding facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. Bordeaux was slow to make the change, in part perhaps because it’s been a fairly traditional place and in part because so much of the public debate centered on whether to build a subway, which would have been an enormously expensive undertaking, thanks in part to Bordeaux’s soils. Bordeaux’s sprawl also made it a poor fit for what would have been a short linear system.

Bordeaux’s shift to planning for pedestrians and transit only occurred in the mid-1990s. The election of Alain Juppé as mayor in 1995 was apparently a factor.  A decision was finally made to move forward with an elaborate tram system and to take numerous other steps to reduce the role of the automobile and improve conditions in the central city. The change in the landscape of central Bordeaux over the next decade was so enormous that it’s inspired at least three books.³

Bordeaux’s transformation involved several interconnected steps.

[1] A tramway system. Bordeaux started with a three-line system that barely made it out of the inner city. It was felt to be a success from the day the first line opened in 2003. All three lines have since been extended, and a fourth line is supposed to open by the end of 2019. Most of Bordeaux’s tram lines now reach the Rocade. There are something like 300,000 passengers a day, which is respectable in an urban area of approximately 1.2 million (especially when you consider how many people walk and bicycle in Bordeaux). Service is quite frequent during the day. All of the trains I rode this month were substantially full in the inner city—and rather empty out near the Rocade. It isn’t easy anywhere to get people who are part of the automobile culture to change their ways. Outer Bordeaux remains a diffuse and sprawling place. At least large swaths of it have better transit than they once did.

Tram on Rue d’Ornano west of the Bordeaux’s central business district. Note the signs forbidding access by motor vehicle. The smallish buildings and narrow, straight streets are characteristic of much of central Bordeaux. Note that the tram is getting power from an underground conduit between the tracks (“alimentation par sol”). This technology was pioneered in Bordeaux.

The Bordeaux urban area emphasizing rail transit lines and facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. Base GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; these data have been heavily edited.

Closeup of much of central Bordeaux. Source of data as in the previous map.

[2] Widespread pedestrianization. Bordeaux’s sprawl and something like a century of only modest pressure to alter the inner city have had one wonderful consequence. There is a very large area in which 18th- and 19th-century buildings on generally narrow 18th- and 19th-century streets predominate. The UNESCO world heritage site that covers much of central Bordeaux is said to be the largest urban UNESCO site in the world. Large parts of this area were turned into pedestrian zones when the tramway was constructed. In many places (including several key streets with no tram line) motor vehicles were forbidden completely (except, sometimes, for early-morning deliveries).

Rue Ste-Catherine in central Bordeaux, said to be the longest pedestrian street in the world. The four- and five-story buildings are characteristic of the central business district and some of its surrounding neighborhoods.

Elsewhere, lanes for the trams replaced lanes for cars and only a very narrow motor-vehicle lane was left. In some inner-city neighborhoods with narrow streets, two-way tram traffic occupied entire streets, and only local motor-vehicle traffic is allowed access, and then usually only in one direction (see photo above). As a result, pedestrianization—or at least partial pedestrianization—can be found not just in the central business district but even in what might be called the outer central city: the blocks of two-story residential buildings built mostly during the 19th century. You no longer feel in most of central Bordeaux that the automobile comes first.

The Pont de Pierre is a special case. It’s the oldest bridge across the Garonne (parts of it date to the 1820s)—and, really, the only Garonne bridge that leads directly to Bordeaux’s central business district. According to a 1968 traffic map, this bridge carried more motor-vehicle traffic than any other stretch of roadway in the Bordeaux area.⁴ These days, two lanes are devoted to trams, two lanes to pedestrians, and two lanes to bicycles, buses, and taxis. On the latter stretches, the buses and (rare) taxis are expected to travel at bicycle speed. During commute hours the bridge is jammed with people walking and cycling.

The Pont de Pierre at sunrise.

Bordeaux had its origin as a Roman city and it was only a tiny place during the Middle Ages. Thus, some of its straight Roman streets have been preserved. Pedestrianization of the irregular streets in the medieval cores of many European cities is common enough. Bordeaux is unusual in that so many of its pedestrianized streets are straight. The Rue Ste-Catherine, at 1.3 km, is said to be the longest pedestrianized street in the world (see photo above).

[3] Replacing the docks with a park that encourages “soft” modes of transportation. Bordeaux was France’s major port during much of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its prosperity was based disproportionately on trade with the West Indies (including, for a time, the slave trade). Bordeaux’s main port area was located along the Garonne, right next to its central business district, where the distinctive bend of the river left an area of deep water at the shoreline. The proximity of port to city was an enormous advantage in the era before mechanical transport. Bordeaux’s port did not do so well in the 20th century, however. Its location a hundred hard-to-navigate kilometers from the sea was awkward. Furthermore, Bordeaux did not have a heavily populated hinterland. Marseille, Nantes, and (in most years) several other French cities now have much more important ports. There is also the issue that modern, container-oriented port facilities in Bordeaux have had to be built downstream, several kilometers from the old port. Bordeaux’s central-city port was pretty moribund by the 1980s.

Years of discussion about what to do with the old port eventually led to a decision in the late 1990s to replace it with recreational land. Close to the CBD, the old port sheds (hangars) were removed completely, and the space they occupied was turned into parkland. A large part of the park’s area was given over to recreational paths. A wide multi-use path was built along the shoreline, and a path for bicycles was added on the inland side of the newly created space. This riverside parkland seemed like an overwhelmingly successful place to me. On warm weekend afternoons, it was attracting huge crowds.

Multi-use path along the Garonne.

In the early morning cyclists and a smaller number of pedestrians turn it into a major commute route.

A peculiar aspect of the transformation of Bordeaux’s old port is that cruise ships are still allowed to tie up in the old port area. The result looks a bit incongruous. Of course, it results in still greater crowds.

Downstream, the port sheds were left in place but were turned into shops and eating places. Here the recreational path is narrower—too narrow really for the number of users.

The much narrower multi-use path along the Garonne a bit downstream. Note the cruise ship on the Garonne.

A more modest recreational path was also built on the other (right, eastern) bank of the Garonne so that it’s easy to arrange to walk, run, or bicycle in a loop.

[4] Revitalization of the Right Bank. Like many cities on major rivers, Bordeaux is a lopsided place. The Garonne has always been a real barrier, and most of the built-up area is on the left, western bank. La Bastide, the neighborhood on the Right Bank immediately across from Bordeaux’s central business district, was until recently an exclusively working-class place, and much of its river bank was occupied by not-very-prosperous factories. Bordeaux’s government has taken numerous steps over the last twenty-five or so years to redress the balance. It’s built new bridges across the Garonne. A tram line that goes quite far into the Right Bank was one of the first lines to open. A park along the Garonne has been created, replacing obsolete factories. I wouldn’t say that La Bastide feels as bustling or prosperous today as much of the Left Bank, and many of the old factory sites are still empty, but it’s no longer a remote and run-down place. It’s become part of Bordeaux.

[5] Euratlantique. The latest inner-city transformation is occurring in the area south of Bordeaux’s train station, the Gare St-Jean. This area, the central part of which is traditionally known as Belcier or St-Jean-Belcier, has been an extremely modest working-class area with a certain number of increasingly obsolete industrial establishments. Its location would probably have put it in line for change even without government intervention, but the municipal government has decided to hurry the process along. While planners insist that they’ve been consulting long-term residents, they’ve developed plans to turn much of St-Jean-Belcier into a neighborhood of offices, apartments, and entertainment venues under the name Euratlantique (derived of course from Euroméditerranée in Marseille and Euralille in Lille). Over the last several years, Euratlantique has come to encompass not just the vicinity of the train station but a substantial area in southern Bordeaux, as well as in neighboring communes on both sides of the Garonne. Most of this broader Euratlantique has been a zone of industry, rail yards, and low-prestige housing, and it’s thought to be ripe for redevelopment.

The process has really only just begun, and much of Euratlantique is still the kind of place where you can see a city being altered before your eyes anywhere you turn.⁵

A lone pedestrian walks through a part of Belcier that is being turned into Euratlantique. Note that several of the old façades on the right side of the street are being preserved.

Belcier/Euratlantique has the peculiar distinction of being virtually the only part of central Bordeaux where there are tall buildings. It’s also one of the few close-in places where it was possible to keep a promise to encourage dense development along tram lines.⁶

The changing urban landscape in Belcier/Euratlantique just northeast of the Carle Vernet tram station.

The only more or less completed part of Euratlantique is a tiny area along the Garonne just south of the railroad tracks, where one can find a shiny new Hilton hotel, an even shinier Caisse d’Épargne office building, and a folly by architect Bjarke Ingels known as la Méca. Méca theoretically stands for Maison de l’économie créative et de la culture d’Aquitaine, but the name’s—provocative—suggestion of a certain city in Saudi Arabia is surely no accident, and, in fact, while la Méca provides office space for several local arts organizations, so far as I can tell, its chief function is to serve as a pilgrimage site for those with an interest in eccentric architecture. A wall helps visitors overlook the fact that la Méca, like the rest of Euratlantique, is cut off from the Garonne by a noisy highway. (There are plans to replace it with an extension of riverside parkland some day.)

Pilgrims at la Méca, Euratlantique.

Those who have known Bordeaux for several decades are pretty unanimous in declaring that the city has changed enormously, and for the better. In the 1980s and 1990s Bordeaux seemed to many to be a city in decline. The powers-that-be set out to make Bordeaux an economically vibrant place again, and a city with a status in Europe commensurate with its population. There was a sense that the best way to achieve these goals was to make central Bordeaux a more congenial place for residents and visitors. Many of the steps that were taken—replacing the old docks with parkland, for example, and diversifying the working-class neighborhoods east and south of the center—were very similar to steps taken in older port cities all over the world.  The effort to end the reign of “le tout automobile” in central Bordeaux has parallels throughout the world too, but this process has usually not been as self-conscious as in Bordeaux. It’s still not clear how successful this effort has been. The number of residents of the Bordeaux area who commuted to work by automobile dropped from 59 to 50% between 2009 and 2019.⁷ The change isn’t huge, but it’s in the hoped-for direction. The rate of automobile ownership, unlike that in Paris, hasn’t really budged, however, and public transit use has been pretty flat. Bicycle use, on the other hand, has been booming, and Bordeaux often appears on lists of the world’s best cycling cities.

What statistics cannot easily capture is that, to a short-term visitor at least, central Bordeaux seems to be thriving. There are people everywhere; shops appear to be doing all right; public transport vehicles are full; and the mostly restored 18th- and 19th-century buildings (and some of the new ones too) are quite impressive. And it’s pretty clear that at least some of central Bordeaux’s  success is connected with the fact that the vast majority of movement there now occurs on foot, by bicycle, or by public transport.

Most of the maps on this site were created at least in part with GIS data from OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM (for those who do not know) consists of GIS data—that is geographic data in a format usable by computer mapping programs—for the entire world. It differs from many other sources of GIS data in that its files are available to anyone for free—and are supplied in part by local contributors, who use information from aerial photos, satellite images, and personal knowledge. (OSM also uses publicly available government datasets.) OSM GIS data, in general, seem to be reasonably good, as several scholarly papers have testified.¹

One of OSM’s contributions to the process of amalgamating data from many sources has been to standardize it. This activity isn’t simple, and it inevitably involves some arbitrary decisions. An example of this can be found in the files for railroads. Railroad files are supposed to be track maps whenever that’s possible.² A railroad consisting of four parallel tracks will be portrayed by four parallel lines. Not only is every track shown; so are switches, marshalling yards, and repair facilities. These extra tracks aren’t very visible in maps at a small scale (that is, maps that show large areas), but they do appear in highly detailed urban maps. Because my focus in most of the maps on this site is passenger rail routes rather than tracks, I’ve often edited the extra tracks out (see the maps of Tokyo railroads for example). This is a time-consuming process, but it does result in cleaner maps. It’s doable in part because OSM data are reasonably standardized, and editing can be done in a somewhat mechanical way,

A major component of OSM’s standardization work is its classification of geographic features. Roads, for example, are classified into more than a dozen different types that are the same for the entire world. There are inevitably some issues of consistency. The category “service road,” for example,  is the lowest-ranked type of road for motor vehicles everywhere. It’s used for alleys in American Midwestern cities, and for access roads in the massive blocks of “new towns” in Hong Kong and Singapore. These aren’t quite the same thing, but neither are the urban landscapes being mapped. There really isn’t much to be done about this problem except to be aware of it. In general, one can count on OSM road data to be reasonably consistent for different parts of the world. The same is true of railroad data, where classifications like “rail” (for mainline railroads), “light rail,” “subway,” and “monorail” are used everywhere. Land-use data are similarly pretty consistent: the world’s parks may not all be the same, but it’s usually fairly clear what’s a park and what isn’t. One can count on data for water bodies to be reasonably reliable too.

“Pedestrian features,” however, are another story. The classifications are wildly inconsistent, perhaps because these have not been quite as important to OSM’s editors as, say, roads and railroads, or (arguably) several other feature types.

“Pedestrian features” are always treated as a special type of road. There appear to be four main types and several additional, less common types. The four main types are “footways,” “paths,” “cycleways,” and a type labeled simply “pedestrian.” Less common types of pedestrian features are “steps,” “tracks,” and perhaps “bridleways.”

Let’s take a look at how these terms work in practice. I’ve included below maps of the central parts of several cities.³ All these maps would be at a scale of 1:50,000 if printed on 8.5 x 11 inch paper. They use the same color scheme I’ve been using in recent posts. Red = subways or other rail rapid transit lines. Orange = streetcars or light-rail lines. Brown = other passenger rail lines. Grey = roads for cars, usually excluding “service roads.” Light blue = water. Light green = parks. Dark green = pedestrian facilities, as specified. Medium green = steps on the Lyon and Moscow maps.

I’ve included maps for central Chicago, Lyon, Moscow, Kyoto, Hong Kong, and Dubai. My sense is that adding additional cities would have suggested that the problem is even messier than it appears to be from the examples given here.

Here are the maps. Commentary follows.

“Footways” are probably the least consistently applied classification. “Footways” are supposed to be “designated footpaths; i.e., [paths] mainly/exclusively for pedestrians. This includes walking tracks and gravel paths.” But in Moscow every sidewalk is classified as a footway, and in Chicago every sidewalk in parts of the Loop and the Near North Side—but not elsewhere in the city—also gets this classification. This makes absolutely no sense to me, if only as sidewalks are essentially universal in central Moscow and Chicago; they are present along every road that isn’t a limited-access highway. Somewhat similarly,  in Kyoto most sidewalks along major streets are considered to be footways. Because sidewalks are often not present along minor roads in Kyoto (and other Japanese cities) and can be very narrow even along some important streets, it’s possible that an attempt is being made to note particularly wide sidewalks, but this process seems pretty arbitrary to me. In Lyon, in contrast, footways include a more modest (and interesting) set of features: pedestrian walkways along the Saône and Rhône; paths in parks; pedestrianized streets; and pedestrian passages in the hills on the West Bank of the Saône. In Hong Kong, the designation footway is used for many things but never ordinary sidewalks: pedestrian paths along waterfronts; pedestrian paths in parks; walking paths in the hills; the elevated walkways that thread through parts of Central; and bridges across major roads, which are quite common. This covers a lot of territory. Similarly, in Dubai, footways include some of the pedestrian paths along Dubai Creek; paths in parks; and Deira’s pedestrianized streets. Sidewalks seem to be excluded.

Employment of the classification “pedestrian” seems a little more consistent. It’s supposed to be used “for roads used mainly/exclusively for pedestrians in shopping and some residential areas which may allow access by motorised vehicles only for very limited periods of the day.” This could be interpreted to mean urban streets that have been pedestrianized, i.e., generally closed to motor vehicles. This category does seem to be used this way in Moscow, where several east-west roads off Tverskai͡a Street north of Red Square as well as in the Zamoskvorech’e District are pretty classic examples of pedestrianized streets. Some pedestrianized streets in Kyoto’s main shopping district and in Vieux Lyon are also classified this way as is the pedestrian corridor that replaced Ogden Avenue in Lincoln Park, Chicago. But “pedestrian” is also used for parts of the walkways along the Saône, the Moscow River, and Dubai Creek, which have a very different origin. And, as noted above, in some cities, pedestrianized streets are classed as footways.

The much less common classification “path” has analogous problems. It’s supposed to be used for “non-specific paths,” that is, those not exclusively for walkers, cyclists, or horse riders. This could, of course, apply quite widely, but in practice “path” is used sparingly. On the maps above it’s used most commonly on the Kyoto map, where, so far as I can see, it overlaps categories like “footway” and “cycleway” in ways that I find hard to understand.

“Cycleways” are bicycle paths. This sounds easier than it is. The OSM guidelines are concerned as they should be with whether cycleways also permit pedestrians but seem not to suggest a completely consistent solution. Also, it’s not clear whether lanes painted along streets should be included. They aren’t on the Chicago map; even protected lanes are usually excluded (and the western route in Lincoln Park that is included is not actually a bicycle path). In contrast, on the Moscow map, the narrow, little-used (and perhaps somewhat dangerous) lanes that follow the Boulevard Ring are considered to be cycleways, as are several bike paths painted on sidewalks. The Lyon map shows both separate paths and protected lanes as cycleways. There are no cycleways in central Hong Kong, so I’ve used the fourth Hong Kong map only for steps.

“Steps” are another type of pedestrian facility. They are common only in hilly cities, and I’ve included them only on the Lyon, Moscow, and Hong Kong maps. Unlike the other categories here, “steps” seem to be applied quite consistently.

“Tracks” are supposed to be used for “roads for mostly agricultural or forestry uses.” On the maps above, the category is used only in Hong Kong, for some of the unpaved trails in the mountains, which makes some sense, I guess (although the distinction between tracks and paths is inconsistent). I haven’t included tracks on any of the maps above.

The chief problem of consistency occurs for the categories “footways,” “pedestrian,” and “paths.” They are definitely not distinguished meaningfully. It might make sense to merge these categories, especially if sidewalks could be eliminated from the “footway” category.

Bridges over and tunnels under roads are another problem. Bridges over roads are noted assiduously in Hong Kong and Dubai, where they are common. The chief problem is cartographic. If you include these in a map at medium scale, you get a lot of odd-seeming green smudges on the map.  Tunnels are extremely common in Moscow (and other formerly Soviet cities), but they don’t seem to be noted in the database. Perhaps that’s just as well, as there is no very nice way to map these except at the largest scale.

In maps on this blog, I’ve typically edited the data for pedestrian facilities quite a lot. For example, I’ve generally taken sidewalks out of “footways.” This has worked pretty well, I think. But it would perhaps be better if less editing were required, and if the categories recognized in the database actually corresponded in a consistent way to differences in the real world. For pedestrian facilities, they really don’t.⁴

Moscow, as I pointed out in an earlier post, is quite a good city for pedestrians. There are high-quality sidewalks nearly everywhere, and there are lots of people using them. The enormously varied and generally attractive built environment guarantees that pedestrians will be entertained. And drivers can be relied on to defer to pedestrians when pedestrians have the right-of-way, which they do at crosswalks. I certainly wouldn’t claim that things are perfect, however. There are huge amounts of highly-polluting traffic along many major streets. Crossing these streets often requires a tunnel, which you enter and exit by stairs. Where there is no tunnel, it’s expected that pedestrians will obey traffic signals, which can take a long time to change; countdown clocks often have three digits. Widespread automobile ownership in Moscow has definitely lowered the quality of pedestrian life in the city, and there has not been as much pushback as there has been in, for example, parts of Western Europe. Still, things are much better than they were in the first decade and a half or so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In addition to sidewalks, there are a certain number of actual pedestrian (and bicycling) facilities in central Moscow, some of which have been improved enormously in the last few years. I made a point of looking at these in the course of a recent trip to Moscow.

Map of central Moscow, emphasizing pedestrian and bicycling facilities and urban rail lines. Base GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; these data have been heavily edited.

The most striking such facility is a set of paths along the Moscow River, stretching mostly on the south bank from the Bol’shoĭ Kamennyĭ Bridge in Zamoskvorech’e through Gor’kiĭ Park then around a substantial river meander past the Neskuchnyĭ Garden and the Vorob’ëbyĭ Hills to the Third Ring Road, for a total distance of approximately 8 km. For nearly all this distance there are separate bicycle and pedestrian corridors.

The parallel paths along the south bank of the Moscow River. The pedestrian path is at the left, close to the river; the bicycle path and service road are at the right. Lenin Beach, a sunbathing area, lies in between. At far right is a shop where bicycles can be rented.

Part of the bicycle path consists of two one-way lanes painted along a well-maintained service road. This really is a service road, but it’s used only by a tiny number of motor vehicles. Many pedestrians—especially runners and skaters—prefer using the service road to using the pedestrian path, which can get quite crowded at certain times.

Pedestrian path along the south bank of the Moscow River on a chilly Sunday afternoon in September.

The parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths pass by numerous landmarks, for example, a group of industrial buildings on or across from Bolotnyĭ Island that have been turned into restaurants and art galleries; a fantastically ugly statue of Peter the Great; the New Tret’i͡akov Gallery (for 20th-century art); Gor’kiĭ Park with its numerous amusements; and Lenin Beach, a major sunning spot. There are several bridges across the river including two for pedestrians only and two for trains that contain pedestrian paths. These were joined just last year by a cable car line.

The enclosed pedestrian bridge at the south end of Gor’kiĭ Park. Photograph taken September 2016.

Because the river bends so dramatically, the view keeps changing. Off in the distance, one can see such landmarks as Moscow University, Moskva-Siti, and the newly reconstructed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The river is often filled with boats. The stretch of the Moscow River with parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths is a distinctive and attractive place.

There is also a pedestrian/bicycle trail on the river’s north bank, but this doesn’t go all the way. The problem is that there’s a major road along much of the north bank. There’s often a substantial sidewalk between the road and the river, but, because of traffic noise and pollution, the sidewalk is not as pleasant as the carfree path across the river. (There’s a similar issue from, roughly, the Kremlin east; major roads hug nearly the entire riverfront.) Still, the north bank path does allow one to arrange a loop. (The pedestrian path is not noted on the map since it’s essentially a sidewalk.)

The north bank of the Moscow River just east of the Kremlin. Here, only a sidewalk is available for walking along the river.

The other major pedestrian thoroughfare in central Moscow is the long-existing Boulevard Ring (it was created the 1820s). If one doesn’t count the squares around the Kremlin, this is the closest-in of several concentric ring roads in Moscow. Despite the use of the term “ring,” the Boulevard Ring forms only a semi-circle: it runs at a distance of approximately 1.5 km from Saint Basil’s and Red Square north of the river only. The term “Boulevard Ring” is an unofficial one. Components of the Boulevard Ring go by several different official names. What connects them is the fact that they all have a similar structure: a linear park is bordered by two one-way roads. The park has enough vegetation so you aren’t particularly aware of traffic if you walk through it. The parks in the Boulevard Ring aren’t just pedestrian thoroughfares. They’re also used for art exhibitions and for public events, and they serve as pleasant places to sit.

Along the Boulevard Ring. The exhibit is devoted to new Metro stations.

The ring is interrupted at several places, once (at the Arbat) for a highway underpass, once for a parking lot, and in several places by buildings. There are also places where a pond and an archaeological site take up much of the park. Still, it’s not hard to walk around the entire ring, although you do face a long wait for certain traffic lights to change and must use tunnels in a couple of places. The hegemony of the automobile is pretty apparent even in this most pedestrian-oriented of Moscow’s thoroughfares.

A parking lot and restaurant interrupt the Boulevard Ring where it’s crossed by T͡Svetnoĭ Boulevard.

Central Moscow also has a number of pedestrianized streets. Several of the commercial strips off Tverskai͡a Street north of Red Square and the Kremlin, for example, have become pedestrian-only as have a group of streets stretching east-west past the main subway stations in the Zamoskvorech’e district south of the river.

One of the pedestrianized streets in the Zamoskvorech’e district.

Red Square itself is a huge pedestrianized space, always filled with tourists and passersby.

There’s also some parkland in central Moscow, including the brand new Zari͡ad’e Park, designed in part by the American architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which is not much like a traditional city park: it’s full of things to do, many of which cost money. One of its claims to fame is that its vegetation cover has been divided into several zones, each of which is planted with species like those in one of Russia’s major ecological regions. At least it’s free to walk in the vegetated spaces, and lots of people do.

The tundra area in the brand-new Zari͡ad’e Park. Saint Basil’s Cathedral can be seen in the background.

Moscow, like many of the world’s cities, has been trying to encourage bicycling. It’s set up a bike-share program, for example, and the linear park along the Moscow River described above includes high-quality bike paths that get a substantial amount of use. Elsewhere in central Moscow, conditions are perhaps not so ideal, but there are places where the authorities have tried to accommodate bicycles. One of central Moscow’s few continuous bike paths can be found in the roads that border the Boulevard Ring. It consists of narrow lanes painted in the streets. It’s probably somewhat dangerous, and it certainly isn’t used much. When I’ve tried to photograph it, I’ve had to wait a long time for a bicycle to come along. There are more motorcycles and scooters than bicycles.

One of the rare cyclists in the bicycle lane that follows the Boulevard Ring.

There are also bicycle facilities along two of north-south streets in Zamoskvorech’e. One street (Bol’shai͡a Ordynka Street) has a painted lane on which cyclists are expected to go in the opposite direction as motor traffic, and parallel Pi͡atnit͡skai͡a Street has a two-way bike path painted on its sidewalk. Both of these facilities attract a modest amount of use, much of it by meal delivery cyclists.

Bicycle path on Pi͡atnit͡skai͡a Street, Zamoskvorech’e.

There are similar sidewalk bicycle paths here and there north of Red Square, for example along Bol’shai͡a Nikitskai͡a Street. Moscow isn’t much like, say, Berlin, but it does have at least a few streets where bicyclists are encouraged to share sidewalks with pedestrians.

The sidewalk bicycle path along Bol’shai͡a Nikitskai͡a Street where it crosses the Boulevard Ring.

Moscow, like many of the world’s other major cities, has been devoting some energy in recent years to developing and promoting alternatives to the automobile. Most of its effort has gone into expanding its excellent Metro and improving its suburban railway network. Moscow has also enhanced its pedestrian facilities in certain places, particularly in central Moscow, an increasingly gentrified area that promises something resembling a Western European environment to tourists and to those who can afford to live there. Central Moscow’s modest but reasonable pedestrian facilities are an important component of the area’s appeal.

I visited Kitchener and Waterloo last week and rode on the new ION light-rail line there. I also walked along the route for several kilometers.

This line is distinctive in that it’s in a relatively small urban area. According to Statistics Canada, the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo census metropolitan area had a population of 523,894 in 2016. It’s thus the smallest North American urban area to have a substantial light-rail system.

It’s true that the Kitchener-Waterloo area could be considered to be part of the Toronto metropolitan area, but, officially, it isn’t, and ION in any case is completely separate from the numerous projects being built by Metrolinx, the organization in the Toronto region that manages public transit. In fact, there is a great deal of open space between Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto. But it’s only something like 100 km between downtown Kitchener and central Toronto, and GO transit has reasonably good service to Kitchener (an hourly bus on weekdays and five trains in the prevailing direction during weekday rush hours). There is also frequent Greyhound service. Kitchener and Waterloo are certainly closely connected to Toronto.

Map of the Toronto region showing urban rail transit lines and the location of Kitchener and Waterloo. I’ve omitted longer-distance VIA lines, including the line to Niagara Falls on which a single daily commuter GO train to Toronto was recently put into service. On the GO (Government of Ontario) lines, only the eastern four-fifths or so of the Lakeshore line has frequent all-day service. But frequency is expected to increase on all the lines in the near future, and they are all supposed to be electrified as well. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, which I’ve edited quite a lot.

ION is 19 km long—longer than the light-rail lines in several larger urban areas in North America, for example, those in Newark, Buffalo, and Charlotte.¹ It has a rather complicated alignment. There are two stretches where ION follows a railroad right-of-way. It also runs in the middle of certain roads in a lane that’s closed to motor-vehicle traffic. Crossing gates or traffic signals protect these parts of the line. In addition, there are stretches where ION becomes more like a streetcar line, for example through the central business districts of both Kitchener and Waterloo where the tracks occupy curbside lanes that are also used by motor-vehicle traffic. There is signal preemption, although, on all the trips I took, the train did have to stop at a small number of red lights. I asked a driver about this, and he said that the software being used for signal preemption chiefly worked by extending green lights for light-rail cars; it did not turn a red light green.

Map of the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge area showing ION’s route.

The line is in all the obvious ways a modern light-rail system. The Bombardier Flexity Freedom low-floor cars are quite comfortable. Countdown clocks in the stations tell you when the next train is arriving, and there is also electronic information on coming stops inside the cars. Service levels are reasonable. The headway between trains is basically ten minutes on weekdays from the morning rush hour until early evening and fifteen minutes on weekends and very early in the morning and very late in the evening on weekdays. This is better service at certain times than is provided by certain North American heavy-rail systems, for example, Miami Metrorail and the Cleveland Rapid, but it doesn’t come close to the level of service provided by, say, most of Toronto’s streetcar lines.

ION, which began operations on June 21, reported that there were around 30,000 riders a day during its initial week of service: an impressive figure. But rides were free at the time. I called operator Grand River Transit to see how many passengers had been riding the system in the weeks since fares were implemented—and got hung up on! Grand River Transit hasn’t answered my e-mail either, so this may be a sensitive point.² The hope is that there will be something like 27,000 riders a day. Even if it’s only, say, 15 or 20,000, that would still be more people than ride the longer Shaker Rapid in Cleveland or the Baltimore subway. All the trains I rode had a respectable number of passengers. There were standees but also empty seats. It’s pretty clear that, even aside from ION, the Kitchener-Waterloo area (like some other college towns) has a pretty high level of transit use for a small North American urban area. Its bus system is reported to have 22,000,000 riders a year, around 60,000 a day. This augurs well for ION ridership. It may or may not be relevant that I had trouble paying my fare. The ticketing machine wouldn’t accept either my American credit card or a pristine Canadian five-dollar bill. Fortunately, I had coins. (The fare is 3.25 CAD.) Would the rider count be higher if it were easier to buy a ticket?

Inside an ION train.

In so far as the line works, it will be in part because Kitchener and Waterloo are somewhat distinctive places. North of “uptown” Waterloo, the large and well-regarded University of Waterloo is an obvious source of riders. And both cities have downtowns that looked to be fairly healthy for North American small-city CBDs.

An ION train in downtown Kitchener.

There were quite a few pedestrians on downtown streets when I was there, and there are several newish high-rise apartment buildings in central Kitchener as well as some new or newly renovated office buildings, including one older industrial building being used by Google. (The region has been quite successful in luring high-tech and electronic firms.)

Waiting for an ION train at Central Station, in an area that’s been tagged the “Innovation District.” Note the Google office building in the background.

The two CBDs are tiny, however, only a few blocks long. It’s hard to believe that there’s a congestion problem in either. And, for the moment, neither city has much in the way of population density. The residential areas around both cities’ downtowns consist mostly of very small older houses. Further out in both directions the line takes you quite quickly into low-density suburbia. The two termini are at suburban shopping malls. The corridor through which the line runs does not exactly seem like an obvious place for a rail line.

Kitchener Market station, south of downtown Kitchener. Note the small houses.

I’ve been struck, however, by the fact that the government’s arguments in favor of building the line stress its ability to reshape the region. The presence of ION is expected to encourage dense development, making automobiles unnecessary over a substantial area. There is talk of “reurbanization in the central transit corridor.” In addition, it’s argued that farmland will be saved if suburban development is curbed. Of course, the close relationship between rail transit and dense urban development and a decline in automobile use is not exactly a secret. The Toronto region as a whole (as I described in an earlier post) also has ambitious plans to use rail transit to make many of its suburbs denser and less car-centered. In the United States, officials often do not emphasize rail transit’s potential as a tool for densification for fear of causing a NIMBY reaction. Canada is (as in many other respects) different.

It will of course be many years before it’s known whether rail transit in a smallish urban area can actually bring about a reduction in automobile dependency. In the meantime, the residents of Kitchener and Waterloo have an impressive new light-rail line to ride on.