Liberal Landscape

Two Midwestern cities—St. Louis and Milwaukee—both acquired new streetcar lines in November, and I went and rode them last week.

The lines are comparable in size. Both are miniscule given that they’re in urban areas that are dozens of kilometers across. The St. Louis line is 3.5 km (2.2 miles) long, the Milwaukee line 3.3 km (2.1 miles). Here are maps, drawn on the same scale:

The lines weren’t cheap to build. The St. Louis line is said to have cost $51,000,000, the Milwaukee line approximately $125,000,000. The difference is surely connected with the fact that the latter line is double-tracked throughout and has more rolling stock and much more elaborate stations.

Neither line is speedy. Each was taking approximately twenty minutes for a one-way trip; average speed was thus something like 10.5 km (6.5 miles) per hour. One factor here is that stations come along frequently. Both lines have ten stations in each direction (the Milwaukee line runs part way on two parallel streets and claims to have 18 stations in all).

The lines really are for the most part streetcar lines. The St. Louis line runs in traffic as it passes through the “Delmar Loop.”

East of there it consists of a single reserved track, either in the middle of or at the edge of a street, but it still must wait for red lights.

The Milwaukee line runs in traffic the whole way except at its terminuses and for a few meters under a freeway. It too spends several minutes of each trip waiting for red lights.

The two lines in some ways are quite different.

The St. Louis route—known as the Loop Trolley–seems to have been created chiefly to give a boost to the commercial district at its western end called the Delmar Loop (or just “the Loop” in St. Louis English). This is a congenial traditional commercial district that, these days, serves chiefly as a restaurant row. It is heavily patronized by students and staff from nearby Washington University, but in fact, people visit the street from all over the St. Louis area, which is extraordinarily short of congenial traditional urban commercial streets. The Loop’s advertising proclaims it one of “one of the 10 great streets in America.” The truth is that, on its own terms, the Loop may at best be one of America’s thousand greatest streets. There are many hundreds of commercial streets in New York that are livelier, and probably just as many spread among Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco. Even in St. Louis, nearby Euclid Avenue, in the Central West End, has many more pedestrians and more interesting restaurants and much more interesting architecture than the Delmar Loop and appears to be thriving these days in a way it’s never really done in the thirty odd years I’ve been visiting it periodically. The Loop seems pretty quiet in comparison. It’s quite possible that the presence of the Loop Trolley may help redress the balance. The new cars, built in an antique style, fit the Loop’s image as an old-fashioned, urban, pedestrian-oriented street. (And the shiny wooden interior of the cars is actually quite attractive.)

The St. Louis line, short one of its two cars, was running only every 45 minutes or so when I was there, and there is no “next train” information available either in the stations or online, so the chances are that walking the whole route would be faster than waiting for a train. There is, of course, the issue that a transit line that runs every 45 minutes and, for the moment, only eight or eleven hours a day four days a week isn’t much of a transit line. As many observers have pointed out,¹ it’s hard to defend the Loop Trolley as urban transportation. It serves two MetroLink stations and runs in the same streets as several bus lines that offer faster and more frequent service.² The fact that it doesn’t accept transfers from Metro, the St. Louis transit agency, considerably limits its potential. There were only a handful of passengers on the runs that I observed.

It must be added that the Loop trolley isn’t quite as redundant as it first seems. There are a couple of dead blocks between the Loop proper and the Delmar Loop MetroLink station. This might seem trivial in New York, but St. Louis remains a city with an extraordinarily high crime rate; its murder rate by most measures is the highest of any big U.S. city—higher than the murder rates in Honduras or Venezuela. The Loop proper seems to be quite a safe place, but the nearby ghetto isn’t, and people in St. Louis are conscious of crime in a way that people in, say, New York no longer are. The ability to travel through a few possibly dangerous blocks in the Loop Trolley might add to people’s security (although the prospect of a 45-minute wait for the thing to come undermines this pretty much completely). But, again, the line was mostly built, I’m sure, to add to the Loop’s aesthetic appeal, and it’s quite possible to argue that it really does do that.

The Milwaukee streetcar (“the Hop”) is very different. It’s more like recently opened streetcar lines in Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Kansas City, and Oklahoma City in that it connects downtown with a nearby destination or two. In Milwaukee’s case, the most important non-downtown destination is the Intermodal Center, which incorporates the Amtrak station. The Milwaukee streetcar also grazes the “Historic Third Ward,” an old industrial area that’s become a fashionable residential and entertainment district. Its northern terminus is in the socially complex but mostly upper-middle-class Lower East Side residential area. It could be argued that the streetcar’s route doesn’t serve Milwaukee’s downtown very well. The heart of downtown Milwaukee runs east-west along Wisconsin Avenue, across a freeway and three blocks north of the Intermodal Center. This is where most of the major stores, hotels, and office buildings are located. The Milwaukee streetcar has stops at Wisconsin Avenue, but they’re a couple of blocks east of what would once have been identified as the 100% location. It’s likely though that, if the streetcar had run along Wisconsin Avenue, it would have encountered traffic problems. There seem to be few problems on the less trafficked streets it does run along.

The line uses modern streetcar equipment. It’s scheduled to run every fifteen minutes and seemed to be coming close to doing so when I was there. There are no countdown clocks in the stations, but schedules are posted. The trains were most certainly not crowded when I was in Milwaukee, but some runs had a couple of dozen passengers. Still, the cars were far from full.

The fact that the line is temporarily free and still a novelty is probably helping to build passenger loads. Current plans are to begin charging a dollar in a year and to keep fares separate from those of the Milwaukee County Transit System buses. I can imagine use of the streetcar plummeting when fares are implemented.

There are proposals to extend the Milwaukee streetcar route network, perhaps into the poverty-stricken areas northwest of downtown, perhaps up toward the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The trouble with this idea, of course, is that a street-running streetcar with no signal preemption is likely to be slower than a bus. You can’t justify building a short traditional streetcar line on the grounds that it will speed up transportation; it won’t. It is possible that the streetcars will add to the aesthetic appeal of the neighborhoods through which they pass. In an era when places are expected to compete with each other, this isn’t a trivial reason for building streetcar lines, but it’s not the one usually stressed by their proponents.

Note added 1 December 2020. The Delmar Loop Trolley in St. Louis ceased operating after December 29, 2019. Its rolling stock continued to be unreliable, and it never did attract many passengers. Efforts to restore service have so far come to nothing. The Pandemic, of course, hasn’t helped.

Hong Kong has four quite distinct urban rail systems:

[1] the MTR (Mass Transit Railway), which consists of approximately 231 km of modern urban rail lines that run throughout the special administrative region; it incorporates the formerly separate lines of the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR);

[2] the streetcar line along the north end of Hong Kong Island that features (wonderfully antiquated!) double-decker trams on approximately 13 km of routes;

[3] the short 1-km funicular railroad that runs up toward Victoria Peak (the oldest of these rail systems);

and

[4] a light-rail system in the northwestern part of the New Territories that includes approximately 36 km of routes.

Most visitors to Hong Kong become familiar with the first three of these systems, but few are even aware of the latter, although, in the history of world urbanism in the last forty years, it’s arguably of some importance.

Hong Kong’s light-rail system was built in conjunction with the building of several of the “new towns” in the New Territories, specifically Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and an addition to the older settlement of Yuen Long.¹ Hong Kong’s new towns were first planned in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a period when the older built-up parts of Hong Kong—southern Kowloon and the northern part of Hong Kong Island—had become incredibly crowded; a few parts of Kowloon were said to be the most densely populated urban places in the world. The territory’s British authorities decided on an ambitious scheme of building enormous new towns in several of the flatter parts of the New Territories to house much of the territory’s population.² There were new towns throughout the New Territories. Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long are all in its northwestern corner. They are arguably among the first newly-built urban areas of the last fifty years that were designed quite explicitly around rail transit facilities. Light-rail transit was planned from the beginning in these three new towns. It’s true that the rail lines didn’t begin to operate until 1988, several years after the first buildings went up, but space for lines was reserved, and the planning of the towns is said to have taken the presence and location of the rail lines into account. They were, in other words, “transit villages” or “TODs” years before these terms came into wide use. While it could be argued that, with transit use high just about everywhere, all of Hong Kong is a kind of transit village, in most cases, rail lines were planned and built only long after areas were settled. The sequence was different in the three new towns of the northwest New Territories.

A few basics:

[1] “New towns” were an important concept in British planning circles in the years after World War II. Several new towns had been built in Southeast England in (roughly) the 1970s. The largest of these was Milton Keynes. New towns were supposed to be reasonably independent of nearby large cities, and a great deal of attention was therefore paid to internal circulation. Hong Kong’s new towns were naturally influenced by British practice. As in Britain, there was a sense when Hong Kong’s new towns were being planned that travel within the towns would be overwhelmingly more important than travel elsewhere; the towns were supposed to be “self-sufficient.”³ The inclusion of light-rail lines in Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long was an attempt to make self-sufficient places function smoothly.

[2] The belief that internal transport would be more important than connections with other places turned out to be incorrect in Hong Kong (as, arguably, it did in Britain as well). The new towns were supposed to be the site of a huge number of jobs, and they all (especially Tuen Mun) included industrial districts, but there were never as many jobs as plans called for. Furthermore, as the factories that were built in Hong Kong’s new towns closed or reduced staff due to competition from the Mainland in the 1980s and 1990s, more and more of the residents of the new towns found themselves commuting all over Hong Kong. At first they mostly did so by bus, but, eventually (2003), West Rail, an extension of the KCR that was incorporated into the MTR rail transit system in 2007, was built. This circuitous but unusually speedy line provided service to central Kowloon as well as connections to other MTR rail lines. The LRT increasingly became a feeder to West Rail. Here’s a map (on which the still numerous bus lines in the area aren’t shown):

[3] Hong Kong’s new towns are substantial places. In 2016 Tuen Mun had a population of 487,404, Tin Shui Wai 286,232, and Yuen Long 160,010 (total: 933,549).⁴ The northwest New Territories’ light rail lines are busy. In recent years, they have carried approximately 489,000 passengers a day.⁵

I made a point of visiting Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long on a recent trip to Hong Kong. Except for a quick ride on West Rail a few years previously, I’d never been to the northwest New Territories. I was particularly interested as always in what these places looked and felt like, and especially in finding out whether new towns built along light-rail lines had distinct characteristics.

We tend to associate new transit-oriented development with many of the features that are fashionable in planning today, for example, calmed traffic, bicycle lanes, and, in general, the re-creation of the traditional street, with housing that’s built flush with the sidewalk, often with ground-floor stores. I was struck by how little Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long conform to these ideals. Instead, they reflect the city-planning notions of the era when they were built (or, as one would expect of a colony, the period just before), and even some of the now deeply unfashionable notions associated with urban theorists of the first half of the 20th century. Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long feature, for example, tower-in-a-park housing, the siting of commerce in special areas away from streets, the separation of pedestrians and traffic, and a concern for keeping automobile traffic flowing. Their geography is based on a rigid zoning regime that has come to seem a little passé. In this sense, they turned out to be much like Hong Kong’s other 20th-century new towns.

Here’s a map just of Tuen Mun that shows building footprints and that will give some idea of the texture of the largest of these places. Neighboring buildings do not touch in Tuen Mun, and few buildings are flush with streets.

Except for the older parts of Yuen Long, the other new towns have analogous internal geographies. They are most certainly not much like traditional cities in which buildings cover almost the entirety of small blocks, and they are most definitely not the products of a mindset that has anything to do with “new urbanism.”

The “Town Centre” of Tuen Mun, for example, is positively Corbusien. It’s built on a platform. Individual buildings have space around them. The train line, roads, loading docks, and parking facilities are under the platform.

It seemed like a healthy, bustling place to me when I was there, although it was most definitely not crowded.

Unlike in Corbusier’s (in)famous plan voisin for central Paris, the platform doesn’t extend much beyond the CBD. If you want to walk between Tuen Mun’s central platform and nearby residential areas, you have to go downhill. You don’t need to look far for help; directional signs are common:

You’ll be directed along paths that avoid main roads. Many pedestrian paths are located between buildings, parallel to, but away from major roads.

There are tunnels under major cross streets.

Sometimes pedestrians are expected to take bridges across main roads. There are usually elevators for those who don’t want to climb stairs or ramps. Still, clearly, the automobile is being “privileged” here despite the extremely low levels of automobile ownership in the new towns (this is true elsewhere in Hong Kong as well⁶).

The new towns all have a great deal of recreational space. There is a substantial amount of parkland that incorporates heavily used walking paths, sometimes with separated lanes for cyclists.

In addition, there’s a walkway along most of the length of the elevated West Rail tracks and quite a nice seaside “promenade,” apparently built as part of Hong Kong’s relatively recent project to build “promenades” along all the coasts it could.

Most of the commerce in the new towns occurs in small- or medium-scale shops in buildings that typically don’t face roads with traffic. These tend to be near train stations.

The light-rail lines mostly follow roads. To get to the stations, passengers must often cross busy streets.

In only a few places (see the third photo above) do they take shortcuts away from roads.

Only in the older parts of Yuen Long that existed before the nearby new town was built is a light-rail line located in the middle of a street. In this case, it’s in the middle of what appears to be a successful traditional commercial street, which is far more crowded than the Corbusien center of Tuen Mun.

The light-rail lines are definitely not “state-of-the-art.” Speed is modest. The trains stop often for red lights, and stations are generally close together. It takes perhaps six times as long to get from Tuen Men to Yuen Long by light rail as it does by West Rail. Still, it’s not a bad experience. The one- or two-car trains are usually only moderately crowded, and the stations all have good lighting, reasonable seating, protection from rain, and countdown clocks. Trains come along every few minutes, although the extraordinarily complicated service patterns assure a longer wait for many.

In one respect, the new towns are quite un-Corbusien, and not at all like the low-rise English new towns either.⁷ Their housing consists almost entirely of enormous multi-unit apartment buildings. Several buildings are forty or fifty stories tall. This is true both of public housing (the majority of units in Tuen Mun and Tin Shui Wai⁸) and the slightly more luxurious private housing.

I don’t know how much the height of buildings in Hong Kong’s new towns was discussed by their builders, but Hong Kong had little choice but to build upward. It just doesn’t have much flat land given its population of nearly eight million.⁹

Despite the overwhelming predominance of extreme examples of a type of housing that’s associated in Western countries with urban dysfunction, Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long are by all accounts extremely safe places. To an outsider, they seem congenial enough. Although few rich people live in these new towns, the areas seem reasonably prosperous; there are lots of people in pedestrian zones; and the central role of transit and walking makes them ecologically sound.

These are definitely not, however, among the most prestigious places to live in Hong Kong. There is no reason to think that this has anything to do with the area’s light-rail system. The causes are the new towns’ location and the generally modest status of their inhabitants. Tin Shui Wai in particular has a reputation for being downscale, in part because so many of its inhabitants are said to be relatively recent immigrants from the Mainland (or their children); native-born Hong Kong residents can be rather scornful of Mainland Chinese. There are in fact some objective problems in these places, notably the absence of local jobs and the cost in time and money to travel to central Hong Kong.¹⁰ There may also be a certain amount of social anomie.¹¹ Shu-Mei Huang reports in a recent book that the inhabitants of Sham Shui Po, a very modest neighborhood in northern Kowloon, fiercely resisted being moved to Tin Shui Wai even though the move would certainly have led to an improvement in the quality of their housing. They preferred to stay in one of the grittier parts of Hong Kong’s central city. They had friends and relatives there, and they were close to places they wanted to get to.¹² Middle-class “professional” people who have a little money (and few if any children) also tend to prefer to live in or near the city center. If they have a lot of money they might opt to live in the hills above the center or, for example, in quasi-suburban Kowloon Tong. No doubt the short commute is a major reason for this preference. I can’t prove it but suspect that an appreciation of inner-city bustle may be a factor too. In any case, living in the northwest New Territories is not high on very many peoples’ wish list.

It’s not clear that daily life in Tuen Men, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long is tremendously different from daily life in the new towns built in roughly the same years that lack light rail. All of Hong Kong’s new towns are extraordinarily transit-oriented. Census data suggest that there are only minor differences in journey-to-work mode between different non-central parts of Hong Kong. According to the 2016 census, 79.1% of Tuen Mun’s working population took public transit to work, as did 78.4% of the working population of the Yuen Long/Tin Shui Wai area. The figure for Hong Kong as a whole was 77.6%.¹³ It’s just that some of the new towns use buses for local transit rather than light rail. Some of the other new towns—Sha Tin, for example—consist of an even narrower corridor than, say, Tuen Mun and get by just fine with MTR rail lines. The presence of light rail in the new towns of the northwest New Territories probably does assure a more comfortable, less polluting, and (to many of us) aesthetically more pleasing ride. Perhaps that’s enough to justify its existence.

A simplistic view of post-World-War-II French urban transportation planning would identify two very different phases.

In the 1950s and 1960s, and well into the 1970s, the government largely devoted itself to catering to the automobile. Limited-access highways were built to connect French cities and to speed movement by car in the suburbs that were growing rapidly in many urban areas. There was only modest investment in public transport.

By the 1970s, there was a widespread understanding of the limits and problems of a mostly car-based transportation system, and there was a radical change in emphasis. Since then, there has been much more investment in public transport. An intercity network of high-speed trains has evolved (the first TGV line opened in 1981); the Paris Métro began growing again (early 1970s); and rail rapid-transit systems were added in Marseille (1977), Lyon (1978), Lille (1983), Toulouse (1993), and Rennes (2002). Furthermore, tramways, which had come close to vanishing completely in the 1960s, have been added in 27 cities.¹ In addition, numerous cities have engaged in pedestrianization schemes in their centers and occasionally elsewhere. Bus, tram, and bicycle lanes as well as parking restrictions have also reduced the amount of space available to car drivers. Although most changes have been the object of huge amounts of discussion and not everything planned has actually been implemented, there really has come to be a consensus that it would be wise to push back at least a little against the hegemony of the automobile.

I don’t want to overstate the case for the chronology proposed above. There was no day in, say, 1975 when everything changed; the shift in emphasis occurred over several years. It’s also the case that there was one spectacular exception to the rule that there was little investment in public transit in the three decades after World War II. The first line of the Paris RER opened in 1969, and the RER continued to grow through the 1970s. It’s also true that limited-access highways continued to be added even after 1980, but mostly not in big cities. Note also that, with the exception of the creation of the Parc Rives-de-Seine to replace an expressway along the Seine in Paris, even the most obnoxious facilities for automobiles have generally not been removed.

Of course, there were similar trends throughout the Western world, but, with its long-term habit of having the government do more than in many other countries, France saw a particularly sharp break in what was emphasized, and it was definitely a pioneer in the creation of cross-city suburban rail transit (the RER), high-speed passenger rail (the TGV), urban bicycle sharing (Vélib’), and perhaps even facilities for pedestrians.²

I spent several days in Lyon last month. I’d visited Lyon quite a number of times over the years and had always appreciated its big-city feel and its hills (and views!), but I’d never been there for more than twenty-four hours at a time. I was particularly interested in looking at the Confluence, a more or less new neighborhood that has grown up over the last fifteen years and that, in some ways, exemplifies the general trends in French urban planning. I say “more or less new” because the Confluence—the southern end of the peninsula between the Saône and the Rhône—has been there for as long as Lyon has. But the area south of Perrache Station was a somewhat disreputable working-class and industrial area that was quite cut-off from the rest of Lyon in the decades preceding the current renovation work. It required a long walk “under the vaults” (the train tracks) to get to what is now known as the Confluence, and there wasn’t much there that would have been of interest to outsiders (except, it’s said, those in search of prostitutes). The addition of an only partly underground freeway in front of the Perrache Station during the 1970s increased the neighborhood’s isolation. The decline of much of the Confluence’s industrial facilities in the 1990s, however, presented an opportunity for Lyon’s powers-that-be.³ A decision was made to rejuvenate the area, leveraging, first, the scenic joining of two rivers,⁴ and, second, the Confluence’s proximity to Lyon’s central business district, which, arguably, begins on the north side of Perrache Station and whose center lies only a kilometer or two north. The Confluence, in other words, was similar in some ways to Hamburg’s HafenCity. There was a chance to extend the CBD and to create a new kind of neighborhood on a very large site.

Fifteen years later, work in the Confluence is far from finished, but enough of what was planned has actually been accomplished so that it’s possible to get a sense of what the “completed” area will be like.

The Confluence differs from HafenCity (and many other new neighborhoods) in that it was inhabited at the moment that work on its “rejuvenation” was begun. Its northeast fifth (roughly) was a working-class neighborhood called Sainte-Blandine, the site of numerous interwar public housing projects. French pre-World-War-II social housing facilities—called HBMs (habitations à bon marché)—were (and are) quite different from the mostly suburban, giant tower-in-a-park HLMs (habitations à loyer modéré) built after World War II that are now widely despised. HBMs, in contrast, were generally constructed flush with the sidewalk. They were basically plain versions of the middle-class apartment buildings of the same period and were in fact generally located in areas where most of the housing was privately built.⁵ A casual observer would not be able to identify them as public housing. HBMs have generally aged well, although, of course, they often need some renovation. A decision was made simply to leave Sainte-Blandine in place, offering improvements and replacements when necessary.⁶ One result of this decision is that the Confluence differs from most new neighborhoods in being quite socially and economically diverse; it’s a pretty good example of the new ideal of mixité. It also has a historical component that’s a little deeper than, say, the nautical symbols that dot HafenCity. There’s still a well-used pétanque (or maybe boule lyonnaise) court next to the 19th-century Église Sainte-Blandine, and there are still several very working-class cafés along the Cours Charlemagne, existing quite happily among half a dozen new midrange hotels that have been added to the area over the last decade as its respectability has grown.

Most of the rest of the Confluence has undergone substantial change.

The northwest quarter of the neighborhood, for example, has become a more or less upper-middle-class apartment district, with some offices. One could argue that a government project to house the well-off isn’t quite fair, but those living in the area are generally paying a substantial amount for their housing, and it’s hard to imagine a successful urban-renewal scheme that catered only to the poor.

Halfway south is a gigantic shopping mall, with a Carrefour, a Monoprix, and numerous other shops. These shops generally seem to be catering to those who are well-off, but, as is true of big shopping malls all over the world, people from all classes are certainly welcome to come and buy things. The shopping mall was built on a man-made inlet that’s often used for recreational boating.

The southwest part of Confluence—which is identified by the English-language name “The Docks”—has become predominantly an office district, with some apartment buildings and restaurants and a large art gallery in an old sugar warehouse mixed in. The new architecture here is quite eccentric. Several of the buildings, the headquarters of Euronews for example, have what might be termed exoskeletons.

The southern end of the Confluence (near the actual confluence of the two rivers) has acquired an impressive museum.

There is also a small, rather austere park where the rivers come together.

Infrastructure has been very much part of the plans for the Confluence. Tram line 1 has been extended south through the Confluence. It runs quite frequently along the middle of the Cours Charlemagne. Signal preemption means that it almost never has to stop for red lights.

South of the Confluence the line runs over the Rhône on a tram/pedestrian bridge to Gerland, another neighborhood where old industries have given way to other things, in this case office buildings devoted to technology firms as well as apartment blocks and a major concert hall.

The Confluence (like many other newly-built or newly-renovated places in the Western world) is quite self-consciously “green.” It has been planned to be as little oriented to the automobile as possible. One of the major features of the Confluence is a new walking/bicycling path along the Saône. This path has been extended (with two medium-sized gaps) far north of the Confluence so that it’s now possible to walk north along the Saône for dozens of kilometers.

In the areas where the Saône and its walkway pass by Vieux Lyon on the right bank and Croix-Rousse on the left bank, the river valley is quite narrow, and the views of a dense, hilly, and relatively old city are very pleasing. I don’t know quite what to make of the fact that many more people use the walking path for sitting than seems to be the case along recreational trails in urban areas in the English-speaking world. As a result, while the path along the Saône is marked as a piste cyclable (bikeway) on official maps and while some cyclists do use it, it’s often not possible to bicycle much faster than at walking speed here.⁷

A similar, but generally wider, path, often with a separate piste cyclable, has also been built along the east bank of the Rhône, that is, across from the Confluence. Like the path along the Saône, the creation of the Rhône path was not strictly speaking part of work on the Confluence, but it certainly grew out of the same view of the ideal city as being friendly to what the French call “modes doux” (literally, “gentle modes”), that is, transportation modes other than the automobile.

Both paths get a huge amount of use on pleasant weekend days. A measure of the number of kilometers of off-road pedestrian paths per million inhabitants would end up ranking Lyon quite high.⁸

Work on the Confluence is continuing. A large section of the southern Confluence that once held giant factories consists today mostly of open fields and weeds. Unlike in the rest of the Confluence, pedestrians are, naturally, scarce here. There are plans to fill this area in with apartments and office buildings, and (I’m afraid) a giant parking facility.⁹ There’s also quite a substantial railyard in the southern Confluence that was supposed to be moved elsewhere but that remains in place.

The Confluence’s greatest problem has been the failure to dislodge the partly elevated 1970s A7 freeway that blights its Rhône shoreline.

When the Confluence was being planned, the idea was to move the A7 to somewhere in the western suburbs, but this move (which would have been expensive and which would have damaged a substantial swath of territory) has never been carried out. The highway is incredibly noisy and polluting and really limits what can be done with the Rhône side of the neighborhood. The feeling is that the road is such a key link that it can’t simply be torn down.

Despite the presence of the A7, I was pretty impressed by the Confluence and the associated paths along Lyon’s rivers. Government set out to change a substantial swath of city, generally in a direction that made it far less oriented to the automobile, and it’s actually accomplished a great deal of what it planned to do and seems primed to continue the work.

 

Philadelphia’s Center City (which I recently visited for the first time in more than a decade) is one of the United States’ finest pedestrian spaces. It’s possible to walk comfortably just about anywhere within its roughly twelve square kilometers, and, when you do, not only do you get to see a physically appealing zone of high-density urbanity,¹ you’ll also have plenty of company. Nearly 200,000 people are said to live in Center City, and, since Center City incorporates Philadelphia’s CBD and tourist sites like Independence Hall, its daytime population is considerably higher. Center City’s population skews young and well-educated, factors that contribute to its “vibrancy” (and safety).²

Center City doesn’t, however, do very well by the substantial part of its population that would like carfree places to bicycle, run, or walk long distances. One might think the Delaware would be an excellent site for a long recreational path, but its shoreline is hugged by Interstate 95, and it wouldn’t be easy to insert an agreeable trail along it. Except very early in the morning, the one exception—Penn’s Landing just south of Market—tends to be too jammed with tourists to be usable as a recreational path, and it isn’t very long in any case. The northward extension of the path (shown on the map below) consists mostly of bicycle lanes running through predominantly industrial districts not far from I-95, and the short recreational path to the south isn’t connected to anything.

Fairmount Park—Philadelphia’s big city park—would seem to be an obvious place for recreational activities, and in fact it’s full of cyclists, runners, and pedestrians at all hours of the day and early evening, many of them surely from Center City, which isn’t far away. The southernmost part of Fairmount Park—near the Philadelphia Museum of Art—abuts Center City. The catch is that, perhaps more than any other big city park in the United States, Fairmount Park has been mutilated by facilities for automobiles. The Schuylkill Expressway (Interstate 76) runs the entire length of its West Bank portion, and busy Kelly Drive on the East Bank and King Drive on the West Bank are right next to the otherwise fine Schuylkill River Trail. I once (1979) ran a marathon in Philadelphia that consisted of three loops around Fairmount Park, almost all of which lay next to busy roads, and I felt I’d ended up absorbing more pollutants than on any day of my life. There is of course also an aesthetic problem with running or walking next to a busy highway. In the years since 1979, Philadelphia’s created a “city marathon” that uses city streets for part of its course, and it’s instituted some weekend road closures in Fairmount Park. Still, an awfully large part of Fairmount Park remains devoted to automobile use, and it’s an imperfect place for exercise that requires moving substantial distances along recreational paths.

Over the last few years, “Schuylkill Banks,” a short but much more attractive extension of the Schuylkill River Trail, has been built south of Fairmount Park.³ This new trail is not only closer to Center City, but it also lies further from major traffic arteries. It mostly runs along the narrow space between the Schuylkill and a CSX Railroad branch used only for freight.

For the next-to-most-recent extension (2014), there really was no space at all, and the trail at some expense was run on a “boardwalk” over the river. This segment is quite striking.

You get wonderful views of Philadelphia’s modest but distinctive skyline, of the 30th Street Station, of new apartment buildings along the river, of the athletic facilities at the University of Pennsylvania, and of a few remaining factories. It’s not that Schuylkill Banks runs through a pristine environment. The Schuylkill Expressway on the West Bank is extraordinarily noisy, and users must also contend with the sounds of construction, of speedboats showing off on the river, of Amtrak and SEPTA trains, and of traffic on the bridges that cross the river. There are also occasional freight trains along the CSX line that lies right next to the Trail. But to me all of this visual—and aural—complexity adds up to a pleasantly intense spatial experience. Like many of the other successful urban recreational trails that have been built in American cities in recent years, Schuylkill Banks works in part because users of the trail are reminded constantly of just where they are. The trail provides an extraordinary sense of place. If it had been built in a national media center like New York or even in Boston, Washington, or Chicago, it would have received a huge amount of favorable publicity. It has been covered pretty well by the Philadelphia edition of Curbed and by the Philadelphia Inquirer, and of course it has a good Website.

Since the latest segment opened in February of this year, the trail has ended awkwardly at a power plant run by Philadelphia’s electric company, PECO. The plan is to run the trail all the way to the Delaware, perhaps 9 km away along the winding river. Two isolated segments south of the PECO plant already exist, but a bridge across the Schuylkill and additional land acquisitions will be needed to join everything together and to extend the trail south. It’s taken something like ten years to build the existing 2.5 km trail, and it will no doubt take many more years to reach the Delaware. But, even incomplete, the trail provides a striking view of part of central Philadelphia to those who bicycle, run, or walk along it.

When I was in Toronto, I also explored a much smaller project: the renovation of Queens Quay.

Queens Quay is a short (3.3 km) street along Toronto’s “Harbourfront.” Over the last forty or so years most of its western 2 km has been transformed from an industrial thoroughfare into a street of expensive high-rise apartment buildings on its north, inland side and recreational facilities on its south, lakefront side.

Until well into the 21st century, most of the space on Queens Quay was devoted to automobile (and truck) traffic, although the street did gain a light rail line in 1989.

In recent years part of Queens Quay West (from Bay Street to Spadina Avenue, approximately 1.3 km) has been converted into a much less traffic-oriented place. Automobiles have generally been limited to only two lanes. Most of the rest of the thoroughfare has been divided into three similarly sized corridors, one each for the light-rail line, cyclists, and pedestrians. Pedestrians get the south side along the Lake, which varies in width tremendously depending on what’s built there. There is also a narrow sidewalk on the north side of the street. The Queens Quay renovation occurred over many years but has been considered more or less finished since 2015.

The symbolism of this transformation is pretty clear. Cars are being relegated to a minor role on Queens Quay.

The renovation of Queens Quay has been thoroughly documented in various places, for example, at the Complete Streets for Canada Website. The only thing I can add is to point out how special this change is. I don’t know of any other street in North America that has so clearly been subdivided into four more or less equal-sized spaces for pedestrians, cyclists, streetcars, and automobiles. This is, I’ll admit, chiefly because there are so few cities with streetcar lines in North America. Automobile lanes have been shrunk to make room for pedestrians and cyclists in a number of places, for example along Broadway in Midtown Manhattan.

The 1.3-km-long renovated section of Queens Quay is of course just a drop in the bucket in an urban area with thousands of kilometers of roads where automobiles come first. The Queens Quay bicycle and pedestrian trails do continue west to Mississauga and beyond but are not always separated and run awfully close to major highways in places. The bike trail also continues east but quite quickly becomes uncomfortable for pedestrians. And just to the north of the renovated part of Queens Quay is the Gardiner Expressway, one of North America’s most egregious urban freeways, a hulking structure that makes walking to Queens Quay a bit of a chore and that brings truly massive amounts of traffic through and into Toronto’s central business district. The Queens Quay renovation is a wonderful model that, so far, is pretty exceptional.

I spent several days in Toronto this month. This was perhaps my twentieth trip to Toronto since 1966. I had been a witness over the years to Toronto’s astonishing transformation from a socially conservative place whose inhabitants were mostly of British “stock” into one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities. More than half of the Toronto area’s inhabitants are now immigrants themselves or else are the children of immigrants. Toronto’s immigrants come from everywhere, but particularly from China, South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

Toronto’s massive immigration has not only increased its diversity; it has also enormously increased its size. Toronto has grown faster than any other big urban place in eastern North America. Depending on where you put the boundary, the Toronto region now has between six and a half and perhaps nine million people. It is thus the fourth or fifth largest urban area in North America, and, if only because the Toronto area is by far Canada’s largest metropolitan region, it plays a substantial role in the world’s urban hierarchy.

On my recent trip I made a point of exploring Toronto’s new subway line to Vaughan. This extension is only 9 km long, but even that modest length appears to make it the longest completely underground rail transit extension in North America for quite a number of years (possibly decades).¹

Toronto’s public transit system has been reasonably good for quite a long time. It relies heavily on a subway whose total route length (79 km) is not enormously high, but that attracts more passengers a day than any other North American subway except those in New York and Montréal, that is, more than the much larger systems in Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco. In addition to the subway, Toronto has an extensive streetcar network in the inner city as well as the GO train system of suburban railroad lines. In recent years, the TTC (the Toronto Transit Commission) has also worked assiduously to improve bus service. Buses run on ten-minute-or-better headways on numerous lines, including many in the outer city.

Toronto’s new subway line is an extension of Line No. 1 (the western branch of the U-shaped line on the subway map), from Sheppard West to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre.

The line opened last December. The spacious stations are pleasant and in some cases are joined to elaborate bus terminals where it’s possible to wait indoors. The new line takes passengers well outside the area where older subways in eastern North American cities usually bring their customers. The stations are all deep into car country, and, except for the stop at York University, are not likely to be close to the places where most passengers are traveling to and from.

The terminus, at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, for example, features a single office building, acres and acres of parking lots, and a rather elegant bus stop. There are big box stores and some medium-rise apartment and office buildings in the distance, but threading one’s way on foot through the parking lots on a cold winter day would not be much fun. The station seems to serve chiefly as a stop for buses to numerous suburban destinations, and, when I was there, a large number of passengers were indeed making transfers between bus and train.

Some of the other stations on the line are even more clearly located in outer-city places. The Highway 407 station sits in the shadow of a freeway across a major highway from a cemetery, the only nearby destination to which most people would be willing to walk. The station’s southern and western neighbors are fields. Across Highway 407 (a formidable walk among a tangle of fast highways) is a neighborhood of auto-repair shops. There is parking. Still, this is not the kind of place where subway stations on older lines are usually built.

Toronto’s last subway extension, the Sheppard Line (2002), also took one outside the comfortably walkable parts of Toronto. It runs parallel to Highway 401, a kind of beltway, which, like similar roads in the U.S., has acquired office buildings along much of its length (there are apartment buildings too). The thought in building this line was that it would serve workers in and residents of these highway-oriented structures. The catch is that the eastern four-fifths of the subway runs under a wide road that is not at all inviting to pedestrians. It does have a well-maintained sidewalk, but hardly any of the buildings along the road have sidewalk entrances. They were built to be accessible chiefly by automobile (this is even true of the buildings built since the line opened). Not too surprisingly, the billion-dollar Sheppard subway attracts only something like 40,000 passengers a day.

The two ends of the hybrid subway/light-rail line that is now under construction under Eglinton Avenue are also located in territory where walking is uncomfortable. The line will run through several kilometers of strip malls and big-box stores and intersections that you can cross on foot only after waiting a very long time for a walk signal.

Meanwhile, the inner portions of Toronto’s subway system suffer from terrible overcrowding. A “relief line” has been planned for decades but hasn’t yet even been started.

It turns out that there are some pretty good reasons for the odd geography of Toronto’s recent subway construction.²

Toronto’s distinctive socioeconomic (and related political) geography has played a major role. The so-called “great inversion,” in which the well-off come to occupy urban centers and the poor move to city edges, has affected Toronto as much as anywhere in North America.³ Toronto’s congenial central city, while remaining a socially complicated place, has been the scene of a considerable amount of gentrification over the last fifty years. It’s Toronto’s suburbs—or at least its inner suburbs (mostly located within the boundaries of the amalgamated city)—where urban problems including transportation problems are often felt to be most acute. Not only are these the areas with the most serious traffic jams; they’re also the areas where recent immigrants—who sometimes have no access to cars—have been most inclined to settle. An argument favoring the extension of the subway into the suburbs is in some ways an argument in favor of transferring resources from the well-off center to the not so well-off city edge. Or so a left-of-center politician might put it.

In Toronto’s idiosyncratic politics of the last couple of decades, however, it’s often been right-of-center politicians who have had the more decisive role in favoring subway extensions, although they most certainly don’t talk in terms of redistribution of wealth. This statement requires some explanation. As elsewhere in North America, the left in Toronto has typically been more inclined than the right to favor investment in non-automotive transportation modes. In the 2010 election battle between the notorious Rob Ford and George Smitherman the former even argued that the left had been engaging in a war on the car—and managed to win the election. But Rob Ford did not dislike all public transport. Arguing that “streets are for cars,” he revealed something that it’s fair to call a hatred of streetcars and bike lanes, but he strongly favored the building of subways. Rob Ford’s brother Doug Ford, just elected premier of Ontario, has continued this tradition, arguing for an extension of the subway to far-suburban, low-density Pickering, 16 km from the current subway terminus and already served by GO trains.⁴ In other words, the Toronto area’s populist, right-leaning politicians have actually been in favor of extending Toronto’s subway system to the outer city even though doing so is at odds with their obsessive interest in saving taxpayer money. This is partly a tribute to the high regard in which the TTC is often held—and also due to the fact that supporters of right-leaning politicians tend to live in the outer city and would like better access to the subway.

Subway extensions to the outer city make sense for reasons connected to Toronto’s urban morphology as well.

Apartment buildings in the years since World War II have generally constituted a much larger proportion of the new housing stock in Toronto (and a few other Canadian cities) than in the United States. There have been a number of reasons for this. Canada has never allowed mortgage interest deductions on income taxes, and there has thus been less incentive to spend lavishly on housing. This tendency has been reinforced by the fact that Canada has almost always been a little poorer than the United States, and apartments (other things being equal) are cheaper than single-family houses (which are as expensive in Toronto as anywhere). Canadian cities including Toronto have also generally had a stronger planning apparatus than U.S. cities. While Toronto’s planning history is formidably complicated,⁵ planners have sometimes in recent decades been able to push for denser, sprawl-avoiding housing (although there is still plenty of sprawl around Canadian cities). Toronto’s large immigrant population may have played a role here too. People from China and Iran, for example, may be less likely than native North Americans to think it’s normal to live in a large house on an enormous lot (although there are plenty of exceptions). The point is that much of Toronto’s massive suburban growth in the last several decades has been influenced by planning directives and economic and cultural forces that have worked together to push toward dense building that can be served reasonably by public transit. The catch is that there hasn’t always been much coordination between the building of rail transit and the siting of apartment buildings, and this fact, in conjunction with the pedestrian-unfriendly landscape mentioned above, means that the potential synergy between density and transit is only partially realized. But it still exists.

North York—especially the two kilometers between the Sheppard-Yonge and Finch subway stations that includes the area known as the North York City Centre—is the place that most clearly demonstrates the power of the subway to create pedestrian-friendly density when both government officials and property developers are on the board with its doing so and when social forces help matters along. When the line to Finch was being planned in the early 1970s, the area consisted mostly of modest single-family homes. It now has dozens of skyscraper office and residential buildings. The inhabitants of the apartments consist disproportionately of immigrants.

It’s significant that many of the original commercial buildings on Yonge Street have survived and that many of the new buildings also come with street-facing shops. Much of the commerce on Yonge consists of surprisingly modest storefront ethnic restaurants instead of the banks and chain stores you usually find in new developments. Thus, not only is Yonge Street in North York lined with high-rise buildings. It also has places you can walk to, and there are people walking there at all hours of the day and evening.  I don’t know whether North York is really an “edge city,” but, if it is, it must have the best pedestrian environment of any edge city in North America. A healthy pedestrian life is as always connected with high transit use. The Sheppard-Yonge and Finch stations are two of the three busiest non-downtown subway stations in Toronto.

For the moment, North York seems to be an exceptional place, but in the medium run it’s not supposed to be. One of the goals (dreams?) of many planners in Toronto for years has been to turn the Toronto area into a region with multiple high-density, walkable centers all connected by transit. The hope is that even places like Vaughan Metropolitan Centre will become something like North York City Centre. Of course, while planners are perfectly capable of making maps showing where dense regional nodes should go, they generally don’t have the funds actually to construct them. It’s an open question whether developers will really build such places on a large scale.

The move to improve transit in the outer city has nonetheless become pretty well entrenched. Public transportation in the Toronto region has been overseen by an organization called Metrolinx since 2006. The subway extension to Vaughan was built with the full support of Metrolinx, which has planned a truly massive increase in the amount of public transportation in many parts of the Toronto area. Work has started on light-rail lines in Mississauga, Hamilton, and northwest Toronto;⁶ the Eglinton crosstown line in Toronto; and several BRT lines. In addition, Metrolinx also plans to electrify Toronto’s GO suburban rail system and to increase the quantity of service substantially on its main lines. The 15-minute all-day service on the GO line along the Lakeshore would make this something like North America’s first S-Bahn/RER service, although I don’t believe that there are any plans for complete fare integration or for simplifying transfers between the GO trains and the subway.⁷

The building of all these lines is intended to transform Toronto into a 150-km-wide urban area where high-quality public transport is available nearly everywhere and where walking and bicycling are possible in many areas other than the central city. It’s a very ambitious goal, far beyond anything planned seriously in any U.S. metropolitan area in so far as I know. I have no idea whether the new line to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre—and all the other planned new suburban lines—will one day serve the kind of dense suburban places that they’re supposed to help create, but Toronto is certainly moving in an interesting direction.

Thorek Hospital is a 118-bed hospital on Chicago’s North Side. It is most definitely not a major research institution. It ranks as “below average” in U.S. News and World Report ‘s evaluations of U.S. hospitals. Many (although not all) of its Yelp reviews are savagely negative. There’s nonetheless every reason to think that it’s a reasonably competent place, and, if I ever had a bad fall or a heart attack while walking in its vicinity, I’d be very glad that it was there.

I’ve lived a couple of blocks from Thorek since 1996. Fortunately, I’ve never had to use its services. The aspect of Thorek of which I have chiefly been aware is that, since something like the 1980s, the hospital has been on a campaign to bulldoze its neighborhood. It’s systematically acquired property in its vicinity, torn down whatever was there, and used the land for surface parking. Thorek’s smallish main building is now complemented by three huge parking lots that cover approximately five times as much land as the hospital itself. These lots are rarely very full. In fact, most of the time they seem rather empty. Here’s a map:

And here’s a 2012 air photo:

Thorek’s obsessive effort to create surface parking puts it completely at odds with its location. The hospital is diagonally across from a CTA rail station, and it sits in a medium-high-density, prosperous, and generally safe neighborhood.

Exactly why Thorek became so interested in surrounding itself with parking lots is not altogether clear. No doubt it felt that it needed some parking, but it would have saved a huge amount of money had it opted to preserve most of the area’s urban fabric and built a mid-rise parking facility. I can’t explain Thorek’s actions in any way except to invoke a vague concept like “suburban mindset.” Important buildings in the suburbs are typically surrounded by massive amounts of parking, therefore … One aspect of a suburban mindset of course is to be frightened half to death of complicated urban neighborhoods. Parking lots from this point of view functioned as a kind of moat between the hospital and the neighborhood.

Let’s take a look at the history of the area.

The blocks around Thorek were mostly rather empty until the early 20th century when they began to be filled in with small apartment buildings and Chicago “greystones,” which served either as single-family houses or (more commonly) contained three or four apartments. Here are Sanborn maps from the turn of the 20th century:

The elevated rail line that is now called the CTA Red Line arrived in 1900, and the lots that were vacant in 1905 were filled in one by one in the years just afterward. There was enough demand for this land after the El arrived so that most new buildings were three- and four-story apartment buildings. There were also some commercial structures. This neighborhood—the southern end of Uptown and northernmost part of Lake View—was never exactly wealthy, but it wasn’t poor either, and it adjoined the quite upscale single-family neighborhood now known as Buena Park just to its north. Thorek Hospital was added to the mix in 1911, occupying a relatively modest mid-block space on Irving Park Road. Here’s a set of Sanborn maps from the 1920s:

During the 1950s and 1960s, numerous tall apartment buildings were built in the blocks between Thorek and the Lakefront. Although the 1950s and 1960s were generally years of massive suburbanization in older American cities, Chicago was pretty successful in encouraging the construction of middle- and upper-middle-class high-rise housing in its North Side Lakefront neighborhoods. Neighborhoods just inland from the Lakefront did not do so well. There was definitely some downward “filtering” in the blocks right around Thorek. A couple of SROs just south of Thorek came to house a considerable population of economically marginal men, and, in the 1970s and 1980s, numerous Mexicans and other Latin Americans moved into some of the older apartment buildings in the area. None of the blocks became predominantly Hispanic, but there were enough Latin Americans to support a Mexican supermarket at Sheridan and Dakin next to the El station, and there were a few blocks (for example Cuyler between Broadway and Clarendon) that featured full-time salsa music all summer and car-repair activity down on the street pretty much all year. These years were the only time when there was some reason to worry about the future of Thorek’s neighborhood, and, not coincidentally, they were the years that Thorek began building a moat of parking around its main building, which was now located at the Broadway end of its block.

Slow gentrification, however, definitely set in by the 1990s, although it’s never been as powerful a force as it was further south; numerous long-time residents have stayed put. Most of the “filtering” over the last twenty or twenty-five years, however, has definitely been upward; newer residents have tended to be a bit better off than those they replaced. There has also been a modest amount of new construction. This consists mostly of four-or-so-story apartment buildings, which have replaced wooden single-family houses or marginal commercial buildings (including that Mexican supermarket). Thorek itself was partly responsible for the construction of a nine-story senior apartment building just to its west. Several much larger apartment buildings within a few blocks of Thorek have just opened, are now under construction, or are planned; several of these are TODs (“transit-oriented developments”).

The neighborhood remains economically complicated, but on the whole it’s a fairly prosperous place. Per capita income in the two tracts that contain Thorek was $48,254 in 2012/2016 according to the American Community Survey (Chicago average: $30,847). One striking feature of the neighborhood is that, despite the gentrification, it’s remained ethnically diverse. In 2012/2016 it was 68.6% non-Hispanic white, 12.3% Hispanic, 11.6% non-Hispanic black, and 4.5% non-Hispanic Asian. Like most of Chicago’s North Side Lakefront neighborhoods, the area around Thorek is a place with an unusually high proportion of well-educated people. 65.0% of the population 25 and over had a college degree in 2012/2016 (Chicago: 36.5%). The area’s doing all right.

Automobile ownership is modest, especially considering the area’s prosperity. 43.9% of households were carfree in 2012/2016. Most people (even many car owners) seem to get about largely on foot or by transit. Others have brought suburban habits into the city and drive everywhere, even though parking is scarce and/or expensive and minor traffic jams are common. There are, in fact, several automobile-oriented entities in Thorek’s immediate neighborhood, most dating from the decades when the neighborhood’s future was most uncertain: a BP gas station with a convenience store and a car wash on the southwest corner of Irving Park and Broadway; a storage center facing a U-Haul rental facility on Broadway north of Cuyler; and a (more recent) Walgreen’s with a parking lot at the southeast corner of Irving Park and Sheridan. Despite these incursions of “automobility,” I think it’s fair to say that, while the area is not Manhattan, it’s not the suburbs either, and it works well enough for those who prefer to have little to do with automobiles, although Thorek’s huge parking lots are certainly an aesthetic barrier to walkability.

Thorek Hospital continued its bulldozing all through the 1990s, even as the never-very-serious threat of neighborhood decline vanished completely. When I moved in in 1996, there were still several greystones in the area that’s now Thorek’s biggest parking lot; these were soon torn down. There was a McDonald’s where its northern parking lot now stands; I acknowledge that the destruction of the housing that once stood here predates Thorek’s acquisition of the site.

While many of the people who live nearby have lamented Thorek’s behavior, no one’s ever, so far as I know, tried seriously to stop it. One reason is that it wouldn’t be easy to do this. Chicago’s land-use laws wouldn’t have provided any help. The city’s weak historic preservation statutes only cover a limited number of landmark buildings and a few quite distinctive areas; ordinary early-20th-century landscapes are generally not protected. And Chicago’s zoning laws mostly act to discourage what are felt to be excessively intense land uses; they do not prevent lowering land-use intensity.

Of course, Thorek Hospital is hardly the only institution that has thought that the replacement of dense inner-city buildings with parking lots was a good idea. This is a widespread phenomenon in American urban areas, but it’s been commonest in places that were truly depressed or where the use of the land really was obsolete. Thorek’s been doing its dirty work in a healthy neighborhood that’s been getting healthier, and it’s a little hard to see the point.

Note on GIS sources

The GIS data were taken from many different sources, and they don’t always fit together perfectly.

Curbs and 2017 building footprints come from the City of Chicago’s data portal.

The CTA tracks were downloaded from the bbbike.org version of OpenStreetMap.

The outlines of Thorek’s parking lots come from the “land use inventory” data set prepared by CMAP, formerly the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. CMAP’s land-use data-set, a descendant of a land-use data set prepared by the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, was not really intended to be used for maps as detailed as those shown here; they generally underbound the parking areas. I’ve resisted the temptation to edit them, since the exact boundaries of the parking lots have changed over the years as buildings have been torn down, and I thought the outlines were probably good enough.

The 2012 air photos were downloaded from the United States Geological Survey’s EarthExplorer Website.

The 1894 Sanborn maps were downloaded from the Library of Congress “Sanborn maps online” Web page. I georeferenced the separate pages.

The 1905 Sanborn maps were downloaded from the University of Illinois’s Sanborn fire insurance maps Web page. I georeferenced the separate pages.

The 1923 and 1928 Sanborn maps were downloaded from ProQuest’s Digital Sanborn maps 1867-1970 Website, hosted by Chicago Public Library (and unavailable except to subscribers). These files were scanned for ProQuest from a set of black-and-white microforms published by Chadwyck-Healey. Resolution of downloads from this site is poor. There’s nothing to be done about this. I georeferenced the separate pages.

Footnote

*Schaumburg is a suburb northwest of O’Hare. The term “Schaumburg” in some dialects of Chicago English has come to imply an intensely suburban place. Those who began using “Schaumburg” this way were surely thinking of a district in Schaumburg that contains malls, big-box stores (an Ikea, for example), and office buildings, all surrounded by enormous parking lots. If the term “edge city” means anything, it would definitely apply to this area. Much of Schaumburg in fact is a medium-density residential suburb, with mid-sized single-family houses and modest apartment buildings. An unusually large proportion of its streets acquired striped bicycle lanes as long ago as the 1990s. The colloquial use of the word “Schaumburg” as an epithet isn’t quite fair.

In the world of urban planning, Hamburg has perhaps become best known for HafenCity, which has been slowly replacing Hamburg’s obsolete 19th-century port in the years since 2003 (an enormous new container port has grown up across the Elbe). HafenCity is claimed to be the largest urban renewal project in Europe. It is not only big, but the fact that (unlike, say, London’s Docklands) it abuts the old central business district makes it particularly important. The coming-into-being of HafenCity has presented Hamburg with an opportunity to create a kind of ideal 21st-century inner city.

I spent a fair amount of time in HafenCity when I was in Hamburg late last month. In many ways it’s an admirable place. Its mixture of office buildings, residences, and institutions gets away from what is widely felt to be the pernicious effect of rigid zoning in mid-20th-century cities, although there is a certain amount of internal zoning: residential areas are largely on the western side of HafenCity, offices in its central spine. Just about all the new buildings contain “sustainable” elements; most have achieved gold “ecolabel” status (that is, a European Union certification analogous to LEED status). There are numerous pedestrian- or bicycle-only corridors. Automobiles are allowed, but play almost no role in internal movement. For the most part they are kept to the edge of HafenCity, or put underground. HafenCity even includes a new subway line (U4). It now has two stops, and a third will open soon. There is also access to HafenCity from subway lines U1 and U3 just to its north.

HafenCity’s form provides an excellent window into what people who have the power in the early 21st century to create urban spaces are thinking cities should be like. The fact that HafenCity’s ecological virtues are stressed in its official literature is pretty significant. So is its relatively modest density. No one officially connected with HafenCity has ever seriously proposed building really tall buildings there or recreating anything like, say, a 19th-century city.

HafenCity’s status as a 21st-century enterprise is manifested in one more way. It may be the product in part of government planning and have all kinds of official backing and financial support, but it is also a speculative real-estate venture. It’s supposed to be a commercial success. Thus, it’s created an enormous publicity apparatus. There’s an elaborate Website and two on-site information centers, where one can begin a free tour or choose from a great many beautifully illustrated brochures.¹ Of course, one should view advertising for HafenCity like any other advertising, somewhat skeptically. I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that the substantial academic literature on HafenCity describes the place just as positively as the advertising.²

I must admit that in some ways I found HafenCity mildly disappointing, chiefly perhaps because on weekdays at any rate it seemed rather empty. It doesn’t feel at all like an inner-city neighborhood in a major city. The Hamburg metropolitan area has a population of something like five million and has several dense, bustling, and complicated inner-city neighborhoods.³  These are all quite different in feel from HafenCity, which has a population of something like 3700 in its two square kilometers. HafenCity is also the location of approximately 14,000 jobs, but the other inner-city neighborhoods host commerce too, and the figure given for HafenCity apparently includes jobs in the long-existing Speicherstadt.⁴ Let me add that HafenCity’s emptiness has something to do with the fact that it’s not even half finished. Only approximately one of its two square kilometers has been built on. Eventually, there are supposed to be two or three times as many inhabitants and jobs. And it needs to be said that on weekends HafenCity gets a bit more crowded, as numerous mostly local tourists visit HafenCity’s largest building, the Elbphilharmonie, or go on guided tours.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder whether HafenCity wouldn’t feel a bit more, well, urban (that is, bustling) had it been built to a higher density. The apartment buildings are mostly only six or seven stories tall, and they do not touch each other except at their base. I’ll admit that I may be imposing a personal aesthetic taste that makes no sense in the context. It might have been difficult to get world-class architects to participate in a project with buildings that weren’t quite separate from each other. It’s also possible that a denser project might have found it harder to pass the ecological tests that HafenCity set for itself. Furthermore, it’s easy to imagine that there wouldn’t have been as much of a market for larger apartment buildings. Away from its center, Hamburg is not a particularly dense place. The city of Hamburg has approximately 2400 people per square kilometer, and the Hamburg region is even more spread out.⁵ Hamburg’s most prestigious districts (for example, around the Alstersee) are definitely not built to a very high density. They consist of smallish apartment buildings and quite a few single-family houses. There aren’t very many high-rise residential buildings in Hamburg. The modest, ecologically sound buildings of HafenCity fit Hamburg pretty well. Let me add that plans for some of the as yet un-built-on areas along the Elbe show taller buildings.

I still couldn’t resist contrasting HafenCity with the Speicherstadt, just to its north.

The Speicherstadt, built at the end of the 19th century, was claimed to be (and probably really was) the world’s largest warehouse district. The Speicherstadt, which consists mostly of two rows of enormous buildings on both sides of a canal, separates the Altstadt from the old port. It is still one of the world’s most distinctive places. It was constructed at the one time in Hamburg’s long history when the city, the largest port in continental Europe’s most powerful country, could be said to have taken on elements of “world-city” status. It was the world’s 20th largest city in 1900 and 18th largest in 1914.⁶ Its size and status were connected with Germany’s pre-World-War-I effort to build a major empire in Africa and the Pacific. A huge number of goods were flowing through Hamburg’s port. The Speicherstadt was built to support this trade. It’s truly an amazing place in a way that HafenCity, as a physical entity, really isn’t.

It needs to be added that, like Germany’s other big cities, Hamburg, even without HafenCity’s ecologically sound features, would seem to most Americans like a rather “green” place.

There is plenty of healthy inner-city housing. Public transit, consisting of integrated U-Bahn, S-Bahn, regional rail, and bus routes, is excellent. Most lines have services at regular (often five- or ten-minute) intervals until late in the evening. The elevated portions of the U-Bahn, like their counterparts in Berlin and Vienna, look like the “els” in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia but are mysteriously much quieter for reasons that I wish I understood.

Sidewalks are generally well-maintained. Cyclists are catered to admirably, with spaces on sidewalks or lanes in streets that almost never put cyclists at risk of being doored (the pedestrianization of bicycling does make speed difficult, however).

Drivers are almost always respectful of pedestrians and cyclists. There are also nearly continuous walking/bicycling paths around Hamburg’s inner-city lake, the Alstersee, and along the Elbe downstream from Hamburg; these paths are jammed on weekends and busy on weekdays.

It is true that there are freeways and major highways in Hamburg that can be enormously overcrowded and horribly polluted by diesel fumes, but official policy in recent years has leaned in favor of restricting car use, and Hamburg is generally a comfortable place for anyone preferring to live a life that has little to do with automobiles.

HafenCity is different from the rest of Hamburg. It’s newer. It’s on an island in the Elbe rather than inland. And the relationship of building to street to non-motorized-vehicle right-of-way in HafenCity is different than elsewhere. HafenCity is also far less bustling than certain other inner-city neighborhoods and has the controlled feel of most of the world’s newly created urban districts. I suspect, though, that it would be difficult to prove that HafenCity is substantially sounder ecologically than the rest of Hamburg even though this is one of its major claims to fame.

I had been in Jakarta only once before, in 1998. I concluded then that Jakarta was just about the most pedestrian-unfriendly city on earth. Many of its roads had only the narrowest of cracked sidewalks—and carried mind-bogglingly huge amounts of traffic most of which consisted of incredibly loud and polluting two-stroke motorcycles. In several cases the narrow sidewalks were bordered by unspeakably dirty canals on one side and overcrowded roadways on the other and seemed almost absurdly dangerous.¹ Numerous streets even in the central city actually had no sidewalks at all, or else had sidewalks that had been so completely taken over by vendors that one had little choice but to walk in the roadway. Crossing streets was extremely difficult. Drivers never yielded to pedestrians, and there were hardly any traffic lights or bridges. There were naturally very few people walking anywhere, even though motor-vehicle ownership in Jakarta was not very high. Curiously, population density in the city was rather substantial, and there were numerous very tall buildings, but access to these buildings was intended to be mostly by vehicle. It was very odd that Southeast Asia’s largest urban area was so automobile-oriented, but that was just the way it was.

I’ve since learned that much of the autocentric planning in Jakarta can be attributed to the actions of the government of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, who ruled in the years between Indonesia’s independence after World War II and 1967.² Sukarno had actually been trained as an engineer and had worked for a year as an architect, and he brought to politics a set of strong prejudices about cities, which he was able to act on after becoming a near dictator in 1957. Sukarno’s ideas can fairly be termed Corbusien. He was absolutely obsessed with turning Jakarta into a modern-looking city, that is, one with tall buildings and wide highways. He is said to have been particularly proud of Jakarta’s Semanggi cloverleaf highway interchange (“the first in Southeast Asia”). It was Sukarno who presided over the construction of a network of mostly elevated toll highways in the Jakarta area, and who insisted on bulldozing Jalan³ Thamrin and its extension Jalan Sudirman through the center of the city, and it was he who pushed the construction of skyscrapers and what in effect was a new CBD in South Jakarta.

In Sukarno’s imagination, all of these new urban features represented progress and modernity, and their presence made Jakarta a modern city. It’s worth remembering that the period of Sukarno’s reign was the 1950s and 1960s. This was the era when superhighways were being pushed through the centers of American cities and when Brasília was being built. Pedestrian needs played virtually no role in much of the urban planning of this era, and they certainly didn’t in Jakarta, even though Jakarta, unlike U.S. cities or Brasília, was the kind of place where only a minority of the population could afford a private car.

Sukarno was effectively deposed in 1967 and replaced by a military officer, Suharto, who ruled until 1998. The Suharto government apparently concerned itself much less with urban matters, and local officials had more power. But it’s not clear that there was any great change in priorities. Jakarta kept growing, and it continued to rely almost exclusively on automobiles. The unfortunate consequences of Jakarta’s excessive reliance on motor vehicles were no secret. Air pollution levels in Jakarta were sometimes astonishingly high, and traffic jams were so frequent that it could take hours to travel a few kilometers. There was also the ever-present issue that the poor had limited mobility in a city built for cars. Plans to build a subway line were formulated at least as long ago as the early 1990s, but they were never implemented, and a financial crisis in 1997-1998 put them on hold indefinitely.

In the years after my 1998 trip, however, as in many other urban areas, there was a real change in what was felt to be desirable. The government has been taking quite a number of steps to alleviate the problems of automobile dependence.

[1] Old train lines were revived. The KRL Jabodetabek is a regional, mostly electrified rail system that dates back to the Dutch colonial era. It had so deteriorated and was felt by the government to be so antique that it was actually closed completely in the 1960s. It reopened in 1972 (long before the current revival of interest in reducing the role of the automobile in urban transportation), and the government has gradually modernized the system in the years since. It elevated some of the central-city tracks in the 1980s. It renovated stations. It acquired new (or used) Japanese rolling stock, and it insisted that passengers use electronic tickets. And it recently (2017) added a branch to the Airport.⁴ These days, trains on the major lines run every few minutes for most of the day. The KRL Jabodetabek (like its counterpart in Mumbai) resembles a rail rapid-transit system in its service frequency.⁵ It does however betray its origins as an ordinary railroad. There are grade crossings. Tracks are shared with intercity passenger and freight trains. And the system doesn’t quite go where a modern rapid-transit line would. It only skirts the edge of the CBD and spends a great deal of time in industrial areas.⁶ There are roughly 850,000 passengers a day. This is an impressive number, but perhaps not so high when you consider that the Jakarta area (Jabodetabek) has a population of something like 30,000,000.⁷

[2] A large BRT system was established. The government also built TransJakarta (sometimes spelled Transjakarta), opening the first line in 2004, and adding numerous new lines in the years since. TransJakarta is claimed to be the world’s largest bus rapid transit system. It now consists of more than 230 km of routes on thirteen separate corridors.

There are also a number of feeder routes (which appear not to be counted in the statistics). On most of the corridor routes, bus lanes and stations are in the center of major roads. Passengers prepay. Stations are sheltered from the elements.

Transfers are free. Many of the buses use natural gas. Service on the major lines is frequent, and stations include countdown clocks. The system is quite impressive and makes getting around Jakarta by public transit enormously easier than it was in 1998. TransJakarta is generally considered a great success and its expansion has enjoyed considerable political support. But it needs to be said that there does not seem to be signal preemption, and red lights definitely slow the system down.

An additional problem is that some of the corridors are not fully separated from the main roadway. Only the original route 1 has acquired even “silver status” from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. TransJakarta has also evidently not been very successful in luring people out of cars. There are approximately 450,000 passengers a day, which does not seem like a huge number when you consider that the Jakarta proper (to which TransJakarta is limited) has a population of more than 10,000,000.⁸ That is, many smaller BRT systems in (mostly) smaller cities (for example, those in Bogotá, Guangzhou, Mexico City, Istanbul, and Curitiba) attract far more passengers.

[3] Construction of a subway and an LRT line was begun. After several earlier attempts that ended in failure, the government has recently finally begun to build a modern rail transit system. The initial segment, from Plaza Indonesia in the CBD to the southern suburbs, is scheduled to open in 2019, and an extension north to Kota Tua and a second, east-west line are supposed to follow. The CBD portions of the line will be in subway. This “MRT” will be joined by an “LRT” line (which, despite the label, will apparently have its own right-of-way). The first part of this, in northeastern Jakarta, is supposed to open before the Asian Games in August 2018, and it too will be extended, first toward the city center, where it will meet the subway, and then in several directions at once.⁹

[4] There have been some traffic restrictions. Motorcycle traffic has been restricted on some roads at some times of day. And. of course. the TransJakarta lanes are in theory closed to ordinary traffic.

It could actually be argued that,  even if modal share remains modest, Jakarta has become a place with a fairly large amount of reasonable-quality public transit and that, within a couple of years, it will have quite a bit more (see map).

I spent a few days in Jakarta in mid-March. I’ll gladly concede that my twenty-year-old memories may not be altogether reliable, but I had the sense that things really have changed, at least to a limited extent. Sidewalks in central Jakarta are still pretty empty, but there seemed to be a few more pedestrians than in the past, many of whom were on their way to or from TransJakarta stations. The stations come along approximately every kilometer, so walking is often needed to get to destinations. The building of BRT stations in the middle of many major streets has an additional advantage: station bridges can also be used for crossing streets. Many of the bridges even come with elevators, although I noticed that some of these are broken. Most passengers seem to avoid them. Of course, a bridge every kilometer constitutes a fairly ungenerous street-crossing provision!

The sidewalks may get a little more use than was the case twenty years ago, but there isn’t much sign that they are any safer or more pleasant to use. Sidewalks are narrow, and adjoin traffic lanes. Surfaces are often cracked or missing. Vendors sometimes block the way. Motorcyclists feel free to invade any sidewalk at any time.

Furthermore, it is still not easy to cross streets with no bridges, even at corners with traffic lights, as drivers of turning vehicles do not feel they need to stop for pedestrians. Many Jakartan pedestrians tend to slither across streets, expecting that, if they walk slowly, drivers will miss them. This does not feel very safe to me, or, it seems, to most Jakartans. The majority of those willing to cross busy highways through moving traffic appear to be young men. I did come across a couple of actual pedestrian signals in the tourist area Kota Tua, but drivers were ignoring them.

There are still hardly any special provisions for pedestrians. The OpenStreetMap database’s pedestrian facilities categories show very little except paths in some of the few parks. It misses paths in kampung, however.¹⁰

There are, it must be said, a few streets—side streets off the major roads, streets in Glodok, the old Chinatown, and, arguably, some of the streets in kampung—which work more or less like traditional Western big-city streets, where shops and housing offer easy pedestrian access. But even on these streets, shops and residential buildings often have parking facilities. There is not much expectation in Jakarta that anyone will walk anywhere.

None of this is a secret to people in Jakarta, and there have been some grassroots protests. A new group—the Jakarta Pedestrian Coalition (Koalisi Pejalan Kaki)—has been trying to change conditions.¹¹ This group has been quite successful at generating publicity, which is an important first step. It’s not clear, however, that it’s managed to change conditions.¹²

This jibes completely with the well-known recent study in which physical activity was measured for 111 countries.¹³ Indonesia came in last.

The disappointing ridership figures for TransJakarta are sometimes blamed on middle-class reluctance to use public transport, and it’s likely that there is much truth here. But surely the poor pedestrian environment, which makes it difficult to walk to and from the stations, is a factor as well. Public transit can’t live up to its potential if the stations are only marginally accessible.

I did come across one event that I found startling and delightful. On Sunday mornings, Jalan Thamrin and Jalan Sudirman, except for the TransJakarta lanes, are closed to traffic for several kilometers, including the stretch through Jakarta’s CBD.

There must have been at least a hundred thousand people enjoying this event on the Sunday I was there. Most were walking or hanging around, but there were some cyclists and runners as well. There were also food vendors, advocates of various causes, and buskers. The latter included dozens of people dressed as characters from Javan traditional tales, as well as a great many musicians, most of whom were presenting what seemed to be Indonesian pop, but I came across a group of two violinists and one guitar player who were doing pretty well by Pachelbel’s canon.

Jakarta’s street closures were of course inspired by Latin America’s ciclovías. They go back to 2002, although they have become more common and regular in recent years. The event that I attended seemed to this perhaps naïve observer like an almost perfect manifestation of one of stated goals of the original ciclovías in Bogotá: to encourage people of different social strata to enjoy public space together.¹⁴ It was an infinitely happier use of public space than Jakarta’s norm, in which public space mostly involves pedestrians working their way gingerly along noisy, irregular sidewalks and across uncrossable streets.

The most common phrase for ciclovía in Indonesian seems to be the English “car free day,” which tells you something: this event is an import. The “car free day” is an astonishing vision of a very different Jakarta. The coach turns back into a pumpkin at 11 sharp, however. This felt rather depressing to me. Perhaps it does to Jakartans as well.

It’s rather curious that in Southeast and East Asia, it’s generally the richer urban areas—Hong Kong, Singapore, and the cities of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (in something like that order)—that have become the most transit-oriented and pedestrian-friendly, and the poorer urban areas—those of Burma and Indochina, for example—that have remained most reliant on private motor-vehicle transit, even though private motor-vehicle transit is surely out of reach of many of the inhabitants of the poorer cities.  Jakarta’s efforts to become a modern city have left it much more like the latter places than most Indonesians would probably want to acknowledge. Its transit share remains low, and its pedestrian infrastructure is pretty awful. Jakarta is still one of the world’s least pedestrian-friendly cities. The rotten pedestrian environment of course sets up a feedback loop with the low transit share. Sukarno was wrong. In 2018 anyway, being modern does not seem to mean wide roads and cloverleafs and tall buildings that you can get to only in a car. It appears to mean allowing automobiles only a modest place.

Will current efforts to add better transit to Jakarta change things? It’s easy to imagine that they will help the transit dependent and the minority of middle-class people who prefer taking public transit. But has there been a case where an urban area in recent times has gone from having a low transit share to having a high one? I’m not sure there has. It’s not easy to change well-entrenched cultural habits that define transit use and urban walking as low-prestige, or to alter a society where a huge proportion of the built environment is designed exclusively for automobiles. Maybe the best that one could hope for is a bit of change around the edges, but even that is likely to happen if and only if the government keeps supporting the building of rail transit—and maybe above all if it begins to devote serious energy into disciplining automobile drivers and improving pedestrian infrastructure.