If we want more density and less sprawl, where will the land come from?
Re-zoning exclusively single-family home space is a rising idea, and feasible, given the example posted earlier on PT from Houston.
But there’s an invisible 30% of city land that needs re-thinking. Given the growth in alternatives, do we still need so much land devoted to the most space-inefficient form of transportation?
Christopher Pollen writes in The Tyee “Imagining City Life After the Car“.
Across North America today, precious urban housing space is languishing right under our noses — or more precisely, under our wheels.
In the City of Vancouver alone, it’s estimated that over 30 per cent of all land — worth an estimated $48 billion — is tied up by our roads, parking lots and alleys. This vast urban “greyfield” constitutes the largest tract of un-built space in many cities, raising exciting questions about how it could be used to make urban density liveable, family friendly, and maybe even more affordable. . . .
. . . . We seldom think about it, but our roads and alleyways occupy enormous tracts of valuable land. Consider: the City of Vancouver has more than 1,400 linear kilometres of roadway, including over 1,000 kilometres of local roads and 650 kilometres of driveable lanes and alleys; a typical street in Vancouver is 66 feet wide, while larger arterials are 80 feet.
And really, it’s not such a new idea, as this PT post from 2013 shows.
Rush Hour, a fourth book by Iain Gately, is a comprehensive fun to read book on many aspects of commuting. He studied law at Cambridge, so you know his mental processes are of the highest order. The chapter on road rage is great. In the chapter: Crush Loading, he states that there are 10 deaths every day on the Mumbai Suburban – 36,000 over the past decade. For the locomotive engineer the question: “How was your day dear?” must be particularly poignant.
Desmond Cole makes a good point in today’s Toronto Star: that the mayor has no trouble finding billions for roads, but cries poor about housing.
There’s a book worth reading called: Modernist Estates, which describes housing constructed after WW2 when the need in London was dire. It profiles many specific developments; names the architects, and asks its ultimate owners how they feel about their digs. This is a great template – inspiration – for those who build.
There’s a lot to be said for Thatcher’s: Right to Buy program. Many people could afford to buy their housing, but are stymied by the hoops they have to jump through by the banksters. If the bailout money – public cash given away to Wall St, the banksters, and the hedge fund parasites, went to people in need, there would be no housing crisis.
Curious to know what exactly some found objectionable about this post.
The other obvious solution is to increase density on existing sites by going taller
– then maybe the roadways can be used for open public spaces instead of being built upon.
When back in Vancouver after a time in Europe one is struck by how open and expansive even our “dense” core is. Not that open public space is bad, but it is so ubiquitous as to lack meaning. The open squares in Europe provide sunny breaks from the cozy, intimate streets.
We don’t lack space. We lack quality space. European cities create a comforting sense of enclosure with 5-6 storey buildings and we should learn from that.
We did and built higher as Europe’s 5-6 story buildings and zoning were often designed before the elevator was invented, as they had housing / affordability crisis long before the word was invented in the 1700’s and 1800’s, i.e. when the fastest transportation around was a horse, and cities thus had to be built for walkers. They also revered God more then as one design was to have cities be visible from the distance by its church steeples only, and not by anything higher.
This of course changed with the invention of first the steam engine, then electricity, then elevators and then the car ! Our build form is a reflection of that. Living on the 5th floor of an aging building with a rear view of the courtyard and 100 other windows is not necessarily better than living on the 12th floor of a 30 story highrise. Just different.
Some blog entries on faith, God and building code might be useful for perspective too.
“….above us only sky…”
‘Imagine’ by John Lennon.
The checkering of public open space in downtown Vancouver is by design so as to avoid dark soul-less canyons (i.e. alternating plazas down Burrard Street)
I think that if downtown south had been built with 10 storey streetwalls (like Olympic Village) you’d end up with shadowy canyons (i.e. like the 1300 block of Hornby St.).
I agree that the podiums could/should be more than 2 storeys, but the sunlight filtering down to the streets makes them pleasant to walk along.
The Tyee article indicates some cogent thinking on land use. It’s pertinent to note that the referenced 30% of Vancouver’s land area devoted to roads and cars is public land. It probably approaches 45% when private parking lots and driveways are included. It’s certainly more in the suburbs where road standards are larger.
Thirty per cent works out to 40 km2, or over 9,880 acres. It’s so large that it is invisible, and taken for granted spatially and financially in public budgets. For illustrative purposes, that acreage will accommodate 425,000 rowhouses, each using 1,000 ft2 of land. You can add 180 acres of land currently consumed by the front yard setbacks of every group of 10,000 standard lots.
It’s a mystery to me why the management of urban land is often excluded from the debates on affordable housing.
The author praises Calgary’s Plus 15 skybridge system. I think he needs to spend more time there and really have a good look. In their desire to protect citizens from winter, they created an entire elevated and enclosed sidewalk system 15 and 30-feet in the air over the roads, and thus sucked the life out of much of the downtown surface street network. The treatment at sidewalk level in downtown Calgary can be downright inhumane as the result, with the great exception of the Stephens Ave pedestrian mall. Moreover, like Pacific Centre — which also sucked people off the street but in the other direction (underground) — great sections of the skywalk system is privately-owned where they penetrate into private office buildings. This is not great urban design.
Streets became travel conduits for machines last century. One could hope they would become our living rooms and backyards this century.
And once we finish on the roadways, we can fill in the yards. And then move on to other fripperies like park space. We must not rest until the maw of the real estate development beast has been sated.
You’ve made a very major error in logic here, one that many people of slippery slope hypothesis make, and that is that all land, whether parkland, yards, roads or parking lots, have the same public value or public good. This is obviously not the case.
Imagine for a moment I’m over budget and I decide to cut my spending on going to the movies. And then you tell me: “And once you stop spending money on going to the movies, you can cut out your rent payments and food bill as well. We must not rest until the maw of the budget beast has been sated.” Absurd, right?
Now, I’ll accept that you may see road space as having the same value as parkland, but I personally strongly disagree with that assertion. Parkland is important for our social wellbeing, for recreation as well as health benefits, which bring with them economic benefits. Many roads in the more suburban-looking parts of the city, especially the north-south side streets, are overbuilt, underutilized and a drain on tax dollars through unnecessary maintenance, not to mention lost opportunity costs. Some of that land could even be transformed as parkland and other more valuable uses, especially in areas which currently lack parkland. Certainly, a discussion with many different viewpoints would be needed to find the right balance, but by responding as flippantly as you have, you have in a way surrendered your chance to take part in that discussion in a productive manner. And that’s disappointing. If you want to share your values of how land is used, talk about that, but don’t be afraid to prioritize or ask others for clarification. Either way, the result will be better than simply avoiding that discussion.
Uhh, I think Bob’s remark was sarcastic.