@Lewis N. Villegas
There is no requirement for skytrain technology to be elevated, and it can easily be underground, just as the Canada Line was underground. What matters is that the system not skimp on reliability or capacity. I think an LRT or a BRT would compromise both of those areas.

Urbanismo, I do not take offence to you insulting the shiny trinket, but please also don’t take offence when I say that your ideal city would be the last place on earth I’d ever want to live, visit, work, or invest. 🙂

Zero moving around may be the greenest option, but to me it sounds like an incredibly bleak existence that few would accept without force. I think a more realistic goal is working to reduce dependence on the automobile by continually expanding the regional public transit network.

No one would argue against more livable neighborhoods, but I despise this increasingly popular idea that cities should be a series of separate self-contained neighborhoods (ghettos seems a better word). In Urbanismo’s case I have no doubt his belief is sincere, but it is also frequently adopted by people who want to keep outsiders from passing through their neighborhood and are happy to have found an intellectual-sounding justification for their NIMBYism. They also tend to live in one of the nicest neighborhoods and have cars ready to take them wherever in the GVRD they wish to go.

Cities are fun to explore for the sake of exploring. Cities work well because they bring diverse skill-sets together who could never be found in single neighborhoods. Cities have the scale to support big hospitals, universities, etc. which need to be available to everyone and not just the neighborhood that houses them. These and probably dozens of additional reasons all require people to be able to move throughout their city.

Oh god AWE this is getting tedious . . .

“Cities work well because they bring diverse skill-sets together who could never be found in single neighborhoods. Cities have the scale to support big hospitals, universities, etc.”

No, no, no not “ . . . single neighborhoods . . . ” a city made up of many autonomous SKILL-DEFINING neighbourhoods all with the power to define their own character and loosely connected at street level: QUARTIERS the agglomeration of which support hospitals, airports etc.

How about zero moving around by automobile. Other modes are fine or at least OK.

In fact, the only way we have survived for most of our history has been to move around in search of food, water, a better place to live, a mate, etc.

Grenoble – La Villeneuve: The City Conceived Anew

It is a “quartier” in on of the most scenic city of France, and could look like a concretization of the utopian urbanism tooted by Urbanismo.
In the 70s when the district was built, with intense participation of the population (what we could call today “Charette”), it got international praises, and even got celebrated by a Canadian documentary “Grenoble – La Villeneuve: The City Conceived Anew” (1974) (1).

One of the striking feature of this “self contained” neighborood is ihat it is centered on a park, and all streets have been sent at the periphery of the neighborood, unpenetrable by car (including by the police cruiser), “which means that children can run in and out of their houses unsupervised, create their own tribes and learn their own rules […]. They have a place in which to run wild …”

If you don’t now how “own tribes”, “own rules” and “run wild” translate in a real district build according such utopia, like the one touted by Monbiot, you should go to La Villeneuve Grenoble…but a recent New York Times article will start to give you a prelimianry idea (2).

Right the “square” is a very old idea, but the original idea, or at least the one making it popular in Europe, could have been “Place des Vosges” in Paris (3), and you will see that the street are not put in the back of the building, but keep forefront, because street are not only utilitarian, but are connecting people,
in all sort of way: and what make a succesfull neighborood is well connected people: that is something I don’t see in the modern “utopian idea”.

…and yes “Another Westender” is right, at least in France, noone want to “live an incredibly bleak existence” where “moving around” is not part of the picture, and facilities allowing it, considered not much more than sewage (what I have already noticed in the Townshift competition (4)) . yes a “Zero Moving” Quartier could be connected, but designed as a ghetto: it is one!

Anecdotically did I mention that La villeneuve district was also the Olympic village of the 68 olympic games at Grenoble in 68?

That said, I tend to believe that the urbanism ideas as expressed by Monbiot in the post of MB, are nothing short of criminal.

Huh there is something quite stimulating about being ganged up on!

So, let’s go over Vancouver: future (as preferential to Vancouver: failed which appears far more likely given what’s going on here) just once again: that is if it survives the current hedonistic know-it-alls who just haven’t the patience to read carefully what one octogenarian writes:

1. We can afford to live in our own town.

2. We enjoy the view but it does not control our lives.

3. We are mostly blue collar because that is where the high salaries used to be and where they should be now.

4. We work at producing things people need rather than at highly paid, talk, talk government jobs, pushing paper, that are essentially unfulfilling and, really, quite unnecessary to the prosperity of our town.

5. We do barista but only after school for a bit of pocket money.

6. We live in autonomous, green urban quartiers designed for living, walking and generally enjoying ourselves. We have control over our lives.

7. We move around freely, but our mode of TX does not become a fetish. It is designed to fit our needs, networking across town at ground level, so as not to disrupt our neighbourhoods. We will not allow it to become so expensive it impedes our way of life.

8. We do not do real estate. Rather we enjoy our homes for what they are and respect those of us who help us find a place to live and who help us pass our homes on to others when necessary.

9. Our neighbourhoods are essentially self-contained but we are sophisticated enough to share facilities, health care, education, entertainment, intellectual fulfilment etc., across town as necessary.

10. We recognize the good life is not always easy to encapsulate in one gulp and may at times be a challenge for the simple minded. However we are compassionate towards those who climb the intellectual hills.

QED . . . I’d rather be sailing . . .

I suppose, Voony, one has to differentiate between a restricted-access private park and an open public park. I agree with Monbiot’s assertion that green space is vital, but I would add, it depends on how it is configured.

Also, Monbiot was quoting other’s studies, some of which are already well-documented (e.g. human health vs. car dependent suburbs). He is a general practitioner journalist (a very good one, in my opinion — he challenges climate change denialists very effectively and always, without exception, supplies references), not a specialist, and has a knack for sewing together seemingly disparate ideas to draw unique conclusions. And he admits when he is wrong.

@ urbanismo,

In all fairness, discussions about transit mode in certain corridors are outside of what you are proposing. It would see you are aiming for an idealized nostalgic past as our future, similar to what Prof. Condon espouses.

But let’s say we do want to get to your idealized city – how do we get from where we are now to there, realistically?

And at first glance, I do take issue with a few points:

1) what if your strengths are not in “blue-collar” work? what if you’re clumsy with your hands, but good at talking? or computers/IT?

2) “blue-collar” work that doesn’t involve “talking” or government work tends to be male-dominated (construction, longshore, etc.) Where would women fit into this picture?

@ Urb.
Interesting ideas but, if “1. We can afford to live in our own town.” isn’t happening, are the rest are stuck too?

Hi all, those wondering about the accuracy of Canada Line ridership numbers, we invested in automatic passenger counters when the line was built, so the totals are pretty accurate.

At 100,000 riders per day, Canada Line is attracting new people to transit — the former bus routes carried an estimated 60,000 per day.
The Olympics attracted some ‘converts’ for sure and I’ve heard from quite a few people on the North Shore that are now using SeaBus to get to Canada Line to get to the airport.

There is still lots of capacity expansion possible. With the current 20 trains in service, the line handled over 280,000 on February 19th this year during the Games. Not very comfortably, mind you, but it gives you an idea of what the system can do.

In the future, TransLink will fund the operation of more of the current train sets, then we’ll add more trains…then we can add a third car between the two-car train sets…then we can do what will soon be happening on the Expo Line — extend the platforms to handle even longer trains.

Has anybody every tried to take the Canada Line / Hyundai Pony out of Richmond at night? 15 minutes between trains?
Are these people out of their minds?
This is at Aberdeen.
15 Minutes.
What a rip-off

Dan Cooper (38)—I may have screwed up Jarret’s point. I think he said, “taxis and two-wheeled vehicles share bus lanes in Paris”. Like you, I’ve been thinking that cyclist speed and BRT don’t mix. However, I wonder whether HOV lanes could carry trucks off-peak.

“@ boohoo “Build it and they will come!… ball-parks, free-ways and shiny trinkets . . .”

—Urbanismo

Urbie, that “shiny trinkets”, that language’s magic!!

MB (49)— high volume streets; urban trees; walking to a BRT/LRT is good for my health; build around a square [but mind the ratios for human scale and oversized birds]; let the kids run wild…

Well, before we get to “youth gangs” we can change the channel. How about “human scale” and neighbourhood platting that makes walking a breeze? A pleasure?? Socially meaningful??? Which is Urbie’s point in the final analysis.

Tessa (52)—Canada Line is not linear induction. You cannot put Skytrain on grade without barbed wire on both sides because touching the rails is fatal. Most subways are the same way, with high voltage lines and warnings to stay on the platforms. So, in the ground or up on stilts. Both prohibitively expensive.

The weak link in Evergreen Skytrain is that people have to take transit to get to transit—you can’t get there by walking in a reasonable amount of time. If a bus, that is not reflected in the trip times we’ve been told. Jarret thinks transfers are okay. One sales-point for Evergreen Skytrain was eliminating a transfer at Lougheed Mall.

Ken Hardie’s numbers are welcome, but only give half the picture. Counting persons per day rather than people per hour per direction allows direct comparisons to vehicular use, tallied as vehicles per day.

1. [Embrionic] Canada Line — 100,000 persons per day.

2. Add vehicles, new stations, and new station connections (‘correspondences’ in Paris)— 300,000 ppd. [equivalent of 30 lanes of cars].

3. B-Lines and buses — 60,000 ppd.

Now for the half that’s missing:

4. BRT???

5.LRT???

The matrix is the city we have.

(a) Take away 2 lanes to put in BRT/LRT = removing 20,000 vehicles per day.

On Vancouver arterials that would be welcome relief for homes fronting. But how much capacity can we put back with BRT/LRT?? Ken’s B-line numbers makes me think capacity increases could be significant just with BRT/LRT.

Not Skytrain, please Tessa—elevated track blights neighbourhoods. The issue we are bumping up against here is transit planners understanding/appreciating the resulting quality of the urban experience.

Here, I’m in Urbie’s camp (oh, and we have a Ghost, and a Voony, MB, and a budding consensus!).

(b) We can build the city as a matrix of quartiers.

The issue in transportation becomes how many 300,000 subway lines are needed? How far afield do we need to go to collect 1/3-million passengers per day? Why can’t that be handled with LRT running rouge on railway R.O.W.? Did someone say Interurban transit? WCExpress?

I think that’s the scale that Urbie’s thinking at—regional planning.

DW (59)—some comic relief—I know “Urbanismo” and I don’t think he is “largely white”. He’s about medium.

Urbie’s Top 10 (62)—should be by a “Politicismo” instead. It will take a sharper wit than mine to draw the line between politics and urbanism, but the 10 principles seem more of Rousseau than Camillo Sitte.

mezz (66)—I think we can extricate Urbie’s position by stating simply that the greatest number of urban trips are walking trips.

Well designed Quartiers make walking safe, easy and fun… up to about 20 minutes. Then my dogs start barking, and transit takes on the qualities of salvation. Voony and I seem to agree that after 20 minutes BRT/LRT/Subway becomes tedious. Bikes can be trip extenders, taxis, and automobiles.

(c) In the final analysis, Urbie’s “people staying put” is all about walking. In well shaped quarters, walking is the primary form of transportation, but a full range of options are there too.

“I grew up in East Vancouver in a neighbourhood of detached homes. Kids played in the streets back then, but they no longer do. Why has this happened? The neighbourhoods themselves have not changed, nor has the amount of car usage increased. Re-designing neighbourhoods is not going to make the kids come back, or stimulate conversation among neighbours. Something deeper, more fundamental, is at work, and while I have some ideas, I cannot quite articulate what has happened.”

—DW

I grew up in Montevideo, two blocks from the beach and 1.5 blocks behind a wall of condos that stretched for the full extent of the city’s boundary with its southern beaches, called “La Rambla” after the Moorish word for the dry river beds of the stream in Barcelona that we were discussing a week or two ago. In the course of 20 years, the my neighbourhood in Montevideo changed completely. The condo towers moved in-land, the streets were choking with cars, and a bus-based transportation system that is still touted as among the best in the world (better road maintenance might make for a smoother ride) is now competing with an increased hoard of automobiles. That was roughly 1970-1990. My brother has just got back from a 3 month visit. The buses are still working; the economy barely sputtering along. The football team finally got its international act together. That took 40 years.

Change happens, and one thing we have to change in Vancouver is that we don’t do “urban” planning. The shift in planning paradigm has to be to incorporate urbanist thinking in our plans and in our neighbourhoods, and that begins with the “walking experience of place”. So the foregoing is a very good sign that we are reaching a consensus.

I think the heat has turned up slowly on car usage.

I remember a post here during our Olympic Summer stating matter-of-faclty that the commute across the Port Mann was like nothing that had been seen since the 1960’s. When did you grow up on the East Side, DW?

“Re-designing neighbourhoods is not going to make the kids come back, or stimulate conversation among neighbours.”

I disagree. And we can show you results that speak to this very fact. I don’t expect anyone to just take urbanist statements at face value, we need to show verifiable facts, achievable results, and identify the hoped for results.

For example, if we just take high traffic volume streets, traffic counts alone are an accurate indicator for what is—and what is not—a good neighbourhood street. Then there are a host of other factors that also contribut.

Let me be a good neighbour and get comfortable sitting on the fence. I agree with this:

“Something deeper, more fundamental, is at work, and while I have some ideas, I cannot quite articulate what has happened.”

My suggestion was “Deep Throat’s” suggestion to Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate investigation… Follow the money trail.

In the suburban mode of planning, we have given over too much to the automobile. We are seeing here on this blog the way out of that jam. In the economic model we have today, where the markets are subject to wild gyrations, we pay no heed to the inflationary trends of one kind of development on the rest of the urban land at our own risk. That could ultimately unravel our social fabric.

We also seem to pay no mind to the livability of an apartment unit on a double loaded corridor. Somehow, its okay if kids growing up today live in north-facing units with nary a bit of sun.

The only value we are tracking it would appear… Oh, that’s Deep Throat’s point again.

There are other values besides maximizing financial return on one assembled plot of land, putting an enormous construction on it, and blighting all the lots around its perimeter. We can also measure return on investment at the scale of the quartier as a whole. Ultimately, we can show, that is the greater social good, and there is plenty of room left over for individuals to benefit.

The following is Part II to the previous post, which I dashed off as I was on my way out the door.

The other aspect of planning an urban quartier that is not generally understood is how many people should live in one “neighbourhood footprint” in order to achieve sustainability. A quartier that we can cross on foot from one end to the other in 10 minutes covers an area of approximately 120 acres. These are the density yields for the typical building types for such a quartier (road space is included):

1) 33-foot lot Bungalow — 6 units/acre — 1,800 persons/quartier

2) 33-foot lot Duplex — 12 u/ac — 3,200 persons/quartier

3) 3 storey walk-up — 60u/ac — 15,800 persons/quartier

4) 3.5 storey zero-lot-line house — 65 u/ac —17,000 persons/quartier

5) Tower and podium — 120 u/ac — 31,680 persons/quartier

The question is how many people do we need to house per quartier? A common figure from the urban design literature suggests that 10,000 neighbours are enough to make a place viable.

If we take two thirds of Vancouver’s 44.3 square mile footprint, that amounts to some 165 quartiers. At 10,000 persons/quartier we would achieve a buildout population of 1,650,000 or 1.65 million. That’s 285% increase in population from the 2006 census. In other words, we could triple the population and not build higher than human scale, or 3.5 storeys above the typical street.

Density would still be higher in apartment zones, and in the downtown tower neighbourhoods. I arrive at the same calculations as Patrick Condon. We can rebuild the arterials, implement transit, and double the city population just by looking at the arterials for intensificatioin.

My calculations are that the density required can be reached with a building height that is kept in proportion to one-half the width of the fronting street, or 3.5 to 5 storeys depending on the right-of-way in question.

@Lewis

Your calculations seem to leave out things that most people value, that take up land, like parks, schools, stores, office space and industry. So there are probably no areas of Vancouver that have 120 acres of land without several other land uses taking up some of the area.

Similarly, there’s nowhere in Vancouver where all you can build is a bungalow – you can add a suite and a laneway house on most of residential land, so really development capacity is much higher.

You can see if that is true in reality by looking at Census Data that you can download for free (for 2006 at least) from the Statistics Canada website. You can see that an area of mostly ‘single family housing’ (although as already noted they may have a suite and these days maybe a laneway house too) on the west side like CT43.02, from 8th to 16th Ave west of Alma is 240 acres and has 4,357 people – so more than your bungalow example. On the east side CT18.02, which is also 240 acres, has 6,537 people. The difference is almost certainly the lot size – on the west side you don’t find as many 33 ft lots; they are often larger.

Looking at an area like Fairview as an example of 3 storey walkup, CT40.02 is 75 acres and has 4,162 people. CT47.01 in Kits is also 80 acres and has 3,606 people. CT22.00 is Kerrisdale, and it has 3,256 people in 80 acres.

In Downtown and the West End densities are much higher than your numbers would anticipate. Downtown South, CT59.04 has 9,000 people in 100 acres (and that area still has a lot more development yet, much of it already built since the 2006 census). You can find West End Census Tracts with over 100 people per acre CT60.02 and CT65.00. So Downtown generates much much higher densities than you suggest.

What this suggests to me is that Vancouver’s housing areas generally already have densities quite a bit higher than you suggest, say 20-30 per acre and that while lower density apartment zones obviously generate higher population densities at around 45-55 per acre these aren’t nearly as high as your theoretical calculations might suggest. Downtown has much higher densities than your calculation suggests.

StatsCan? CMHC more like it.
Almost as bad as the new series topo maps with data from a dozen non-cooperating agencies contributing t0 messy, fuzzy maps with errors and gross assumptions.

I was working backwards from your acreage calculations to see how much domestic space the “unit” would occupy. Then comparing to public housing, and ‘forced-public-housing’ (taking over a one-family bunglow and installing 3 or 4 families in it) and the sizes of living space per person in other countries where they don’t “swing a cat” in a smaller room.

See this graphic
http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/buho/sune/images/average_rooms_van.jpg

Showing number of rooms in various disticts in the region. They give example local districts/quartier names.
It came from Comparing Neighbourhoods http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/buho/sune/sune_007.cfm

What is a ‘bedroom’ 10 x 12 feet pre metric, or 3 x 4 in a metric house? Moya Mason talks about sizing trends in North American homes at http://www.moyak.com/papers/house-sizes.html quoting Peter Ward’s famous ‘Domestic Space’ book.

City pulls up census numbers and the people per household and shows trends, including the new building permits (a trend of other things) at : http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/stats/dwellings/index.htm

And you know about the Regent Street CMHC planned “Convertible House” and its division from 197 sq. metres to 86, 71 and 40 sq metre separate parts, as a model for appropriately sized housing. http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/inpr/afhoce/tore/afhoid/cohode/deflho/deflho_005.cfm

@ Ken, 70. I’m still waiting to see your, Vancouver’s & Richmond’s CL capacity vs station rezoning capabilities. What’s going to happen when Oakridge’s 10 towers, Gateway ++++, Richmond, Whiterock, Delta, etc. do what they’re already doing? What happens when some form of upgraded Broadway transit links in? Please reference the appropriate studies.

@ Mez, 85. Thank you for the link. It does not answer my ?s. In fact it proves my arguments if you really think about what I’ve said & what info they are providing. They do not talk about the future. They are just dealing with NOW. Not good enough.

You are correct however, the City should, in fact be the one who is generating this data &, they are not. As I have said in my Sun Op-Ed article a month ago, this essential missing info is a fundamental flaw in the City’s planning process. I’m still waiting for them to address this.

1 ] http://www.ravprapidtransit.com/files/uploads/docs/doc256.pdf

2]http://vancouver.ca/engsvcs/transport/rto/canadaline/faq.htm

3] http://www.humantransit.org/2009/08/environmentalist-critiques-of-strategic-transit-planning.html

Mezz, Bill

I believe Bill has a biais against Vision: whatever they will be doing, they will be never right. right?

in his last paper in the Sun:
Bill was criticizing the city to intend to increase density where there is “no public transit” (not sure where that can be in Vancouver).
he is also against density increase around best transit hub in the city such Marine drive.
Where people should go Bill?

yes may be in 2100 we will need 3 canada lines like said in the Sun piece and so what ?

in 1900, Paris built its first subway line, for something like 4 train set narrower than he skytrain MK1

If they had to wait study to know what is going by 2100: it could not have been any subway built, and for sure the study on such an horizon could have been complete fantasy: and yes by 1950 the line was at capacity, so what?

Paris built another one, the RER A, and so on…
nowadays, one century after the Paris line 1, the corridor is in fact served by basically 2 subway line (1 and 14), 2, express subway (A and D), and a third express subway line (E) is supposed to relieve it…to build those kind of line for 160meters long double decker train in 1900 because it is what could have been forecasted in 2100 could have been simply a non starter.

yes eventually the C line will be at capacity someday, but we are nowhere near it for the time being, and foreseeable future (concession life) and that is what matter.

and the best we can wish is to build such a transit demand along the corridor, that we need to have some sort of tram to relieve it (like the Paris T3, relieve the subway line 6).

The Jarret citation given by Mezz is probably the best answer: your quest for always more study is mostly a rational for inaction.

… and by the way study on impact of the marine gateway project on canada ridersip exists :
why you keep ignoring them?

When it comes to Voony and myself, you anglos out there have to appreciate that we are formed in a different culture. We share universal values, but we express ourselves differently, and we also carry different habits of thinking and analysis. Dido for the other cultures.

However, I think we all recognize the need to work with people of different political stripes (auto spell check thinks, “poetical”) if we are to reach across to build the consensus. With all that in mind, let’s look at an incisive point, poetically mis-cast for english grammar:

“Where people should go Bill?”

—Voony (but also much of Bill Lee 82 and Bill McCreery walking the 100 x 100m square blocks of Montevideo’s initial extension—El Centro).

If you refer back to my gross density and built form analysis, and you accept as a working proposition that 10,000 people per quartier is enough density to get to sustainability, then we can answer Voony (auto-spell check suggests “goony”).

Turning to the transportation side of the issue—all the systems of urbanism are involved here, power, water, waste, communications, and the social net—what does that look like?

In the urban core, inside the city limits for Vancouver, it is trolley-BRT/LRT and a host of systems linking to the periphery (including highways).

Skytrain is a blight on urban land, so if necessary to get the trains separated from the surface, then it’s subway. However, we have to look at the possibility of using BRT/LRT and dedicated bike lanes as tools for redesigning our public ROWs to be more people-friendly, or human scale.

In the suburbs, the quartiers are footprints of intensification. We take single family residential with shopping malls and business parks, and inject 120-acre footprints of middle and high density (at human scale in my view). Then we link with LRT.

The point here is with getting the people to the LRT stop by walking, rather than taking the bus to Skytrain. Station spacing is 2x greater with Skytrain, and a station cost (Evergreen Line) is $20 million. We can probably build 10 LRT stops for that price, GPS-smart, and etc.

If suburban municipalities wish to support bus transit at densities of 6 per acre and lower, let the local tax base decide on that.

Is this sustainable? Given that we are in one of the largest countries in the globe, I don’t see why not.

The real challenge is that in order to realize this we have to get out of our cars and experience the quartier on foot. Jarrett Walker also had a line about “decisions made from behind the steering wheel”. That mindset is the old paradigm. To experience the new paradigm you have to go on foot.

Note to the cyclists.

Running in Rome, Florence and Venice, I realized that even that increase—from walking to jogging—in the speed at which I experience “place” altered my experience of place. The piazzas became bunched up, one came after the other much too soon. The ambulatory rhythm was broken.

In Venice, running in its tiny streets (early in the morning with only locals around) the knowing Italian glances were to the effect of, “Oh, not one of those again. Can’t he see he is moving too fast to be safe turning a blind corner. Bastard.”

I think so, Mezz. It was interesting to see JW focusing on “process” and what I would call consensus-building. I realized soon after I graduated from architecture school that I did not know how to “listen”. To hear people, and to understand their concerns, then apply them to problem solving (some of our profs believed there were no “problems”).

So, it is important to fight the good fight, put the points that we are concerned about in clear and persuasive language. But, it is just as important to live to see another day. There is a bit of emotional-management required there. We will see mistakes built. We can see them in history, in recent memory, and just up the track a way.

The consensus-building method that I use is also very close to JW. His “geometry” is my “concrete and verifiable stuff”. It turns out that if you can present people with hard facts, they respond in a very positive way (even artistic choices can be quantified—color theory, physiology of human sense perception, etc.). That may well be one of the missing elements in the public consultation process we see implemented by the municipalities in our region. Although, I suspect, the other half of that is that no consultation takes place, period.

When we go to “show some facts” we face the other problem: what facts should we choose to show?

The transportation debate is interesting. The first pitfall is that we seem to fall for one type of system or another (I was thrilled by the Olympic Line). After that, though, Voony and I seem to have settled on “trip length” as a good measure of service. If it takes more than 20 minutes, then all the other factors (dependability, frequency, costs, etc.) seem less important. I may well just get in the car and go.

The one that I have been ranting about lately, the idea that when we take ROW away from the cars we improve the quality of our quartiers. And, that when we dedicate that ROW to BRT/LRT not only do we put back many times more capacity, but we also get a chance to design the street (add trees, rationalize crosswalks, create islands of safety for pedestrians, calm traffic, etc.).

With all those issues flying around, the dilemma we confront is choosing which facts to present. I find that interesting because it suggests that we need a complete “theory” of urbanism to tell us where to look, or what “facts” to present. (A complete theory woudl include building types, street types, transportation, quartier footprints, public open spaces, financing formulae, social and cultural sustainability, etc.).

In order to practice effectively, and cope with those “problems” that are sure to arise successfully, we really have to spend some time thinking, and analyzing the results.

Keep up the good work Lewis . . .

But don’t get too excited about JW or other itinerant preachers from aways . . . nor focusing on “process” and what I would call consensus-building.

Consensus building is for pant-waists.

Check out . . .

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/curitiba-pedestrian-only-street-video.php

. . . how Jamie made Curitiba the poster-planning-city-of-the-world.

He converted Rua XV de Novembro to pedestrian on the weekend and when the auto-freaks awoke Monday morning it was fait accompli. Ya!

“Urbanismo”, you are a master (mistress?) of the straw man argument.