tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4153985804832811048.post5725438756351084806..comments2024-03-18T16:22:10.302-04:00Comments on Urban kchoze: Streetcar suburbs: how they were designed and what we can learn from themsimval84http://www.blogger.com/profile/10615053214354191224noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4153985804832811048.post-5365384690885172882016-09-09T15:14:53.766-04:002016-09-09T15:14:53.766-04:00Actually, you can ignore that. Image #6 and #9 wil...Actually, you can ignore that. Image #6 and #9 will suffice. Some Construction Guyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13063746076312632895noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4153985804832811048.post-41327746427678885062016-09-09T14:54:31.119-04:002016-09-09T14:54:31.119-04:00Thank you for posting this. If it's not too mu...Thank you for posting this. If it's not too much to ask could you outline the typical placement of streetcar stops on image #7, #8, and #9?Some Construction Guyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13063746076312632895noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4153985804832811048.post-54952554986668202352014-08-16T12:17:57.686-04:002014-08-16T12:17:57.686-04:00This is perhaps getting a bit off-topic, but to do...This is perhaps getting a bit off-topic, but to do a streetcar suburb today you have to look beyond just the local zoning issues. The biggest problem I see is that of job sprawl, and by extension retail sprawl. A reason streetcar suburbs worked is because they connected the residential suburban areas with downtown. Yes businesses grew along the streetcar lines, but they were usually for serving those local areas almost exclusively. All the major jobs, shopping, and service activities happened downtown, while the businesses along the streetcar lines were secondary convenience type businesses, like the local restaurant, butcher, convenience store, etc. <br /><br />Such a pattern is similar to what you see along rapid transit lines and in a slightly more nodal form in commuter rail. The neighborhoods along the lines or around the stations are primarily residential with some local convenience type businesses, but the main economic engine is the big city downtown that all the routes converge at. This means you can have an effective transit system that's entirely radial, which is very easy to build, though unfortunately it's very unbalanced as far as time-of-day and directional running. The point is, since everyone for the most part is going to and from downtown, you don't need to worry about suburb-to-suburb trips because few people have any reason to make those sorts of trips. <br /><br />In today's paradigm however, downtown is usually just one of many employment centers, and may not even be the single largest one anymore. At the very least, even if still dominant, there's so many jobs dispersed throughout the rest of the metro area, that to properly serve them with transit you need a comprehensive net, more of a spider web than a radial arrangement. Chicago is a perfect example of a city with a radial transit network, at least when looking at the 'L' and Metra. The bus system is much more gridded within the city itself though. Anyway, that radial network is great if you're living in the suburbs (or residential neighborhoods within the city) and commuting to downtown, but nothing else. It's very hard to get decent transit ridership to suburban offices even if they're near transit lines because they can only effectively pull people from the particular route they're on. Anyone else from the rest of the system will have to take an "in and out" route through downtown which can easily quadruple the time it takes. Plus with little major shopping going on downtown but in suburban malls and strip centers, there's even fewer people using the radial transit network that would have in the past. <br /><br />A statistic that would be worth knowing is just how effective particular transit routes are at capturing the rides they actually serve. If you look at all of Chicagoland, transit ridership is pretty bad, in part because of massive job sprawl and suburb-to-suburb commuting. People can't take transit that doesn't go where they need to go, obviously. But I bet if you could find the transit ridership for suburb-to-downtown commuting it would be a much higher percentage. Jeffrey Jakucykhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04092631645389171565noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4153985804832811048.post-54687500938542574132014-08-16T01:48:06.564-04:002014-08-16T01:48:06.564-04:00You're right on workplace density, I checked i...You're right on workplace density, I checked it out and found figures between 150 and 250 square feet. That is still 2 to 3 times more than residential density, but not as high as I thought it would be. Retail does generate a lot more trips too because of the customers.<br /><br />There is data for this, the "Trip Generation Handbook" by the ITE provides the number of expected trips per floor area/employees/housing units based on empirical data. I do have access to it at work, but my professional conscience forbids me to use a workplace resource to feed a personal blog with data.<br /><br />I guess you could say that wealth and resultant lesser tolerance for crowding is the real reason for declining occupation rate per dwelling unit. I think it's a combination of factors, but the main point that is important to remember is that there are less people per unit than before. Lower residential density means that trips grow longer as residential areas are bigger for the same population and so people are on average farther from employment and retail centers. This greater distance commands faster means of transport.<br /><br />Reserving ROW for transit could very well maintain the functionality of such neighborhoods. However, it might never be the same because at the time of old streetcar suburb, streetcars were basically the fastest mode of transport. Nowadays, cars are faster. I think it would be possible to build new streetcar suburbs... if minimum parking requirements, minimum lot zoning and the like were waived for the area, and if the streetcar or even bus plugs into a rapid transit system (as you said, cities are more expansive than before, a surface transit line with an average speed of 15-20 km/h is just not going to cut it apart from some inner suburbs within 5-8 kilometers of downtown, people's tolerance for commute time is not limitless). simval84https://www.blogger.com/profile/10615053214354191224noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4153985804832811048.post-33749768184296851932014-08-15T12:45:19.445-04:002014-08-15T12:45:19.445-04:00Chicago was somewhere in between Toronto and Phila...Chicago was somewhere in between Toronto and Philadelphia and Montreal in terms of density back in 1940/1950. The neighbourhoods like West Town, Old Town and the Lower West side were I think pre-streetcar, and with a significant and usually dominant multi-plex component. Lots were generally deeper, and buildings detached though, so densities were somewhat lower, but still denser than Toronto. The exception was the inner South Side where blacks were forced to crowd into. Although the built density was similar to West Town, Old Town or Lincoln Park the population density was higher, more like the Plateau if not a bit higher. Neighbourhoods further out had densities similar to Toronto but with more of a multi-plex component, such as Irving Park.<br /><br />I think an important point on the layout of streetcar suburbs is that the retail was along the streetcar line, so no matter where you were coming home from, you could stop at retail on the way home without increasing your travel distance.<br /><br />I think workplace densities aren't quite as high as you suggest, when you include board rooms, kitchens, corridors, etc I think 150-200sf/worker is more typical. Look at some big buildings like First Canadian Place or the former World Trade Centre and what was their worker population and square footage. A store might not have a worker density much higher than residential (I don't think 500 sf per worker would be unusual), however, a small shop with one worker could easily get 50 customers per day. You can probably get an idea of this by looking at the assumptions behind parking requirements for retail, and compare to the # of trips per day the average household makes (there should be stats on that too). <br /><br />I'm not sure changes in household sizes changes that much. They largely decreased because we got wealthier, so that means the average resident should be able to support more retail. And while population density has decreased, I'm not sure worker density has. A lot of the decrease was also related to fewer children, and also back then there were very few women that worked while today most do, which can basically make up for something like a 30% population loss in terms of the kind of job density a neighbourhood can support.<br /><br />You could have the highrise and retail be in a single building like a retail podium, or you could have no podium and just a straight up tower, similar to many of Manhattan's avenues, which would allow lowrise residential buildings on the side streets while maintaining the same density (Manhattan's streets are mostly lowrise or midrise). Or you could have something like with Yonge Street, where the commercial street has separate lowrise buildings (with a couple floors of office/residential above) and then highrises on the side streets. That can help make for a more diverse commercial street with smaller buildings and varied businesses.<br /><br />BTW do you think ROWs with frequent stop spacing can work more like the streetcars of old? For example the St Clair or Spadina streetcar ROWs? You should still have subways or other rapid transit too though, since cities have gotten more expansive than they were 100 years ago.NickDhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07006815196885883516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4153985804832811048.post-68641511302398018392014-08-14T18:25:16.438-04:002014-08-14T18:25:16.438-04:00Indeed, the Plateau is quite dense. I think I have...Indeed, the Plateau is quite dense. I think I have already mentioned that it seems that Americans (and Canadians) tend to have a cultural aversion to multi-family housing which results in them building single-family homes even where higher densities might be useful (though some townhouse neighborhoods are extremely dense like in Philadelphia). Whereas in Québec, even old villages with a populations in the hundreds tend to have a reasonable amount of duplexes and other stratified multi-family housing in the center.<br /><br />I checked out old streetcar lines in Chicago, around Irving Park road and Montrose Road and the same basic design seems to be there, with side streets ending on a commercial avenue where the streetcar line used to run. Except instead of multiplexes like in the Plateau, the side streets were full of narrow and deep single-family homes (like in Toronto and Vancouver). Though the density was much lower, the design also reduced distances as much as possible to the commercial avenue (and the streetcar line).<br /><br />Some people criticize urbanists in favor of transit-oriented development of trying to deprive people of choice, but as you say, transit-oriented development indeed can preserve choice, with higher density along transit lines and lower density farther from them (but still within acceptable walking or biking distance).simval84https://www.blogger.com/profile/10615053214354191224noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4153985804832811048.post-75048061193021815452014-08-14T16:21:21.020-04:002014-08-14T16:21:21.020-04:00The examples are a lot more dense than what are us...The examples are a lot more dense than what are usually referred to as streetcar suburbs in the US. Usually they're neighborhoods of small-lot single-family houses with a mix of duplexes and small apartments, with some larger apartments and stores/mixed use buildings along the main thoroughfare where the streetcar ran. Because they're less dense, you don't usually see a continuous commercial corridor along the streetcar route, but it tends to be a bit more nodal with business districts at important intersections and denser apartments in between. What I find interesting about it is that since density naturally wants to fall away the farther you walk from the streetcar line, it allows for a lot of variety in the built environment in a relatively short distance. It's not unlike the finger plan of Copenhagen, which although it's arranged around more of a rapid transit/electric commuter rail system, the space between the "fingers" of development along the rail line is much more rural in character with parks and preserves. Streetcar lines can do a similar thing, though on a bit smaller scale. <br /><br />Anyway, the design of the street grid is of paramount importance, regardless of the density. It's still the same pattern if you have multi-story commercial buildings along the streetcar line with dense apartments and row houses on the side streets, or small single-story shops along the streetcar line with single-family houses on the side streets. The connectivity and spinal nature of the streetcar line is what's important. Even neighborhoods that never had streetcars but were built in the 1930s and 40s can have this pattern, though I suspect they were laid out pre-Depression and just sat in limbo until the post-war period. Either way, maybe they figured buses would serve the same purpose, and that parking could be accommodated either on-street or in parking lots between the commercial buildings and the residential neighborhoods. They probably never foresaw just how tempting the new strip mall a mile or two out of town would be in luring those businesses or their customers away. Jeffrey Jakucykhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04092631645389171565noreply@blogger.com