Places to Grow - Pictures Tell the Story

I have never been a big fan of the approach in Ontario's Places to Grow plan for the Golden Horseshoe, particularly compared to community-centered plans like Vancouver's EcoDensity plan.

The Places to Grow Web Site has just been redesigned. Besides a bunch of links to existing materials, the redesign includes a new image gallery that can be used in presentations. The gallery includes both real pictures and computer-generated models.

Photo Source: Ontario Growth Secretariat, Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal

It goes from a lovely heritage neighbourhood, with lively street level retail and 3-4 floors of walkup apartments and offices above, to one where the heritage buildings look dingy in comparison and the streetscape is interrupted with out-of-scale blank slabs that are completely out of context, where the sidewalk now looks cluttered and some of the retail businesses seem to have disappeared. Ironically, they complete the picture by removing the child in a stroller and the elderly woman in a wheelchair on the left and replacing them with two men in suits. Is it unfair to mention that the street tree right next to the subway entrace can't possibly survive there with most of its root system gone? And in both cases, the transportation planning that makes buses stop in the bike lane is unfortunately typical of Ontario planning, assuming the bus stops somewhere near the subway.

Besides the ugly dehumanizing architecture with the blank walls, and new buildings that pay absolutely no attention to the context into which they are placed, what they have done is to take a functioning main street that could be the bustling centre of a complete urban neighbourhood and changed its character completely into a downtown office area. The change in the type of people illustrated here may be intentional or it may be subconscious: it no longer supports a full range of the people that live in a city, it specializes in a particular demographic. Most of the new buildings are clearly offices, but some may be residential. But think about it. Did children live near that street before? Probably. Do children live near that street now? I don't think so. When they saw what was happening to their neighbourhood they moved to the suburbs. Now consider the price of the land on that street. If your family business owned one of those nice old buildings with some neighbourhood-oriented retail on the ground floor and apartments on top, what would you do? First, the skyrocketing value of the land would mean you are tempted to demolish and redevelop. Second, you need the businesses to make more money per square foot, if the businesses survived the subway construction at all, and you won't get that by catering to the nearby residents behind you. There is a brand new clientele walking by who doesn't live there and whose standards are, shall we say, different. They don't care if people can pick up all the ingredients for a meal here, avoiding a car trip to the supermarket, they just want to buy high-margin convenience food. They don't care if you make noise till all hours of the night. Cater to them and you become richer and the community poorer.

Photo Source: Ontario Growth Secretariat, Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal

This could all be renovated into something close to the original, using the dominant two-story line. Instead what do we get? Concrete and glass modernist buildings with a bit of masonry cladding. The entire heritage feel, streetscape, and form factor buried underneath an architectural mish-mash. That wonderful building with the gabled roof? It seems to be gone to make way for a boring concrete and glass slab. Those nice old industrial buildings at the left and right of the picture? Buried under modern 6-storey buildings. If I know anything about building methods, they weren't preserved, not even their facades; they were demolished and a similar-looking cladding was built on top of the new concrete structure. One of them has an underground parking lot, which definitely required demolition of the original building. I look at it and think what a travesty, recognizing the value of the original enough to pretend it's still there, yet to not preserve it.

Tags: Urban Planning Smart Growth Architecture Toronto Ontario

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How do the New Fuel Efficiency Standards Compare with California and Europe?

It looks like Canada will be adopting the new U.S. Corporate Fuel Efficiency Standards. It's fashionable to say "too little too late" but I won't since these standards are a significant improvement on our current standards. I will point out, however, that since auto makers don't tend to make vehicles specifically for Canada unless they have to, these standards will probably have no effect compared to doing nothing at all, and that since these standards are already law in the U.S. before a minister even announces that the government is considering introducing a bill in Parliament, it could hardly be introduced any later. The fact that this is about as little and as late as could be achieved does not necessarily make it too little or too late. In Canada energy regulators aren't expected to demonstrate leadership.

The standard will apparently be for an average fuel economy of 6.7 L/100 km within 12 years. Not bad considering that the current fleet average for cars and light duty trucks is about 11 L/100 km. Which light trucks are and aren't included in the figures makes a big difference. Current (voluntary) Canadian standards don't include trucks.

The current Memorandum of Understanding with auto makers in Candad is for an absolute reductions in total emissions by all light-duty vehicles including cars, minivans, sport utility vehicles and pick-up trucks, and given increases in population and vehicle kilometres driven this would require massive improvements in average fuel efficiency. The California standards (as soon as California wins yet again in the Supreme Court) would reach 6.16 L/100 km in 2012, exceeding Canada's 2020 6.7 target eight years earlier. Quebec has announced that it intends to adopt the California standards.

The European Union has a 2008 requirement of 140 g CO₂/km, or about 5.8 L/100 km. The new standards are achieveable, and even with the aggressive new standards, Canada will be trailing behind most of the rest of the world in years to come.

Tags: Transportation Energy Canada Fuel Efficiency

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Why We Still Need Separation of Uses

An interesting column by Glen Murray of Navigator Resources, saying that separation of uses is a throwback remaining from industrial economies, where we all worked in factories. We don't have to keep so much abandoned industrial land available for when the jobs come back, he says. People work in the second bedroom of their 20th floor condo.

Amalgamation of regions has somewhat reduced the need to artificially deflate the price of industrial land by keeping it plentiful, compared to when different cities and suburbs were competing with one another to attract jobs. Companies, manufacturing or not, are still one of the major motors of the economy. One-man operations in their condos still do not have the competitive advantage that companies get by gathering together a larger team and high-volume equipment. They still benefit from proximity to their clients and their suppliers, particularly in the service sector. So companies still need land, but the price of land is not a huge factor in deciding that they need to locate in your general region. With amalgamation, they can't easily play one municipality against another. Locate wherever you like in this region, the amalgamated cities can say, we're still getting the tax revenue. So it's safe now for cities to start becoming more thrifty with industrial land. Dear company, do you really need to use quite so much of it? Build more than one storey, bring the density up so that transit service can be attractive. Cities probably still need to keep some industrial land relatively cheap, implementing a supply stategy that you don't apply to housing or offices. That is one pragmatic reason to have separation of uses - so they are not competing for the same land. Separation of uses is not just about not having the factory fumes spewing into your back yard.

As I touched on before, a certain density of jobs is required to support a good transit service. And contrary to popular belief, the density of destinations such as jobs along the routes is a much bigger determinant of transit use than is residential density. In both cases, a certain minimum density is required to make transit pay for itself, but the density thresholds and increase in ridership with increased density are quite different for the two types of uses. In general terms, for employment the denser the better, but not so for homes. So a second reason why you need some separation of uses is to achieve job densities that are more difficult to achieve with mixed uses and that interfere with achieving optimal residential densities. You want a dense and expensive downtown where office towers go up and up. Stackable jobs, right on the transit line. Having jobs and housing competing for the same land makes the structure of land prices all wrong for both. For environmental reasons, highrises are a good solution for jobs and a poor solution for housing, for reasons I've explained elsewhere.

The third reason is also related to competition for land. Once you declare land to be mixed use, the market will tend to make it specialize into all one use or all the other. It would be an unlikely coincidence for the economic rent on the two types of uses to happen to be the same, unless there is an economic benefit to proximity. Unfortunately, there isn't much of one.

There are benefits, economic, social, and environmental, to having houses near houses and to having offices near offices. Kids can play with the neighbours and walk to school. Bicycle couriers reach your client in minutes. Where there is an economic benefit to the mixing of uses is in neighbourhood-serving retail, and that is where the mixed-use effort should be concentrated. The commute to work is responsible for only a quarter of all driving, and the best way to improve that is to have modest density of housing, very high densities of service jobs, and medium densities of other job types. But non-work destinations like retail and entertainment - every effort should be made to put those in walking or transit distance, or even conveniently between the houses and the transit stations. While we're modernizing urban planning for the realities of this century, let's not fixate on the single-breadwinner family of the 50's where you could try to minimize the home-job distance within your budget and where only daddy drove. Instead, encourage small local stores and schools and discourage large regional ones, and try to build real complete communities.

Tags: Sprawl Environment Transportation Transit Urban Planning

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Wikia Search Launches, Minus the Unique Features

Wikia Search, the latest Google Killer has launched in Alpha, with much hype. What launched seems to have none of the features that the hype is about. Wisdom of crowds? Social driven social search? Not there in the alpha as far as I can tell.

But what is there is interesting. They recycle some well-known components. Good old Grub, a distributed crawler that is now apparently open source, one that is so annoying that webmasters regularly ban it from their web sites, and Lucene/Nutch, a relatively unsophisticated open source search engine. Ho hum, just another amateur search engine start up. But Wikia does some unique things which I quite appreciate. It lets you download the source code for the search engine. And for every search, it lets you peek at most of the calculations and weights that result in the ranking of the web pages.

The algorithm is pretty standard tf-idf stuff. But it tells you the term frequencies and the document frequencies it is using. For instance on one page of one of my sites, it had document frequencies like "24", while the ranking of a different site was based on tens of thousands of documents for the same term. It tells you all the factors it considers and all of the weights and exponents. So for instance the tf-idf score of search terms found in the title is raised to the power of 1.5, while the weight in the url is raised to an amazing power of 4, and another power of 2 for the keyword in the hostname.

Now this "explain" facility does not explain the entire entire ranking. There are some unexplained differences between the explained and the actual ranking and some ability for community members to participate. Sounds interesting. When I look at the participation so far, it seems pretty idiosyncratic. Lots of open source type sites receive favourable bias. The input is signed, including Jimmy Wales. I decided to give a boost to the site of a complete stranger whose site ranks poorly and looks terrible but has good content, just for fun.

Google Killer? Not by a long shot. I wouldn't trust a search engine that is so easy for people like me to manipulate. The algorithms are still too rudimentary to be used in public. It doesn't have the basic protection against SEO techniques and I'm not sure that relying on people with time on their hands to manually re-rank queries is a reliable and scaleable solution. Still, it gives some interesting insights into why some sites rank highly in other search engines.

Tags: Wikia Search Search Engines Information Retrieval

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Malls as Make-believe Town Centres Minus the Wrong Kind of People

The Economist has an interesting article on how the enclosed shopping mall is dead and how a new breed of mall is being built - open air, with community serving uses like butcher shops, and sometimes mixed use.

That got me Googling and reading. The innovative real estate developer Rick Caruso is named in the article as someone who is thinking out of the box in making outdoor malls. Caruso doesn't call them malls, he calls them "streets". He gives them eclectic architecture like real streets built over time, and adds little squares and tramways. Caruso says he is trying to re-create the feel of a european town, on the theory that people spend more money when they're on vacation.

So why a fake main street when there are real ones in most older cities? The Economist says essentially that the real ones suffer from too much reality. People moved away from older downtowns and stopped shopping there because they were filled with people that most well-off americans would rather not acknowledge, the poor and ethnic minorities. This is why they built the suburban shopping mall. But now with diversity creeping into the suburbs and even its malls, what are people to do? One solution is to build these fake streets, but with acres of parking lots all around to keep out the poorest people and entirely on private property so that security guards can shoo out the individuals that scare away polite society.

Still, those snobs are the very people who will drive the cars that put GHGs in the air, so maybe catering to their irrational fears can be done in a way that makes them want to give more of their money to local businesses and less to oil companies. Maybe we can build complete communities around the open-air shopping mall. Caruso is famous for listening to local communities and giving them what they want in a compact package, compactness being measured here in dollars of retail revenue per square foot.

Caruso is starting to build mixed use centres, with housing and offices as well as retail, including housing above retail. In pursuit of maximizing profit and keeping out the riff-raff, are we going to accidentally minimize GHG emissions? I don't think Caruso's an environmentalist, but some of his plans look positively liveable and walkable. Expensive, but this is southern California, real estate is hot.

Then I saw this bozo. Westfield is a Caruso competitor whose projects are not only sprawl-inducing segregation between childless households and families, but one who actively plays to the prejudices of local communities in order to kill any true mixed-use community. And Caruso is now caving in. According to the article, "Caruso intends to build luxury housing in his malls in Glendale, Playa Vista and Albany, Calif. He dropped plans for housing at his planned project in Arcadia after opponents including Westfield said the new residents would strain local schools."

There you have it - new residents would strain local schools. This is the usual code for saying we don't want their kind (I'm guessing Latinos) here even if they can afford a house. There's something seriously wrong with a municipal taxation and governance system where higher-density development can be rejected because families would live there. As I may have said before, the density of childless households has no positive environmental benefit, it is largely irrelevant to smart growth, it is the larger households with chidren whose driving behaviour is affected by density.

Westfield's mixed use plan, on the other hand, is much more troubling. They argue that offices cause traffic congestion but shopping does not since it is off-peak, so they are transforming an existing mixed-use neighbourhood into a different mix and form. They are getting rid of two small office buildings, and replacing them with a five storey parking structure and a 42-storey luxury condo tower, with a 3-storey retail podium. A walkable town centre? I think not. This looks to me like an alienating community-killing auto-oriented anonymous set of land uses. Three-storey retail is a traditional auto-oriented mall. The condos have no interaction with the street. Definitely not pedestrian-oriented or family-oriented.

Tags: Urban Planning Urban Design Walkable Downtown Revitalization

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NASA's scrambled data: it's not rocket science

Several newspapers, including the New York Times and the Houston Chronicle have been complaining that the data released by NASA collected in a survey of pilots were in a cryptic or intentionally scrambled format.

The problem? The data is in PDF format. According to the Times, "the agency released the data from the $11.5 million program in a format that made it difficult if not impossible for outsiders to analyze in search of trends, presenting the reports as documents rather than spreadsheets" while the Houston Chronicle said "Some experts said the PDF file was difficult to reconfigure for a timely computer analysis"

Difficult if not impossible? Having extracted data from PDF files on a regular basis, it is extremely easy. Here is how to do it. Go to the page where the data is being provided, http://www.nasa.gov/news/reports/NAOMS_air_carrier_survey_data.html and open the file using the free Acrobat reader. Save the entire file as text (File|Save as Text). That menu option is sometimes there and sometimes not, I never figured out why. In this case it was there. If not, use Ghostscript to extract the text. Once the text is extracted, open up Excel and use Data|Import External Data|Import Data to import the text file. The format is delimited with space as the delimiter. There is some garbage in the text, but don't worry about it: sort the page on the first column, the RandomID field that has been helpfully put in as a record key. Given that the data is from a relational database, you can easily import the data into a relational database package, MS Access if you like. But the data is randomized, so the keys in different tables may not match.

As to the "cryptic coding" that the Houston Chronicle complains about, I find it reasonably well explained in the documents on this page http://www.nasa.gov/news/reports/NAOMS.html . Odd how the journalist's own inability to deal with the information given to him somehow becomes newsworthy.

Tags: NASA Journalism

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