Alex: Priority bike lanes.
Watson: What is the solution to the conflict between parking regulations and traditional bike lane rules?
As I discussed below, there are long stretches of Newton streets on which we want to have bike accommodations where there isn't a lot of parking, but parking is legal and the street is not wide enough for travel lanes, bike lanes, and parking in the shoulder. Because parking is legal, bike lanes are not permissible. (Note, some of these same roads have stretches where parking is legal and regularly used (at least during the day). Those stretches are a different case.) And, striped shoulders -- legal for parking and separate space for bikers where no one actually parks -- are not sufficient accommodations to attract new riders to the streets.
In sum, we've got shoulders that are currently available for biking and for parking, but without real demand for the parking and no way to make it more inviting to ride in them.
The answer to the problem is some sort of hybrid treatment of the shoulder that designates it's a place for bikes to ride, but also acceptable for parking. Putting a sharrow in the shoulder isn't a good idea, because sharrows designate -- as the name suggests -- a shared space for moving cars and moving bicycles. We don't want to create an invitation for cars to drive in the shoulder.
But, priority bike lanes might work. Priority bike lanes are, essentially, bike lanes with the bike lane stencil, but using dashed lines rather than solid lines to demarcate the lane. Priority bike lanes indicate to bicyclists and motorists where bikes are expected to travel and where motorists are supposed to yield to bicyclists. They are typically used where there is no other facility for bikes and bicyclists need to ride in the travel lane. They set out a space for bikes that cars may also use.
For the problem of the regulatory conflict on our street's shoulders, they may be perfect. Because they define a shared space, there is no need to undo parking regulations to install them. The combination of the striped line and the stencil should provide motorist with notice to expect bikes and to be careful. The stencil will invite the less advanced rider. And the dashed line will allow the accommodation to co-exist with the seldom used right to park.
There may be some design niceties about whether it might be good to bring a priority bike lane a little into the travel lane, But, otherwise, that's it: a bike lane with a dashed line rather than a solid line. The answer to the regulatory conflict that prevents us from taking full advantage of the space in the shoulders.
Friday, March 4, 2011
How bikes and legal parking can co-exist
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Paying for paving
We're wrapping up a winter with unusually high snow removal costs. And, we've got an epidemic of potholes that are going to have to be fixed.
This might be a good time to reflect on the fact that maintaining a traffic infrastructure costs serious money and that we expect road conditions that exceed our willingness to pay for them. It's time for a higher gas tax, with a distribution to municipalities for roadway maintenance based on traffic volumes and a significant distribution for transit and other alternative transportation.
What's the real conflict between bikes and parking?
It is an article of faith that, in Newton, there are two major impediments to bike accommodations: too narrow streets and legal parking. Combine them and they eliminate the possibility of bike lanes. There just isn't room in the right of way for travel lanes, bike lanes, and parking. That requires at least 20' -- 9' travel lane, 4' bike lane, and 7' parking shoulder -- and more like 23' in each direction. So it's posed as an either or: bike lanes or parking.
But, maybe things aren't as bad as they seem.
Along the streets where parking is principally overflow parking, there is no real competition for space between bikes and cars. The shoulder is predominantly available for cycling and a striped shoulder separates bikes from traffic pretty well. But, because of regulation, that nice space for biking can't be designated as an official bike lane. A bike lane can't be striped where cars can legally park.
For long stretches, it isn't a conflict between actual cars and actual bikers, but a conflict of regulations.
On those long stretches of road, why isn't a striped shoulder enough? From my own experience (principally on Beacon and Winchester) the stripes keep the cars out of the shoulder. But, the goal is broader than making life safer for the bikers on the road now. We want to encourage more riders. And, unfortunately, the stripes don't attract new bikers to the shoulder.
Less advanced riders, the riders we need to attract to our city streets, don't feel comfortable without more explicit bike accommodations.
So, what are we to do? One option is to disallow parking, at least from the stretches where parking is infrequently used. That's certainly a better balance of accommodation for bikes and cars: full time access for bikes at the expense of occasionally used parking. But, it invites a political battle.
What if there were a way to create bike accommodations that attract new riders without taking on the parking regulations? The answer lies in this bit of reality. If the regulations did allow parking and a bike lane to co-exist on these up-for-grabs stretches of road, the actual incidence of parking wouldn't be too much of a concern. Occasionally, a biker would have to go out into the road. Not ideal, but much better than what we have now. And, not too different than what you see with the occasional illegally parked car in official bike lanes in other cities.
Next up: the solution.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Riverside lot not for Newton residents
Natick man got a ticket from Wellesley the day he parked in Newton, in the Riverside lot. Funny story. Wellesley town staff used a hand-held ticketing scanner, supposedly coded not to issue tickets, to do a license-place survey of cars in the Riverside lot. But, they accidentally issued tickets on the surveyed cars.
Why is Wellesley doing a survey of an MBTA lot in Newton? Because the town wants to know the transportation choices that its residents make. And, enough of them are presumably using the Riverside lot to matter. And, apparently, folks from Natick, too.
How, exactly, is this good for Newton?
Saturday, January 8, 2011
How the aldermen helped kill the Atrium
The Atrium has a bunch of flaws*, but when you ask people why they don't like to shop there, the number one complaint is parking. Not "they don't have any stores I like." Parking. It was parking when there was William-Sonoma and other now gone stores were there. It was parking when the economy was humming along.
Parking. Parking. Parking.
People hate it.
But, when you consider the Atrium from a land-use perspective, the number one thing it's got going for it is parking. It's a building with over 100,000 square feet of retail space and around 20 surface parking spaces. It's a giant parking structure with a few stores above it. By comparison, the first phase of Chestnut Hill Square is going to have just under 250,000 sq. ft. and 699 surface parking spaces. To be fair, the planned but not guaranteed second phase will have a 300+ space parking garage when the 90-100 residential spaces are built. And, the second phase will eliminate about 100 surface spaces. But, in the end it'll be about 600 surface spaces.
So, what's the board got to do with this?
In a not-even-perfect world, we'd have a lot more structured parking. Surface parking encourages sprawl, creates run-off problems, &c. But, structured parking is at least marginally less appealing for shoppers who drive. So, a mall -- like Chestnut Hill Square or the Mall at Chestnut Hill -- will be a more appealing option than something like the Atrium, which is served almost exclusively by a parking garage. When Land Use and then the full board capitulated to New England Development's one-less-surface-space-and-we-walk threat**, they not only doomed Chestnut Hill Square from a land-use perspective, but they made things worse for the Atrium in this particular regard. It's not only a competing mall within spitting distance, it's a competing mall with more surface parking.
Obviously, this is a regional problem. Making more structured parking at Chestnut Hill Square wouldn't undo the attraction of the surface parking at the Mall at Chestnut Hill or the Chestnut Hill Shopping Center or any of the dozens of surface-parking surrounded shopping options in the area. But, it sure would have been nice if the board had not reduced the incentive to provide structured parking.
* Pedestrian access across the front is awful. The wall along Florence Street is inhospitable. No open space. Possibly even not enoughsurface parking.
** The irony, of course, is that New England Development built the Atrium and it's underground parking garage, which undoubtedly cost 2 or 3 times per parking space what an above-ground garage would cost, and built it with far more capacity then has ever been met by demand.
Monday, December 13, 2010
The bridge is out of the bag
Shots of the Lower Falls bridge now that it is fully stripped and painted and no longer in a baggie.
In the last shot, the wood under the tarp appears to be the new surface for the bridge.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Alderman Baker is good at what he does
Watching Lisle Baker at work last night, I couldn't help but wish that he and I shared the same values. More so than any of his colleagues, he's willing to say I'm not happy with what I see and I want an answer or change. He's civil. He's well-prepared.
Most importantly, he's patient and tenacious. He doesn't get discouraged or distracted if the first answer he gets is not an answer he likes.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Drive-thru open space
Though the rezoning that New England Development requested for the Chestnut Hill Square site will not obligate them to provide open space, there is universal recognition that open space is important enough that they ought to provide a little on a site that may include up to 100 residential units. It's important even if there end up being no residential units.
The open space provided is really inadequate. The measure of its inadequacy is the lengths NED goes to take credit for open space. Here's the open space map provided by NED:
A will probably be a nice little space. Too small to really act as a "garden" for the 100 residential units, but a real open space. Note, however, that it could only be open space. Squeezed between the apartment building to the right and the parking lot to the left, it's a leftover squib of land. There's no way it could be developed.
B is a pedestrian plaza. It's all hardscape. And, its virtues are likely oversold. But, it's arguably open space.
C and D are a stretch. They are primarily passages between the two buildings on either end of the parking lot. Such passages are a good enough feature that we should overlook the fact that they too are oversold as open space, in this case as potential gathering spaces.
E is too small to matter. I hope that it functions as a lively outdoor cafe, as advertised.
It's F and G, though, that really take the cake. They are bigger together than either the garden or the plaza. Take them off and the paucity of open space would be glaring. You can understand the developer's desire to have them on the map. But, calling them open space is an insult to the city.
Take a closer look. Click on the picture to see it full sized. Then come back. The unshaded part is F.
It's the world's first drive-thru open space! A car-centric innovation brought to you first in Newton.
It's part of the driveway. It includes parking spaces. Handicap, to be sure, but parking spaces. You can't get to a a quarter of the upper lot parking spaces without driving through one or the other of these so-called open spaces. No one will or could linger without getting run over. You might as well call all of the parking lot open space.
Again, there's no explicit legal requirement to provide open space. But, the developer wants a zoning change and a special permit to build what it's building. And open space is a quid pro quo for that very valuable benefits that the zoning and special permit confer. So, the board order (in its draft form), includes language stating that the site has open space. And, by recommending the board order, six of the city's alderman consider this open space. Paved. Parking lot. Driveway.
Sidewalks on Boylston St.
At the Land Use meeting on Tuesday, city attorney Ouida Young got into a heated exchange with Alderman Deb Crossley about a draft board order finding related to pedestrian accommodations. At one point, Young said that Route 9 is not pedestrian-friendly and never will be.
The comment is unfortunate on at least four levels.
First of all, it's not accurate. There are parts of the corridor that are quite pedestrian-friendly. Here's the situation in front of the Capital Grille. Decent sidewalk. Huge grass berm. Wide shoulder before the travel lane.
Second, it is dismissive of or ignorant of the fact that, regardless of the quality of sidewalk, people use it.
Not caring about pedestrian accommodations is a real screw-you to the people who use those sidewalks by people who only drive on Route 9 and cannot imagine walking beside it.
Third, it fails to acknowledge that the Chestnut Hill Square proposal doesn't just fail to provide good pedestrian accommodations, it makes the existing conditions much worse. Here's a picture of the sidewalk in front of the site. Again, wide shoulder, a grass berm, decent sidewalk.
Here's a picture from NED's materials. NED has since agreed to put a berm between the sidewalk and the roadway, but the berm is no wider, the sidewalk is no wider, and the shoulder will now be an active turning lane for a large portion of traffic into the site. Bottom line: the situation is worse.
In front of David's, as the NED rendering shows, it's much worse. The roadway widening eliminates or (possibly) reduces a very wide berm.
Fourth, it's not consistent with what many of us understand is the city's policies on promoting pedestrian mobility. It is critical that we make it easier and more attractive to walk around our city. Car traffic is destroying our quality of life. It's killing the planet. The infrastructure needed to support our car dependence creates sprawl. We have to take every opportunity possible to actively promote walking.
No, Route 9 is not the most attractive place in town to take a stroll. But, it is a tremendous opportunity, nonetheless. There are people, lots of people. It's the densest residential area in the entire city. There are destinations. The Mall at Chestnut Hill, the Chestnut Hill Shopping Center (lower mall), the shops on Boylston across from the shopping center, the Atrium, Barnes & Noble and Milton's, Hammond Pond, MIshkan Tefila, Webster Conservation, Longwood station, &c.
If we connect those people and places, if we create a network of really good pedestrian accommodations, we can get people out of their cars. Not all of them. Not all the time. But enough to make a difference.
Route 9 and its traffic is an impediment, but there is no reason to give up on making a walkable district. In fact, if anything, Route 9 and its traffic should be a constant reminder of why we need to promote walking.
So, it's incredibly discouraging to hear from city staff, the lead negotiator on the board order that's going to define New England Development's responsibilities, that promoting pedestrian mobility on Boylston St. is a waste of time.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Land Use fail on Chestnut Hill Square
On the substance, there's lots to say about tonight's 6-2 Land Use vote to recommend a board order granting a special permit to New England Development, but here are three little bits of atmosphere that give a sense of why there wasn't a better outcome:
- The board order includes and makes reference to a site plan that counts as open space active parts of the site driveway, as in space that cars will regularly drive through
- City Attorney Ouida Young got into a heated debate with Alderman Deb Crossley, arguing that Route 9 is not pedestrian-friendly and won't be pedestrian-friendly
- The three Ward 6 alderman were non-participants in the discussion, despite the site's proximity to and impact on the neighborhood
Monday, November 15, 2010
Lower Falls Bridge in a bag
Pretty impressive operation to strip/delead the Lower Falls bridge without contaminating the Charles River.
Once the infrastructure is stripped and repainted, it will get its pedestrian deck.
CHS -- Allow parking on Boylston?
According to New England Development, one of the major constraints on the Chestnut Hill Square proposal was a prohibition against parking along Boylston St. (Rte. 9). It makes sense. Parking in the front setback (the area between the street and the front of the building) is a big no-no. It deadens the street and makes it pedestrian-unfriendly (if not hostile). Just about any big-box retail suffers from parking in the front setback.
But, keeping parking off of Boylston St. has some particular consequences for Chestnut Hill Square that may be worse than allowing it.
The intention of the restriction against parking in the front setback is to have new development engage the street and create a retail streetscape. But, for reasons good and bad, the developer was never going to put storefronts on Boylston St. And, because of the depth of the site, the developer understandably wants to have multiple retail fronts. 
So, the retail in Chestnut Hill Square faces inward. And, Boylston St. gets the back of a building hard up against the street, with a narrow sidewalk (orange). There's a huge parking lot to navigate to get from the north retail building to the south buildings (green). And, there's a dangerous crossing to get from the north building to the west residential/retail building (red).
Since we're not going to get retail along Boylston St., maybe it's a good idea to relax the no-parking-in-the-front-setback restriction and reduce or eliminate the worst problems of this design.
If the north building and the sea of parking simply switched places, the design would get a whole lot better -- even with the blight of a parking lot along Boylston St.
The retail buildings would all be close together and the circulation area much more compact and easily navigated by foot (orange). The crossing between the north retail building and the west residential/retail building would be much safer (A). And, there would be an opportunity for wider, tree-lined sidewalk along Boylston St. (green).
Take it a step further and divide the north building in two.
Keep the idea of a mid-parking lot sidewalk (D), to connect from the sidewalk on Boylston St. to create a nice pedestrian spine through the development (B). Passage from the Milton's building to the east (C) and the residential/retail building (A) would be much safer.
Ironically, this configuration makes retail entrances along the north side of the building attractive to tenants (shown in orange along with retail along the gap), so there might end up being parking in the front setback after all. But, given the peculiarities of the site, it may be a compromise worth making.
We're not going to get the ideal development -- one that engages Boylston St. But, we can get a better development.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Smart talk about parking at Chestnut Hill Square
The Land Use committee is turning into the go-to resource for smart parking policy. They granted Panera Bread, the station diner, and Pie parking waivers, essentially lifting parking requirements from Newton Centre.
At Thursday night's Chestnut Hill Square working session, parking was discussed in all the right terms. There was no discussion of parking minimums. The discussion about the number of spaces required was driven by what the developer said he needed, in other words, by market demand. The aldermen, particularly Susan Albright and Deb Crossley, pushed on the developer's stated need, as the city should. Alderperson Albright kept pushing the developer to shift spots from surface to structured. Alderperson Crossley proposed waiving some setback requirements to allow more levels on the parking garage. And, there was even discussion about charging for parking! (More on that in another post.)
The parking situation at Chestnut Hill Square is still not close to ideal. But, at least the city is having the right kind of discussion.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Chestnut Hill Square -- designed in danger
Probably the key connection in the entire Chestnut Hill Square plan is a connection not made: the connection between the north retail building (A) that runs along Boylston St./Rte. 9 and the residential/retail building (B) to the south and east.
In its pedestrian circulation plan (the image above), New England Development has not include a crossing between the two buildings. While it seems odd to leave out such a short and obvious crossing, it's a matter of safety: a crosswalk there would be too close to the development entrance.
Omitting a crossing, NED is proposing that people wishing to go from A to B will go south through the parking lot to the south retail, cross two driveways, and walk down the residential retail building. In fact, one of three things will happen, two of them bad. As NED hopes, some people will take the long march, which will keep them on foot, in the development, and a little healthier. More likely, people will be put off by the hike and not go to both spots in the same trip, which is bad for the development. 
But some people will act like pedestrians often do, and simply cross the driveway. While pedestrian accommodations encourage walking, the lack of accommodations don't necessarily prevent walking. For an illustration of this truth, just wait a few minutes along any major street in Newton when sidewalks full of snow force people on foot into the road.
By creating demand for a crossing at a spot that they say is too dangerous to provide a crossing, NED has designed in a dangerous situation. The developer ought to be obligated to eliminate the danger.
Fortunately, the solution seems to be straightforward: create an overlap between the north retail building and the residential/retail building farther away from the development entrance, by moving the north retail building south (into the site), making the north retail building deeper, by creating a deeper sidewalk-cum-pedestrian plaza, or some combination of all three. Moving the whole building south is consistent with providing a better sidewalk along Boylston. Making the building deeper is consistent with breaking the two buildings into one to relieve the blank facade along Boylston.
But, somehow, NED has to connect the dots.
Possible gas tax reform
According to this Josh Barro post, there's a compromise under consideration in Washington that would extend the Bush tax cuts in exchange for a switch to an ad valoremgas tax. The misguided priorities and the deficit havoc of the Bush tax cuts are beyond the NS&S jurisdiction, but adoption of an ad valoremgas tax would be a step in the right direction.
Currently, the federal and state gas taxes are fixed: the federal tax is 18.4 cents-a-gallon. Meanwhile, gas prices have gone up.
Really, this change shouldn't be thought of as a tax increase - instead, think of it as canceling the annual gas tax cut. The federal gasoline tax hasn't been raised since 1993, when it was set at 18.4 cents per gallon. That means it has fallen by a third in real terms over that period - if the tax had kept pace with CPI, it would sit at 27.8 cents per gallon today.
In the meantime, "spending on road construction and maintenance grew almost exactly in line with the economy from 1994 to 2008 - a 102 percent increase." As a consequence, "[f]ederal, state and local governments grew road spending faster than road revenues by borrowing more and by diverting general tax revenues to spend on roads."
It's just math. Federal and state gas taxes are too low.
Read the whole post. Barro has some excellent analysis of the relationship between road and highway spending and related revenues.
Ultimately, though, simply stemming the backward march of gas-tax revenue is not enough. We need to make up lost ground. We need to account for the impact of increased fuel economy. And, we need to capture more of the costs of driving from those who drive (or consume goods that have been shipped). One of the virtues of switching to an ad valorem gas tax, though, is that it has no immediate impact, but preps for the future.
