Town of Plenty
Lasalle may soon become the poster-child for scaledown.ca.
Thom Hunt, I know you just got the job but, I hope you are paying attention to our neighbouring communities because they are starting to get wise to the idea of making attractive places. You may have seen the article in the Star today and if you go to the Town of Lasalle’s website you can learn a little more but the long and the short of it is that Larry Silani, the Planner for the Town of Lasalle is going to make his community better.
Larry and his department set the bar for new development pretty high with the planning standards for the Bouffard - Howard area. But now, they are going to take a poorly planned, multi-lane, auto-centric road and plaza district and turn it into a community corridor.
Some highlights:
- Neighbourhoods, town centre and employment districts with a highly interconnected road network and balanced transportation system that is designed and built for pedestrians, cyclists, transit and automobiles;
- Shorter block lengths, a finer grain of block sizes and 5 minute walking distances to neighbourhood activity centres;
- Parks, schools, places of worship, compact pedestrian-scaled shopping districts (mixed-use town centres) and employment opportunities situated closer to where people live, easily accessible by foot, bicycle, transit and automobile;
- Public places that foster a sense of community pride and well-being within each neighbourhood (with each neighbourhood having an activity centre - parkettes, daycare centres, transit stops, corner stores/cafes, places of worship, etc. - which would be the focal point, creating a sense of place for each neighbourhood);
- Urban places framed by architecture and landscape of a high standard of design that celebrates local history, climate, ecology and building practice, in keeping with new urban design guidelines and standards for both the public realm and for private lands.
I want these things in my city. I want to be equal with cars when I ride my bike. I would love to have a city full of compact pedestrian-scaled shopping districts instead of power centres and giant grocery super-mega marts. Public places that foster a sense of community pride? Get me some of those. Architecture and landscape of a high standard of design - bring it on! Celebrate our local history - that would be refreshing.
This is what every area of the City of Windsor should be striving for. These proposals will benefit everyone that lives in the Town of Lasalle and visits the Town of Lasalle. These are the kind of things that when you visit a place make you want to come back or even move there. At first I was dubious that the Planning Department in Lasalle expects their population to double over the next 20 to 30 years but, if this is the kind of place-making they want to do and are committed to doing then the population of Lasalle will go much higher than it is today and the Lasalle Planning department will have built a community they can be proud of.
Tags: Alternative Transportation, community building, local business, mobility, pedestrian, place making, planning department, Urban Design, urban sprawl, walkable
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Just to balance the discussion, from today’s Globe and Mail.
Randal O’toole is being touted as the next Jane Jacobs.
Read what he thinks of efforts to limit the automobile and sell public transportation
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080521.REYNOLDS21//TPStory/Business
TRANSPORTATION
Road to hell is paved with public transit
NEIL REYNOLDS
reynolds.globe@gmail.com
May 21, 2008
OTTAWA — The average public transit bus in the U.S. uses 4,365 British thermal units, a measure of energy, per passenger mile and emits 0.71 pounds of carbon dioxide. The average car uses 3,445 BTUs per passenger mile and emits 0.54 pounds of CO{-2}. Whether you seek to conserve energy or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, your public policy decision here appears remarkably obvious. Get people off buses and get them into cars. The decision to do precisely this will get progressively easier. By 2020, the average car will use only 3,000 BTUs per passenger mile; by 2035, only 2,500 BTUs. By this time, the car will be - by far - the greenest option in the 21st century urban transit system.
Thus calculates Randal O’Toole, an Oregon economist with impeccable environmental credentials. Senior economist for a number of years with the Thoreau Institute (an environmental think tank in Portland) and lecturer in environmental economics at Yale and at the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. O’Toole has been described as the next Jane Jacobs, the influential contrarian environmentalist who ironically worked in more innocent times to keep cars out of North American downtowns. Author of provocative books such as The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths and The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Mr. O’Toole is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the Washington-based libertarian think tank. He reportedly cycles to work every day.
Most public transit systems, Mr. O’Toole says in a research paper published in April, have never done the job that governments entrusted to them, which was to move large numbers of people safely to work in the morning and to move them safely back home at night. (On the basis of every billion passenger miles, he asserts, “light-rail [public transit] kills three times as many people as cars on urban freeways.”) Judged on either environmental or economic efficiency, he says, public transit systems consistently produce diminishing returns.
New York operates the most energy-efficient system in the U.S. - but only because its buses carry an average of 17 passengers, or 60 per cent more “load” than the 10.7 passengers carried by the average public transit bus nationwide. (The average public transit bus has seats for 39 people and standing room for 20.) New York keeps losing market share to cars, too. In 1985, the public transit share of passenger travel in New York was 12.7 per cent, far ahead of the No. 2 system (with a 5.2 per cent share) in Chicago. By 2005, though, the public transit share in New York had fallen to 9.6 per cent; Chicago, in the same period, had fallen to 3.7 per cent. At the lower end, Buffalo fell from a 1.2 per cent share of the passenger market to 0.6 per cent; Sacramento fell to a 0.7 per cent share from 0.9 per cent.
The great boondoggle of the past few years, Mr. O’Toole says, has been light rail, a fashionable alternative to heavy rail, the underground subway train.
“Most heavy-rail systems are less efficient than the average passenger car and none is as efficient as a Toyota Prius,” Mr. O’Toole says. “Most light-rail systems use more energy per passenger mile than an average passenger car, some are worse than the average light truck and none is as efficient as a Prius.” Curiously, the Prius delivers exceptional mileage but emits roughly the same greenhouse gases (per passenger mile) as the average car and average public transit train.
Perhaps because they remain market-driven enterprises, cars and trucks have eclipsed buses and trains - by a wide margin - in energy-efficiency advances in the past generation. Americans drive four times as many miles as they did 40 years ago but produce less than half as much automotive air pollution. Some new cars pollute less than 1 per cent as much as new cars did in the 1970s.
Public transit buses are a different story. In 1970, the average bus used 2,500 BTUs per passenger mile; by 2005, it used 4,300 BTUs, a 70 per cent increase. In 1970, by way of contrast, light trucks used 9,000 BTUs per passenger mile; in 2005, they used 4,300 - a decrease of 50 per cent. The average pickup truck is now as energy efficient now, per passenger mile, as the average bus.
“The fuel economies for bus transit have declined in every five-year period since 1970,” Mr. O’Toole says. Why? U.S. public transit agencies keep buying larger and more expensive vehicles - and then driving around town with fewer people in them. In 1982, the average number of bus occupants was 13.8; by 2006, it was 10.7.
“Since 1992, American cities have invested $100-billion in urban rail transit,” Mr. O’Toole says. “Yet no city in the country has managed to increase [public] transit’s share of commuters by more than 1 per cent. No city has managed to reduce driving by even 1 per cent. People respond to high fuel prices by buying more efficient cars - and then driving more.”
The thing about lopsided arguments such as these is that the author is just taking into account tail-pipe emmissions and calling the car better.
I would have to see the sources he used to arrive at most of his claims, but even so, that won’t change my mind. Even if every argument in the article was true and all his facts-and-figures used in their proper context, I would still be advocating for exactly what we’re advocating for - because we’re taking everything into acount. We’re taking the economic and environmental costs of sprawl into account, the billions of acres of increasing asphalt, the subsequent toxic effect on our watershed, and above all else, the costs to our communities. Cars divide communities and make them fat and ugly.
I read articles such as these and understand that we must make our public transit better, not continue to pour resources into the failed social engineering experiment of drivable suburbia. It’s interesting that the researcher supposedly rides his bike into work every day. There must be a reason for that.
So give me a little of what Larry Silani is dishing out. That’s the kind of community-focus that this dude is hungry for!
(Larry, by the way, will be one of the panelists at the roundtable discussion on the effects of urban sprawl that Scaledown is cohosting together with Artcite and their downtown gallery on June 18th from 7 - 9:00 pm. Check back soon for more details on that event.)
I’d love to know who it was that described Mr. O’Toole as the next Jane Jacobs, and whether they have ever read any of her writings? Sure, she could have been described as having a libertarian streak to her, but I don’t think she would have ever advocated an abandonment of public transit in favour of the private automobile.
One thing Rick, don’t publish whole articles from newspapers or magazines, these articles are under copyright and permission is needed to reprint them. It is okay to sight quotes from an article and link to the article but don’t publish the whole article. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, I agree with Chris, I want to see his research.
I’ve done this too, Rick. Sometimes, the content is just too juicy not to print, eh?
Not to jump all over you Rick but, the counter to my article would be that sprawl is O.K. or the automobile will continue to rule or that the kind of development that Lasalle is calling for already exists in Windsor and so we should cut our Planners some slack.
Lasalle’s plans call for transportation equality because they recognize that future populations may choose to get around differently or that in the future we may not be able to rely on cars for personal transport. So, let’s go back to walkable neighbourhoods and communities that allow better transport alternatives.
The purpose of scaled-down development is to provide choice to people. I’m not going to advocate for the banishment of the automobile. (I think its sown its own seeds of destruction.) What I want is the option to walk or ride my bike to something close if I want. If I choose to drive out to the burbs to shop, that’s a valid choice as well.
One last thing, look at the group that pays Mr. O’Toole’s salary. Libertarian policy is typically against public sponsored initatives, this would include public transit. A libertarian view would go something like this, “you choose to live miles from where you need to be - figure out how to get there and leave me and my tax dollars alone.” Also, light-rail and inter-urban rail tend to require land be acquired by the authority usually from private citizens or at a cost to the public purse - two more things that a libertarian politician would not approve of.
All good points, James. Great discussion starter, Rick.
Thanks Urbanrat, I’ll keep that in mind.
Also, I did not provide this link because I buy into it (after all, I am a regular reader of Scaledown) but I thought it provided a good basis for further discussion.
What is scary to me and should be for the rulers of Windsor is that our bedroom communities are finally “getting it”.
If LaSalle and Tecumseh start to build the proper neighbourhoods that most people want (though are missing out on) it will attract even more people to their towns and they may very well double their populations within the next 20 to 30 years.
These towns have already siphoned off a good portion of Windsor’s retail (especially from the downtown area) and they have siphoned off a good portion of manufacturing as well with more land available to attract more business than Windsor has to offer.
As Windsor taxes increase time after time to which they are already much higher than both towns, people willl continue to flee the city for the suburbs if Mr. Silani has his way and wants to promote the CHOICE between driving and walking/riding a bike. It will be more of an incentive for people to leave Windsor for better pastures. Not only do they get a walkeable neighbourhood with lower taxes but they can shop in their neighbourhood and go to the big box stores in Windsor should the need arise. Considering these big box stores are all on roads that connect quickly with the suburbs it would be a quick commute.
For LaSalle and Tecumseh they barely have to go into Windsor to visit these stores as our council decided it was a good idea to plant big box development right on suburbia’s doorstep.
So I will ask anyone out there. Should Mr. Silani succeed in his endevours why would anyone choose to live in Windsor when the suburbs offer the same thing as the city but at a lower cost? Considering more people are working in these towns and more will continue to do so (while Windsor debates half-baked schemes to sell onions from their airport to Germany) the commute won’t amount to much so the arguement of travelling will be fairly moot.
Again I ask. What does Windsor offer that LaSalle and Tecumseh don’t?
It is really sad to see that the only increase of population for Windsor has been immigrants with little skills to offer (or hampered by red tape from all levels of gov’t) with little hope of finding decent employment. The people leaving Windsor for suburbia are already employed taking the tax base with them. Windsor will have to increase taxes just to stay on top of services rendered, which in turn only drives up the flight of people leaving!
Until Windsor addresses quality of life issues and development such as Mr. Silani proposes it will continue to lose ground to suburbia and will find itself in a predicament it will have a difficult chance of getting out. Until Windsor realizes that quality of life issues not only attract new people looking to live in another city, it also attracts business as businesses want to do business where their employees will be happy and where it is cost effective (notice the size of business taxes in Windsor?), it also RETAINS the current population which is like money in the bank.
I find it very surprising we have a model right next door to us that shows us the right and wrong way of allowing city to go off course, that model being Detroit. Why our civic leaders don’t look north is beyond me as it is plain to see that we are NOT doing what Detroit has done in the last decade but we ARE DOING exactly what Detroit and the suburbs did for 40 years. It truly is mind boggling!
when confronted by arguments such as these, I think people should read scaledown’s vision and mission statement. I don’t recall public transit being referred to. I recall us talking about walkable neighborhoods with local independant businesses public spaces and vibrant artists.
Walkablility has no emission issues
I have never advocated for the end of using cars, only that people have other options for transportation.