#example of how American suburbs are designed to be car dependent | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lilliankillthisman · 1 year ago

Text

David Friedman has a lot of practical ways to turn government-run systems into better-functioning private market-based systems; they're all genuinely thought-provoking, and some are convincing when you're reading them. They're all ambitious enough that I'm not interesting in nitpicking minor problems, but there are also bigger issues that are genuinely annoying? I complained about his proposed litigation-based solution to regulating pollution here; there are three others I wanted to complain about. Discussion below the cut.

Chapter 16 starts with the claim that Friedman has solved the problem of mass transit; he has not.This is, I think, the only utopian bit of the book - a system that's proposed as a solution because it would be good if things worked this way. He wants networks of stops for decentralised carpooling from suburbs to the city centre, where people pay driving commuters to take them further in and get off at a later stop nearer to where they're going. This supposedly gets us cars carrying 4 people in, at which point they're as efficient as public transport (kinda true!). This idea is so bad it's unworkable even if you manage it with an app instead of the 1970s kludge Friedman comes up with. No, making commuters regularly stop along the way won't reduce congestion; that's almost as bad as adding more cars. No, people won't get efficiently to where they're going just because they're all heading into town. No, people won't give up the freedom of their own vehicles and timings to avoid congestion (they already don't! we know that!). No, people won't become taxi drivers on their way to their office jobs for spare cash (they have that option today, but there are very few uber drivers who do it casually as a small part of their working day). Annoyingly, Friedman claims that the current existence of rideshare apps proves his idea was prophetic; he fails to realise the total difference between paying a dedicated driver to get you to a destination (a service that existed in 1974) and paying to get in someone's car on their own commute (a service that barely exists today). It's one of the few bits of the book that feels like someone proudly detailing the solution to a problem that they don't understand at all.

Chapter 26 outlines Friedman's vision of a decentralised, market-driven system of justice, where law, the courts, and enforcement are all produced on the private market and idealised by systems of demand and supply. He goes into futher detail later in the book, and I do want to stress that I was impressed by his ideas. I just do not see how his system of bought-and-paid-for, insurance-style law enforcement can ever protect a financial dependent. It seems perfectly designed to protect domestic abusers and offer no hope of escape for children or spouses where one member of the family is the breadwinner and pays for the household's legal protections. And I'm sure that in 1974 Friedman would have said, well, we aren't saying it's perfect, just better than the current system, and the American justice system doesn't protect those people anyway. But you can imagine a community- or state-run justice system helping domestic abuse or child abuse victims, or being improved (as has happened to an extent over the last 40 years) in the ways they act on those crimes. You can't imagine Friedman's system changing in those ways; the ineffectiveness is intrinsic. He also doesn't note that objection; it doesn't seem to have occurred to him over 40 years, which feels like a huge blind spot or an admission that he doesn't have an answer.

Chapter 19 is... odd. It's Friedman explaining how the free market could have funded the Apollo program, taking as read that the Apollo program was a good and worthy cause. This is... kind of cute? He's clearly really keen on going to the moon; he would have a much better argument if he were to point at the Apollo program as an example of government-driven waste defying the demands of the market and taking money from the common man for the vanity of politicians. As it is, his ideas seem... childish. He points to the 400 million-person audience for Neil Armstrong's first steps as proof that huge funding could be gleaned from pay-per-view TV and advertising, plucking a ridiculous figure of 20 hours per person at 25 cents an hour from thin air (how would that funding be provided up front beforehand? how would that compare to every other option TV networks have for attracting viewers? how are you charging by the watcher instead of by the TV set, when in most countries multiple families would gather by a single TV screen? where did 20 hours come from anyway?). He says companies would love to fund the program as an advertising scheme; how would they love to be indelibly associated with the deaths of the Apollo 1 flight crew? He says the program would be done more safely and more slowly without the constant government pressure to win the space race; I think asking for speculative capital investment for a one-off event 20 years in advance instead of 10 years would probably kill off the whole project altogether. He says that companies could advertise with billboards on the moon; well, we have privatised space flight now, and we see absolutely nothing like that.

Complaints finished; onto something else.

#i'm probably going to read animorphs 20-22 now #but first i'm going for a walk #the machinery of freedom

1 note · View note

postcards-from-the-future · 5 years ago

Text

The Ecological Impacts of Poor Urban Planning and Urban Sprawl

Blog Post #1

The need for sustainable infrastructure in our growing societies is an important issue of our time. In North America a pressing matter in regards to building and planning urban living spaces is poor urban planning and rampant urban sprawl.

Along with negative effects on the psyche, health, and mental well-being of the people who inhabit these poorly designed spaces there is also ecological and environment devastation as a direct result of such practices.

Urban planning is the act of planning the structure of a city which includes its policies, infrastructure, neighbourhoods, building codes, and regulations.

Urban sprawl is the uncontrolled expansion of urban areas. The Oxford Dictionary gives the detailed definition of urban sprawl as “the disorganized and unattractive expansion of an urban or industrial area into the adjoining countryside.”

It can be logically assumed given these definitions that urban sprawl is a direct result of poor or failed urban planning seeing as good city planning makes for intelligently designed and cohesive living spaces that do not unnecessarily encroach upon the surrounding landscapes.

To begin, urban sprawl affects the areas it directly encroaches upon. It overtakes forests, wooded meadows, farmland, and prairies that surround an existing city. Old growth forests, fields, and meadows are habitats with thriving ecosystems. These areas are disrupted for development, and as a result the habitants such as insects, birds, and animals are forced to relocated and plants and trees are cleared. Nearby water sources are polluted by runoff from construction sites and expanded human presence.

Statistically Speaking

According to the Sierra Club more than one million acres of parks, farms, and open spaces are lost to urban sprawl in the United States each year.

In Canada according to a Statistics Canada study urban uses and needs have eaten away more than 7,400 square kilometers of dependable farmland in the past few decades. This is particularly troubling considering that Canada has a very small amount of land that is suitable for food production. Every year there appear to be new development projects that are questionably approved that continue the assault on wildlife habitats for short-term profits.

A recent and local example of this lack of consideration towards habitat preservation is the South Cameron woodlot in Windsor, Ontario that was stripped of its “significant wetland” designation opening it up to urban development by the city’s mayor, Drew Dilkens.

Dilkens personally lobbied Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, to fast-track the destruction of a pristine wildlife habitat and greenspace for luxury residential units that will only consume resources and release carbon emissions.

Windsor is a municipality that only has 8 percent tree cover and a municipal city plan that prioritizes the need for more green space. There is no logic in opening up a green space that has been untouched by urbanization in an urban zone and losing the precious and inimitable benefits that space provides.

Unfortunately this is a scenario that plays out numerous times all over the North American continent year after year, unnecessarily eating away at wildlife habitats and greenspaces.

Who is Affected and Effects Over Time

The main ecological effects of urban sprawl are air pollution, water pollution, unsustainable water consumption, and loss of greenspace and wildlife habitats. The ecological impact of sprawl is devastating and impacts humans as well as the animals that dwell in the once pristine areas.

Sprawl is directly responsible for increased uses of personal vehicles and makes it difficult to get around a city efficiently. This created dependence on vehicles, directly contributes to air pollution, traffic fatalities of both people and animals, as well as poorer human health due to lack of physical mobility. Sprawl shapes life as moving from box to box to box. One’s home is in a box, one’s method of transportation is a box, and one’s destinations are boxes. This removed manner of living allows for citizens to turn a blind eye when city planners and developers begin destruction of yet another plot of land to expand the ever growing and cheap builds.

Over time what was once a city may become a conglomerate of suburbs with no natural reprieve or cohesive and pleasurable way of living, much like the Greater Toronto Area. With more humans there is more waste, and a greater need for landfills. Instead of containing the waste in a dense city and controlling the distribution of waste-producing products and materials sprawl allows for more space to consume and produce waste.

Since everything is connected it is only a matter of time before urban sprawl consumes a natural area once thought to be safe. With the passing years as more and more unchecked and poorly regulated development is approved more and more animals lose their habitats, more bodies of water are polluted and/or depleted faster than they can replenish, and the more the air quality decreases due to massive car use.

Sources:

https://vault.sierraclub.org/sprawl/factsheet.asp

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/12/urban-sprawl-how-cities-grow-change-sustainability-urban-age

https://www.britannica.com/explore/savingearth/urban-sprawl

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2013/02/21/urban_sprawl_is_destroying_ontarios_farmland.html#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20study%20by,what%20once%20was%20mostly%20farmland.&text=At%20the%20same%20time%2C%20urban,size%20of%20Prince%20Edward%20Island.

(https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-biodiversity-doesnt-stop-at-the-city-limits-and-conservation-needs/)

https://www.everythingconnects.org/urban-sprawl.html

#urbansprawl #urbanjungle #urbanism

1 note · View note

and-then-there-were-n0ne · 5 years ago

Text

As machine learning and robotics improve in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of jobs are likely to disappear, disrupting the economies and trade networks of the entire world. The Industrial Revolution created the urban working class, and much of the social and political history of the 20th century revolved around its problems. Similarly, the artificial intelligence revolution might create a new “unworking class,” whose hopes and fears will shape the history of the 21st century.

The social and economic models we have inherited from the previous century are inadequate for dealing with this new era. For example, socialism assumed that the working class was vital for the economy, and socialist thinkers tried to teach the proletariat how to translate its immense economic power into political clout. These teachings might become utterly irrelevant in coming decades, as the masses lose their economic value.

In order to cope with such unprecedented technological and economic disruptions, we probably need completely new models. One that is gaining increasing attention and popularity is universal basic income.

UBI suggests that some institution - most likely a government - will tax the billionaires and corporations controlling the algorithms and robots, and use the money to provide every person with a stipend covering basic needs. The hope is that this will cushion the poor against job loss and economic dislocation, while protecting the rich from populist rage.

[…] Yet the formula of universal basic income suffers from several problems. In particular, it is unclear what “universal” and “basic” mean.

When people speak about universal basic income they usually mean national basic income. For example, both Elon Musk and former President Barack Obama have spoken about the need to consider some kinds of UBI schemes. But when Musk said that “There’s a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income […] due to automation,” and when Obama said that “whether a universal income is the right model […] that’s a debate that we’ll be having over the next 10 or 20 years,” it is unclear who “we” are. The American people? The human race?

Hitherto, all UBI initiatives were strictly national or municipal. In January, Finland began a two-year experiment, providing 2,000 unemployed Finns with $630 a month, irrespective of whether they find work or not. Similar projects are underway in Ontario, Holland and Livorno, Italy. Last year, Switzerland held a referendum on instituting a national basic income scheme, but voters rejected the idea.

In the U.S, Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, proposes to greatly expand the Earned Income Tax Credit program, boosting the income of poor Americans by about $1 trillion. Though the plan does not promise any stipends to the unemployed, it is seen as a first step towards instituting national basic income.

The problem with such national and municipal schemes, however, is that the main victims of automation may not live in Finland, Amsterdam or the U.S. Globalization has made people in one country dependent on markets in other countries, but automatization might unravel large parts of this global trade network with disastrous consequences for the weakest links.

In the 20th century, developing countries made economic progress mainly by exporting raw materials or by selling the cheap labor of their workers and service personnel. Today, millions of Bangladeshis make a living by producing shirts that are sold to customers in the U.S., while people in Bangalore, India, earn their keep answering the complaints of American customers.

Yet with the rise of AI, robots and 3-D printers, cheap labor will become far less important, and demand for raw materials might also drop. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to New York, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon and print it in Manhattan. Zara and Prada stores could be replaced by 3-D printing centers, and some people might even have such printers at home.

Simultaneously, instead of calling customer services in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI representative in the Google Cloud. The newly unemployed workers and call center operators in Dhaka and Bangalore don’t have the education necessary to switch to designing fashionable shirts or writing computer code - so how will they survive?

Under this scenario, the revenue that previously flowed to South Asia will now fill the coffers of a few tech giants in California, leading to huge strain on developing economies. American voters might conceivably agree that taxes paid by Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. be used to give stipends to unemployed coal miners in Pennsylvania and jobless taxi-drivers in New York. However, does anyone think American voters would also agree that part of these taxes should be sent to Bangladesh to cover the basic needs of the unemployed masses there?

Another major difficulty is that there is no accepted definition for “basic” needs. From a purely biological perspective, the only thing a Homo sapiens needs for survival is about 2,500 calories of food per day. Over and above this biological poverty line, every culture in history defined additional basic needs, which change over time.

In Medieval Europe, access to church services was seen as even more important than food, because it took care of your eternal soul rather than of your ephemeral body. In today’s Europe, decent education and health care services are considered basic human needs, and some argue that even access to the internet is now essential for every man, woman and child.

So if in 2050 the United World Government agrees to tax Google, Amazon, Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. in order to provide a basic income for every human being on earth, from Dhaka to Detroit, how will it define “basic”?

For example, will universal basic income cover education? And if so, what would these services include: just reading and writing, or also composing computer code? Just six years of elementary school, or everything up to Ph.D.?

And what about health care? If by 2050 medical advances make it possible to slow down aging processes and significantly extend human lifespans, will the new treatments be available to all 10 billion humans on the planet, or just to a few billionaires? If biotechnology enables parents to “upgrade” their children, would this be considered a basic human need, or would we see humankind splitting into different biological castes, with rich super-humans enjoying abilities that far surpass those of poor Homo sapiens?

Whichever way you choose to define basic human needs, once you provide them to everyone free of charge, they will be taken for granted, and then fierce social competitions and political struggles will focus on non-basic luxuries - be they fancy self-driving cars, access to virtual-reality parks, or enhanced bioengineered bodies. Yet if the unemployed masses command no economic assets, it is hard to see how they could ever hope to obtain such luxuries. Consequently, the gap between the rich (Tencent managers and Google shareholders) and the poor (those dependent on universal basic income) might become bigger and more rigid than ever.

Hence, even if universal basic income means that poor people in 2050 will enjoy much better medical care and education than today, they might still feel that the system is rigged against them, that the government serves only the super-rich, and that the future will be even worse for them and their children.

People usually compare themselves to their more fortunate contemporaries rather than to their ill-fated ancestors. If in 2017 you tell a poor American in an impoverished Detroit neighborhood that she has access to much better health care than her great-grandparents did in the age before antibiotics, it is unlikely to cheer her up. Indeed, such talk will sound terribly smug and condescending. “Why should I compare myself to nineteenth-century peasants?” she might retort. “I want to live like the rich people on television, or at least like the folks in the affluent suburbs.”

Similarly, if in 2050 you tell the useless class that they enjoy better health care than in 2017, it might be very cold comfort to them, because they would be comparing themselves to the upgraded super-humans who dominate the world.

Modern communication systems make such comparisons almost inevitable. A man living in a small village 5,000 years ago measured himself against the other 50 men in the settlement. Compared to them, he probably looked pretty hot. Today, a man living in a small village compares himself to the 50 most gorgeous hunks on the planet, whom he sees everyday on TV screens and giant billboards. Our modern villager is likely to be far less happy with the way he looks. Will universal basic income include plastic surgery for everyone?

Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently, even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before.

If universal basic income is aimed to improve the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed to make people subjectively more satisfied with their lot in order to prevent social discontent, it is likely to fail.

- Yuval Noah Harari, 21 lessons for the 21st century

#yuval noah harari #21 lessons for the 21st century #21 lessons

1 note · View note

sciencespies · 5 years ago

Text

Downsizing the McMansion: Study gauges a sustainable size for future homes

https://sciencespies.com/humans/downsizing-the-mcmansion-study-gauges-a-sustainable-size-for-future-homes/

Downsizing the McMansion: Study gauges a sustainable size for future homes

Credit: New Jersey Institute of Technology

What might homes of the future look like if countries were really committed to meeting global calls for sustainability, such as the recommendations advanced by the Paris Agreement and the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development?

Much wider adoption of smart design features and renewable energy for low- to zero-carbon homes is one place to start—the U.N. estimates households consume 29% of global energy and consequently contribute to 21% of resultant CO2 emissions, which will only rise as global population increases.

However, a new scholarly paper authored at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) assesses another big factor in the needed transformation of our living spaces toward sustainability— the size of our homes.

The paper published in the journal Housing, Theory & Society makes the case for transitioning away from the large, single-family homes that typify suburban sprawl, offering new conceptions for what constitutes a more sustainable and sufficient average home size in high-income countries going forward.

The article surveys more than 75 years of housing history and provides estimates for the optimal spatial dimensions that would align with an “environmentally tenable and globally equitable amount of per-person living area” today. It also spotlights five emerging cases of housing innovation around the world that could serve as models for effectively adopting more space-efficient homes of the future.

“There is no question that if we are serious about embracing our expressed commitments to sustainability, we will in the future need to live more densely and wisely,” said Maurie Cohen, the paper’s author and professor at NJIT’s Department of Humanities. “This will require a complete reversal in our understanding of what it means to enjoy a ‘good life’ and we will need to start with the centerpiece of the ‘American Dream,’ namely the location and scale of our homes.

“The notion of ‘bigger is better’ will need to be supplanted by the question of ‘how much is enough?’ Fortunately, we are beginning to see examples of this process unfolding in some countries around the world, including the United States.”

Reimagining “Sufficient” Size of Sustainable Homes

Cohen’s article explores the concept of “sufficiency limits” for the average contemporary home—or, a rough baseline metric of “enough” living space to meet one’s individual needs while considering various environmental and social factors, such as global resource availability and equitable material usage.

In the paper, Cohen reports that standardized building codes used in the United States and many other countries define minimally “sufficient” home size as 150 square feet for a single individual and 450 square feet for a four-person household.

However, from the standpoint of resource utilization and global equity, the maximally sufficient threshold is more significant.

Based on assessments of global resource availability and so-called total material consumption calculations developed by industrial ecologists and others, Cohen estimates that sustainability and equity considerations require that a home for a single person should be no larger than 215 square feet, and for a four-person family the maximum size should be approximately 860 square feet.

As a striking point of comparison, average home size in the U.S. today is 1,901 square feet—more than twice what could be considered sustainable.

Applying these sufficiency limits in the real world would mean a radical departure from the mindset that is common today in the American homebuilding industry: large cathedral-ceiling foyers, expansive porches, spare bedrooms, extra dining rooms, and a fundamental rethink of the McMansion-style homes that line the cul-de-sacs of the country’s suburbs in general. However, it could spur innovation in the design of more space-efficient homes, a trend gaining popularity particularly among younger generations.

“Lifestyle magazines and websites, television programs, and other media today regularly highlight the benefits of smaller homes,” said Cohen. “One of the most popular contemporary design trends focuses on minimalism and especially Millennials express a desire to live in cosmopolitan urban centers rather than car-dependent suburbs. In some cities, micro-luxury apartments are becoming a fashionable alternative.”

Along with making the critical transition toward greener technologies, Cohen says exploring sufficiency limits in the design of future homes would help to begin aligning infrastructure planning with global sustainability targets, and address two interrelated—and in many ways perplexing—trends in wealthy countries like the U.S. ongoing since the 1950s: home size has been increasing while household size has been declining.

Over the past seven decades, the average size of a newly built single-family home in the country nearly tripled from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,740 square feet in 2015. Meanwhile, the average number of people per household has decreased 24% (3.3 persons to 2.52 persons) due to falling fertility rates and the fading of residential arrangements in which extended families lived under a single roof.

So, what would the average newly built U.S. home look like if architects and the building industry followed the numbers and adopted sufficiency limits?

In the U.S., average floor space per person would need to be reduced from 754 square feet to 215 square feet, which perhaps surprisingly, is roughly comparable to the amount of space available during the baby boom of the 1950s.

While Cohen acknowledges the myriad political, commercial and cultural challenges of imparting such a sufficiency ceiling on current housing practices, he highlights five examples that he asserts point to shifting sensibilities: the tiny-house movement in the United States; the niche market for substantially smaller houses and apartments in the Nordic countries; the construction of accessory dwelling units in west coast cities of North America; the growing popularity of micro-apartments in New York City and San Francisco; and the emergence of co-living/co-working facilities in Europe.

“Downsizing at such a radical scale may seem unrealistic today, but lifestyles are continually in flux and when looking back on our recent practices of spending such vast sums of money on overly large houses and creating vast separations between neighbors, thirty years from now we will in all likelihood be utterly dumbfounded,” said Cohen. “The idea of spending endless hours mindlessly driving around in cars to reach houses with rooms that we rarely use, we can only hope, will become a faint memory.”

Explore further

House size a factor in tackling global climate emergency

More information: Maurie J. Cohen, New Conceptions of Sufficient Home Size in High-Income Countries: Are We Approaching a Sustainable Consumption Transition?, Housing, Theory and Society (2020). DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2020.1722218

Provided by New Jersey Institute of Technology

Citation: Downsizing the McMansion: Study gauges a sustainable size for future homes (2020, March 5) retrieved 5 March 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-03-downsizing-mcmansion-gauges-sustainable-size.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

#Humans

1 note · View note

xtruss · 3 years ago

Text

How the 1970s Oil Crisis Helped Copenhagen Become a Cycling Paradise

Bicycles didn’t always dominate the streets of the Danish capital. It took rising oil prices and a great deal of political will to make significant changes that would last.

— March 14, 2022 | By Adele Peters

Rush hour in Copenhagen is dominated by people on bicycles: Around two-thirds of the city’s residents now bike to school or work instead of driving. That wasn’t an inevitable reality: Bikes were popular in the city early in the 1900s, but by the 1950s, as people got richer and moved to the suburbs, cars had overtaken bikes on roads.

By the 1960s, city planners saw cars as the future and bicycles as outdated. They sketched visions to add new urban highways and take out bike lanes that some thought were a waste of space. But the global oil crisis of 1973—when oil prices quadrupled within a few days—helped push the city in a different direction.

Even before the oil embargo, when Middle Eastern suppliers stopped selling fuel to some countries because of a conflict in Israel, some Copenhageners were beginning to question the wisdom of following the American example of city planning. (At the time, Danish leaders visited American cities to see car-centric design in action; Americans now visit Copenhagen to see the opposite.) A proposed highway that would have paved over lakes in the city sparked protests. A busy street in the center of the city was pedestrianized, though the mayor at the time faced death threats for making the changes.

The oil crisis helped lead to faster changes in the 1970s. Driving was temporarily banned on Sundays because of the shortage of gas. “I remember, as a child, walking in the middle of the highway,” says Klaus Bondam, CEO of the nonprofit Danish Cyclists Federation. A growing environmental movement started talking about bikes as alternative transportation. The city eventually abandoned plans for some major new road projects, pedestrianized more streets, and banned through-traffic in other areas.

Top: Traffic near Højbro Plads, Copenhagen ca. 1964. Bottom: That same street ca. 2011. (Photos: courtesy Torben Liebst/Wiki Commons, Flickr user Heather Cowper)

As Denmark confronted its dependence on foreign fossil fuels—when the oil crisis happened, imported oil covered 80% of its energy needs—it looked for ways to generate electricity and heat differently and to drive less. Danish Cyclists Federation proposed a plan for a citywide bike network, and the city slowly started building new bike lanes.

“Since the ’70s, the city has basically set aside money every year to expand and expand and expand the bicycle infrastructure of Copenhagen,” Bondam says. The changes accelerated further in 2005, when a new mayor was elected on a platform that championed cycling. Bondam was deputy mayor at the time.

“We started some huge investment schemes in more cycling infrastructure,” he says. “But I think more importantly, we moved cycling and cycling culture up on the political agenda.” The city also launched a marketing campaign to encourage more people to bike, with an “I CPH” logo and messaging about how cycling could cut congestion and pollution and help improve quality of life.

Top: Traffic on the Langebro ca. 1972. Bottom: A pedestrian and cyclist bridge built along side the Langebro, ca 2019. (Photos: Kurt Rasmussen/Wiki Commons, olli0815/iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus)

Copenhagen now has 250 miles of bike lanes—with curbs that separate them from car traffic—17 recently built bike bridges, and cycle “superhighways” that let suburban commuters ride into the city without stopping at traffic lights. “If you don’t make those investments, people won’t change the mode of transportation,” Bondam says. “You can paint white lines and stuff like that, it’s fine to begin with, but you should move it to the next level, where you actually build proper, segregated infrastructure.”

Even the most bike-friendly American cities don’t look like this. But it’s possible that the current spike in gas prices could help accelerate the changes that have started to happen in the U.S. over the last decade.

Copenhagen is unique in some ways. It’s compact, so biking anywhere doesn’t take long. It’s flat—although so is Silicon Valley south of San Francisco, with much better weather, and few people commute by bike there. Denmark never had a car-manufacturing industry lobbying for car-friendly roads (neighboring Sweden, home to Volvo and Saab, developed fairly differently.) Denmark also taxes cars heavily, making bikes even more attractive.

Still, Bondam says, change is possible anywhere. Take the example of Paris, where an influx of new bike lanes has quickly filled the streets with cyclists and made it look a lot more like Copenhagen. The full transformation takes time, he says.

“I think it’s important to understand that there’s no quick fix in this. It is an ongoing development that really needs political attention. It needs a public dialogue,” says Bondam. “It needs also courageous politicians sometimes that say okay, we’ll remove 100 parking spaces. Trust me, having been a politician, I know that it’s not an easy thing to do. I mean, people hate you. They literally hate you. But the funny thing is that, when you have done the changes, they kind of understand that it was probably the right thing to do. Because they suddenly see, it’s more quiet now. There isn’t as much air pollution. It’s actually safe for our children.”

— Fast Company

0 notes

orbemnews · 4 years ago

Link

The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome HEIDELBERG, Germany — Eckart Würzner, a mayor on a mission to make his city emission free, is not terribly impressed by promises from General Motors, Ford and other big automakers to swear off fossil fuels. Not that Mr. Würzner, the mayor of Heidelberg, is against electric cars. The postcard-perfect city, in southern Germany, gives residents who buy a battery-powered vehicle a bonus of up to 1,000 euros, or $1,200. They get another €1,000 if they install a charging station. But electric cars are low on the list of tools that Mr. Würzner is using to try to cut Heidelberg’s impact on the climate, an effort that has given the city, home to Germany’s oldest university and an 800-year-old castle ruin, a reputation as a pioneer in environmentally conscious urban planning. Mr. Würzner’s goal is to reduce dependence on cars, no matter where they get their juice. Heidelberg is buying a fleet of hydrogen-powered buses, building a network of bicycle “superhighways” to the suburbs and designing neighborhoods to discourage all vehicles and encourage walking. Residents who give up their cars get to ride public transportation free for a year. “If you need a car, use car sharing,” Mr. Würzner said in an interview at Heidelberg’s Baroque-style City Hall, which was nearly deserted because of the pandemic. “If you can’t use car sharing because you’re living too far outside and there is no mass transportation, then use the car, but just to the train station and not to downtown.” Heidelberg is at the forefront of a movement that is probably strongest in Europe but has a presence in plenty of communities around the world, including American cities like Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore. The pandemic has given many citizens a taste of what densely packed urban areas would be like without so much traffic, and they like it. Vows of fossil fuel abstinence by carmakers in the last month, including G.M., Ford Motor and Jaguar Land Rover, are a tacit admission that they will no longer be welcome in cities at all unless they radically clean up their acts. Even then, the tide of history may be against them, as urban planners try to free up space now occupied by vehicles. Dozens of cities in Europe, including Rome, London and Paris, plan to limit center city traffic to emission-free vehicles during the next decade. Some, like Stockholm and Stuttgart, the German home of Mercedes-Benz, already ban older diesel vehicles. National governments are adding to the pressure. Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Slovenia say they will ban sales of internal combustion cars after 2030. Britain and Denmark say they will do so in 2035, allowing only hybrids after 2030, and Spain and France in 2040. Such declarations of intent “certainly push vehicle manufacturers,” said Sandra Wappelhorst, a senior researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation in Berlin who tracks plans by companies and governments to phase out internal combustion. Heidelberg, a city of 160,000 people on the Neckar River, which was threatening to overflow its banks this month after unusually heavy rains, provides a glimpse of how an automobile-light city of the future may look. Heidelberg is one of only six cities in Europe considered “innovators” by C40 Cities, an organization that promotes climate-friendly urban policies and whose chairman is Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. (The others are Oslo, Copenhagen, Venice, and Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.) Among the city’s measures to make cars irrelevant are building bridges that would allow cyclists to bypass congested areas or cross the Neckar without having to compete for road space with motor vehicles. Buildings are also important. The city has cut energy consumption of schools and other city buildings by 50 percent in the last decade, no small feat when many of the structures are hundreds of years old. Battery-powered vehicles don’t pollute the air, but they take up just as much space as gasoline models. Mr. Würzner complains that Heidelberg still suffers rush-hour traffic jams, even though only about 20 percent of residents get around by car. The rest walk, bicycle or take the electric buses that ply the narrow, cobbled streets of the city’s old quarter. “Commuters are the main problem we haven’t solved yet,” Mr. Würzner said. Traffic was heavy on a recent weekday, pandemic notwithstanding. Electric cars are also expensive. At current prices, they are out of the reach of lower-income residents. Political leaders need to offer affordable alternatives like public transportation or bicycle routes, Ms. Wappelhorst of the Council on Clean Transportation said. “It’s not only about cars in the end,” she said. “You need the whole package.” Heidelberg’s mile-long pedestrian zone, usually thronged with tourists but nearly empty recently because of the pandemic, is said to be Germany’s longest. But the best showcase for the city’s emission-free ambitions is built atop a former rail freight yard on the edge of town. In 2009 work began on the Bahnstadt, or Rail City. The vacant parcel, which had to be cleared of three unexploded bombs from World War II, offered planners a blank slate with which to create a climate-neutral neighborhood. The modern apartment buildings, architecturally the opposite of Heidelberg’s Baroque city center, are so well insulated that they require almost no energy to heat. What warmth they do require comes from a plant just outside the neighborhood that burns waste wood. Cars are not banned from the Bahnstadt, but there is almost no traffic. Most streets are dead ends. Apartment buildings are arranged around generous courtyards with playgrounds and connected by walkways. The one street that cuts through the triangular neighborhood has a speed limit of 30 kilometers an hour, or less than 20 miles per hour. Bicycles have the right of way. The Bahnstadt, with 5,600 residents and still growing, has its own kindergarten and elementary school, a community center, two supermarkets, several bakeries and cafes, two bicycle shops, and six car-sharing stations, each with two electric vehicles. Heidelberg’s main train station and a tram stop are a short walk away, and a bicycle path follows the route of an old rail line to the city center. There are also jobs. The Bahnstadt has several large office buildings whose tenants include the German subsidiary of Reckitt Benckiser, the maker of consumer products like Clearasil and Woolite. “The idea is to get back to the classic early city, where living and working are closely intertwined,” said Ralf Bermich, head of Heidelberg’s Office for Environmental Protection. Dieter Bartmann, who in 2012 was one of the first people to move into the Bahnstadt, owns a car but figures he drove it about 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, in January, mostly to the supermarket to stock up on staples that were too bulky to carry on his bicycle. Mr. Bartmann, a former manager at SAP, the software company whose headquarters are in nearby Walldorf, was sitting on a bench along a promenade that borders one side of the Bahnstadt. The area is blocked to motorized traffic and looks out on farmland. Runners, cyclists and people on in-line skates glided by. It looked idyllic on a sunny winter day, but Mr. Bartmann, former chairman of the Bahnstadt residents’ association, said there were still things that could be improved. He would like to do more to keep cars out, for example by blocking off the one through street. Some buildings have underground garages, but these were not built with electric cars in mind and do not accommodate charging points easily. The paved promenade is not wide enough, Mr. Bartmann said, leading to conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians. But he added: “This is high-level complaining. You have to be realistic.” Mr. Würzner, the mayor, said his goal was to make Heidelberg climate neutral by 2030, an ambitious target. The city plans to generate its own wind and solar power and is installing a hydrogen filling station for a fleet of 42 buses powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The city wanted to order hundreds of the buses, but Mr. Würzner complained that the bus makers had been slow to respond to demand for emission-free transportation. “We can’t get enough,” he said. (Daimler, which makes buses in Neu-Ulm, about two and a half hours from Heidelberg, does not yet sell a city bus powered solely by hydrogen.) Mr. Würzner, who drives an experimental hydrogen-powered Mercedes, acknowledged that not every city could afford to do all the things that had made Heidelberg a showcase for environmentally friendly planning. The University of Heidelberg, one of Germany’s most prestigious universities, has spawned numerous research institutes that provide a solid tax base. The residents tend to be well educated and affluent. “It’s true the city is in a quite good financial situation,” Mr. Würzner said. But he said he often heard from mayors in Europe, the United States and Asia who wanted to emulate Heidelberg’s strategy. “We all know we have to go in this direction,” he said. “It’s just a question of how fast.” Source link Orbem News #Cars #City

0 notes

shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

Text

The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone

Last summer, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, co-bylined an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal promising to “protect America’s suburbs," describing how they reversed policies that would allow for the creation of denser living structures in areas zoned only for single-family homes.

"America’s suburbs are a shining example of the American Dream, where people can live in their own homes, in safe, pleasant neighborhoods," they wrote.

But the suburbs, in the sense of the idyllic American pastoral Trump and Carson referenced, have been changing for some time—not necessarily the physical homes, stores, roads, and offices that populate them, but the people who live there, along with their needs and desires. Previous mainstays of suburban life are now myths: that the majority of people own their homes; that the suburbs are havens for the middle class; or that the bulk of people are young families who value privacy over urban amenities like communal spaces, walkability, and mixed-use properties.

This mismatch has led to a phenomenon called “suburban retrofitting,” as documented by June Williamson, an associate professor of architecture at the City College of New York, and Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They have a new book out this week: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges.

Since the 1990s, Williamson and Dunham-Jones have been watching the suburbs evolve. They have found that much the suburban sprawl of the 20th century was built to serve a very different population than the one that exists now, and so preserving what the suburbs once were doesn't make sense.

Their book describes 32 recent instances in which suburban structures have been transformed into something new. Many of the cases in Williamson and Dunham-Jones first book from 2011 on the same topic were focused on underused parking lots being transformed into mixed-use spaces. But in this new book, the retrofitting projects have become more ambitious, as cities and towns turn old box stores, malls, motels, or office parks into places for people to live, work, eat, play, exercise, go to the doctor, or even watch Mexican wrestling.

They have found that when the suburbs are retrofitted, they can take on an astonishing array of modern issues: car dependency, public health, supporting aging people, helping people compete for jobs, creating water and energy resilience, and helping with social equity and justice.

Motherboard talked with Williamson and Dunham-Jones about why and how we should retrofit the suburbs, and whether or not the COVID-19 has made the suburbs appealing again, or instead accelerated the desire to retrofit the burbs.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Motherboard: How do you define the suburbs—a slippery term with no concrete definition? You write in the book that you define something as suburban based on its “suburban form," not necessarily on location or city lines—what do you mean by that? June Williamson: We're architects and urban designers and so we are focused on the built environment. That means that when we're looking at places, generally, that have been built out in the second half of the 20th century to be car dependent, not walkable, and have comparatively lower density. Ellen Dunham-Jones: Similarly, you can look at the street networks. If you've got a grid, more or less, with small, walkable-sized blocks, that's urban form. If you have a highway leading off into cul de sacs, that's suburban form, which is a more treelike kind of pattern. JW: That kind of development certainly characterizes most of the peripheral areas around the older urban cores in Northern American cities. But it can also be found within municipal boundaries of cities. We advocate for an erosion of oppositional thinking that you're either in the city or the suburbs. When you look at a larger metropolitan area, suburban form can also be found near the center in need of retrofitting.

Watch more from VICE:

You argue that many of these suburban forms are obsolete today because they don't fit the needs of the people who live there now. Can you walk me through some of the major demographic changes that have led to these suburban forms becoming obsolete? EDJ: One of the biggest shifts is that the U.S. now is a majority of one to two person households. And yet, the majority of land within regional urban boundaries is zoned for single-family houses. That already is something of a mismatch.

The expectation going forward is that something like 80 percent of new households that will form over the next 15 years will be these one to two person households. A lot of them would prefer an apartment or a condo—smaller units.

Plus you have the aging of the society, that's the other really big piece. Especially in the suburbs, a lot of elderly people loved their single-family house while they were raising the kids. But now that they're empty nesters and retiring, it's kind of lonely. They want to stay in their community with doctors and friends nearby. But a lot of them are looking for, frankly, a more urban lifestyle.

It's pretty interesting how the desires of both the younger millennials, Gen Z, and a lot of those aging boomers are converging on an interest in more walkable, mixed-use, compact urban places out in the burbs.

JW: Commuting has also been transformed dramatically over the past decade or so, too. The notion that people live in the suburbs and work in the cities just isn't true anymore.

EDJ: We tend to think that the jobs are downtown. Since the 1980s, the majority of jobs have been more than three miles from the central business district. In places like Atlanta, where I live, it's closer to 90 percent of jobs are way outside. The central business district often has high rises and so it's really visible, but we’re really seeing something called job sprawl. I certainly see in Atlanta, we have a lot of reverse commuters in that situation.

So when you talk about retrofitting, you mean finding and altering underused or abandoned suburban buildings to better accommodate the demographics and desires of the people who live there now? JW: Absolutely. And in most of the cases we've studied, this is happening because the built places have failed or are struggling to some degree.

The dead and dying malls, the vacated office parks, the ghost box stores left behind. Rather than bring back the same thing, this is a tremendous opportunity.

It can be as simple as re-inhabiting, or an adaptive reuse—fixing up the building, or changing the parking lot for something that's better suited to the times. Taking something that was commercial and turning it into housing.

It can also involve re-greening because so much of the suburbanization processes disrupted the regional ecologies and stormwater flow systems. Then it's an opportunity for wider ranging benefits. There could be places of recreation or social exchange having small plazas and program parks. And then there is redevelopment. Taking a low density, car-dependent use-separated or mono-use place and mixing it up and investing in it.

I was really struck by the statistics in the book about how many parking spaces there are per household in certain cities. Like how there are 1.97 cars per U.S. household, but in Des Moines, Iowa, there are 19 parking spaces per household. In Jackson, Wyoming, there are 27. These all seem like really obvious places to re-think about how we're using land. JW: These choices around parking we've made have been codified through regulations and naturalized as normal.

EDJ: We really have made it almost a right to park as opposed to a right to housing. Cars have much more protection than people do.

There are these aging properties for the most part; a lot of them have become obsolete and those are places to retrofit. But sometimes [properties] are thriving. They're doing well. Yet they still look at their parking lot as this underperforming asphalt. It's not doing enough of the job. Sometimes there's a mall that is doing well, and it makes more sense now to build a parking deck and build housing and bring in offices and make more mixed use.

All of these: the parking lots, the dead space, the vacant spaces. Those are the opportunities for the suburbs to finally address really urgent challenges of equity, climate change, and health.

You’ve been documenting retrofitting since 2011, when your first book came out, and now this second book includes even more case studies. Is the retrofitting phenomenon increasing, or does it need a push? EDJ: If you go into any architecture school or city planning school's library, there are tons of books on downtowns. There's remarkably little written about the suburbs or suburbia. Most of what is there are sort of condemning them as wasteful and ecological boring places.

We're academics, we're documenting this stuff, but we're not exactly neutral. We are advocates. We're advocates within our disciplines to to sort of say, hey, we really need to bring design to the suburbs

There's so much opportunity. It is where most Americans live. We saw a lot of these projects happening and noticed that none of the architecture magazines would cover them because they weren't cool looking enough.

And yet this stuff was happening. We thought it was important both to say it's important that the suburbs do retrofit and become more sustainable and resilient in just places. But it's also really important to recognize this is actually happening. And that this should happen even more. A lot of communities are afraid to do something unless they know that some other community has already done it.

A former Big Lots box store and parking lot converted into the Collinwood Recreation Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo courtesy of City Architecture.

You discuss the many social challenges retrofitting can take on. Some are more obvious like reducing dependency on cars or becoming more environmentally friendly. But there are some less intuitive ways retrofitting can impact our lives, like improving public health. JW: One of the observations in public health is that there are chronic diseases of our time in developed countries, and certainly in Northern America, related to obesity and the higher incidences of diabetes, and so on.

One way to address those kinds of diseases is simple physical activity, yet we've designed physical activity out of our environments. To design it back in is a kind of low cost way of getting people to move their bodies.

A lot of literature looks at how access to nature, being able to have a view of trees, but also being able to socialize with others is really important. That links back to the demographic prevalence of one and two person households. That leads to loneliness. How can our physical environments create places—not force people to be physically active or to socialize in any particular ways—but to support the possibility?

Can you explain one specific facet of intentionally designed well-being called the "third place?" JW: This is a sociological concept. The "first place" is home and then the "second place" is work. The third place is is a little harder to define

You might know it as the coffee shop, barbershop, or pub—so it might be a privately owned place, a place of business. It's where one habitually gathers with others, forms friendships, and is engaging in social life. These are the places that we can design into suburbs as a way to support the overall social body.

EDJ: The suburbs largely sold themselves on the value of the terrific private realm that they present. The suburbs emphasize privacy. As these demographics are changing, there's more and more people recognizing, "I'm lonely. I would like a little bit more of a public realm."

If your public realm is just a commercial corridor full of strip malls and parking lots, there's not much opportunity.

What we see happening are both the incorporation of the third places, but also small programmed parks, little town greens that have places for yoga classes, farmers' markets, concerts, movie nights, and those kinds of activities that don't force people to talk to one another, but at least enable the building of community.

The atrium at Bell Works, formerly Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. Photos by Belma Fishta, 2018.

You also write how retrofitting the suburbs can be a tool for social equity, or minority community building—how does that work? JW: When thinking about social equity, it's about how people use their social relationships in their social network in order to get connected to opportunity. It really is worth a lot. And it’s one of the reasons we need to challenge the exclusionary practices that have been codified in suburban jurisdictions for decades now. And the coarse sorting that we find in suburbs.

Some of the ways to break out of that is in older retail properties, the rent might be less. There's an opportunity for networks of immigrant groups with social and business relationships to form businesses, bring people in, and enliven a place.

There is a number of examples of vanilla shopping malls that had seen better days that were dead and dying. They have been reinhabited and revitalized by reflecting the changing demographics of the neighboring areas.

One example is Grand Plaza in Fort Worth, what has been rebranded as a Latino mall. One of the large several story department stores was broken up into hundreds of stalls for very small businesses, like a mercato that you might find in Central America or Mexico. The central atrium space in the mall now hosts Mexican wrestling and other kinds of themed events that reflect the culture of the dominant ethnoburb demographics surrounding it.

These places can also become flash points in political movements. If you're in the suburbs and you want to gather to have a peaceful protest, where do you go? One of the places you might go is the mall parking lot or along an arterial boulevard.

A lucha libre professional wrestling match at La Gran Plaza de Fort Worth in June 2018. Photo courtesy of Boxer Retail.

What is there still left to do when it comes to retrofitting the suburbs with social equity in mind? EDJ: One of the other myths about suburbia is that the suburbs are middle class. Well, the middle class has been shrinking—we all know that. What we also see is that the suburbanization of poverty has really been tremendous. And yet it's relatively invisible.

Poverty remains most highly concentrated in our cities. But there's actually more Americans living in poverty out in the suburbs.

We draw attention to some of the efforts that have been made. Sadly, we don't yet see nearly enough examples of retrofitting that are really addressing the problem.

There have been some cases of aging garden apartments that are the housing of last resort for a lot of very, very poor people.

Those are just kind of aging out. In some cases, they're being redeveloped into more expensive fancy apartments. We need a lot more attention to preserving and restoring a lot of those. It's not solving a lot of ecological problems. These places are very auto dependent. But there's such desperate need for more affordable housing out in the burbs.

JW: I don't think we can emphasize enough that there are people in very precarious conditions across the metropolitan landscapes of North America, and that retrofitting is a way by increasing the mix and introducing supportive housing and other kinds of support services in places where people aren't marooned if their car breaks down and so forth. It’s an important factor in this conversation. It's not something that can be isolated as only a city or urban problem.

Remaking these garden complexes or old motels, if you're going to add transit, make sure there's access for lower income people, and also younger people who might be on the beginning stages of their kind of lifelong earning trajectory. They should be saving money and shouldn't have all of their income poured into housing and supporting a vehicle.

There were a couple other case studies from the book I wanted to bring up. For example, I did not know that Bell Labs had been retrofitted! JW: That's a super interesting retrofit. Bell Labs is a storied mid-century modern research and development campus designed by Århus Saarinen, a famous architect who unfortunately died right near its completion.

All sorts of things were invented there: transistors and technologies that led to cell phones. But it lay vacant for many years.

It's in an affluent exurb in New Jersey, and the municipality hoped to tear it all down and develop 50 or so McMansions there

But the Preservation Society and other groups rallied and a developer got interested, and now it's become like a vertical downtown. It has a quarter-mile long atrium and dozens of businesses located on the ground floor. They have a farmer's market, yoga, a hairdresser, a Montessori school, a branch of the local public library, and fireworks on the Fourth of July. It's called Bell Works.

This kind of development concept is being repeated in another former AT&T property outside Chicago, so we'll see how that goes.

EDJ: There's well over 150 office parks that are now being urbanized in some way.

The atrium at Bell Works, formerly Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. Photos by Belma Fishta, 2018.

Bell Works is an example of mixing the uses of a space that used to be just offices, and where the assumption was that scientists would have epiphanies if they were isolated in their office looking at a pastoral landscape. Now, we tend to think of innovation as occurring in much more urban places, and it's the chance encounters that trigger innovation.

It's also being driven because employers recognize that the younger workers do not want to work in a cubicle in an office park. They do not want to work in a place that is only "work."

Another great example is the old box store that became a recreation center. JW: Yes, in this case it was Big Lots in a relatively low-income neighborhood on the periphery of Cleveland that has been transformed into a recreational center.

It now has a running track through it, a pool, some outdoor recreational spaces, and it’s yards from the lake there, too.

There are opportunities to take these dead retail boxes all across the country—and there are thousands of them—and rethink not only the building itself, but the entire property and parking lots to support health, wellness, day care clinics, clinics for routine health care, libraries, and other kinds of sharing services.

A former Big Lots box store and parking lot converted into the Collinwood Recreation Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo courtesy of City Architecture.

Sometimes it's not about redeveloping these spaces, but about regreening them. Can you give an example of that kind of project? JW: Back in the 19th century, Meriden, Connecticut lost all of its industrial use and job space, and so by the middle of the 20th century, a suburban, enclosed shopping mall had been built in the middle of downtown over in creek, and it failed miserably.

Every time there was a big storm event, the creek would flood and cause millions of dollars of damage to all the neighboring businesses and the town had become increasingly lower-income.

Formerly a mall and parking lot, Meriden Green, CT, now has relocated subsidized housing, and green infrastructure including a daylit brook and stormwater park. Photos courtesy of Milone & MacBroom, Inc.

What happened here was an incredible greening retrofit where the mall was demolished, the creek that had been put into concrete below ground was opened back up to the air. The ground was regraded—that's a technical term, but basically the surface of the ground was made lower.

The whole property was turned into a park, which is a stormwater park. The next time there's a big storm event, the park becomes like a big bathtub and water will drain there and eventually percolate into the soil and not cause all of the damages that it had in previous cycles.

There's this beautiful amenity and then around it, lots of new housing is being built that then has the park amenity. There's a train station right there that's been rebuilt with increased service through central Connecticut. It has all of these kinds of connected benefits around taking away development.

Last summer, the New York Times wrote that "New Yorkers Are Fleeing to the Suburbs" because of the pandemic. There's been this narrative that people who live in urban areas are moving back to the suburbs—and they suddenly want the things that were previously obsolete. Do you think that's true, and would it put a stall on these kinds of retrofitting projects? JW: Broadly, what we've seen in this past year is an intensification, or an acceleration, of some of the trends that were happening already. There was already the redistributing of populations to some of those locations, especially in metro areas like New York, which are so insanely expensive. If you could find something that was New York-like in New Jersey or Westchester or Long Island, it would make sense that those places might be attractive to people.

What we're seeing right now, I think in New York certainly, is people who'd been thinking about this acting on it. But where are they moving in the suburbs? They’re not rejecting the urban lifestyle altogether. They're being drawn to already urbanizing locations in the suburbs.

It's not a complete rejection of one for the other, but it's finding like for like. Still, the evidence is mostly anecdotal at this point. Time will tell.

I think it's also understood that developers who are planning new projects in these suburban locations are looking to make mixed-use places, and are looking to add different housing types in their suburban projects.

EDJ: In the long run a lot of those suburbs that those folks are moving to, if they're going to retain those households, they're going to have to start providing more of the urban amenities.

I'm certainly seeing around Atlanta as one example, a lot more communities changing their zoning to allow for access to accessory dwelling units, to allow for what’s been called the "missing middle"—duplexes, quadplexes, townhouses—in existing neighborhoods with suburban neighborhoods that were single family [only]. Now they're allowing that densification.

Those regulatory changes have happened just in the last eight months. There's been a surge of that. And it's very much in response to recognizing that there is the market, the demand. People want these more urban lifestyles, even if they are choosing to move to the burbs. A lot of people who have isolated themselves might still be craving places to be able to gather safely. And so it could accelerate the retrofitting of suburbia.

Follow Shayla Love on Twitter.

The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

0 notes

christineharrington1994 · 5 years ago

Text

lincoln heritage insurance reviews

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :insure4car.xyz

lincoln heritage insurance reviews

lincoln heritage insurance reviews Allstate A company that received a great rating overall, it made no mention of an auto policy on J.D. Power s 2018 study on the automobile purchasing experience. In fact, if you buy a home and have a large insurance claim, you won t be able to take action against its homeowners or flood insurance, it s likely we ll see an increase in claims on claims. The company will also continue to be an easy payment provider for any of its customers. Progressive Progressive is a different company from many other insurers on this list, it s an insurance company that can serve as a financial security partner to your policy. This means that the company pays the claims that first arrive on your behalf, which will give them leverage in the long term. If you need to file a claim through the company s claims branch, you may be able to take the steps with the company to prevent other companies from taking advantage of you. Geico The company has been. lincoln heritage insurance reviews are the best thing about the job. The job is to maintain a foundation of integrity, with solid customers and a good track record. The first step in this process is to do your research into the insurance companies you’re going to work with. You will likely see a variety of insurance companies on the list. These insurance companies are going to be based out of the top 25 insurers in the country. While this won’t necessarily make you feel safe while getting a quote, it can help with determining what company is likely to work at that same place for you. A few insurance companies specialize in this type of business. These insurance companies specialize in getting good and cheap car insurance for low-income residents of Illinois. As an example, there are some companies who specialize in this. These are looking at people’s driving records, using outdated driving record studies to identify drivers with lax driving habits, and using more than the necessary number of hours as a tool for determining your rate.. lincoln heritage insurance reviews, and we give you a list of the top six insurers in Lincoln County, including rates. Your home insurance quotes are always free. The best home insurance company will depend on the coverage you choose with them. The more coverage you choose, the higher the premiums are going to be. A standard home insurance policy does not include additional living expenses, nor does it cover damages caused by theft or fire. These extra protection mechanisms protect your family. There are several different types of home insurance policies. There is coverage for damage caused by a fire, flood, vandalism, or other covered event. There is also coverage for personal belongings that are damaged by theft, fire, or flooding. Your premium will increase once you’ve determined your additional cover. One of the biggest perks to owning your home is the fact that you have peace of mind knowing that your homeowners policy will be taken care of should any unexpected happen. Most home insurance policies are designed to cover your belongings. Some home insurance policies will include personal.

Lincoln Heritage Burial Insurance Review

Lincoln Heritage Burial Insurance Review: One of the top reasons why I would buy an insurance cover is the price. It is not at the same price as other car insurance. If I want life insurance, my insurance need to be a large priority. But Lincoln Heritage is one of the best insurance companies. That is why I’m going to switch to Lincoln Heritage because of their customer service. Is American Car Insurers an Insurer? Our independent agents have the freedom to choose from many different insurance companies, saving you money and providing you with the most comprehensive insurance. You can compare quotes, purchase insurance online or ask your agent directly. If you are a new client now, you can use our quote tool to find the best rates from different insurance companies. If you’d like another quote, you can call our office at . For the longest stay-at-home option, you should consider comparing the best auto insurance quotes for Lincoln Heritage. We are happy to help.

Lincoln Heritage life insurance rates

Lincoln Heritage life insurance rates. Enter your ZIP code and tell us what you’d like covered so it will be available when necessary. This is insurance we are going to be talking about right now but can’t say a lot of specific details about this policy that is. If you are going to be receiving a premium from Lincoln Heritage for your final life insurance benefit or a policy, there are many other different options available right from their website. They have two different rates on life insurance for children and adults in their child’s form. In that case, then you and your child can call them for any questions they have and will receive the best coverage for your needs. This policy would not cover the parents or the insured at any time and is for life and is a final expense insurance for infants up to age 25. This does not include a life insurance product on children that is still in a physical line to die. This is also the best time to look into it, it is the same reason as.

Who is Burial Insurance Best for?

Who is Burial Insurance Best for? Buried in the same article, there is a common misconception about what is the only acceptable policy for health insurance: Buried in the same article, there is a common misconception about what is the only acceptable policy for health insurance: Buried in the same article, there is a common misconception about what is the only acceptable policy for health insurance: Insurers typically look at the following things when determining a Burial Insurance quote: Buried in the same article, a different option may still be the cost of Buried in the same article. There is absolutely a big difference between the two, especially with the $3,000,000 or more,000 “Buried in the same article, on the other hand, in terms of coverage amount.” Buried in the same article, there is a different option may still be the cost of Buried in the same article. There is absolutely a big difference between the two, especially with the $3,000,000 or more.

Wide coverage and payouts within a day on funeral insurance

Wide coverage and payouts within a day on funeral insurance in states that didn t go it yet. No money if you are in the US. But they are all on the $500,000,000 that the death benefit will make if your loved one was terminally ill. I m a former insurance agent and banker turned consumer advocate. My priority is to help educate individuals and families about the different types of insurance they need, and assist them in finding the best place to get it. Expert Insurance Reviews has one simple mission – to help consumers learn about insurance and get free insurance quotes online. We aim to be your first stop for insurance questions and to save you money on your insurance with our free policy quotes from the trustworthy companies in our nationwide network of insurance providers. We are a full service independent insurance agency that represents an extensive selection of insurance companies in California to help consumers find the perfect one for their situation and budget. We will work with all insurance providers to ensure that our experienced team will meet and discuss your needs and budget. With our extensive selection.

Is Lincoln Heritage Life Insurance Right For You?

Is Lincoln Heritage Life Insurance Right For You? From Life - Units to Insurance Companies and Unemployment Insurance - Life Insurance Companies. If you choose to stay on life insurance and are not happy with your life insurance in the past, let us review your current health insurance and our life insurance options here at Lincoln Heritage, can help you get a quote for the best coverage in Lincoln for free. It is important to consider the quality of the service that I have been receiving from your company. As a company that we are excited to have in operation throughout many years, I have received my insurance from Lincoln Heritage. From the day I began serving the Chicago area, in 1931, my family history has been passed on to other Lincoln Heritage insurance companies. My staff has over 100 years of combined experience and have helped my family of insurance with providing coverage in the Chicago area, and the surrounding suburbs. We know what to expect.

How Much Burial Insurance Coverage Do You Need?

How Much Burial Insurance Coverage Do You Need? There is no single answer to the question of whether you should buy funeral insurance coverage. The key here is to have a solid understanding of the types of burial life insurance, as well as the different types of burial life insurance, so you can be certain that your loved ones will not suffer should your loved ones pass away. As we all know, it’s an expensive task — not just financially, but also emotionally, emotionally, and life-wise. Life insurance can help you live a more fulfilling and just life if you can avoid taking risks. In fact, you can reduce your expenses by taking advantage of special events, like the and that allow your loved ones to be cared for when you aren’t there. Choosing a life insurance plan can help you plan your long-term financial future and make sure your family is cared for when you’re gone. One of the most common questions we see when it comes to , however, is when it comes.

Burial Insurance for Tobacco Users and Health Issues

Burial Insurance for Tobacco Users and Health Issues If you have a serious medical condition like COPD or asthma issues, you may qualify for coverage through Health Insurance Exchange or . It’s a policy that must be purchased through an insurance agent and must be submitted by the insured’s doctor. Medical conditions can increase cost. Insurance companies will charge higher premium rates to treat your condition. In addition, the amount of the premium will depend on the patient’s age, sex, and the length of the COVID-19. In some cases, it takes 30 days or longer to get insurance coverage from an insurance company. The main thing to consider before choosing an insurance coverage is whether or not a policy will cover you in the event of a potential emergency. That is because in the event of emergency, an insurance company will sometimes require a medical exam. This is typically included in an individual health policy. To find out your eligibility for the most suitable insurance coverage, you should start by getting medical information through the.

How to Choose Your Burial Insurance Policy

How to Choose Your Burial Insurance Policy Burial insurance covers you in cases of premature death as well as any other accident that is likely. It is a policy that protects what is right for your family and you as well as your business. What type and level of coverage do you need? You or your child will get your policy when you are an insured adult over the age of 19. It protects your children and your future heirs for anything that happens to you or your family upon their passing. The good news is that the life insurance products that your child might be choosing as a policy will protect the life and assets of your family members against a number of unforeseen circumstances as per the guidelines of your policy. The important thing to bear in mind as a young person is to design a policy that is suitable for your family and it should have the best coverage. It is often much better to get a quote from an agent with a similar level of insurance as before when it is not a good idea to buy a policy at all..

Lincoln Heritage life insurance policies

Lincoln Heritage life insurance policies are underwritten by Lincoln Heritage Life Insurance Company with Level Premiums being Level Premium Term Plans. The Level Premium Term Plan is the most basic form of life insurance for most people. The cost of their term policy is typically higher than the Level Plan. They also usually offer an Advanced Underwriting Option, which allows the insured to be more risk-free and increase their premium over time. If you need to carry a term-specific life insurance policy, youâll want to familiarize yourself with the different types of policies available for the market during the months that occur as people age out on the job. In addition to the basic term policy that most people should also purchase, some people can get coverage for the whole year. There are a few life insurance plans that are common to consumers â theyâre also the most affordable for businesses. Hereâ.

Lincoln Heritage Burial Insurance Review – Takeaways

Lincoln Heritage Burial Insurance Review – Takeaways from Our goal at Lincoln Heritage is to work with all of the best Burial Insurance companies and deliver quality policies which are both affordable and work the best for you. We will help you achieve this level of service. As an independent insurance broker with an exclusive focus on Burial Insurance and Funeral Contractors, we offer policies from top-rated Burial Insurers in Omaha, Nebraska. We will work with every single insurance company and our Burial Agents in Omaha. You could be saving up to 50% or more on your car insurance! A.M. Best is one of the most reputable credit irrationally important in the industry. The company has a A+ rating from A.M. Best and is a great choice for any individual who wants an independent, expert insurance advisor. For more information, please or read on to learn more. The A. M. Best Rating.

0 notes

socimages · 8 years ago

Photo

The percent of carless households in any given city correlates very well with the percent of homes built before 1940. So what happened in the 40s?

According to Left for LeDroit, it was suburbs:

The suburban housing model was — and, for the most part, still is — based on several main principles, most significantly, the uniformity of housing sizes (usually large) and the separation of residential and commercial uses. Both larger lots and the separation of uses create longer distances between any two points, requiring a greater effort to go between home, work, and the grocery store.

These longer distances between daily destinations made walking impractical and the lower population densities made public transit financially unsustainable. The only solution was the private automobile, which, coincidentally, benefited from massive government subsidies in the form of highway building and a subsidized oil infrastructure and industry.

Neighborhoods designed after World War II are designed for cars, not pedestrians; the opposite is true for neighborhoods designed before 1940. Whether or not one owns a car, and how far one drives if they do, then, is dependent on the type of city, not personal characteristics like environmental friendliness. Ezra Klein puts it nicely:

In practice, this doesn’t feel like a decision imposed by the cold realities of infrastructure. We get attached to our cars. We get attached to our bikes. We name our subway systems. We brag about our short walks to work. People attach stories to their lives. But at the end of the day, they orient their lives around pretty practical judgments about how best to live. If you need a car to get where you’re going, you’re likely to own one. If you rarely use your car, have to move it a couple of times a week to avoid street cleaning, can barely find parking and have trouble avoiding tickets, you’re going to think hard about giving it up. It’s not about good or bad or red or blue. It’s about infrastructure.

Word.

Neither Ezra nor Left for LeDroit, however, point out that every city, whether it was built for pedestrians or cars, is full of people without cars. In the case of car-dependent cities, this is mostly people who can’t afford to buy or own a car. And these people, in these cities, are royally screwed. Los Angeles, for example, is the most expensive place in the U.S. to own a car and residents are highly car-dependent; lower income people who can’t afford a car must spend extraordinary amounts of time using our mediocre public transportation system, such that carlessness contributes significantly to unemployment.

Originally posted in 2010.

Lisa Wade, PhD is a professor at Occidental College. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture, and a textbook about gender. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

#subways #car dependent #infrastructure #institutions #suburbs

70 notes · View notes

willemdirksmit · 6 years ago

Photo

Altering [Cape Town’s] Reality

I tend to be a rather optimistic person. I see myself as grateful and realistic. I also, however, see systems in the world that can be optimised to better serve people and the environment. One of these problematic systems, in my opinion, lies in our urban planning. Somewhere in our history, people planned cites around cars. I am in no way against cars—they are wonderful metal boxes with wheels that provide people with tons of convenience and freedom. My aim with this piece, however, is to challenge you, dear reader to entertain the thought of being able to cut the need for cars out from our lives altogether.

Let’s go to the source of our current car culture. We in Southern Africa have adopted a Western life, influenced significantly by America. Take our entertainment or food, for example. We love our Tarantino films and hamburgers and the same goes for our daily lives. If you have a smartphone, access to Netflix and a car, you’re well on your way to live out your own version of the South African dream. Our urban planning too, has been influenced by the American way of designing cities from scratch, unlike Asian or European cities that had existed well before cars came into the picture. While our current urban layout is convenient, it is an inefficient design that tends to serve vehicles more than people. The best evidence of car-centred urban planning is the amount of space devoted to roads, freeways, parking areas, intersections and traffic circles. These tend to enlarge cities in width (at least 4.5m for every road build) and in length, depending totally on the length of the road, which also further motivates structures in cities to be farther and farther apart. Roads and tarred surfaces like parking areas also tend to draw solar radiation and contribute to the overall heat of a city. Then there’s the increase in property prices in order to accommodate real estate-hungry parking facilities. This results in increasing amounts of rent, squatting or even homelessness to those that can’t keep up with the costs of modern-day life.

Our existing nearsighted urban planing could very easily be converted to one where cars have a reduced importance. The way to start would be to either completely ban or at least temporarily shut off the flow of cars into certain parts of the city. If money is needed, municipalities could even tax cars whenever entering parts of a city where pedestrians have priority. The redirecting of traffic has been proven effective in cities like Barcelona, where the system of Superillias has been implemented. (Superillas called Superblocks in English are large residential blocks consisting of 3 buildings by 3 buildings, with the streets between their residential blocks free from any cars. Vox on YouTube does a great documentary of this, titled Superblocks: How Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars).

We could instead have more parks and businesses where parking lots are. Imagine for a bit that Cape Town’s city centre was car-free and one could walk freely from one cafe to the next and visit stores on foot as one goes. It’s good for business and your overall pedestrian—a good indicator of a healthy city, by the way—would feel way more at ease and free. There’d be no car accidents, no smash and grab incidents and no parking or clamping fees. You’d be able to clear a street, danger-free in a matter of minutes on foot, without having to waste time at a traffic light or jammed behind other cars. In addition, noise pollution would decline and hence, attract more people, feeding the cycle of a happy environment and increased business opportunities. Cities with more pedestrian-orientated areas also tend to attract more tourists, which again, is good revenue for any city.

Cape Town does have areas, like the Sea Point promenade and the Waterfront, where people’s needs were taken into consideration, instead of cars’. The Mother City, however, also lacks connectivity. You need a car to get to Century City, Noordhoek and anything east of Woodstock. These areas can also be seen as suburbs that carry on in isolation, which isn’t completely a bad thing. My point here is just that Cape Town could have been much more compact, like Paris or Shanghai, where it is insanely easy to get from one part of town to the next without the need of a car. Cape Town is, fortunately, working on its public transportation infrastructure and the existing services are good where they are. The next step to evolve into a more connected, efficient people-city would be to implement city-wide shared bicycle services, convert inefficiently placed freeways to greenery areas (like in Seoul and Dallas), keep adding and improving public transportation options, combine city-centre blocks by pedestrianising streets, tax or limit vehicles in areas where pedestrian streets could work, and cut down on the expansion of a city, and rather focus on improving what already exists. In an ideal world, we’d have less pollution, less noise, less segregation, less land-usage and more social, connected people, business opportunities and in general, a healthier city.

#dt210

0 notes

anestiefel · 5 years ago

Text

Berlin: 10 tips for riding public transit like a local

Officially, the Berlin public transit goes by the rather daunting name, Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, but Berliners all lovingly shorten it to BVG (beh-fow-gey). The BVG includes the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, as well as hundreds of bus lines, trams (a type of street car only running in former East Berlin), and even ferries.

Berlin’s transportation system is truly one of the best in the world. It will zip you through the city at pretty much any hour of the day.

Berlin Public Transit Tips

Here are 10 of our best tips for how to ride the Berlin public transit system like a pro.

1. Know which ticket to buy (and how to buy it)

Unfortunately, this is no easy task. Although the ticket machines all have an English language option, they can still be very difficult to figure out, and the locals waiting behind you are likely to get impatient with any greenhorn taking too long to buy a ticket. To avoid too many nail-biting sessions at the ticket machine, it’s better to know which ticket to buy in advance.

Related: Getting the most for your money with Berlin public transit tickets

Here’s a list of all the single fares and some tips for how to understood what the heck they mean by them:

Short-trip ticket = up to three stops in one direction

Single ticket = ticket in one direction, including any transfers, valid for up to two hours

Reduced = ticket fare for children, students, and seniors

AB = fare zone for central Berlin and outlying suburbs

BC = fare zone for outlying suburbs and Potsdam

ABC = fare zone for all three

A regional map of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn system. Photo: Bre Pettis

If this seems confusing to you, it’s because it is. A better option — and one that will save you some dough — is to buy a ticket that’s valid for a longer period of time. Depending on how much longer you plan to stay, you can either buy a day ticket, a 7-day ticket, or a monthly pass.

(If you’re also interested in visiting some museums, you may also want to opt for the Berlin WelcomeCard, a ticket specifically designed for tourists that includes admission to attractions and covers public transportation.)

The good news? Although tickets are a bit tricky to figure out at first, they’re valid for any form of Berlin public transit. You won’t have to worry about having to buy a separate ticket if, for example, you want to ride both the bus and the U-Bahn.

Familiarizing yourself with the transportation map will help, too. Download the route map here.

2. No credit cards

As is often the case in Berlin, U-Bahn, and S-Bahn ticket machines do not accept credit cards. Unless you have a German bank card, your only option is to pay with cash. Machines accept any coin ten cents and above as well as €5, €10, and €20 bills.

Please note that they will give you your change in coins only, so if you’re buying a ticket for a smaller amount, it’s better to use a smaller bill, so you won’t be overly weighed down with a pocket full of change. Not all machines accept bills, so if you don’t have enough small change, look around until you find the one that does.

Keep an eye out for ticket machines like this one.

3. Stamp it — or be shamed!

Once you successfully buy the ticket you need, there’s one more crucial step you need to take before you hop on the train: Stamp and validate that baby!

Unless you’re riding the bus (more on that below) it’s unlikely that anyone will “control” (ask to see) your ticket, but it’s still very important that you remember to stamp it. To do so, locate a validating box and insert the top of the ticket in the slot that says “please stamp here” (the machines are usually near the ticket machines on the platform).

If you fail to validate your ticket (or, gasp!, board without a ticket), you’ll be riding schwarz (black), which is German slang for fare dodgers.

If you’re caught during one of the checks they do periodically, you’ll have to pay a €60 fine. If you have a ticket but forgot to stamp it, you might get lucky and be controlled by someone who has mercy on clueless tourists, but you may not luck out. Don’t take a chance — stamp it!

4. Know the difference between the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn

If you want to impress someone with your nerdy BVG knowledge, you can tell them U-Bahn stands for Untergrundbahn (underground train) and S-Bahn for Stadtbahn (city train). While “underground” train is clear, we think a better word for the S-Bahn would be Übergrundbahn (above ground train).

Although they sometimes break those rules, both train systems usually stick with the program, the U-Bahn staying underground and the S-Bahn running above ground. Although this means the S-Bahn can make for a more scenic ride, there are other differences. The U-Bahn makes more frequent stops in the city, while the S-Bahn functions more as an “express”. The S-Bahn can more quickly whisk you off to the suburbs.

The U-Bahn also runs more often (every two to three minutes during rush hour) and is generally more reliable. The S-Bahn is sometimes notoriously late — in winter, it’s been known to sometimes even shut down completely.

A bus rolling through the streets of Berlin near Alexanderplatz. Photo robdammers

5. Taking the bus

As we mentioned above, your transit ticket is also valid on the bus. If you have a valid ticket, get on in the front of the bus. Then, show your ticket to the driver.

You can also buy a ticket on the bus. To do so, you’ll need to tell the driver which kind you need, for example, single ticket AB (in German, Einzelfahrt AB (Eyen-cell-fart ah-beh). The fare is the same price and can be paid in coins only. Once you’ve achieved this feat — and don’t take it personally if the driver was grumpy, because they almost always are — the driver will hand you a ticket, which you don’t need to stamp.

6. After 1 a.m. on a weekday? Take the Nachtbus

Berlin is famous for its late nightlife, but the U-Bahn runs around the clock only on the weekends. If you feel like living it up on a Tuesday, you’ll find the U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations shuttered and closed down between around 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. Although you could always take a taxi — and luckily they are not as expensive in Berlin as they would be in, say, London and Paris — you’ll still have to dig deeper into your wallet than you might want to pay.

But never fear, the Nachtbus is here to save the day (or, in this case, night). When the U-Bahn, S-Bahn, and regular bus lines shut down for the night, the Nachtbus (night bus) takes over, and all for the nice price of a regular ticket.

7. Get used to silence and stony faces

Yes, it’s true. Many Berliners you’ll see on the BVG will look as if they’ve been having a bad day… for the past 20 years. Tourists often find the frowns and silence a little intimidating and spooky, but true Berliners often just don’t see the need for idle chit-chat when they’re on their way from A to B among strangers.

If you’re on one of those trains, filled to the brim but as silent as the grave, be sure you aren’t too loud yourself or people might start giving you dirty looks. And take comfort. They’re smiling… inside.

Riders on the Berlin subway. Photo: Alexander Rentsch

8. Don’t put your feet or bags on the seats

If Berliners have one pet peeve (aside from giddy American extroverts), it’s riders who put their bags on the seats of a busy train. When the train is not full, you can place your bags there. Be sure to move them right away when more people get on, not just when someone wants to sit down. If not, someone is likely to get annoyed, and Berliners aren’t shy when they’re irritated.

Want to tick them off even more? Put your feet on the seats. That was a joke — don’t do it. In Berlin, it’s just about one of the rudest things a person can do.

9. You’re probably not getting hit on

Some tourists think Berliners stare because they’re silently judging them, and others think it’s because they think they’re hot. Neither one of them are right. Staring is just what you do here, so do as the locals do and stare away.

If the person next to you is also sitting so close you can feel their leg touching yours, it’s also not likely that they’re coming on to you and/or creepy. In general, Berliners aren’t as particular about personal space in crowded spaces, so it’s likely they’ll sit more snugly next to you than you might, um, expect.

10. Get used to being pushed around

Although German has words for “excuse me”, Entschuldigung for example, means “sorry”, it’s unlikely that you’ll hear it too often during your trip. In a crowded place like the U-Bahn, you will get pushed and prodded and sometimes elbowed. Your toes might get stepped on. If you’re very unlucky, it will be strong enough to leave a bruise. Don’t expect an apology, because it’s not coming.

However, even with the occasional push, leg touching and stony face, the BVG is an expansive and efficient transit system. It’s far more reliable than most of the public transportation networks in other countries (including, obviously, the US!).

Enjoy the ride. And seriously — she’s not hitting on you.

Need even more tips?

We have many more posts in our budget guide to Berlin. Check out these 12 simple ways to save on your trip to Berlin, plus this recommended list of budget hotels in the city center.

The post Berlin: 10 tips for riding public transit like a local appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

from EuroCheapo’s Budget Travel Blog https://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/berlin-10-tips-riding-public-transit-like-local.html Publish Firt on

0 notes

cathrynstreich · 5 years ago

Text

Changing the Rulebook, Charting the Future

Redfin Makes Its Mark on Real Estate

Editor’s Note: This is the cover story in the January 2020 issue of RISMedia’s Real Estate magazine. Subscribe today.

“I want my company to be the Apple Store of real estate,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman back in 2012. “Shopping for a home should be all about the customer. By thinking more like a retailer, it’s possible to make the experience better.”

Today, Kelman has grown Redfin into one of the country’s leading real estate brokerage websites, with full-service agents who build relationships with real estate consumers in personal ways, whether over coffee or during home tours, but who are also equipped with online tools designed to make them smarter and faster.

Over the years, Redfin has set out to make many changes to the classic real estate model to create a better experience for the customer. Redfin’s agents are paid on salary and their commission, which is lower than most real estate firms, is dependent on customer satisfaction. Customers also have access to all listings online, and don’t have to rely on an agent to show them which properties are for sale.

Redfin believes that one tool that truly sets them apart from other real estate firms is their consumer-focused mobile app, which allows prospective buyers to peruse an area and search for nearby listings that fit their criteria. Consumers can search by neighborhood or school district…even by pizza shop.

Redfin believes its model is clearly working. The company reports that its listings sell 17 days faster and for $9,100 more than the average real estate transaction. More than 10,000 customers buy or sell a home with Redfin each year. Perhaps most important of all, Redfin boasts a 95 percent customer satisfaction rating.

Glenn Kelman, CEO, Redfin

The Redfin Customer Survey: Transparency Is Priority Redfin distributes various surveys based on the event at hand. For example, a customer would receive a different survey after making an offer versus taking a home tour. Redfin makes sure that all reviews are shared with agents.

The first part of every survey, however, starts the same way and asks the following questions:

1. How likely are you to recommend your agent’s real estate services to a friend or acquaintance? (Rated 0-10, with 10 being the strongest possible recommendation)

2. Please review your experience with your agent.

3. Can we anonymously share your comments about your agent with other Redfin website users? We will never share your name, email or other contact information.

If a client worked with a Redfin partner agent, his or her survey may include additional questions about that experience.

Once the client submits the first survey, they may be taken to a longer second survey. The second survey asks questions that are specific to the event. These responses are used internally for purposes such as developing demographic statistics, and are not directly displayed on Redfin.com.

www.redfin.com

Foretelling the Future As Redfin plans for further growth in the year ahead, tracking the market and consumer trends will remain a critical part of its strategy. To that end, the company has made some bold predictions for the 2020 housing market.

“We predict the housing market will be more competitive in 2020 as the cooldown that began in the second half of 2018 comes to an end,” says Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather. “Charleston and Charlotte will lead the nation in home-price gains, thanks to homebuyers moving in from expensive cities. Hispanic Americans will experience the biggest gains in home equity wealth, and climate change will become a much bigger factor for homebuyers and sellers.”

Here are Redfin’s six top housing market predictions for 2020*:

Prediction No. 1: Bidding wars will rebound thanks to low mortgage rates and a lack of homes for sale.

Low mortgage rates will continue to strengthen home-buying demand, but due to a lack of new homes for sale and homeowners staying put longer, there will be fewer homes on the market in 2020 than in the past five years, according to Redfin. More demand and less supply mean bidding wars will rebound in the first quarter.

“We expect about one in four offers to face bidding wars in 2020, compared to only one in 10 in 2019,” says Fairweather. “This increase in competition will push year-over-year price growth up to 6 percent in the first half of the year, considerably stronger than the 2 percent growth seen in the first half of 2019. Supply and demand will become more balanced later in the year as more listings of new and existing homes hit the market, allowing price growth to moderate to 3 percent.”

Prediction No. 2: Thirty-year fixed mortgage rates will stabilize at 3.8 percent.

Throughout 2020, 30-year fixed mortgage rates will remain low, hovering around 3.8 percent, Redfin forecasts. Faced with slowing economic growth, the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates low. Although the housing market is strong, weakness in other sectors, like manufacturing, is pulling down on the economy.

“Because investors are already bracing for the possibility of a recession, we don’t expect mortgage rates to fall much lower than 3.5 percent in 2020 even if the economy weakens,” says Fairweather. “And even if the economy strengthens, we expect mortgage rates to stay below 4.1 percent.”

Prediction No. 3: For the first time, Hispanic Americans will gain more wealth from home equity than white Americans.

According to Redfin, in the next decade, Hispanic Americans will, for the first time, gain more home equity than white Americans; that’s because the majority of new homeowners are Hispanic, and home values in Hispanic neighborhoods are increasing faster than in white neighborhoods.

“There are more Hispanic homeowners in Texas than in any other state, and Texas cities are likely to experience strong gains in home values over the next decade as people move here from more expensive places like San Francisco and Los Angeles,” says Fairweather. “Hispanic families will likely benefit from home equity gains for generations to come. Hispanic Americans could tap their home equity to finance their children’s education or to start businesses. Over time, this will improve economic equality for Hispanic Americans.”

Prediction No. 4: Climate change will become a bigger financial factor for homebuyers and sellers. In 2020, homebuyers and sellers will take the consequences of climate change into account when deciding to buy, says Redfin. The financial costs of climate change are already becoming more tangible as fire and flood insurance premiums rise.

“More people are becoming hyper-sensitive to flood insurance and its costs,” says Houston Redfin agent Irma Jalifi. “They’re thinking about how the weather will change over the next decade and whether there will be more historic floods like we’ve experienced recently. I had a buyer back out of a deal because he found out the property required flood insurance.”

Over the next decade, higher insurance premiums in high-risk areas will make housing even less affordable to more people, predicts Redfin. And in areas with the highest risk, insurers may stop providing insurance altogether, which means it will be nearly impossible to secure a mortgage in those areas.

Prediction No. 5: Charleston and Charlotte will lead the nation in home-price growth. Affordable Southeast cities like Charleston and Charlotte are attracting an increasing number of migrants from expensive cities, which will drive up home-price growth in these areas, according to Redfin. Charleston saw a 104 percent annual increase in the number of Redfin users looking to move there, relative to the number of users looking to move out, in the third quarter of 2019, and Charlotte saw a 44 percent increase. Migrants are attracted to the growing economies of Charleston and Charlotte—Microsoft is spending $23 million to expand its Charlotte campus, and in Charleston, the new Volvo plant is adding thousands of jobs.

“A lot of migrants from up North or out West move to Charleston because it is such a lovely place—out-of-towners fall in love with our Cypress gardens and world-class beaches,” says Redfin agent and Team Manager Jacie Paulson. “The fact that we have an international airport means that companies are more willing to allow their remote employees to live here because it is easy to travel back and forth to headquarters. We also have a strong local economy with jobs at Boeing, Volvo and in the military.”

Prediction No. 6: More city streets will become car-free.

In 2020, Redfin believes more cities will favor green modes of transit and actively discourage driving. Some cities already have plans in the works—San Francisco’s Market Street will transform into a car-free corridor in 2020 and New York City drivers will have to pay to drive into the heart of the city beginning in 2021. In cities that become less car-friendly, those that frequently spend time in the city center will place more value on a commute that doesn’t require a car and move to either the walkable city center or close to public transit. Meanwhile, some people will choose to avoid the city center altogether and put a higher value on homes in the suburbs where they can work, play and live.

The Redfin team at the NASDAQ Market Site in Times Square

Partnering for the Future By consistently staying ahead of the curve on key market trends and consumer demands, Redfin plans to make an even bigger impact in the real estate space in the year ahead.

“We strive to be good partners, as individual agents negotiating a sale with another party, and as a company,” says Kelman. “We pride ourselves on the quality of life we offer our agents who, compared to agents at other brokerages, earn more and stay at their brokerage longer. We believe the only way to advance the careers of agents at Redfin, and, ultimately, at other brokerages, is to innovate, giving agents the best products to serve customers. This is why we’re hopeful that we can develop new partnerships with other brokerages over time, so all of us can help people take advantage of new technologies for selling homes.”

*These predictions reflect the beliefs of the Redfin team about the overall housing market. It’s not intended as historical information or future guidance to the investment community and shouldn’t be relied on for those purposes. To find out which predictions in this article come true, and which predictions turn out to be incorrect, follow the Redfin blog for real-time research on the housing market.

Adam Wiener is Redfin’s chief growth officer. For more information, please visit www.redfin.com.

The post Changing the Rulebook, Charting the Future appeared first on RISMedia.

Changing the Rulebook, Charting the Future published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

0 notes

theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

Link

You’ve probably seen the term “walkability” thrown around in relation to cities, neighborhoods, and even apartments. A city’s walkability, per Walk Score, is determined by analyzing how many errands can be done without a car, and cities with the highest scores (like Boston, New York, and San Francisco) often come with an incredibly steep cost of living.

On Walk Score’s one to 100 scale that evaluates cities with a population of 200,000 or more, New York City is the most walkable city in the country with a score of 89, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, is the least walkable with a score of 29. The average walk score of all American cities with a population of over 200,000 is 49.

Walkability is treated as a static part of a city; your city is either walkable or not. You either need a car or you don’t. But a city’s walkability is dynamic and can be improved with people-oriented city planning, which will benefit the local economy and make societies more equitable.

American city planner Jeff Speck has been advocating for walkability for the past 40 years, and in his new book, Walkability City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places, he carefully outlines how to “sell” walkability and then implement it.

The idea is marketed based on a few big benefits, according to Speck’s book, one of them being economics. Cities with high walk scores also have high property values. According to a 2009 study, each additional walk score point resulted in home values increasing between $500 and $3,000.

Investing in walkable cities, whether through allocating funds to repaint pedestrian walkways or building affordable housing close to downtowns, also attracts diverse populations and creates jobs. According to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, 63 percent of millennials and 42 percent of boomers would like to live in a place where they don’t need a car. And according to the National Association of Realtors, 62 percent of millennials prefer to live in a walkable community where a car is optional. If cities seem less automobile-dependent, chances are they are more appealing to a range of ages.

Walking also costs the city very little, unlike cars and even public transit. According to Speck’s book, if a resident takes a bus ride, it may cost them $1 but costs the city $1.50 in bus operation. If a resident decides to drive, it costs the city $9.20 in services like policing and ambulances. When a resident walks, the cost to the city is a penny.

People also tend to spend more money in walkable cities, stimulating the local economy. A 2008 report of San Francisco’s downtown found that public transit users and walkers spent less on each trip downtown but made more frequent trips, which meant they spent more money overall. Those in cars spent more money on one trip but frequented downtown less.

This aligns with the concept of people-oriented streets, the urban planning practice of making roads safe to cross and filled with amenities people need (restaurants, banks, salons etc.). Many streets in America, especially in areas of suburban sprawl, are vehicle-oriented, don’t have sidewalks, and are not accessible without a car.

Even though the United States is a car-centric society, one-third of Americans don’t have a license, and according to a government census, a majority of those who walk to work make under $50,000.

“The most common condition is the poor person who can afford a car but it totally disrupts their finances,” Speck told me. “The unfortunate circumstance is that most Americans live in places where car ownership is mandatory.”

With talk of home prices going up and walkability attracting more people, walkability can read as a recipe for displacement. Take Oakland, California, for example. When San Francisco become too pricey and people were looking for a more affordable alternative, nearby Oakland was an appealing option. But while the influx of people spurred new development and increased walkability, it also hiked the cost of living; now the average rent for an apartment in Oakland is $2,926, compared to $1,695 in 2011.

But Speck says walkability can actually work to make communities more equitable. According to his book, cities with more transit choice demonstrate less income inequality and less overspending on rent. Walkability opens up the world to the elderly, who often struggle to find transportation when they lose the ability to drive, and public transit is used most by minorities and those making under $50,000. Since transit and walking go hand in hand, improving the walkability of a city could help better serve those in lower income brackets.

“For the typical city where most Americans live, there’s very little risk of improved walkability causing gentrification,” he told Vox, “particularity in the short term, just because [cities] have so far to go just to reach a modicum of safety and comfort.”

The National Association of City Transportation provides before and after blue prints of what an auto-oriented street would look like if transformed into a people-oriented street. National Association of City Transportation The National Association of City Transportation’s drawing of a Neighborhood Main Street. National Association of City Transportation

Though he’s been preaching the walking gospel for years, Speck says the message has only recently caught on. “In the ’80s, no one got it,” he said. “In the ’90s, developers started to get it. In the aughts, the cities got it. And now I’m finally seeing in this decade that the engineers are starting to get it. Our biggest impediment [in developing walkable cities] was the public works folks and engineers who weren’t letting us do things right.”

The National Association of City Transportation (NACTO)’s executive director, Linda Bailey, says that in years past, the national city planning standard addressed people walking as an afterthought, which is why NACTO builds design guides to direct cities on how to become more pedestrian-friendly. Guides outline a number of transformations including how to turn a heavy-traffic two-way street into a “neighborhood main street” with bike lanes, sidewalks, and greenery.

Cities that have been notably increasing their walkability include Washington, DC, and Seattle, where city planners started dedicating space on the edges of roads to pedestrians and calling them “walkways” as opposed to sidewalks.

One of the biggest reasons many cities aren’t walkable is because land is dissected into “uses,” something called “single-use zoning”: Retail cannot be next to a medical office cannot be next a single-family home cannot be next to a multi-family home. So in order for a person to get lunch, go to the doctor, and then buy a birthday present, they have to travel to three different “zones,” and can only do so efficiently by car.

This may have been helpful in the 19th century when homes needed to be far away from factories emitting toxic fumes, but today it makes less sense. The solution: Cities should adopt regulations that allow land to be multi-use, such as in the mixed-use developments that dot the sprawling landscape of many American suburbs and cities.

In Plano, Texas, the Legacy Town Center features shops, apartments, a movie theater, and restaurants in a pedestrian-friendly smattering of urbanism. The city of Tampa is constructing Water Street Tampa — a $3 billion development that will include shops, entertainment, residences, and offices.

Bailey says mixed-use developments are attractive to developers because they present an opportunity to experience what it could have been like to plan a city 50 or 80 years ago. “Really, they’re trying to recreate what cities like Philadelphia have always had,” she says. (With a walk score of 79, Philly is the fifth most walkable city in America.)

Other steps in Speck’s book include pushing for local parks and schools, both of which foster community and ownership of a neighborhood. He also says that cities need to invest in attainable housing downtown so they don’t get overrun with the wealthy.

“An extreme example [of wealth in walkable cities] is this kind of jack-o’-lantern effect, where many homes are owned by people who own five homes and if they are distributing their time between these homes evenly, most of the time a house is empty, so you get this weird condition of the extremely dense ghost town, which is the worst,” Speck says.

There are also more simple tasks like reallocating road space to accommodate bikes or creating street parking so people can drive to a city, park, and then walk around and enjoy. “Restriping a too-fast street to include a bike lane, or turning a row of parallel parking spaces into angled parking, these things can be done for the price of paint,” Speck tells Vox. “If a street needs resurfacing anyway as part of its regular maintenance, the changes can be done for free.”

Whatever method, walkability is a spectrum, and implementing positive change that gets people to drive their car less is better for the economy and the environment. “The more we can walk, bike, and take transit, we’re spending a lot less than the alternative, which is to drag around a two-ton carcass of steel that belches climate change,” Speck says.

Original Source -> Why walkable cities are good for the economy, according to a city planner

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

0 notes