In the last hour or so before I retire, while Stephanie takes her lengthy bath, I often surf YouTube. One of my favorite subjects are very old films. This one, of New York City cable cars from around 1900 caught my attention a few months ago. There’s essentially only two modes of transport to be seen: walking and an endless line of closely spaced cable cars in the middle of the street.
It occurred to that this is a very efficient transportation system. Either walk or step into what is almost a rolling walk-way of continuous street cars. Could something like this be adapted to help solve today’s congested streets? But something more efficient, and less labor-intensive than so many human-operated trollies? How about autonomous ones?
Then a few weeks later, I ran into this article at the New York Times. Bingo. The well-known urban planner Peter Calthorpe, one of the key founders of New Urbanism back in the 1980s—which seeks to create walkable neighborhoods—has proposed a complete redevelopment of the 45 mile-long El Camino Real, a boulevard that runs from San Francisco to San Jose. The development along this key artery is almost universally of the low-rise suburban kind, reflecting the ethos of the times (1920s – 1970s). As such, it’s very space inefficient, and almost totally dependent on automobile transportation.
Calthorpe’s proposal is a response to the crushing housing shortage in this area. It seeks to create a continuous urban corridor, with a mix of retail and residential housing in buildings that would vary in height, but inevitably taller and with denser housing than is the case now.
And down the center of it there would be two dedicated lanes devoted to a continuous line of autonomous vans/small buses. Calthorpe, along with others, is very concerned that the rise of typical automobile mobility services like Uber and Lyft will only exacerbate traffic issues. It’s going to be essential to have shared services to avoid that, and his proposal would address that, at least for mobility up and down this urban corridor.
His proposal for El Cammino real would add no less than a quarter million new housing units, without impacting the low-density residential neighborhoods just a block or two away. It seems quite promising to me, although I can’t help wonder why not put the “streetcars” on the outside lanes (in each direction); that way pedestrians wouldn’t have to cross traffic to get to them.
Speaking of, you may have noticed the utter lack of any restrictions on where pedestrians walked in that old film. That’s because the streets fully belonged to them, there was no such thing as “jaywalking”. Pedestrian controls and jaywalking laws were the result of heavy lobbying by the automobile industry, who feared that cars would never be allowed to drive faster than horse buggies and a fast walker if pedestrians weren’t forced off the streets.
This second film is quite remarkable, as its quality is so high (sound effects were added). It’s from 1911 and shows many aspects of New York at the time, but there are a lot of good street scenes with early automobiles. And one can see how slow they were.
As a frequent visitor to the Silicon Valley, I think it’s a promising idea. Driving El Camino can get pretty slow.
Palo Alto, Mt. View and Sunnyvale all have fairly dense downtown-ish areas with restaurants and shops that are a few blocks from El Camino. These could be hubs for development of walkable work and housing along the route.
El Camino Real is also roughly parallel to the CalTrain high-speed rail that links San Jose and the peninsula to San Francisco. But in the heart of the Valley from Mt. View to Santa Clara they get fairly far apart, a bit too far for easy walking. Self-driving cars between El Camino to CalTrain would knit the El Camino streetcar into the whole Bay Area.
They would also connect El Camino with the huge number of existing workplaces between El Camino and 101. So I disagree with the planner’s hostility to self-driving cars. I think they should harmonize with attractive transit like the streetcar.
Someday they should tie the north end of the streetcar into BART, though the super-rich towns of Atherton and Menlo Park would probably nix that.
All this raises the question, many residents of this streetcar corridor will want their own cars for trips to the grocery store, Ikea, the coast and the mountains. Where will they park them during the weekdays? Self-driving cars, Uber/Lyft taxis and rental cars can all be shared, but what happens when everyone wants to get out of town at once?
Ask New Yorkers, many/most of whom don’t have cars.
The grocery store and IKEA are non issues (Uber, etc.). As to the weekends, you grab a Car2go or Zipcar or some other rental or such. That’s the direction things are going in dense cities. Owning a car is increasingly seen as a liability in many of them. That’s why mobility services of all kinds are such a fast-growing sector.
I just started dating a wonderful woman, born and raised Long Island NY, and she never owned a car until she moved to LA ten years ago at 40 years old. I couldn’t imagine that, like they said about Volkswagen shortly after the war, “The worst ride is better than the best walk” I have to agree.
I didn’t own a car until I was 25 – smiliarly, thanks to living in relatively dense downtown Glasgow with its Victorian layout. Ah, Cathcart Circle, how I miss ye. Even 10 years on a car’s a luxury, hence why I can run around in a 15-year-old MR2 so much of the time. Perfect car for a European city, if you ask me 🙂 Small enough for narrow streets, fun enough to keep me happy and cheap enough that I don’t mind the dings it picks up in a communal parking lane. And I can get tall IKEA things in…
Plus, a ÂŁ1.50 litre of fuel makes the best walk seem rather more digestible than that worst ride.
I lived in Japan for four years and Korea for eight. In those twelve years, I never once drove.
In Japan there really wasn’t anywhere you couldn’t reach by train or bus, and the tolls on the expressways were outrageous.
In Korea there was a great transit system and taxis were dirt cheap.
Next year, I will be relocating to southern China. No need to drive there, eigher.
Next year, I will be relocating to southern China.
That’s news. Temporarily, or?
It will be my finale until I retire.
There is a house on a tropical beach with my name on it.
“what happens when everyone wants to get out of town at once?”
We already know the answer- This picture is of the 405 through LA on the night before Thanksgiving.
Actually, I agree with Paul’ assessment, but this picture graphically demonstrates the issue, and explains why I took last Wednesday off. I drove out of LA Tuesday night, stayed overnight in Laughlin, AZ, then continued on to Albuquerque the next morning.
Traffic is already modifying our behavior in LA. In ten years, it may force me out of town…
EVERYONE is wearing a hat!
And the same black clothes. How drab. And hot. So much for the good old days. 🙂
Uh-huh. Maybe it’s cuz they hadn’t invented color selfies yet. You people do realize you’re looking at black and white photography right?
Not only is everyone wearing a hat, but they are all dressed very respectably. Unfortunately, we have become a nation of slobs. Fortunately film like this proves that it wasn’t always so.
Aaaaaand there it is. The inevitable “casual clothing is a sign of moral decay” comment. It’s hard to call a certain style of clothing “respectable” when there were no real alternatives. What else was there to wear but suits?
Blue jeans and overalls were an alternative. I never mentioned moral decay. You did. Sorry, but when pajamas in public have become acceptable you do have to admit that we have slipped just at a bit?
So the “nation of slobs” comment wasn’t meant as a social observation? What was it meant as, then? What do you mean by “slipped”? I won’t defend wearing pajamas in public, but why does it bother you so much?
Blue jeans (dungarees) and overalls were very much not the alternative if you wanted to be thought of as any more than a poor laborer. There were no synthetics either. It was the business suit or nothing, which means it was just regular clothing. Nothing special about it.
People in cities during this time wore respectable dark clothing so the thick haze of coal burning everything covering them in soot them wouldn’t be so noticable.
Growing up in Uptown New Orleans, we actually had a variant of this and it was fantastic: the St.Charles Avenue streetcars. They run from the Central Business District, through Uptown and around to the Carrollton neighborhoods, right down the center of St.Charles Avenue for most of the route. Stops are typically every few blocks, though the streetcars won’t stop at every stop unless there are people waiting to get on or off at that location. Typically the streetcars come through in each direction every 5 minutes or so.
Previously New Orleans had enjoyed even more lines, like on Canal Street, though by the time I arrived it was just down to St. Charles. That said, it was a great way to get around, and was used by people from all walks of life for commuting and getting to different parts of the city. Benefits include short wait times with frequent cars/stops and routes that are easy to understand (straight down the tracks, no need to memorize convoluted bus routes and schedules). As a kid, I could walk 4 blocks from my house to get to a streetcar stop, and then visit friends farther uptown or in the Garden District and/or even head downtown. And then my personal favorite, getting together with buddies and heading over to the Camellia Grill on Carrollton–it was great freedom, getting a meal with no moms involved! You’d see a lot of kids on them too–Tulane University is right on the route, for example. Locals relied on them heavily for years as a very useful mode of transportation through a key urban corridor. Now the streetcars are totally filled morning, noon and night with tourists getting a taste of “real” NOLA, so sadly the experience is nowhere near as functional or easy as in the past. But a great idea nonetheless.
I know the El Camino Real corridor well, and I think that such redevelopment would be brilliant. Also, given the pleasant climate, it would get tons of use and be really easy to have people hopping on and off.
My wife and I were two of those tourists about 15 years ago when we had the pleasure of riding the St. Charles streetcar. It was one of the most memorable parts of our New Orleans visit, in addition to the wonderful dining, the music, the history and the beignets. Such beautiful homes and landscapes.
Somehow I can’t imagine tourists overrunning the El Camino Real.
You know, where I live, there is this amazing thing called public transportation. The downtown of Vancouver is so congested that transit is much easier, cheaper and more convenient that driving for most people. This is because we have a system that works to move people around efficiently.
Here is an example: I arrive at Vancouver International Airport. My wife could drive there (30 min) pay an outrageous parking fee, wait for me, and drive home another 30 min.
Or I can take train for $2.85 and get home in 30 minutes.
It’s a pretty stunning concept.
All kidding aside, my three children are of driving age and none of them has even the slightest desire to drive. They have grown up around a comprehensive, well designed transit system that whisks them wherever they want to go for like the price of one tank of gas a month.
In Vancouver, anything can be delivered to you home and you can rent cars by the hour anywhere you want. Or by the day, week, whatever. Young people don’t want to be tied down with a heavy financial burden.
There will be much less demand for private cars going forward.
My younger son lost his driving privileges, but he’s over it too. Our bu system is excellent; he catches one a block from his house and gets anywhere he needs in short order. Or walks. Or if he’s feeling flush, Lyft.
My older son and his GF in Portland have stopped driving lots of places within Portland; the transit system there is superb, and it eliminates all the hassle of traffic and parking.
Living about a 7 minute bus ride from a station, I can’t praise the airport/downtown line highly enough. It was built arguably ‘on the cheap’ (for the 2010 Winter Olympics) with smaller stations and necessarily shorter trains than the rest of the (automated) SkyTrain system. But the result is a service in which a driverless two-car train arrives every three minutes throughout the day.
Labour costs are a huge factor in most transit systems. A driverless system needs only the additional electricity to add extra service, and this line can be expanded to handle three-car trains every 2 minutes if need be.
The Vancouver region (pop. 2.5 million) currently has the fastest growing ridership of any major transit system in North America, with last month’s bus & train boardings of 40 million (the busiest month ever) up 7% over last year, and one (or possibly two?) major SkyTrain extensions to be completed in the next 5-7 years. Pretty positive and exciting stuff.
Yes, the Skytrain system makes it so easy to get around metro Vancouver, BC. I can’t imagine how bad it would be without it. It’s almost a victim of its own success as it can be crowded even at off peak times. My wife and I returned on flights from Florida arriving at 10:00 pm on a Sunday night and by the time we got to Oakridge station the train was packed heading downtown.
I have to drive because of my business, but without the comprehensive transit network in the Lower Mainland, it would be pretty much impossible to get anywhere. We pay something like $0.20 a litre in fuel taxes to pay for the system and I think it is worth it.
There are pick up trucks in Vancouver, but not many. They are too hard to park and at our fuel prices, too expensive to run.
Just saw this really hit home the other day. My buddy and I went in on a small Blackhawks game package. 15-minute bus ride door-to-door from my place to the stadium. I’m probably home by the time the last cars are filing out of the UC parking lot.
When public transit works, or you live where you can walk without fear of high speed traffic, NOT driving is pretty awesome. (I know that’s going to be an unpopular opinion here, but I really think so. I also don’t think that way is for everybody.)
I’m wondering if there is now a subway underneath that street full of cable cars. The “rolling walkway of continuous streetcars” was actually a symptom of a system that had reached full capacity and then some. Adding more cars would just choke the line down to a near stop. There are pix of Market Street in Philadelphia, before the subway was built, which show precisely that — complete gridlock of streetcars from the river to City Hall (14 blocks).
No enormously fat people in sight.
Anyone who is interested in transport and public infrastructure would enjoy The Race Unferground about the building of New York and Boston’s subways. It gets into the transportation challenges not really displayed in these films, for example the impact of all these trolleys being owned by dozens of private companies with no coordination at all between them.
I now fully understand why almost all of my great great grandparents who came to the country around this time had short stays in New York before high tailing it to dairyland.
Calthorpe is a modern day Luddite who wants everyone to be crammed into “stack and pack” housing like NYC over 100 years ago, and he’s crushed that AVs will allow more people the ability to to own a single-family house on a decent chunk of land. With a yard where their kids can play.
The internal combustion engine was a fantastic advancement for mankind. It allowed individuals to determine where they live, as opposed to the external combustion engine which by nature powered only massive, slow-starting, collective means of transit limited to rails.
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=14677
To each his own. After watching the video and looking at the urban planning I am doubly glad I made the decision years ago to live in a smaller community far from an urban area. I am a friendly guy who likes other people, but I don’t like being crammed in with a lot of strangers all the time. I lived and worked right in the middle of a city and decided after two years that it was enough for me. For the last 13 years I worked I spent at least 2 days a week working right in the middle of Indianapolis so it’s not like I have no experience with urban life.
I also love to drive. In fact, it is great entertainment for me. I want to be able to go where I want to go when I want to go and not rely on someone or something else.
As I said, to each his own. Urban life just isn’t for me.
@Paul: “that the rise of typical automobile mobility services like Uber and Lyft will only exacerbate traffic issues. It’s going to be essential to have shared services to avoid that, and his proposal would address that, at least for mobility up and down this urban corridor.”
I believe that we as a society in the US seems to recognize very little reward in sharing resources to help the average citizen. I seem to see increasingly less cooperation among all strata of society. Maybe the vantage point from which I’ve observed this is not the best one, but this is what I think I see.
On a totally unrelated note: Why does the Museum of Modern Art insist upon adding sound effects to these films? This is not the first one I’ve seen from them. I understand they’re not a historical society, so there’s no mandate or command not to alter them. I guess I dislike the added sound effects for the same reason I dislike colorized movies. It was not the original intent and IMO, it adds little to the experience.