Category: Urban Planning

Suburbia wayfinding

February 25, 2009 / / 0 Comments

An unfortunate part of living in the suburbs and only ever traveling to major points of interests in the region by auto is that you never actually learn how to navigate the region, or the areas surrounding those points of interests. What you do you learn is the location’s position to the nearest highway. The result is that you don’t know where anything is, just how to get there from one origin.

The same holds true for large cities, like Chicago, when it comes to traveling to new places – you learn how to travel to your destination, but you don’t know your destination. You won’t know what’s in between here and there, and you won’t see the changes and history that brought social groups from here to there, spatially and chronologically. 

A method to encourage visitors – this doesn’t mean tourists – to know their destination, and spread out “their feelers” to get a real understanding of a neighborhood’s substance is by pointing out significant spaces and places. This technique is popularly known as wayfinding. It can be quite simple, like adding signs that show the direction and distance to a well-defined community or major park, or it can be complex by involving residents and asking what are the important points of interest that they would like to promote.

Wayfinding signage is only one way to correct the original statement in this article: that the motor vehicle hides local values and decreases our knowledge of the space in between and around our origin and destination. We travel too fast, and we take bypassing highways. 

There are other approaches cities can take to help people slow down and experience more interesting places.

  1. Make it accessible. This doesn’t mean complying with Americans with Disabilities Act. It means increasing the options on how people can get there, or informing them of their options. This could mean identifying nearby roads suitable for bicycling, or promoting existing transit service nearby, but also making sure that locals and visitors don’t compete for auto parking space.
  2. Market the place. Use traditional marketing and advertising to tell people why they should spend a little more time exploring and getting to know the place. Perhaps your community has a bistro bustling during lunch, and a few blocks away is a farmer’s market where business has plateaued because only the locals are buying. Some low-cost graphics and a good relationship with the restaurant now has 5% of its customers venturing out to the market. 

I wrote a paper on the residential and economic dynamics between two adjacent neighborhoods in Chicago’s Lower West Side, University Village and Pilsen. University Village is a neighborhood created from scratch – designed to be “perfect” you could say. It houses a few thousand university students who come and go on different daily and weekly schedules, as well as permanent homeowners population. Sprinkle in some restaurants, local and national retail firms, and essential services like dry cleaning and hair salons along two major and intersecting bus routes and you have a “perfect” neighborhood.

University Village, because of its newness and designed quality, lacks character, history, and can seem a bit sterile. That’s where Pilsen can support the new neighborhood; Pilsen is over 100 years old, has seen major demographic, spatial, and physical changes, and heavily influenced by its majority Mexican population that it more than makes up for what University Village lacks. The problem is that neither neighborhood knows about the other aside from a bus, bike, or car ride through. There’s also a railroad viaduct separating the two. These barriers can be overcome, and each neighborhood can require the services of the other. Students usually need cheap food – you can get that in Pilsen. And long-time residents want new retail choices – University Village can provide that.

Read the entire paper, titled Economic and residential dynamics between University Village and Pilsen.

GIS and mapping tools

February 9, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Some of the work I do for school and my job requires that I make maps. I’ve never taken a class on how to make maps or analyze data sets featured in maps (what GIS does), so I learn as I go.

There’s no one around me I can call upon when I have questions that need immediate answers. Well, there’s me! Because of this, I must quickly find a solution or workaround myself.

Today I had to import a list of Chicago Transit Authority and Metra rail stations into ArcGIS so I could plot them on a map that also showed Chicago’s boundary and our bikeways. I could do this in Google Earth, but then I would have less control over the printed map I wanted to make, or the image output. ArcGIS has a built-in geocoder and I learned how to use it six months ago, but a skill not practiced is lost – and I forgot how to do it.

That’s okay – what follows is how I overcame this barrier:

Because I know how to use PHP to instantly create Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files (the format which Google Earth and Maps speaks fluently). Then, with this user-contributed KML to SHP plugin for ArcGIS, I was able to convert my KML files to Shapefiles and display them on my map. Unfortunately, my custom “fancy” icons were lost in the translation. Supposedly this alternate user-contributed script does the same thing.

Other tools I used to get my map created:

  • BatchGeocode.com – This site is indispensable for turning a list of addresses (with names, descriptions, and URLs) into the same list but with latitude and longitude coordinates! It will even create a KML file for you.
  • KML Generator (PHP class) – This class allows you to quickly and easily create KML files from any array and array source of coordinates. I store the transit stations in a database and run a query on the database and loop through them to generate the points in a KML file.

I’d like to thank James Fee’s GIS Blog for the links to the ArcGIS scripts/plugins I used in my project. To everyone else who must confront software, technology and mapping roadblocks, there’s almost always a solution for you.

Read about how I got around QGIS’s lack of geocoding.

Bike shops’ social responsibility

February 5, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Bike shops have a responsibility to teach their customers safe cycling.

This is because the bike shop salesperson has the customer’s attention, and it’s when the customer will be most receptive to tips, advice, and training. The bike shop salesperson, in many cases, will be the first and last person the customer talks to about biking. Lastly, it’s because the bike shop is a community center with a wealth of knowledge and experience – all of which should be shared.

The customer’s family is probably not a good resource and websites and friends can only teach them so much. But a bike shop salesperson has two advantages over other friends, family, and the internet: the customer’s time and trust.

Each bike shop should take it upon themselves to teach each new customer how to ride safely and legally on the street, the local laws regarding its operating and accessories (buy some lights, please!), etiquette for multi-use paths (like Chicago’s Lakefront Trail), and proper locking techniques.

  1. All bikers will, at some point, have to ride on the street in mixed traffic.
  2. It’s unreasonable to expect cyclists to know the laws applicable to cycling when they’ve had very little experience cycling and when there are no widespread institutions that teach cycling.
  3. Multi-use paths are fountains of rage and dangerous commingling. 
  4. The cyclist will be in a situation that requires them to secure their bicycle.

No matter how adamant the customer is that they won’t be riding in the street, they will. The sidewalk is illegal territory in so many communities, and isn’t safe for the cyclist themselves or the pedestrians they might run over. On sidewalks or on multi-use paths, they will have to cross streets with automobile traffic. It’s a little different than being a pedestrian and crossing these streets because you are operating relatively heavy equipment and you move at a different speed. Eventually, this cyclist will graduate from scaredy-cat to coffeehouse comfortable, biking to a café down the street. Talking one on one about these things, using diagrams from a brochure will influence the new cyclist that safe cycling matters – for themselves and those with whom they’ll interact. Then show them how to read a map.

Bicycle laws are not handed to 16-year olds in high school (actually, they most likely are, but who reads that?). That might have been 10 years ago, and they won’t remember that a front headlight but only a rear reflector are required for post-dusk riding. Or that red lights are for all street users (and really dangerous to disobey). Don’t forget that some bicyclists were taught to ride against traffic, facing cars down on the wrong side of the street.

Those customers who might be telling the shop salesperson that they won’t be riding in the street probably think they’re only going to ride on the multi-use path. These customers need trail etiquette stressed to them. They need to know when it’s safe to pass, what to say to those they’ll pass, the right speed to travel, and when to stop or slow down. The trail is not a speeding zone; rollerbladers, children, strollermoms, teams in training, walkers, and in some places even horses and their riders, will all be groups with whom the cyclist must interact and take care of – this mix is fun to watch and be around, but path users must pay attention to each other. 

Real locking techniques may be one of the most useful things you can teach any cyclist. They won’t be cyclists if they can’t keep their bike! The City of Chicago offers a guide on theft prevention and proper locking, two unique but related concepts. You shouldn’t do one without the other, because they enhance the overall “theft-proof-ness” of a bike. The salesperson can spend five minutes demonstrating to the customer cross-locking, and then having the customer practice. They can also quiz the customer on appropriate locking locations. What structures are secure and which ones aren’t? Why or why not?

Preface this lesson to the customer that “in 20 minutes, you can become a bicycling expert!” The bike shop-customer bond will strengthen and you’ll have proved to them your service is necessary and appreciable. Because you took the time to show a customer how much you care about them, their new bike, and the sport or utility of bicycling, they’ll spread the word and come back.

Sources for urban planning-related articles

November 19, 2007 / / 0 Comments

What sources do I read for urban planning issues, research and articles?

The New York Times is a great place to begin one’s search for urban planning articles. The Times doesn’t exactly categorize their articles as such, so a search for them must involve a specific city’s name. Architecture will be a topic appearing more often than “urban planning.” It’s great, though, that architecture is often closely related to urban planning, or at the least, urban design.

Other large newspapers around the world (like San Francisco Chronicle, Guardian and Observer and Times in London) serve as venues for authors of urban planning articles. India is a notable place because the amount of growth and wealth in that country is expanding rapidly – this makes for a lot of writable experiences and observations. Out of all the large newspapers, the NYT is by far the best. U.S. cities that have a history of good urban planning (namely Portland and Seattle) have excellent representation of the profession in their mainstream media.

On the web, Planetizen has done the hard work of filtering the thousands of articles from mainstream media and picking out those of interest to the urban planning members of the website. I like the thrice-weekly email updates of new news articles the site editors have selected.

My last source is Streetsblog. This is quite strictly a New York City-only blog but it’s updated more quickly than the local mainstream media about events and happenings that are even closer to home – for example, what’s happening in your own block.

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APA and one Illinois neighborhood

October 8, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The American Planning Association, the premier organization for urban planners, just released a list of the Top 10 Great Places in America. It’s a list of which “celebrates places of exemplary character, quality, and planning.”

“The designated neighborhoods and streets are defined by several characteristics, including good design, functionality, sustainability, and community involvement.”

Included in the list is one part of Illinois: West Urbana in Urbana.

I didn’t realize Urbana (and Champaign) had definable neighborhoods like I think of when New York, Chicago and San Francisco come to mind. Thankfully, the APA has a description of West Urbana and why it was chosen to be included as one of America’s best neighborhoods.

The American Planning Association has selected West Urbana as one of 10 Great Neighborhoods in America for 2007 in recognition of the neighborhood’s sustainable design; commuters who walk, bike, or ride transit at higher-than-average rates; inviting neighborhood spaces; and community focus on enhancing quality of life.

It also goes on to say how many children walk or bike to school – an activity that has declined greatly since before the 80s. The neighborhood is also very picturesque with large shade trees and narrow streets. Fortunately, to further bike use in the city, Urbana is working on a bike master plan.

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