The last few weeks I’ve been on holiday in California, visiting friends and family up and down the length of the state. As always, I’ve been surprised at how familiar – and how different – the state seems. In some ways, it’s ahead of New Zealand. In others, it’s behind. And in many more, it’s simply off on a quite different path of development.
One thing I noticed was the surprising ubiquity of New Urbanist town centre upgrades. Cities and towns up and down the state are upgrading sidewalks, adding sharrows (or even painted bike lanes), installing planter boxes and parklets, and doing up historic buildings in old downtown areas. This seems to be a bit of a new trend – or at any rate, I don’t remember it being so common when I was growing up in California.
So, for example, here’s downtown in Walnut Creek, a suburban city in the San Francisco Bay Area. It sits at the junction of two freeways, but there’s also a BART station, a rails-to-trails cycleway, and public parking buildings that allow less surface land to be devoted to parking. As a result, the core of the shopping centre is surprisingly walkable and leafy:
However, Walnut Creek hasn’t always been developed this way – here, for example, is retail frontage a few blocks over. It’s the pretty classic Californian design of big parking lots out front and big boxes in the back (plus a few street trees). But the city seems to have undergone a transition away from building more uninviting carparks and towards walkable, efficient places.
The same ideas are also being implemented in smaller places. Here, for example, is the historic town centre in Grass Valley, a town of around 13,000 people at the foothills of the Sierras. A decade or so ago, many of the shopfronts were empty, but now they’re full of various boutique-y shops catering to tourists. (Including a lot of wine tasting rooms – there are a number of wineries in the area.) They’ve installed complementary retro-kitsch like the clock on the left side of the picture:
We saw similar things in other small towns around the place. But the small towns generally also illustrated the limitations of New Urbanist town centre upgrades. Unlike Walnut Creek, which is larger (and more affluent), they didn’t usually succeed in drawing back in major retail chains and supermarkets, which continued heading for suburban shopping centres. Hence the tourist-oriented retail in Grass Valley.
Finally, New Urbanist design is hardly a panacea or a remedy for other ills. Take this development on the main highway in Torrance (in Los Angeles). It conforms to many New Urbanist strictures – traditionalist building design, ground floor retail facing the street, etc. But because it’s also included a great big parking garage with two gaping entrances (one of which is pictured), it hasn’t gotten rave reviews. Apparently the neighbours, some of whom live in condos or apartments themselves, have cited it as an example of why it’s necessary to “protect” the area from “overdevelopment”.
As an aside, I quite like the way that LA strip retail is built. Major at-grade highways in the older areas of the city are densely packed with street-front retail. The building styles are eclectic and entertaining, and the businesses within are usually pretty varied as well.
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While I’m sure these towns are much better than they used to be, they still suffer from one major problem: the roads are just too wide.
-Overly wide roads decrease density.
-Because density is low, you lean towards vehicles (any kind of non-walking mode, really) to get around (all the places you want to go are further apart).
-Because roads are too wide, a lot of vehicles can be accommodated.
-Because roads are too wide, people can’t occupy the entire space, meaning vehicles can travel faster through the area (fewer obstacles for motorists)
-Any road with high volume, high speed traffic is going to be unpleasant for people, so fewer people go there.
-Cue automobile dependence.
I think part of the reason Auckland is so car dependent now is because historically the roads were build far too wide. Seems crazy to say we’d have a significantly denser, more walkable city if we’d just placed buildings closer to each other, but there you go.
Those street trees are really nice, though.
Wide roading was intelligent future planning. Just think if the roads were small you wouldn’t be able to include your cycle lanes etc.
You don’t need cycle lanes on narrow residential streets. A low design speed does the trick, preferably with the help of low speed limits.
Arterials, yes, I agree, we should absolutely use the width sensibly to provide protected cycle lanes and bus lanes instead of oversupplying traffic lanes.
@Ricardo As Chris mentioned, if roads were smaller then all occupants of the road would be travelling slower as everyone perceives a higher level of risk (of collision), and hence behaves more cautiously. There have been some really good studies on this effect. Use separation is best on arterials or boulevards – roads designed for high speed travel.
Also consider, that if roads were significantly smaller, then all the destinations you’d like to travel to would be closer together, and hence you wouldn’t need to travel as fast or as far.
Slow speed is bad.
The roads are too wide and why does New Urbanism always come out so twee?
There are far better examples of new urbansim to be found.
I didn’t say they were very good examples… just a few places that I’d been through on the trip.
They’re also not very good pictures, as fiddling around with Google Street View is awkward. I haven’t been able to download any photos from my phone.
It was a reply to Patrick’s ‘always’ comment.
I think that the last picture reveals something important – that for a successful city we need a good amount of reasonably priced commercial property which is accessible to the public. The old storefront model does that well.
As for the roads, they’ve been built now. So let’s make the most of them. They can be effectively narrowed by allowing buildings to creep forward and with cyclelanes and other encroachments.
Is this area prone to “drive -bys” that there are no pedestrians on the street?
I always find that is an important litmus test – are there actually people visible wandering around the district? That’s a pretty good indicator that it works as a people-friendly urban space. Not many to be seen in these pics…
The thing I note with many “new urbanist” designs is that the same thing that makes it easier to walk around (i.e. interconnected “grid” network of streets) also makes it easier to drive there too. A smart urban design for encouraging walking would provide that network permeability using links that are not all car-accessible as well, e.g. street blockages or off-street walkways.
Time of the day or week could be major factor? I see long Google car camera shadows….hmmmm one shot anyway but yeah different areas etc. where the hell is everyone?!?