Climate scientists have told city planners that based on current trends, Chicago will feel more like Baton Rouge than a Northern metropolis before the end of this century.
So, Chicago is getting ready for a wetter, steamier future. Public alleyways are being repaved with materials that are permeable to water. The white oak, the state tree of Illinois, has been banned from city planting lists, and swamp oaks and sweet gum trees from the South have been given new priority. Thermal radar is being used to map the city’s hottest spots, which are then targets for pavement removal and the addition of vegetation to roofs. And air-conditioners are being considered for all 750 public schools, which until now have been heated but rarely cooled.
“Cities adapt or they go away,” said Aaron N. Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment. “Climate change is happening in both real and dramatic ways, but also in slow, pervasive ways. We can handle it, but we do need to acknowledge it. We are on a 50-year cycle, but we need to get going.”
Across America and in Congress, the very existence of climate change continues to be challenged — especially by conservatives. The skeptics are supported by constituents wary of science and concerned about the economic impacts of stronger regulation. Yet even as the debate rages on, city and state planners are beginning to prepare.
The precise consequences of the increase of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are hard to determine, but scientists are predicting significant sea level rise; more extreme weather events like storms, tornadoes and blizzards; and, of course, much more heat. New York City, which is doing its own adaptation planning, is worried about flooding from the rising ocean. The Navy has a task force on climate change that says it should be preparing to police the equivalent of an extra sea as the Arctic ice melts.
Some of these events will occur in the near-enough term that local governments are under pressure to act. Insurance companies are applying pressure in high-risk areas, essentially saying adapt or pay higher premiums — especially in urban and commercial areas.
The reinsurance giant Swiss Re, for example, has said that if the shore communities of four Gulf Coast states choose not to implement adaptation strategies, they could see annual climate-change related damages jump 65 percent a year to $23 billion by 2030.
“Society needs to reduce its vulnerability to climate risks, and as long as they remain manageable, they remain insurable, which is our interest as well,” said Mark D. Way, head of Swiss Re’s sustainable development for the Americas.
Melissa Stults, the climate director for ICLEI USA, an association of local governments, said that many of the administrations she was dealing with were following a strategy of “discreetly integrating preparedness into traditional planning efforts.”
Second City First
Chicago is often called the Second City, but it is way out in front of most in terms of adaptation.
The effort began in 2006, under the mayor at the time, Richard M. Daley. He said he was inspired in part by the Kyoto international treaty for reducing carbon emissions, which took effect in 2005, and also by an aspiration to raise Chicago’s profile as an environmentally friendly town.
As a first step, the city wanted to model how global warming might play out locally. Foundations, eager to get local governments moving, put up some money.
“There was real assumption that Chicago could be a model for other places,” said Adele Simmons, president of Global Philanthropy Partnership, a nonprofit group based in Chicago that helped bring in $700,000 at the early stages.
Climatologists took into account a century’s worth of historical observations of daily temperatures and precipitation from 15 Chicago-area weather stations as well as the effect of Lake Michigan in moderating extreme heat and cold to come up with a range of possibilities based on a higher and lower range of worldwide carbon emissions.
The forecasts, while not out of line with global predictions, shocked city planners.
If world carbon emissions continued apace, the scientists said, Chicago would have summers like the Deep South, with as many as 72 days over 90 degrees before the end of the century. For most of the 20th century, the city averaged fewer than 15.
By 2070, Chicago could expect 35 percent more precipitation in winter and spring, but 20 percent less in summer and fall. By then, the conditions would have changed enough to make the area’s plant hardiness zone akin to Birmingham, Ala.
But what would that mean in real-life consequences? A private risk assessment firm was hired, and the resulting report read like an urban disaster film minus Godzilla.
The city could see heat-related deaths reaching 1,200 a year. The increasing occurrences of freezes and thaws (the root of potholes) would cause billions of dollars’ worth of deterioration to building facades, bridges and roads. Termites, never previously able to withstand Chicago’s winters, would start gorging on wooden frames.
Armed with the forecasts, the city prioritized which adaptations would save the most money and would be the most feasible in the light of tight budgets and public skepticism.
“We put each of the priorities through a lens of political, economic and technical,” said Suzanne Malec-McKenna, the commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment. “What is it, if you will, that will pass the laugh test?”
Among the ideas rejected, Ms. Malec-McKenna said, were plans to immediately shut down local coal-powered energy plants — too much cost for too little payback.
For actions the city felt were necessary but not affordable, it got help again from a local institution, the Civic Consulting Alliance, a nonprofit organization that builds pro bono teams of business experts. In this case, the alliance convinced consulting firms to donate $14 million worth of hours to projects like designing an electric car infrastructure and planning how to move the city toward zero waste.
Mr. Daley embraced the project. He convened 20 city departments in 2010 and told them to weigh their planning dollars against the changes experts were predicting. The department heads continued to meet quarterly, and members of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration have said he is committed to moving the goals of the plan forward, albeit with an added emphasis on “projects that accelerate jobs and economic development.”
Updating Infrastructure
Much of Chicago’s adaptation work is about transforming paved spaces. “Cities are hard spaces that trap water and heat,” said Janet L. Attarian, a director of streetscapes at the city’s Department of Transportation. “Alleys and streets account for 25 percent of groundcover, and closer to 40 percent when parking lots are included.”
The city’s 13,000 concrete alleyways were originally built without drainage and are a nightmare every time it rains. Storm water pours off the hard surfaces and routinely floods basements and renders low-lying roads and underpasses unusable.
To make matters worse, many of the pipes that handle storm overflow also handle raw sewage. After a very heavy rain, if overflow pipes become congested, sewage backs up into basements or is released with the rainwater into the Chicago River — an emergency response that has attracted the scrutiny of the Environmental Protection Agency.
As the region warms, Chicago is expecting more frequent and extreme storms. In the last three years, the city has had two intense storms classified as 100-year events.
So the work planned for a six-point intersection on the South Side with flooding and other issues is a prototype. The sidewalk in front of the high school on Cermak Road has been widened to include planting areas that are lower than the street surface. This not only encourages more pedestrian traffic, but also provides shade and landscaping. These will be filled with drought-resistant plants like butterfly weed and spartina grasses that sponge up excess water and help filter pollutants like de-icing salts. In some places, unabsorbed water will seep into storage tanks beneath the streets so it can be used later for watering plants or in new decorative fountains in front of the high school.
The bike lanes and parking spaces being added along the street are covered with permeable pavers, a weave of pavement that allows 80 percent of rainwater to filter through it to the ground below. Already 150 alleyways have been remade in this way.
The light-reflecting pavement is Chicago’s own mix and includes recycled tires. Rubbery additives help the asphalt expand in heat without buckling and to contract without cracking.
The new streets bring new challenges, of course. The permeable pavers have to be specially cleaned or they eventually become clogged with silt and lose effectiveness.
Still, the new construction is no more expensive than traditional costs, Ms. Attarian said. Transforming one alleyway costs about $150,000. But now, she said, “We can put a fire hose on it full blast and the water seeps right in.”
Reconsidering the Trees
Awareness of climate change has filled Chicago city planners with deep concern for the trees.
Not only are they beautiful, said Ms. Malec-McKenna, herself trained as a horticulturalist, but their shade also provides immediate relief to urban heat islands. Trees improve air quality by absorbing carbon dioxide, and their leaves can keep 20 percent of an average rain from hitting the pavement.
Chicago spends over $10 million a year planting roughly 2,200 trees. From 1991 to 2008, the city added so many that officials estimate tree cover increased to 17.6 percent from 11 percent. The goal is to exceed 23 percent this decade.
The problem is that for trees to reach their expected lifespan — up to 90 years — they have to be able to endure hotter conditions. Chicago has already changed from one growing zone to another in the last 30 years, and it expects to change several times again by 2070.
Knowing this, planners asked experts at the city’s botanical garden and Morton Arboretum to evaluate their planting list. They were told to remove six of the most common tree species.
Off came the ash trees that account for 17 percent of Chicago tree cover, or more than any other tree. Gone, too, are the enormous Norway maples, which provide the most amount of shade.
A warming climate will make them more susceptible to plagues like emerald ash disease. Already white oak, the state tree of Illinois, is on the decline and, like several species of conifer, is expected to be extinct from the region within decades.
So Chicago is turning to swamp white oaks and bald cypress. It is like the rest of adaptation strategy, Ms. Malec-McKenna explains: “A constant ongoing process to make sure we are as resilient as we can be in facing the future.”
The windy city is outpacing NYC’s greening efforts in some aspects. The storm water systems, especially, with permeable sidewalks, capacious tree pits and fast spreading green roofs.
Ted S. Warren/APThe Alaskan Way Viaduct, the raised two-level highway that runs along Seattle’s downtown waterfront, is seen from the air in 2006. Seattle is now replacing it to improve mobility for people and goods.
Half a century after cities put up freeways, many of those roads are reaching the end of their useful lives. But instead of replacing them, a growing number of cities are thinking it makes more sense just to tear them down.
To Clevelanders like Judie Vegh, the whole idea of tearing down a freeway just sounds crazy. “I think it’s a pretty bad idea for commuters because I commute every morning downtown,” she says.
Vegh takes the West Shoreway each day from her home in the nearby suburb of Lakewood, Ohio. When she learned that the city plans to convert this freeway into a slower, tree-lined boulevard, she was not amused.
“If it was 35 miles per hour, I would just be later than usual,” Vegh says.
Bob Brown, Cleveland’s city planner, says this is not the traditional highway project. “The traditional highway project is obviously speeding things up, adding more capacity, but often ignoring the character of neighborhoods,” he says.
Dismantling Roads Goes Mainstream
How did this happen? After all, this is the country that always saw roads as a sign of progress.
Now, taking down freeways has gone mainstream. Cities as diverse as New Haven, New Orleans and Seattle are either doing it or talking about it. The chief motivation seems to be money.
Enlarge Marcio Jose Sanchez/APA pedestrian and cyclist are seen along the Embarcadero with the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge in the background. San Francisco dismantled a freeway in this location in the early 1990s.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/APA pedestrian and cyclist are seen along the Embarcadero with the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge in the background. San Francisco dismantled a freeway in this location in the early 1990s.
Milwaukee removed a freeway spur for $30 million. Officials estimated it would have cost between $50 million and $80 million to fix that roadway. That inspired Akron, Ohio, officials to study what to do with an aging six-lane freeway that few motorists use.
“Perhaps we can remove sections of it and have it fit in better with the Akron grid system and offer an economic benefit by making land available,” says Jim Weber, Akron’s construction manager.
This is the city planner’s dream: Take out an underused freeway, open up land for new businesses or parks and magically more workers will move back to the city and property values will soar. So far, though, the results have been mixed.
Milwaukee hasn’t seen as much development as proponents hoped after that city took down a spur of the Park East Freeway. But San Francisco revitalized an entire neighborhood by taking down the Embarcadero Freeway in the early 1990s.
Saving New York City’s SoHo
For many cities, Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood represents the ideal because it’s dense and wealthy. In the mid-20th century, it resembled a neighborhood you’d be more likely to see in some Midwestern cities. It was a fading industrial area after much of its population had fled to the suburbs.
Telstar Logistics/FlickrThe Embarcadero Freeway, circa 1960, as it once existed along San Francisco’s waterfront.
The uber-planner Robert Moses, famous for the freeways he built in New York, wanted to stick a 10-lane freeway there.
“This would have created essentially a giant Berlin Wall cutting off what became SoHo from what became Tribeca,” says Tom Vanderbilt, the author of Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). “And, these two are now sort of essentially connected in what has become a huge swath of really desirable real estate.”
But Moses’ freeway plan never got built, and today urban planners have come full circle. Now that most cities are far less industrial, planners like Cleveland’s Brown remain focused on sustainability and about being able to walk places.
“When you talk about improving the quality of life in neighborhoods and a city, that translates directly into increases in population and jobs,” he says.
Support From The Transportation Department
Few are talking about removing the most heavily traveled roads. But even the U.S. Department of Transportation, which spent decades promoting highways, recently stunned planners when it backed some freeway removal plans.
In Cleveland, many are warming to the West Shoreway’s becoming a boulevard. Walking around a neighborhood near the Shoreway, Don Burrows says he thinks the neighborhood would benefit.
“I like the idea,” he says. ” Because I think it will make the lake much more accessible to the population. I think it will make the neighborhoods more livable.”
And, for all the talk about making cities more livable or sustainable, planners are trying to sell a skeptical public on the idea that a better quality of life trumps a slightly longer commute.
This story was produced by Changing Gears, a collaboration of WBEZ Chicago, Michigan Radio and ideastream Cleveland.
August 2, 2010President Obama is touting alternatives to foreign oil, research funds are flowing into renewable energy and venture capital is again surging into the clean technology sector. But the shift to clean energy is still a long way off. As established startups move towards building their first commercial facilities, some are struggling to find the funding to scale up. They’ve exhausted much of their venture capital and can’t yet satisfy the strict risk terms of traditional lenders.
2010-08-02
The electric Ford Focus is just one in a growing number of hybrid and plug-in vehicles that are reshaping the automotive landscape. FordMore from NRDC
- Green Living: The Coming Electric Cars
- Roland Hwang’s Blog: Detroit Auto Show Recap: Time for a Model Change
- Frances Beinecke’s Blog: EPA’s New Clean Car Standards: The Right Kind of Energy Solution
A veteran car correspondent assesses the industry’s changing landscapeThe electrification of Motown was in full display this week at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show, which runs through January 23. In the past, press previews at the event have featured carnival-style new car announcements. Not this year, but there was still a subdued sense that although Detroit may not yet be fully recovered from bankruptcy and recession, U.S. automakers are getting back on their feet. And electric cars are emerging as central to that rebirth.
The shift is best captured by GM’s all-in bet on the Volt, a plug-in electric hybrid sedan. It’s hard to understate the scope of GM’s conversion with the Volt. GM was poised to pioneer mainstream electric cars with its EV1 over a decade ago, only to curtail the program in a series of decisions made infamous by the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?“
Photo Gallery: Meet the New Electric VehiclesBy the mid 2000s, with sales of big SUVs and trucks spinning off proportionally big profits, I can recall senior GM executives disparaging Toyota’s then small-selling Prius as a bad business strategy, describing it as a costly kludge of electric and gas technologies whose price could never cover its cost to build.
Fast forward a few years. Toyota is the biggest carmaker in the world, and the Prius is a global hit. GM meanwhile is struggling back from bankruptcy and is earning kudos for rolling out an e-car that’s similar to the Prius in more than just looks. The Volt is a 60 mpg, four-door sedan that plugs in and runs on a combination of battery power, a gas engine. And it will cost $40,000, a price that — just like early versions of the Prius — critics have said can’t cover the true costs of its advanced technologies.
If GM failed to recognize the EV1’s potential, it’s not making the same mistake this time. Just as Toyota has benefited hugely from the green halo that the Prius lends the company’s reputation, GM seems to get that even if early Volts are money losers, the reputational benefits are enormous. Thanks to GM’s huge, years-in-the-making publicity campaign for the vehicle, the public is probably more aware of this car than any new vehicle in recent history, gas or electric.
For all the attention heaped on GM, Ford is also banking on a small fleet of new electric vehicles designed to appeal to a broader set of buyers. The sole U.S. automaker to avoid a government bailout, Ford introduced three new electric vehicles at the show. The most ambitious is the Focus Electric, an all-battery plug in sedan, which can roll 100 miles on a charge. It will cost around $30,000.
Ford also announced two new green micro-vans. The C-Max Energi (yes, with an “i”) is a five-passenger “multi-activity” vehicle that — like Chevy’s Volt — can be plugged in at night to recharge, then run on only battery power or a mix of battery and gas for a total range of over 500 miles. Its sibling the C-Max Hybrid is a conventional hybrid — similar to Toyota’s Prius — that boosts its mileage by switching between battery and gas power and storing energy from braking in a big battery pack. Ford’s C-Max vehicles will hit markets in 2012, and pricing is as yet unavailable.
On Switchboard: NRDC’s Transportation Program DirectorEven Toyota is hoping an electric shock can help rehabilitate its image. This may seem odd given that the world’s largest automaker has been building electric-gas hybrids for 15 years (the Prius debuted in 1997). Yet Toyota is struggling back from a series of embarrassing quality problems and high-profile recalls that damaged the reputations of its main Toyota and Lexus brands.
Its Prius line, meanwhile, remains untarnished. It is also the most widely-recognized and best selling eco-car in the world. Indeed, Toyota has announced a goal to make Prius the best selling “nameplate” in the world by 2020. Building on this pledge, in Detroit Toyota announced both bigger and smaller versions of the Prius, along with a plug-in hybrid to compete with Chevy’s Volt.
Returning to the question of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” it’s fitting to note that the maker of that documentary is putting the final touches on a sequel, “Revenge of the Electric Car,” due in theaters this spring.
2011-01-14
Carried away: Ezra Klein and Tom Vilsack ride an imaginary “raft of subsidies.” This week, an interesting — and, I think, bizarre — argument broke out between Washington Post political blogger Ezra Klein and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. The topic was whether rural residents deserve what Klein called a “raft of subsidies,” when in fact, “we still need cities.” Klein’s contributions to the debate were widely hailed as “brilliant” and Vilsack’s were widely deplored (see here and here); but I was left wondering what precisely the two were arguing about — and whether either one of them actually knew what he was talking about.
To me, the debate reflects rather naive prevailing beliefs on the relationship between town and country. Cities and rural areas aren’t locked in a death match for precious resources; rather, their relationship is symbiotic. Healthy cities need healthy rural areas — and vice versa. Right now, in a large sense, we have neither.
Instead of a smart dissection of that dilemma, what did we get from Klein and Vilsack? Klein opened things up with a short post on the ongoing importance of cities. Citing Ed Glaeser‘s new book, Triumph of the City, Klein draws out the fairly standard insight that cities remain important, because face-to-face contact turns out to be better at generating innovation than telecommuting. (They remain important for a lot of other reasons, too). From there, Klein concludes that cities “make us smarter, more productive and more innovative. To put it plainly, they make us richer. And the evidence in favor of this point is very, very strong.” Fair enough. But then he adds this non sequitur:
But it would of course be political suicide for President Obama to say that part of winning the future is ending the raft of subsidies we devote to sustaining rural living. [Emphasis added.]
The way I read this, Klein is arguing that the future health of cities requires the end of federal subsidies to rural living, of which there are a raft. Um …. OK. Lots going on here. Before we even get to Vilsack’s response, I’ve got to do some unpacking.
First of all, when I think of what holds back cities, I don’t think about, say, the farm fields of Iowa or the shale gas regions of rural Pennsylvania and New York. What I do think of is suburbia, and the way U.S. cities have been structured for half a century around the car — specifically, around moving people via private transportation pods through a web of low-density suburbs that surround cities, on publicly funded roads.
I would call the massive public investment in sprawl infrastructure over the past half century, which got yet another boost from the recent ill-fated housing boom, the tragedy of cities as we head into a carbon-constrained, pricey-oil future. Our vast, sprawling suburbs are not going to be easy to dismantle going forward — built environments don’t transform themselves overnight. The phenomenon of asset inertia arises: we are compelled to use (and maintain) existing infrastructure merely because it’s there and we can’t imagine finding sufficient resources to replace it, long after it makes sense (if it ever did). Mass transit works beautifully in dense environments like Manhattan; but not so well in, say, the fourth suburban ring outside of Phoenix or Orlando.
Allison Arieff on design and architecture.
Sometime early this year, New York City’s taxi and limousine commission will announce the winner of its “Taxi of Tomorrow” competition. Or it won’t. The project was begun in 2007, and in December 2009 a “request for proposals” went out to automotive manufacturers and designers. The bar wasn’t set all that high: the Taxi of Tomorrow was meant to be “safe, fuel-efficient, accessible, durable, and comfortable.” A look at the three finalists announced in November 2010 confirms they are perhaps all of those things. They are also, well, dull. Boxy. Lacking in imagination. (Not that New York’s current cab, the Ford Crown Victoria, was one to inspire much.)
Slide Show
Taxis for the Future
See proposals for the taxi of tomorrow by the artist and inventor Steven M. Johnson, a self-described conjurer of “ludicrous” ideas.
The winner stands to supply more than 13,000 medallion taxis for at least a decade, a deal that could be worth up to $1 billion. Imagine if, in turn, the yellow spots monopolizing New York’s streets could help transform the urban landscape, perhaps by being smaller and more streamlined, having less environmental impact, or providing more comfort, convenience and aesthetics to passengers. What if the “tomorrow” part manifested itself not just in the object (the car) but in new initiatives inspired by the broad national movement toward collaborative consumption, like a taxi-sharing app that could help facilitate carpooling from J.F.K. into the city?
Steven M. JohnsonThe perfect solution for these recessionary times, this cab, re-envisioned as a compact bus, allows passengers to pay on a sliding scale. Click on the photo to see more of Mr. Johnson’s ideas.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that “if [the taxi] doesn’t meet our needs, then we can start the process all over again, or say we just can’t find what we want and come back and visit this at another time in the future.” Well, only one of the three is wheelchair accessible, only one offers an electric option. So with the door still open, as it were, I had several conversations with the artist/inventor (and former R&D guy for Honda) Steven M. Johnson, a self-described conjurer of “ludicrous” ideas for decades. But sometimes the wildest ideas result in the best solutions. We discussed the taxi-related issues that seemed to have been inadequately addressed in the Taxi of Tomorrow competition.
There is traffic, as in the inability to do anything about it. Should there be a taxi lane? An elevated one, straight out of Rem Koolhaas’s “Delirious New York”? There’s availability — how to improve the odds of getting a cab when you need one — and also affordability: a cab-sharing program has been tried in the city already, but is there a way to improve it, or create a vehicle that allows for ride-sharing? And there’s reliability — how can you better the odds that your driver knows how to get where you want to go?
In addition, there are different and specific issues of comfort that need to be addressed for a car that hosts many passengers in the course of a day. The average taxi seems too hot, or too cold, or too loud; the upholstery sags, and cleanliness is relative. This affects the relationship between passenger and driver, and the corresponding civility (or lack thereof). Is the environment safe and secure? Are the temperature, noise level and air quality satisfactory? Should there be an enforceable dress code for drivers, as has been proposed by the city’s taxi and limousine commission?
After we talked, Johnson came up with nearly 60 different concepts, some pragmatic, some dystopic, others clearly silly. We winnowed it down to nine, tongues firmly in our cheeks. Click here to see a slide show of his ideas.
I commend the city for soliciting comments on the finalists, and the media, design and innovation firm Human Condition for creating the Taxi of Tomorrow crowd-sourcing site, which has been offering a forum for ideas and commentary since October. I hope the commission pays attention.
See a Magnum Photos gallery of streetcars, trams, and trolleys.
There is a great, if unnamed and often overlooked, attraction in Disney World: Transportationland.
As any visitor knows, one of the most striking experiences at Disney World is navigating it. The place offers an impressively multi-modal suite of options. There’s walking, horseless carriages, steamboats, the famous monorail (said to carry more passengers than most U.S. light-rail systems), horse-drawn trolleys, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover, not to mention mobility scooters and, at some parks, bikes. Then there’s the bus fleet that shuttles visitors from the parking lots to the entrance gates. (If it were a municipal fleet, a Disney engineer once told me, it would be the 21st largest in the United States.)
Transportation was, in fact, so important to Walt Disney himself that it has come up in recent criticisms of Disney’s newish California Adventure park, built in 2001. “Disney obsessives complain the park is “missing a soul … missing that signature Disney theme park transportation.” Indeed the park, which Disney’s own Robert Iger has called “mediocre,” is undergoing a billion-dollar renovation, featuring, among other things, the installation of a “Red Car” trolley—an effort to inject a bit of street life into a “California Adventure” that seemed, well, a little too contemporary Orange County.
AdvertisementWhat’s interesting about Disney World and Disneyland is not merely the range of transportation options, but the mixture of new and old modes they represent. These varied ways to get around reflect biographer Neal Gabler’s observation that Walt Disney was “at once a nostalgist and a futurist, a conservative and visionary.” One imagines he would have been equally happy riding the retro trolley on Main Street as whisking through Tomorrowland in an ultramodern monorail.
But there is something else to note here. The monorail—which must have looked to Disney and the world like the transportation of the future in the 1950s—is now, to many, considered a historical footnote, a relic of World Expos or, at best, an automated ride between airport terminals. America’s highest-profile monorail project, the expansion of Seattle’s line, was plagued by cost overruns and funding gaps, and was finally dissolved in 2005 (costing taxpayers $125 million). The Las Vegas monorail has filed for bankruptcy. At the same time, those retro streetcars, which Disney himself rode in Kansas City in the early 20th century and which must have seemed to him part of a vanishing past, are returning (or may soon return) to any number of American cities, including Washington, D.C.; Cincinnati’ Tucson; Atlanta; Dallas; St. Louis; and Salt Lake City.
So the future we thought we were going to get somehow seems antiquated, while the past looks increasingly, well, futuristic. Why is the trolley ascendant as the monorail declines?
The first thing to know about the monorail—which, simply defined, “guided transit vehicle operating on or suspended from a single rail, beam, or tube”—is that it has a long history of being the transportation of the future. “One of the most enduring ideas in transportation has been the monorail,” notes William Middleton in Metropolitan Railways, “which in a variety of forms has been offered as the solution to urban transportation ever since the late nineteenth century.” The inventor Joe Vincent Meigs demonstrated his patented monorail scheme in East Cambridge, Mass., in 1886. There were other, more fantastical schemes, like the Boynton Bicycle Electrical Railway, but as Middleton notes, this, too, “like almost all monorail schemes, was soon forgotten.”
Modern monorail partisans insist theirs is a viable, if misunderstood, transportation form. (Thanks a lot, Simpsons.) The Web site of their leading organ, The Monorail Society (“Monorails … They’re Not Just for Theme Parks and Zoos!”), extols successful monorails around the world (Tokyo-Haneda, the Shanghai Maglev, a monorail slated for the Philippines!) and argues their benefits: Safe (with some exceptions), popular, and cost-effective. The failure to spread in cities worldwide reflects, they argue, a sense that they are still “experimental.” It is as if they can’t shake the perception that their moment is not yet here. As Wayne Curtis wrote, “the monorail was twenty years ahead of its time, and it has been mired there ever since.” And, more conspiratorially: “Something some transportation experts have whispered to us over the years is that a lot more people can make a lot more money if light rail or subway is built.”
Streetcar supporters counter with a battery of well-practiced rejoinders. They say streetcars are cheaper than monorails. Sure, Japanese monorail systems make money, they argue, but so do Japanese trains. Light-rail—a term that has a somewhat slippery definition, but which I’m using here to refer to streetcars (whether modern or vintage in style) that run short routes with frequent stops at street level—has a proven track record in America and has carried infinitely more passengers. Supporters also claim that streetcars promote urban development—which seems possible if not proven. (Streetcar people, like monorail people, even have their own conspiracy theories about what’s holding them back.)
In a conciliatory note, streetcar fans acknowledge that monorail is suitable “where nothing else fits and there is a need to connect at least two points of high activity”—situations in which you wouldn’t have to build lots of expensive elevated stations or worry about a lot of network “branching.” And if monorails are haunted by their forward-looking past, a rap on many streetcars is that they are simply vehicles for nostalgia rather than real transportation, “Disneyland toys,” as Randall O’Toole snorts. As a famous article, Don Pickrell’s “A Desire Named Streetcar,” noted, municipal officials have persistently underestimated light-rail construction costs and overestimated eventual ridership numbers. (A later study noted planners had gotten better on rider forecasts but no better on capital costs.) Transit advocates (even those on the political right) retort that all kinds of highways “lose” money; some even go bankrupt.
Jarrett Walker, a transit planner in Melbourne, argues that a kind of mode blindness can obscure the actual practicality of any transportation technology. The monorail, he notes, was in part a victim of our vision of what cities should look like, which, for now at least, is not the Futurama world of crisscrossing elevated walkways and extreme grade-separation. “The current generation of urban designers is pretty passionate about the supreme importance of the pedestrian experience at the ground plane,” he writes, “and resistant to putting any substantial structure directly over a street.” This theory may explain why the streetcar is ascendant. But it doesn’t prove that trolleys are superior. Streetcar devotees, Walker suggests, often oversell the streetcar as a boon to mobility; there’s little, in terms of speed or technology, a streetcar can do that a bus cannot.
And we could go here into an exhaustive rabbit-hole of per-mile costs and capacity and other spreadsheet cells, but I want instead to return to Disney, and point out that—to rework Walter Benjamin’s famous declaration—every form of infrastructure is at once a form of desire. Disney didn’t just build monorails or trolleys to move people from A to B. They were and are an experience in and of themselves—an idea often underemphasized in transit planning.
A common critique of both monorail and streetcar projects is that they’re “for tourists.” If they are—and certainly San Francisco’s “historic” lines are heavily touristed—it might be worth asking: So what? Tourists need mobility and access like anyone else, and the economic value of historic streetcars, which in cities like San Francisco (where tourism is a legitimate industry) are often overflowing with tourists, clearly goes beyond ticket costs. Often the “tourist” charge is a brush used to tar urban livability schemes in general (e.g., New York’s Times Square); one study of Vancouver’s “Olympic Line,” a 60-day streetcar demonstration project, found 82 percent of riders were city residents.
I recently spent hours riding the historic streetcars in Lisbon, and while there were certainly tourists (the city’s transit authority has just announced it will raise the price of tickets bought onboard, in part to benefit from this market), there were also plenty of residents—for whom, as a local friend observes, the streetcar is a “lifeline” to neighborhoods like Graça or Campo de Ourique. And while I would not have been particularly excited to board a bus, or even a taxi, there was an undeniable ease and grace to boarding a streetcar. As it clanged up into the Alfama, I alternated between looking at the stellar city views and the urban pageant within. Was it nostalgic? Perhaps. But it was also accessible, and seemed to be a part of the urban scrum, not some elevated train whisking away to an unseen destination. Nostalgia is not by itself good or bad, and it takes many forms. Consider modern streetcars, which despite not reaching high speeds, look as if they could. “If you want one reason why modern streetcars with rounded noses—Strasbourg, Portland, Seattle—are becoming the new norm,” Walker told me, “it’s that they’ve hit on a way to signify the future and the past at the same time. The mere fact of it being a streetcar invokes a nostalgic return-to-1920-paradise agenda, even as the rounded-nose signifies the future.”
It rather puts a new gloss on something Walt Disney once said: “Yesterday is a thing of the past.”
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is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, now available in paperback. He is contributing editor to Artforum, Print, and I.D.; contributing writer to Design Observer; and has written for many publications, including Wired, the Wilson Quarterly, the New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. He blogs at howwedrive.com and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tomvanderbilt.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
Really, it should be streetcars vs monorails vs buses…
LIKE other post-industrial areas in the city, New York’s Gowanus neighbourhood is getting stylish. But those who venture there after a heavy rainstorm might rethink their plans to buy that loft. When the city’s ageing sewerage system is overwhelmed, untreated storm-water and sewage flood into local waterways, including the Gowanus Canal. The resulting whiff is sure to keep property prices at a level starving Brooklyn artists can afford.
Big US cities begin to letting the rain soak in, rather than whisk it away as waste. This creates green spaces, and lowers sewerage costs, as well as noxious sewer overflows into local waterways. Yes, I’d like some permeable concrete, please.
@adamanyc on TwitterGreener Gotham is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache
