Walkable Tacoma: The Problem of Mass Transit

It's no secret that I like mass transit. I ride the Link 2-4 times a day (I live at one end and work at the other), and I would be very happy to see it extended into other areas. Most months I buy a bus pass to cut down on my need for quarters (I'd rather hoard them for laundry, anyway) and to get me to out of range locales (comic book store, clothing stores, parental homes, etc). If it weren't for Sound Transit express buses I wouldn't have been able to take Greek class last year, or go to a meeting at the Bellevue library a couple weeks ago. These services fill a need that exists in our current society, and I hope they continue to expand.

BUT.

There are certain flaws in this paradigm that need to be addressed. Mass transit, while improving congestion, reducing pollution (theoretically), reducing oil use and providing outward mobility for a variety of carless populations, does NOT fundamentally build a sustainable transportation network.

Public mass transit is designed for one thing: to allow people to function in a car-based geography without a car. This is important because that's what we live in. Our cities have, for the last century or so, been designed to cater to the automobile. The farther people are able to travel, the farther out a retail company can build their outlet, away from the big city where the land is cheaper (key example: Ikea... no way it would be in Renton if they thought that distance would be prohibitive to Seattle and Tacoma residents).

So governments see the congestion caused by the cars and the rising gas prices and decide to add a bus route, or build a commuter train. And we pedestrians and environmentalists are happy to see progress being made, and fail to recognize that it is a fundamentally temporary solution. The core problem with a highway-centric economy is not that pedestrians can't get far enough. It's that things are too far away. That may sound like the same thing, but it's not. Pedestrians shouldn't need to be forced into highway economy, any more than drivers should be forced to give up their cars.

Instead of trying to make it easier for the population fit into the design, we should be trying to make designs that fit the population. Adding buses runs into the same problem that adding lanes does: it becomes a war of escalation rather than compromise. We are continuing to say to businesses, urban planners and landowners "You don't need to change what you're doing. We'll just keep figuring out more ways to move more people longer distances." And so we have retail stores flooding remote malls and shopping centers and a barren downtown. A lot of people can walk to downtown, or drive there and walk the length of it, but the stores aren't there, because farther away is cheaper and the geography is no obstacle. (And yes, I know that some of the blame for high downtown rents goes on out of town landlords, but I suspect that even a reasonable rent in Tacoma's downtown is going to be trumped by a location out in Puyallup or Lacey or Kent).

Are buses better than cars? Certainly (as long as people use them... a bus with one person on it as a horrible waste of resources in many different ways). Could I do all the things I like to do without them? No. I just think that it's important for the city planners and the businesses to realize that, at a fundamental level, mass transit is a part of the same problem; that they will run into all the same issues of rising gas prices that car-owners do; and most importantly, that the real answer is not finding new ways to pile it on, but designing within a paradigm that will allow us to scale back motorized transit of ALL forms, personal or public.

In practical terms... given a choice between a bill that spends our tax money to extend the Link to places that I go with frequency (up 6th, out toward the mall and so on) and a bill that spends that same money to do whatever is needed to give us a functional downtown in the area where the Link already runs, I would go for the latter in a second. The goal shouldn't be to get us to other places that have what we want, it should be to put what we want where we already are. So says me, anyway. I know that there are at least three people who will read this and have opinions on this, whether similar or different, and I'm curious to hear what they are.

Walkable Tacoma: Dan Burden

Dan Burden, in case you didn't gather from the eleventy billion posts on feed>>tacoma yesterday, is the founder of a consulting firm called Walkable Communities. The city of Tacoma brought him in for a couple days to look around, and give a talk this evening at UWT. I'll be writing in more detail on some of his points and my own thoughts over the next couple days, but I thought I'd do a quick summary of the event tonight.

(I forgot to bring a bad of paper, so I have in front of me a few sloppily-written notes on the backs of crumpled receipts. Yay me.)

Interestingly enough, the message that permeated the lecture was very similar to the message espoused by Kunstler (from what I gather... I wasn't at that one). There is so much emphasis on making driving easier in our communities that we are losing site of actual sustainable design. Transportation authorities have had a tendency to look at traffic congestion and assume that the problem is too few lanes, when it's actually too many cars. Even those who see that the key is too many cars tend to jump to long-range transport solutions, which still misses the point. It is much better in the long run to build a community where the car is used less because it is needed less.

One thing that I found interesting about Burden's approach is that at no point does he preach the elimination of the car. In fact he speaks very little about mass transit. Instead he focuses on the coexistence of cars and pedestrians. Traffic solutions like roundabouts and networked through streets that allow for higher vehicle capacity at lower speeds, narrower lanes that allow for buffer zones.

It all, to me, seemed to come down to two major factors. Make it sensible and make it appealing. Making it sensible means designing communities based primarily on mixed use areas and small property houses so that we physically can walk from place to place (based on a 5 minute radius, which is about what people are comfortable walking. . I know that my 30 minute = normal walking distance is a bit off the norm). Not only do things need to be nearby, but they need to be connected, which means the elimination of the cul-de-sac culture.

Making it appealing comes in from both an aesthetic and a safety angle. People need to want to make the trip, based on the look of the neighborhood, how comfortable the feel about the sidewalks, the crosswalks, everything. People feel comfortable inside their cars, because it's their own little world. So make the community their world.

The biggest difference between Burden and Kunstler, of course, is that Burden is a kindly-spoken man with a big bushy mustache, and Kustler is a crotchety angry bastard. Kunstler is great for getting a bunch of people who already agree with him fired up and ready to move... Burden strikes me more as someone who can actually convince people of things, because he can't be passed off as just a yelling lunatic by the other side.

Anyway, like I said, just a quick summary. More to come.

Walkable Tacoma: Business District Walkability

After reading about the community walkability lecture happening at UWT on Monday, I got to thinking about what does make an area walkable, and how well we're doing at it. While he says it to be a "generally flippant dude" (a cause I can get firmly behind), Mr. Driscoll brings up a valid point: in a car-based culture, it is easy for those with cars to ignore what makes an area walkable.

To me, there are two major flavors of walkability. The first is Business Disctrict Walkability, which I will abbreviate to BDW because I'm sick of typing walkability. BDW is part of what Erik is talking about in his Spew comment: the proximity of different destinations within an area. While some of these could be residential condos, that's not the core issue of BDW. The intent here is not necessarily to mean that people can walk to the businesses, but rather that once they are in the area they can navigate it entirely on foot.

Let's look at the example of downtown Tacoma vs. the Tacoma Mall. The mall is winning, primarily because of a greater BDW. It's not that people can walk to the mall... the majority of Tacoma would have to drive to either, and this will still be the case no matter how many condo projects go up in either place. The issue is that once at the mall, people can park once, walk down, walk back, and be done shopping for the day. Everything's packed in and can easily absorb business from neighbors. Yes, this makes for the "anonymous shopping experience" that I've heard people complaining about, but there is a balance to be struck between a personal experience and a convenient one, and most people will tend toward the convenient.

Then we have downtown. There's minimal issue with the physical ability to walk the area: sidewalks abound, with a few notable exceptions (such as outside the Luzon and Park Plaza South). The issue here is business density. I've already ranted about this an awful lot, so I won't get into it too much, but the short version is: somebody comes down to the Rock to get a pizza, they see a cool little CD store next door. Maybe they buy something at Buzzard's, and then... they see nothing else of interest and go home. Someone else goes to urbanXchange because they heard about it from a friend. They see a couple restaurants, maybe they go to the Harmon, maybe they continue down the street until... big huge retail gap. Even if they do make it past that to Grassis, and even to the corner where they see Tacoma Art Supply, where do they go from there?

The Link was, I think, designed to combat this. As has been pointed out time and again, it doesn't really get people anywhere. Its main practical purposes are 1) getting people from T-Dome parking to Tacoma's attempt at an IFSA and 2) covering the major retail gaps of downtown. And is it working? Doesn't seem so, and there are two major reasons why: first off, even in the little retail pockets that we do have, there isn't all that much. But even if the parking garage renovations lead to an actual retail cluster there, believing that free public transit will get people from Freighthouse Square to the Museum District to the Theatre District on a whim assumes that the main reason people don't do that is laziness, which is a very faulty assumption. I walk an awful lot, and have no problem covering the span of the Link on foot. But I certainly wouldn't do it on a whim if I didn't know what waited for me on the other end. The success of any mall or shopping center, or the University district in Seattle (what I'd really like our downtown to be like) is visibility and connectivity. People don't just walk to the store down the street because it's close. They walk there because they see it from where they are and it catches their eye. And to get there they are forced to walk past every other business on the strip. Even if someone does hop on the link to get from, say, Freighthouse to Sanford & Son, any interesting place they spot along the way requires a backtrack. People are more likely to walk into a new business if they are standing right at the door when they see it.

Obviously the perfect solution is for all the clusters of business to expand until they collide, and maybe in 10 years that will happen. But first we need small businesses to actually survive long enough to be expanded upon. I have high hopes for the possibilities of having the North have of UWT on Pacific filled in (theoretically the next project after they finish the new common area) and the retail renovation of the south Park Plaza. Hopefully once Tacoma gets done worrying about Russel and DaVita, whichever way they both swing, we can start actually encouraging the small businesses that can really make an area like that flourish.