Episode Summary

1. Electric cars are still cars. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that charging electric cars is the same thing as parking more traditional vehicles. AKA its car storage. And no one likes hanging out in or around storage units.
2. Density defines. Dense spaces typically offer more options for transportation and allow for people to live car-free.
3. More and more cities continue to define car-free zones in an attempt to create and accelerate the trend of supporting additional transportation types and reclaiming public space for people.

Links To Sources

How are we going to charge electric cars? (5 min read, paywall possible)

The U.S has more car-free areas than you might think... (6 min read)

Brooklyn, NY is among one of the newest neighborhoods to implement car free-thinking (2 min read)

Trending in urban/architectural circles this week, the windowless dorm. (4 min read, paywall possible)

Beyond The Episode

Density mapping in the U.S.

There are very few places in the United States where 50% or more of households go (read: can go) car-free. Alaska is the most notable here but that's because those areas don't have the infrastructure to support cars and their primary transportation options differ from those in the contiguous 48.

Map of New York showing % of households without cars and the public transportations routes.

Brooklyn Renderings

The renderings above show some of the vision on how they intend to remove cars and add more human elements and additional transportation options to public space.

Windowless Dorm

The dilemma of building density but at what cost? Munger says he has feedback from previous projects but it would seem that his previous projects didn't include windowless 8 bed, 1 bath arrangements.

More comments from Twitter are below...  

Transcript

Episode 38 - Patterns of Development

Hey everyone, it's Kyle and this is patterns of development. We're going to take the next 5 to 10 mins and think about urban planning, architecture, and real estate development.

Trying to deconstruct what's going on in the world and figure out if there are any patterns, ideas, thoughts that we can apply in our own backyards.

Let's jump in with an article from Slate by Henry Grabar. Titled, "Where the heck are we going to charge all of the electric cars?"

It raises a good point. Before I even get to the article. I want to paint a, I think, relatable scenario.

The year is 1992. And you're traveling through the airport. The airport is a public space and because of the year you don't have a laptop, you don't have a phone. If you need to make a call you stop at a payphone and if you have a computer it's at the office. You get to your gate, you sit down, and maybe you pull out a book, magazine, or newspaper. Maybe, maybe, your CD player.

Ok ok

So now the year is now 2019. And you're traveling through the airport. Since it's 2019 you have a cell phone, a laptop for work, you might even have a personal tablet for content consumption. You get to your gate, and what's the first thing you look for. Outlets. Where can I plug my stuff in?

And so, we get back to the article in Slate. Parking will go the same way as our airport experience, "where can I plug in?"

Of course, patterns of development include building missing middle housing, or even simpler, increasing density, and reducing parking minimums. When we do those things, where will you plug your car in? We have our 1992 airport, our standard way of doing things, and we have this big change coming our way, vehicles are going electric.

According to the 2019 American Housing survey 1 in three U.S Housing units does not have a garage. It's also well documented that there are estimated to be 8 parking spaces for every car in the United States. And so we have a mismatch of where I want to put my car, and eventually, where ever I put my car, I also will need to charge it. The challenge some say is that we need to bring charges to the curb. Have a parking meter that can also charge your car.

And this is now to quote Henry Grabar's article, "the real downside of electrifying the curb in densely populated neighborhoods becomes clear: It would cement the purpose of the curb for car storage for decades to come, just as activists are beginning to convince cities to explore alternate uses, including bike lanes, bus lanes, greenways, public space, and restaurant terraces."

I talked about this back in my doors, cars, expansion episode, electric cars are still cars. And the dominant transportation technology always ends up shaping our built environments. So maybe when we consider the challenges with electric cars we just remember that they're still cars and maybe there's a different way to solve the more 1st principled problem which is we've got sprawl and you need a car to get around.

Ahhh..but not so fast. In a blog post by Chris Winters he reviews data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015/2019 American Community Survey and documents where the largest concentration of households are living without cars. According to the article, 8.7% of American families are living without cars.

Out of the 74,002 tracts, 351 had 75% or more households that were car-free. And there's probably no surprises here:
Manhattan - 163
Brooklyn - 47
Bronx - 68
Queens - 6
Staten Island - 1

So New York is covered.

San Fransisco, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, and LA had miscellaneous tracts.

No surprise but all these areas where you can live without a car are highly correlated with density.

So that's where 75% of households were car-free...what about between 50 and 75%?

This is where we start to see older cities make the cut - Chicago, Philly, Bmore, New Orleans, Pittsburg, Cleveland, even Detroit makes the cut. This led me to think, well maybe that's because people can't affordable automobiles?

And Chris Winters discusses that. Quoting Chris now, "Since most U.S. cities (unlike, say, New York) do not have much in the way of dense, high-prestige neighborhoods, the majority of relatively carfree tracts in smaller cities and in those of the Sunbelt are located in less well-off areas, but population density still appears to be a critical factor in determining their geography. Dense, high-prestige areas like Oakland in Pittsburgh, the Central West End in Saint Louis, South Beach in Miami Beach, and the French Quarter in New Orleans are nearly as car-free as nearby less privileged neighborhoods."

This leads to our development pattern, when people have multiple options to get around they usually don't pick a car. And density is the parent pattern here. Or the 1st principle. When you're in New York you could walk, take your bike, take the subway, get an uber, or drive your personal vehicle. When you have that many choices to get around it's easy to see how a private vehicle might start to become last on the list.

And if that's true why don't we design more places to be car-free? Well, Montreal and Paris are doing that, well documented on this show, and now downtown Brooklyn is making moves.

Article from "time out" has renderings from the downtown Brooklyn partnership and the public realm action plan that reimagines a bunch of streets and notes creating a network of shared streets, new public spaces, and more greenery.

Specifically, new trees, raised planters, green walls, and rain gardens.

"The area has been bursting at the seams since its 2004 rezoning, DBP says, growing into a mixed-use neighborhood with a population boom, new businesses, and jobs. The streets, as they are now, do not serve those who use it—pedestrians, cyclists, and mass transit riders."

And apparently, according to the partnership the population increase of the five boroughs and has tied with Chicago as the third-largest city in the U.S., DBP says.

I couldn't leave this week without talking about the trending urban planning topic of the week. The windowless dormitory powered by Charlie Munger money. He's proposing 4,500 dwelling units most of which do not have windows. According to the plans I've seen there will be 1 bathroom per 8 bedrooms. There's a whole different episode and discussion to be had here. Check out some of the pictures and floor plans in the show notes...

This leads to our patterns of the week:

1. Electric cars are still cars. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that charging electric cars is the same thing as parking more traditional vehicles. AKA its car storage. And no one likes hanging out in or around storage units.
2. Density defines. Dense spaces typically offer more options for transportation and allow for people to live car-free.
3. More and more cities continue to define car-free zones in an attempt to create and accelerate the trend of supporting additional transportation types and reclaiming public space for people.

That's all for this week and I'll talk to y'all soon.