Episode Summary
- Our urban form is heavily influenced by the dominate form of transportation technology.
- Is the city of the future the opposite of a smart city? Less sensors and data. More plants and bees? Humans live in cites and they should be more human.
- If you're building a bike network consider two key elements: make the network interact with cars as little as possible and give people a place to park their bike securely.
Episode Sources
Electric ferries for Stockholm and a word from their manufacturer. (2 min read, landing page)
No more smart cities (at least in Toronto)? (6 min read)
Protected bike lanes in Chicago. (2 min read)
Episode Transcript
Episode 73 - Patterns of Development
Ferry, Smart, Lanes
This is patterns of development.
Hey everyone. I’m Kyle Gulau. On this show, patterns of development, we take less than 10 minutes each week to deconstruct what's going on in real estate, architecture, and urban planning.
So it's summer time in the northern hemisphere. The great outdoors calls us as school is out, nature is greener, and the air and water are warmer.
I was taking some time with the family in Northern Michigan and a relative of mine has an electric truck. As we were talking about electric vehicles, we started to wonder when the technology would jump into water craft. It might have been an ignorant statement. Of course people already have made electric boats, a better question might have been when will the technology improve to make an electric boat more feasible for the main stream.
Can the idea hold water? Will it float? Does it have wind in its sails? All the boat and water puns.
Ok - I need to live up to this podcast's value proposition. What does this have to do with architecture, urban planning and real estate? Well, urban forms tend to be impacted most by the predominant transportation technology of their era. Walking -> Horses -> Trains -> Cars -> Airplanes have all shaped our urban forms. So electric boats? Any opportunities there?
Turns out, maybe? Electric ferries are getting tested out as a green replacement option for the existing ferry fleet in Stockholm's transportation network.
The Candela P-12, labeled the world's fastest electric ferry by the manufacturer, will start serving a passenger route between Stockholm and the suburban island Ekerö in 2023. Additional trial routes will be added in 2024.
According to the article by Feargus O'Sullivan and the Candela's website the ferries have a maximum speed of 30 knots (35 miles an hour) and can cover a distance of about 50 miles making the fjords of Stockholm the perfect location to test out this technology. The boats use hydrofoil technology to achieve the speeds and range. Essentially these boats have airplane wings beneath the hull and as they travel they lift out of the water. By lifting the hull out of the water, they reduce a significant amount of drag. The thinking goes that this drag reduction allows current battery and electric power train technology to be leveraged more effectively.
Shifting gears a bit, an article in MIT Technology review, titled "Toronto wants to kill the smart city forever" discusses what happens when technology gets leveraged in the wrong ways.
In 2017, Sidewalk labs, an affiliate of Google, submitted the winning proposal to redevelop 2,000 acres of some Toronto River front. Their plan was to "build from the internet up" and included features like: robo-taxis, heated sidewalks, autonomous garbage collection, and an extensive digital layer to monitor everything from street crossings to park bench usage.
By 2020, Sidewalk labs took back their application citing economic uncertainty from the Covid19 pandemic but it was the perfect cloud cover for Google's parent company Alphabet to get out from a project that had met significant public resistance.
The term smart city is the idea of using sensors throughout a city to collect data and help make a city run more efficiently. While it sounds nice in practice, people don't like the idea of being tracked 24/7 in physical space. I don't know...something about it creeps people out.
Anyway. Toronto hasn't given up on redeveloping its riverfront neighborhood called Quayside. As the project continues to be developed imagery for the project includes lots of greenery and public spaces.
To quote the article by Karrie Jacobs,
"In every way, Quayside 2.0 promotes the notion that an urban neighborhood can be a hybrid of the natural and the manmade. The project boldly suggests that we now want our cities to be green, both metaphorically and literally—the renderings are so loaded with trees that they suggest foliage is a new form of architectural ornament."
Really the complete opposite of a smart city.
Last up this week, a quick shout out to Chicago, who is choosing to upgrade all protected bike lanes so they have concrete barriers by the end of 2023. 15 miles in 2022. 13 miles in 2023. If you seriously try to ride a bike around town you worry about 2 things: a route where you can interact with cars the least, and where you're going to lock up your bike when you arrive. If you want to build a bike network get inside the mind of a biker and solve those two problems.
Thinking of that "not smart" city. It has green space, it's probably walkable, and there's opportunities to bike around without having to worry about getting smoked by a car.
Which leads us to our patterns of the week:
- Our urban form is heavily influenced by the dominate form of transportation technology.
- Is the city of the future the opposite of a smart city? Less sensors and data. More plants and bees? Humans live in cites and they should be more human.
- If you're building a bike network consider two key elements: make the network interact with cars as little as possible and give people a place to park their bike securely.
That's all for this week and I'll talk to you soon.
