Episode Summary

Which leads us to the patterns of the week.

  1. If you build it they will come. Not good business advice but in the world of infrastructure and urban planning people don't do stuff if they feel like it's dangerous. People want and like to bike but the infrastructure just isn't there to support it...yet!
  2. Affordable housing is a supply and demand issue. Change your regulations or deregulate to incentivize what you want. Which is more housing at an affordable price while increasing your cities tax base. Hey here's a hint, build bike infrastructure instead of parking lots and you're on to something.
  3. There's lots of ways to move people around your community. Cable cars are another creative way to do it. There's legal and economic benefits to using cable cars ie take up less land and cheap to maintain. One caveat - this system will work recognizing that every journey begins and ends on foot. It doesn't do any good if you have to take a car to get to the cable car, and then get another car when you get off the line.

Bike cities emerge across America? (3 min read)

Incremental development in Hawaii got a little easier thanks to Bill 7 (5 min read)

Another option of public transportation for Parisians (3 min read)*

More assets to review when considering road diets by Active Trans and AARP. (14 page pdf, 4 page pdf)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone. I’m Kyle Gulau and on this show, patterns of development, we take less than 10 minutes to deconstruct what's going on in real estate, architecture, and urban planing.

The value proposition of this show? You don't have a lot of time and I find interesting stuff related to our cities and summarize it here. Giving you the next secret weapon, the knowledge bomb, to drop in the meeting.

My own goal, is if I truly study this stuff long enough, patterns will emerge and I'll be a better developer, consultant, coach, neighbor, and citizen. And that's what this podcast is. My studies, shared and summarized for you.

First things First. This is officially episode 52. I've been doing this for a year. Having a great time. So we'll just keep going.

To business!

Bike cities emerge across America. An article in Axios, by Erica Pandey, shares a couple of interesting facts and figures.

0.5% of Americans commuted on bikes in 2019 according to a National Geographic Study. Compared to the Netherlands where 27% of the country commutes by bike. Obviously the US lags behind European counter parts when in comes to biking infrastructure so probably not a surprise that there is a 26.5% difference.

But! As part of that National Geographic study 70% of people in the U.S's 50 biggest metro areas say they're interested in biking to work but are too afraid to bike in the street. Add me to that list. I biked to work for about 2 weeks. Then I decided to take the extra 15 minutes and walk because biking was so terrifying.

As cities start to add infrastructure they start to see usage increase. Oakland, CA added 130 miles of bike lanes and they saw a 40% increase in bike trips across that same period.

Providance, Rhode Island, in less than 2 years went from about 10 miles of bike lane per million inhabitants to 120 nearly two years later. It's possible to easily add this infrastructure because the space is already there.

We've talked multiple times about my two favorite mayors on this show Mayor Hidalgo (Paris) and Mayor Plante (Montreal) they've done this. Win as underdogs on a platform of taking public space back from cars, and then changing roads to bike lanes.

The term road diet comes to mind. How do we put our road on..well a diet...make it less fat...less lanes and take some of that space and reallocate it to other uses? Lots of resistance to this way of thinking in some communities. Common objections include: increased traffic during rush hour, diverted traffic will make neighborhoods less safe for kids playing in the street, and blockage of emergency vehicles.

The AARP, that's right the lobby group for people 65+ in the United States not only fans of Missing Middle Housing but fans of Road diets. A couple of facts from their fact sheet to related to arguments I mentioned above:

On roads that experience fewer than 20,000 vehicles per day, road diets have minimal impact and sometimes a positive impact on vehicle capacity - the AARP is sourcing walkable.org.

Road diets can actually can increase emergency response vehicle times rather than bumper to bumper traffic the addition of a middle left hand turn lane frees up space for emergency vehicles to navigate through traffic. Walkable.org again the source.

Well designed roads don't divert drivers onto other roads. In fact many road diets see an increase in traffic. Their source the us department of transportation.

Road diets, not a bad thing. And free up a cities to utilize their most important resource, their land, more effectively, more diversely, more equitably.

Let's jump to Hawaii, real quick where Honolulu's Bill 7 is helping out small landowners and developers to gain exemptions and waivers to speed up development.

Like everywhere else, Hawaii, has a housing problem. Missing middle housing that use to get built, just doesn't anymore.

To quote the article from Hawaii Business by Noelle Fuji-Oride (sorry about that pronunciation) New versions of those buildings are few and far between as current building and zoning codes make it difficult for developers to make a profit while building affordable rental projects, says Mel Kaneshige, a retired real estate attorney who helped draft Bill 7, the Affordable Rental Housing Bill. \It’s often more profitable to build for-sale condos, he says, but that leaves out affordable rentals.

Honolulu’s Bill 7, which expires in 2024, makes the construction of rentals cheaper by allowing developers and landowners to build taller, wider and denser than normally allowed in areas that have apartment, apartment mixed-use and business mixed-use zoning.

Last up. Parisians getting a new form of transportation. They're getting a cable car system. The Câble 1 (C1) line will link the southeastern suburbs of Créteil and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges with the subway lines of the Paris Métro, making the 4.5 km journey in 17 minutes - less than half the time the same journey takes by bus today. Construction is set to being this year and begin taking passengers in 2025. Too cool.

Why is it cool? Because you get a view and, I'm not sure if this system will have this but other gondola systems have this wifi, and climate control. It also allows for smaller groups of people to travel privately which can be a plus for some people who don't like...sharing.

Which leads us to the patterns of the week.

  1. If you build it they will come. Not good business advice but in the world of infrastructure and urban planning people don't do stuff if they feel like it's dangerous. People want and like to bike but the infrastructure just isn't there to support it...yet!
  2. Affordable housing is a supply and demand issue. Change your regulations or deregulate to incentivize what you want. Which is more housing at an affordable price while increasing your cities tax base. Hey here's a hint, build bike infrastructure instead of parking lots and you're on to something.
  3. There's lots of ways to move people around your community. Cable cars are another creative way to do it. There's legal and economic benefits to using cable cars ie take up less land and cheap to maintain. One caveat - this system will work recognizing that every journey begins and ends on foot. It doesn't do any good if you have to take a car to get to the cable car, and then get another car when you get off the line.

Talk to y'all soon.