Cities at Night

Via The Map Room, NASA's Earth Observatory posts some nice images of cities at night. E.g.:



From le text:

Border cities like Ciudad Juaréz, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, illustrate different city patterns side-by-side, suggesting cultural influences on the development and growth of cities and infrastructure. Ciudad Juaréz supports at least 1,300,000 people. On the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, El Paso is marked by the brightly-lit Interstate Highway I-10 that cuts across the city. Although the area of El Paso, with an estimated population of slightly more than 600,000 is roughly on the order of the area of built-up Ciudad Juaréz, the density of settlement evidenced by the distribution of lights is much less.

Taken April 7, 2003.

Netflixography

The New York Times raided Netflix's queue data and came up with this:



It shows Netflix rental patterns by zipcode in twelve great American cities, plus Dallas. Shown above is the popularity of Gus Van Sant's Milk in New York City. They've got maps for the current top 50 rentals for every zip code in all 13 cities, which is kind of nuts.

A few patterns tend to recur. In particular (based on my limited knowledge of the geography of these cities, especially NYC, which I know best) a lot of titles seem to fit into one of three categories:

Movies that are popular in wealthy urban areas: the yuppie and hipster neighborhoods. Includes Burn After Reading, The Wrestler, Milk (they're not big fans in surburban Atlanta), Revolutionary Road (but suburbs, too), Rachel Getting Married, Pineapple Express, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, W., Sunshine Cleaning, Religulous, Man on Wire, and Mad Men: Season 1.

Movies that are popular in poorer or working class urban areas . Includes Seven Pounds, Twilight, Body of Lies, Eagle Eye, The Soloist, Wanted, Pride and Glory, Push, Obsessed, Transporter 3 (never heard of this franchise), The Taking of Pelham 123 (only 31st most popular in Pelham), and RocknRolla.

Movies that are popular in suburbs. Includes Gran Torino, The Proposal, Mall Cop, Taken (never heard of it), Defiance, Nights in Rodanthe (city people hate it!), Yes Man, Marley and Me, Last Chance Harvey, Australia, and Bride Wars.

Lots of movies don't fit any of those patterns, of course, including I Love You, Man, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen. New in Town is just hugely popular in Minneapolis and nowhere else. And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is inexplicably popular pretty much everywhere.

Urban Growth Regulation in the US

Paul Krugman points to another be-mapped Brookings report, this one on the growth typologies of the 50 largest US metro areas. Here's the map Krugman posts - it shows typology of land use regulation by metro area:



They found that cities followed a few different patterns of growth regulation regimes, which they classify into four orders:

Traditional. This covers 34 metros and 75 million people. In these areas, "planning and zoning remains mostly voluntary, few local governments engage in innovative land-use regulation, and state review of local plans is mostly absent. These are also highly 'fragmented' metropolitan areas with large numbers of local governments, each of which regulates land use based mainly on its own calculus." Densities are falling faster in these areas than elsewhere, and they tend to offer fewer housing opportunities for low-income residents.

Exclusion. These areas regulate against the construction of low-density apartment complexes, and "share a comparatively low use of tools to require that development 'pay its own way'.” Housing prices tend to be relatively high in these areas.

Wild Wild Texas. The Lone Star State is sui generis, its cities less restricted than any others in the country, partly because zoning and comprehensive growth plans are both disallowed for Texas counties. These cities have some of the lowest housing prices, but note that this report was from 2006, the height of the housing bubble.

Reform. These metros use a broad range of tools to regulate and manage development. Central cities in these areas tend to be more prosperous, with more college graduates and homeowners, than in the Exclusion and Traditional areas. (This goes for Texas as well.) The growth control group within this family has thte highest housing prioes in the country.

One thing worth noting is that, though the essentially deregulated environment in Texas is characterized by affordable housing and (in 2010) one of the least bad state economies (not saying much), this is largely due to the existence of uncharacteristically progressive regulations in the mortgage market which kept the housing bubble at bay in Texas' biggest cities. And, of course, the affordability of these cities has lots of external costs in the form of environmental impacts, particularly the worsening of global warming engendered by all that new sprawl. Meanwhile, the report says that reform cities generally offer the best opportunities for minorities (again, ca. 2006; but these areas are generally getting hammered economically right now); and that they succeed when they are oriented towards growth management rather than growth control, the latter of which suppresses development in already built areas.

Krugman makes a further point:

Oh, and someone will surely raise the claim that this shows that you mustn’t have “smart growth” policies because they cause housing bubbles. Can I say that this is deeply stupid? On one side, we’re supposed to believe that markets are efficient and wonderful; on the other, we’re supposed to believe that anything which constrains buildable land — which, you know, sometimes happens for entirely natural reasons — will send markets into wild irrational swings. Those poor, fragile, omnipotent markets, able to handle anything except mild government intervention …

I more or less agree with this sentiment, though I wouldn't necessarily call the opposing view "deeply stupid." I think that on the one hand, a truly deregulated growth environment is sort of like what Ghandi said about Western democracy: it would be a nice idea and we whould try it some time. Even cities like Houston have lots of regulations about how cities can be built, for instance, employing minimum parking space requirements that exacerbate sprawl. (I actually don't know if a truly unregulated city growth pattern would be a 'nice idea,' but it would be interesting to have one such American city as a test case.) But on the other hand, I think what you get from a radically free market in urban development is what you usually get from radically free markets: a tremendous ability to satisfy consumer demand in the short-term, plus horrendous externalized costs (environmental degradation, including global warming, and so forth) and other terrible consequences that tend to mount over the long term, and which private individuals have little incentive to account for.

Metro Monitor Maps

The Brookings Institution does this thing called a Metro Monitor. It monitors metros, economics-wise, and it comes with some maps. This one shows overall performance:



It's based on four factors: "employment change from peak; unemployment rate change from one year ago; gross metropolitan product change from peak; and housing price index change from one year ago."

This one shows employment change. It explains itself:



And this one just shows straight-up unemployment:



Says the accompanying report:

Nationwide, the recession is over—at least in the view of most economists in light of third quarter 2009 indicators. They revealed a real U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) increasing at a 2.8 percent annual rate, after four consecutive quarters of contraction. Most interpreted that rate of output growth, along with other signals such as increasing housing prices, as indication that the economic recovery is underway.

Yet the recovery seems fragile. The output increase may have resulted largely from the replenishment of manufacturing inventories and from temporary federal policies: the “cash-for-clunkers” program (already over), the first-time homebuyer tax credit (now extended through April 2010), and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s economic stimulus. As the effects of these policies recede, the recovery could slow or give way to yet another recession or a prolonged period of economic stagnation.

Real recovery in the labor market, moreover, remains elusive. Although output grew between July and September of 2009, the total number of U.S. jobs continued to decline. Payroll employment dropped by about 600,000 during the third quarter (about half the decline of the previous quarter), and the unemployment rate climbed to 9.8 percent by September. While the most recent national-level report showed a significant slowing of job losses in November, and a slight downtick in unemployment, the national economy still seems a long way from posting the sustained job gains that would meaningfully lower unemployment and boost incomes.

I'll be honest: this article seemed kind of boring so I didn't really read it. I assume it said what we all know - the economy blows and there aren't enough jobs. But it did helpfully put a few points in bold, so we can skip right to those:

• Metro areas continued to register highly disparate economic performance even as the nation showed early signs of recovery.
• Six metro areas—Albuquerque, Austin, McAllen, San Antonio, Virginia Beach, and Washington, DC—had regained their pre-recession peak level of output by the third quarter.
• Recovery seemed to be underway in most metro areas, but job growth remained spotty.
• The first-time homebuyer tax credit appeared to boost economic growth in nearly all metro areas.
• The “cash-for-clunkers” program boosted economic growth in most metro areas, and probably accounted for the improved rankings of auto production-specialized metro areas.[By the way, it is the official economic analysis of The Map Scroll that the government's efforts to continue to encourage home and car buying is propping up a failed economic model and merely delaying the inevitable transition to a non car-and-sprawl based economy while squandering tax dollars in the process. Our qualifications for making this analysis are various and broad.]
• The rate of metropolitan job losses in construction, manufacturing, and administrative services slowed considerably in the third quarter.
• Home prices stabilized or grew in an increasing number of metro areas, but inventories of real estate-owned properties (REOs) continued to mount overall.

This report is from December. The next update will come out in March, and it will probably show improvement, though according to Paul Krugman, there's a strong danger of the economy taking another brody later in 2010. We'll see. In the meantime, So long, Florida, and thanks for all the fish!

Deconstructing Metros

Neil Freeman's rather postmodern fake is the new real site has a graphic of the "fifty largest metro areas (in blue), disaggregated from their states (in orange). Each has been scaled and sorted according to population. The metro areas are US-Census defined CBSAs and MSAs":



This actually took me a while to figure out, but what seems to be going on is that metro areas and states minus their top-50 metro area populations are scaled to population and ranked in that order. Actually pretty interesting: it shows how much of the US population lives in those 50 cities vs. the rest of the country.

And by the way, I still don't believe Jacksonville actually exists, let alone that it's one of the 50 largest urban areas in the US. Have you ever met anyone from there? Have you ever, like, heard of someone taking a trip to Jacksonville? Didn't think so. And yet we're supposed to believe it's home to 1.3 million people? Please.

Via urban cartography.

Job Prospects in the 50 Biggest US Cities

Via Matt Yglesias (via Ryan Avent), an interactive map of job listings per capita for US cities:



Washington, DC has far and away the most job listings - more than 132 per 1000 people. And Baltimore easily takes second, with more than 90. As Yglesias notes, "the metro DC economy is in better-than-average shape and I think that may have a distorting influence on how the hill and the press are seeing the national economic picture which continues to be very bleak despite the fact that the financial panic has ameliorated." The media centers of the US, however, aren't doing nearly so well: New York has less than 28 job listings per 1000 people, and LA has less than 24.

The techie cities of San Jose, Seattle, and Austin are all doing relatively well; the Rust Belt not so much - of Midwestern cities, only Milwaukee has more than 40 jp/k, and Detroit has the fewest of any city: less than 15. Miami is in second-worst shape, with just over 17. The full ranking of the 50 metros are listed with the map here.

The Shrinking of Detroit

Detroit is shrinking, and this map by architecture professor Dan Pitera shows just how great has been the extent of the depopulation:



Back at its mid-20th Century peak - before the race riots, before white flight, before the decline and fall of General Motors - Detroit had a population of close to 2 million. Since then it's shed more than half its population and now, according to City Farmer, "about 30% of Detroit is now vacant land — about 40 square miles, by one estimate." Forty square miles is roughly the size of San Francisco.

You can see the change in the city in these maps of population density from Wayne State's Center for Urban Studies:





For a concrete illustration of the effect of this diminution on the urban fabric, here's a Google maps image of a neighborhood in central Detroit:



This smattering of houses amidst vacant lots looks positively pastoral, but it's within walking distance of the old Tiger Stadium as well as the once-illustrious Michigan Central Station (pictured below). Places like this are common around Detroit

So what can be done to save a city that seems to be evaporating away? The Telegraph discusses one approach that might make sense:

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."

The problem is that economic growth in the US over the past several decades has largely been driven by urban development (for which read: suburban sprawl). In some ways, the old manufacturing base of the economy has been replaced by construction - of housing, strip malls, glass office boxes - and associated financial activities (a model for growth that met a bit of a notorious end in the last few years (at least one hopes it was an end)). As short-sighted as such a growth model might have been, its legacy - as well as the legacy of the history of a country that has grown from a few towns dotting the East Coast to a continental empire with the world's third-largest population - is that contraction seems synonymous, in the American context, with defeat. As Kildee says: "The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there's an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they're shrinking, they're failing."

But changes in cities like Flint and Detroit don't have to follow a pattern of collapse. Kildee proposes another metaphor for the process of urban contraction in the Rust Belt:

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution "defeatist" but he insisted it was "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again".

For more, see this Google street view tour from James Howard Kunstler's podcast, as well as this site on the ruins of Detroit.

Carbon Footprints, Transit Ridership and More

Via Good, the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index has some excellent maps for several dozen US metros that pertain to housing, transportation, and energy issues. This one shows CO2 emissions from auto use per capita in the New York City area:



The numbers go way, way down as you move towards the urban center. Of course, most people in New York City don't even own cars. But maybe a bit more surprisingly, the pattern is almost as striking in cities where sprawl is rampant. Here's Atlanta, for instance:



The gray lines are freeways and the black lines are Marta rail lines. It looks like per capita CO2 use is highest both along the Marta lines and near freeways; in the case of the latter, that's presumably because the sprawl is somewhat more dense near freeways. But, of course, the general rule is that the closer you are to the city center, the smaller your carbon footprint.

There are many, many more maps here on a number of variables pertaining to housing and transportation. To pick one at random, here's transit ridership as a percentage of workers in the Bay Area:



There's much more like this - average rents, gasoline expenses, travel time to work, etc.; it's a ton of information that's both fascinating and useful. And all in map form. If you're like me, in other words, this site has the potential to waste a tremendous amount of your time.

A Tale of Two Very, Very Different Cities

I've lately been listening to the KunstlerCast, a podcast about "the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl," featuring James Howard Kunstler. If you don't know Kunstler, he's a sort of one-man media empire of urbanist criticism of American cities and culture. I think his criticisms of suburban sprawl are generally spot-on, and while I'm sympathetic to his predictions about peak oil and the imminent (or nascent) decline and demise of the "happy motoring" culture that has characterized the US (and, increasingly, the world) over the past 60 years or so, I tend to find his predictions a bit horologically over-aggressive. (For instance, in a recent blog post he anticipated "that the current mood of public paralysis will dissolve in a blur of blood and spittle sometime between Memorial Day and July Fourth, even with Nascar in full swing, and the mushrooming ranks of the unemployed lost in raptures of engine noise and fried cornmeal. It doesn't take too many determined, pissed-off people to create a lot of mischief in a complex society." Watch your clocks - we've barely a month before the uprising begins.) But for my money, the somewhat overwrought pronouncements of doom are more than compensated for by the skill and undiluted vim with which he writes.

Anyways, the KunstlerCast has done a couple of episodes recently which have cleverly employed Google Street View. One was a Virtual Walking Tour of Paris. You can follow along with an embedded Street View player as Kunstler and Duncan Crary talk about what makes Paris such a pleasurable city to visit or to live in.



And, for a happy contrast, they also did an episode in which they toured Detroit. Poor, poor Detroit.



Detroit has been really done in by the decline of the auto industry in the US, of course. But it's also been a victim of clueless leadership, segregation, race riots, suburbanization, and the prioritization of the automobile over the human being in urban design. Now there are entire city blocks, even neighborhoods, once teeming, where most of the buildings are simply gone - razed by demolition crews or burned down (arson being a popular pastime in the Motor City). It's a city that's dying.

Anyway, it's a clever use of Street View, and if nothing else, Kunstler is an expert diagnostician; he does an excellent job of explaining, in detail, what is alienating and depressing about the project of suburban development in the US - and, for that matter, what is pleasant and ennobling about well-constructed cities like Paris.

If You Like It Then You Shouldn't Put a Ring Road On It

Via Strange Maps, Thumb has this poster which overlays ring roads from around the world:



According to Thumb, "This poster is designed as a sort of calling card for Rice School of Architecture, located in Houston. We collected ring roads from 27 international cities and layered them all at the same scale. As it turned out, Houston has the largest system of those we surveyed. (Beijing was second)"

Strange Maps says that it's not entirely clear what is being referred to here as Houston's ring road. But it seems clear that the shape in the poster is that of the area contained by Highway 6 on the south and west sides of town and FM 1960 on the north side. The east side of this loop is a bit undefined, but it looks like it could be formed by Highway 146, which runs up the west side of Galveston Bay. Or maybe the east side of the "ring" is just open, represented by a notional north-south line that forms the right side of the poster.

Now, I can attest from personal experience: follow the route of this ring road and you will see nothing but the worst sorts of urban sprawl; it's truly a netherworld of placelessness, an interminable conurbation of strip malls and glass boxes which inspire the human spirit with nothing but alienation and loathing. I am sure that such is the case with most of the other US ring roads represented here.



As for the rest of the cities here, I can't say much; I've only been to a few of them, and never did I make a point of touring their ring roads. Is the spawning of endless sprawl by ring roads an international phenomenon? Maybe the very concept of the ring road is anti-urban: its function is to connect peripheral areas of the metropolis to each other, rather than to the central city. In the case of smaller rings, like Vienna's or Amsterdam's, the ring might be contained within an area that is basically urban; but for the larger rings, it seems inevitable that they'd promote auto-centric lower-density development - a.k.a. sprawl.

As noted above, Beijing has the second largest ring. I'd be especially interested in knowing what the character of development there is like. One thing that I'm curious about is the extent to which China is emulating the American style of urban development. China is, after all, adding cars to its roads at a furious rate. On the other hand, it seems to be adding to its mass transit infrastructure at an equally furious rate. And the other Chinese ring roads on this poster - Guangzhou and Tianjin - aren't obscenely huge. So, my legion of Chinese readers: what's the deal with urban growth there? Is it proceeding with a sensible consideration of the needs of a healthy urban environment? Or is it sprawling in the same sort of wasteful, inane, and crude patterns as the US has been for the last 60 years?

Subways of the World, United (at the same scale)

One of my favorite maps that I've covered here has been this map from radical cartography showing the mass transit systems of North America at the same scale. Recently, via Matt Yglesias, I came across a similar project: this one is by Neil Freeman and it shows subway systems from around the world at the same scale. Here are some of the subway systems he's got, though there are many others.



I - an American who detests the standard mode of American urban development of the last 60 years - tend to think of European cities as walkable utopias with comprehensive mass transit systems. I don't know if that's quite a fair judgment, but one thing you notice from these maps is that, other than New York City, there are very few American cities with a subway system that forms a dense web like Paris' or Madrid's. Even Washington, which has a very good subway system, is sort of spread out, and then it goes downhill from there. But a bunch of cities in Europe and Asia have very dense systems, and it seems that that's what you need to have truly comprehensive rail mass transit: the ability to walk to the nearest Metro stop, and then to get from pretty much any point in a city to pretty much any other point on the subway. You can do that in New York City; I don't know if you can do it in any other city in North America.

The Three Wests

Headwaters Economics, a non-profit organization focused on issues pertaining to the American West, divides that region into three types of counties.



Blue indicates Metropolitan Counties. This is where the cities are. (And note that the West is the most urbanized region in the country; there's a ton of rural land in the West, but hardly anyone lives out there. For instance, more than 80% of the population of Arizona lives in either the Phoenix or Tucson Metropolitan Statistical Areas.) These areas are characterized by high rates of growth, in terms of population, income, and (at least until recently) jobs. People here are more educated, more of them work in service and manufacturing, and there is less dependence on non-labor sources of income (e.g., Social Security).

Yellow areas are Connected Counties. They don't skew very much towards either the young or the old. They grew slowly in the 1980s, but have grown more quickly since 1990. People here tend to be somewhat more educated, and jobs have been shifting from agriculture and natural resources towards the service sector, with the highest income areas concentrated around airports.

The gray areas, Isolated Counties, are older, less educated, and have slower population growth. Jobs are concentrated in agriculture and natural resources, but incomes are lower and there's more dependence on non-labor sources of income.

Headwaters also has an interactive map that lets you see demographic and economic date for individual counties.

Bus Stops

More good stuff from Good. This is from a pseudo-map depicting cuts in the budgets of transit systems around the US since the economy started to do its frog-in-a-blender routine.



Good has this tendency to publish these graphics that are really impressive looking, and are awesome from a design perspective, but on closer inspection actually contain less information that it seems like they do. This, for instance, looks like it's trying to tell us about the relative scale of cutbacks at transit systems around the country, and maybe even the division of those cuts between job losses, service cuts, and fare hikes. Turns out, though, the only comparative data represented here is the relative size of the 15 largest transit systems where any sort of cuts have been made (though that's still sort of interesting). It doesn't tell us anything about the size of the cuts in either absolute or relative terms. Looks cool, though.

Says Good:

Last year, Americans took more than 10 billion rides on public transportation, the highest level in more than 50 years. But despite the increases, public transit systems are being forced to cut back service, risking losing many of the riders they gained due to high gas prices and a bad economy. In New York, for example, the Metropolitan Transit Authority is moving forward with plans to drastically raise fares and totally eliminate some subway and bus lines.

This is annoying - literally, in that it will make it less convenient and more expensive for people to get around; but also because the middle of a recession is the worst possible time to make such cuts. Firing people who work in these transit systems obviously raises unemployment, which makes the recession worse; cutting service harms people who - perhaps unable to afford to drive a car - are newly dependent on transit; and raising fares hurts people just at the moment when every penny counts the most for them. To a point, it's unavoidable; state and local revenues go way down during a recession, so they end up making cuts in lots of areas, including transportation. On the other hand, I vaguely recall a big to-do not long ago about the federal government spending a not inconsiderable amount of cash to try and stimulate the economy. Seems they could have found the funds in there somewhere to at least bridge the lost revenue gap and keep cities from having to cut services; and it seems like the sums that would be required to keep the buses running in Atlanta, say, would have been pretty paltry on the scale of a $700,000,000,000 bill. But local mass transit (unlike alternative energy and high-speed rail) ended up getting left out of the stimulus for the most part. Guess people who ride subways and buses weren't considered "shovel-ready."

Transportation for America, by the way, has its own map of transit cuts around the US. According to them, "every $1 billion invested in public transit operations generates 60,000 jobs." That would mean $100 billion would save 6 million jobs - well ahead of the pace Obama tried to set by saving 3.5 million jobs with $800 billion. Some sort of law of diminishing returns undoubtedly applies, so it probably wouldn't be possible to save 6 million jobs in mass transit. Still, it has to be one of the more efficient uses of government money available.

Innovation Centers

Again via The Urbanophile, here's a graphic of rates of innovation in cities around the world:



The y-axis measures "momentum: average growth of US patents in cluster, 1997-2006." Say the authors:

Innovation clusters around the world can be classified based on their growth and diversity dynamics: 'hot springs' are small, fast-growing hubs on track to become world players; 'dynamic oceans' consist of large and vibrant ecosystems with continuous creation and destruction of new businesses; 'silent lakes' are older, slower-growing hubs with a narrow range of large established companies; 'shrinking pools' have been unable, so far, to expand beyond their start-up core and so find themselves slowly migrating down the value chain.

The concept here is interesting enough, though I'm not sure what the point of going to all the trouble of presenting this much data is if you're not going to label most of it. There are a bunch of cities that are classified as shrinking pools? Well, bully. Now which ones are they? The graphic doesn't say. Anyways, you can read the article at What Matters for details on their methodology.

Walkability of US Cities

The very nice site Walk Score not only lists the 40 largest US cities by walkability, it provides heat maps of all of them so you can see where the most walkable neighborhoods are. Here, for instance, is Seattle:



And this is what the walk scores mean:

* 90–100 = Walkers' Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car.
* 70–89 = Very Walkable: It's possible to get by without owning a car.
* 50–69 = Somewhat Walkable: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car.
* 25–49 = Car-Dependent: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.
* 0–24 = Car-Dependent (Driving Only): Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!

Seattle, by the way, is the 6th most walkable city in the US. Top honors go to San Francisco, followed, not unpredictably, by New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia; Washington, DC is seventh and Portland is 10th. More surprising, maybe, is that Long Beach and Los Angeles come in at 8th and 9th respectively, despite the latter's epitomization of car-centric development. And the least walkable city in America? Jacksonville, Florida. (By the way, I have a pet theory that Jacksonville doesn't actually exist.)

The methodology does have one flaw, though. The rankings are based on an average within a city's borders, which introduces an element of arbitrariness. For instance, San Francisco actually has a pretty tiny land area; the urban conurbation extends well beyond its political borders, and almost all of the measured area is part of the urban core. Whereas El Paso, for instance - though it wouldn't be ranked high by any measure - is given an even worse ranking due to the fact that much of the area within its city limits is actually comprised of an uninhabited mountain range, driving down its walkability average. (UPDATE: Oops - turns out I was wrong about this. From Walk Score's methodology page: "We weight the Walk Score of each point by population density so that the walkability rankings reflect where people live and so that neighborhoods/cities do not have lower Walk Scores because of parks, bodies of water, etc." However, using city limits still does introduce some level of arbitrariness, since city limits of older and denser cities, like San Francisco and Boston, tend to be smaller, encompassing only the urban core; whereas a lot of younger Sun Beltish cities, like Houston or, indeed, El Paso, have incorporated suburbs. And that drives the walkability average up for the older, denser cities (which are the most walkable anyway, by and large) and drives it down for the (already less walkable) newer, sprawlier cities. So there you go.)

Still, the maps are great; I think it might be the single best measure of the success of urban communities, simply because it measures the extent to which cities are built for people, rather than for cars - and people are, you know, sort of the raison d'etre of urban environments. Now if only they had maps for cities in other countries - the comparisons would be fascinating.

Freeway Dreams: Failed Efforts to Destroy Urban America

It's well known that in the middle of the 20th Century, the US went on an absolute binge of freeway construction. It's been good for commerce and the construction industry, but the unintended consequences for cities have been severe: the destruction of vibrant urban communities to make way for freeways; the inexorable spread of suburban placelessness; traffic jams; pollution. Particularly pernicious were the frequent instances of low-income or minority neighborhoods being leveled to make way for these high-speed commuter roads out to the suburbs. If you have urbanist tendencies, you probably see the freeway system as the greatest crime committed against urban design in the last century. Seen from this perspective, it's easy to look back at the 1950s and '60s as a time when the freeway builders, and their urban planning patrons such as Robert Moses, had unchecked power to will the demolition of whole neighborhoods.

But there were actually all sorts of concerted efforts to stop the bulldozers in those days; and what's more, these freeway revolts even succeeded on occasion, as discussed at Greater Greater Washington. See, for instance, this plan to thoroughly cross-hatch San Francisco with freeways. In the face of public pressure, which began as early as 1955, more than 80% of these roads never got built:



In fact, San Francisco continues to tear down what freeways it does have within its city limits; its the only major city to lose freeway miles since 1990.

There was a major plan to build an inner ring in Boston, too:



Public opposition put the kibosh on that one in the early seventies. (The only portion of the plan that was completed - the Central Artery - became a notorious eyesore, and was itself demolished in the nineties and re-built underground in a project known as the Big Dig, which project was itself an enormous debacle for all sorts of reasons. So you see that the original freeway plan set off a sort of catalytic chain of fiascos.)

Other places weren't so fortunate; in Houston, among many other cities, an inner ring was built around the central business district, coincidentally enough running right through some of the city's most historic black neighborhoods. Funny how that always seemed to happen with these freeway plans. Though even some minority neighborhoods mounted successful efforts to fight off the highwaymen, even in Houston itself, where the Harrisburg Freeway, which would have bisected the city's mostly Hispanic East End was scuttled. And the campaign in Washington, DC that spawned this announcement was also a success:



Jane Jacobs led the fight against freeways in New York, though her great urbanist screed, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,wasn't published until 1961, and the tide didn't turn against Robert Moses & co.'s freeway plans for NYC until they had mostly been enacted. Only the finishing touches on the city's freeway sytem - the dashed lines in the map below, plus the Lower Manhattan Freeway that would have obliterated most of SoHo and the Lower East Side - were halted.



Despite Moses' success in re-building the city as a place for cars rather than people, New York is still the most thoroughgoingly urban city in North America, with the largest and arguably most successful public transit system. That is either a testament to New York's resilience in the face of efforts to re-shape it, or an indictment of the rest of America's cities for failing to provide successful urban environments for their people.

UPDATE: A commenter links to a map of Portland's thwarted freeways. The city, which had commissioned none other than Robert Moses to design its highway plan, was definitely at the vanguard of the freeway revolt movement. The author of that post makes a good point:

We’re lucky to have escaped the fate of many other cities — but I hope we are not getting ready, with the Columbia River Crossing project and all the stimulus spending in our near future, to make some of the same mistakes that we avoided forty years ago.

Growth of the NYC Subway

It's New York City day here at The Map Scroll! Here's a link to an animated map that shows the growth of the NYC subway over time, from Appealing Industries (via Spacing Toronto).


Unfortunately there's no time legend, which would have seemed like a no-brainer to include. Still a very interesting animation, though. And if you want to see about eleventy billion more maps from throughout the history of the NYC subway, go here.

And as a bonus, here's another one from Spacing Toronto of Toronto's own (admittedly less exciting) subway map.

Killer Circles Invade New York City

The Digital Atlas of New York City, put together by William A. Bowen of California State University, Northridge, has a bunch of interesting maps of the Big Whatsit. This, for instance, is from the map showing the distribution of the black population in NYC:



(By the way, does that pattern look familiar?) The atlas also has maps showing income, education, and ancestry - you can see which parts of the city Dutch or Dominicans have settled in, for instance. The only drawback is that it's a bit dated. It's a problem for demographic maps for the US in 2009: the decennial census is a year away, so everything's based on data that's 9 years old.

Ah, and just now I notice that Bowen has similar atlases of Seattle, DC, Boston, Chicago, Honolulu, LA, San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento, as well. And also a bunch of other maps. So there you go.

Visualizing Segregation

That Mondrianesque image on the right there is, believe it or not, a sort of "map." It comes from some folks at Dartmouth who were interested in studying patterns of segregation in cities - not Jim Crow-era forced segregation, but the de facto kind that exists today in most American cities, where the phenomena of "black" neighborhoods and "white" neighborhoods are common. This map is going to need a bit of explaining, but bear with me, because I think it's really interesting.

The map is of a simulated city of "reds" and "blues." As the site describes it:

This segregation applet simulates the movement of people between houses within a "city." The city is divided into 10 x 10 "tracts" which are in turn divided into a grid of smaller squares. Each small square in the city represents a house that can be vacant (white) or occupied by a red or blue or, in three-color mode, a green square.

So the whole grid represents a city made up of people of two races. By pressing the start button on the applet you can set time in motion and let people move around, just as they do in real cities.

However, they're not moving around randomly. See those little boxes on the left that say "minimum # of like neighbors" and "maximum # of unlike neighbors"? Those determine where a given "family" will move to. In the image above there are no preferences, so any family will move anywhere. When you set time in motion, there will just be random movement of blues and reds around the grid. But suppose we change the settings to this:

Now we've set it so that a red family will only move to a neighborhood where it has a minimum of 4 red neighbors and a maximum of 6 blue neighbors; likewise, a blue family will only move to a neighborhood that has a minimum of 4 blue neighbors and a maximum of 6 red neighbors. And what's the result? After about 2,000 "moves," we get a city that looks something like this:

Now almost everyone in the city lives in a neighborhood that is completely homogeneous. This is sort of remarkable: remember, it's not the individual preference of anyone in this city to live in an all-red or all-blue neighborhood; everyone just wants to live in an area where at least half of the neighbors are the same race as themselves. But the end result is that nearly everyone ends up living in an almost totally segregated neighborhood.

Here's another scenario. In this case, the preferences are set quite liberally: every red only wants to have at least 2 red neighbors and no more than 6 blue neighbors, and every blue wants at least 2 blue neighbors and no more than 6 red neighbors. In this case, you can imagine, we have a city with low levels of racism and racial resentment and fear, but people just want to feel like they have at least a couple of neighbors who come from a similar culture or background as themselves. And here's what happens:

Shocking, right? Even though we've posited a city with very little racial animus, and just a seemingly reasonable desire of most people to feel like they share a similar identity or culture or background with just a couple of their neighbors, we still end up with a city where most people live in a generally homogeneous neighborhood. It's a fascinating result. There's a bit more mixing than in the scenario above, but still not as much as you might expect; maybe this comes closest to resembling an actual typical American city.

On one hand, this is sort of reassuring. It means that, even though many cities are still quite segregated, even in the 21st century, that doesn't mean different races are irreconcilably hostile towards each other; people just have a reasonable desire to be around at least a few people similar to themselves. On the other hand, if the end result of this desire is such a significant degree of segregation, then the odds that people would become more comfortable with other races through familiarity with them would seem not to improve over time.

By the way, the site also provides specific stats - those "segregation indices" on the left - for the more quantificationally adept (though that ain't me). You can also play around with different scenarios by changing the relative population sizes of the reds and blues, adding a third race ("greens"), or even instituting 1950s-style policies of restricting races from a particular area. For a certain sort of brain, it can be a bit addictive.