Subject: Ka`u Landing - Can the Substandard Subdivisions Become Sustainable?


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Community Planning, Part I

Can the Substandard Subdivisions Become Sustainable?
Will the Government Let Them?
by Bonnie Goodell © 1998

"Urban form is largely a product of the dominant transportation system in place during a region's prevailing period of growth."
                                                                                     -- Homer Hoyt

This article has two parts.

First: Can the substandard subdivisions on the Big Island transform themselves from automobile-dependent, global-warming sprawl into self-sustaining, diverse, walkable and bikable communities? The answer is yes, for some surprising reasons, as I learned recently in a federally sponsored course on coordinating land use and transportation, in Seattle.

Second: Will they be supported by government to make that transformation? That remains to be seen. At present the state and the county of Hawai`i don't officially recognize the existence of either the subdivisions themselves or the people who live in them. I will describe the discrimination against them by the state and county, how it prevents movement toward sustainability, why it is so hard to reverse, and what is being done about it by an ad hoc group called the Sustainability Committee (Jon Olson, Roger Evans, John Luchau, Bev Byouk, David Skaife, Keith Wallis, Ron Reilly and myself).

Is it possible to move the substandard subdivisions toward sustainability? I have reason to hope because of the top of the heap planning experts (Rei Ewing Robert Cervero, and Uri Avin, for those who read those gripping professional journals, planning texts, and quotations in news magazines) on Coordinating Land Use and Transportation, and the other participants in the Seattle course - mostly transportation planners from all levels of government and from all over the west. (I was the only private consultant and the only Hawai`i participant). Among those present were the people behind the "alternative" transportation transformation Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, and smaller towns and rural areas that are trying hard to transform themselves from auto-based sprawl. Also participating were federal enforcers of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA).

ISTEA is the federal transportation program that initiated, in 1992, the use of federal transportation money to try to re-program transportation nationally away from auto-dependence and toward multi-modal alternatives and Livable Communities. Livable Communities is the label attached to a land use/transportation development pattern that is recognized as being more sustainable than auto-based sprawl. The communities that are serious about Livability, multi-modalism, and sustainability have zoning and subdivision codes that, get this, prohibit single-use in any zoning district, except agricultural and open space districts, which are protected with a vengeance from residential or other use. Around transit stops, Livable Communities require specific land uses that produce the mixed use densities that make public transit work. Within a quarter mile of the transit stop there must be about 2,000 people living and they must be able to meet all their daily needs (restaurants, convenience shopping, videos, specialty stores, bakeries, child care, elementary schools) in that same area. In other words, Livable Communities create urban neighborhoods and rural towns that are more like traditional towns, the places that people lived in before Levittown, freeways and malls. Workplaces are also going back into the mix, because the information age is transforming much of industry into something more like the pre-industrial neighborhood craft shops. Car lanes are getting "calmed" and narrowed, with sidewalks, bike lanes, and bike/walk trails put in. Free car parking is out; secure bike parking, showers, and covered sidewalks with eats, trees and storefronts are in.

Community-building and income diversity is the social mandate and design for pedestrian pleasantries is the architectural theme.

The places that have make these changes, notably Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Seattle, Portland, Chattanooga, Minneapolis, Curitiba (Brazil ), and their surrounding rural towns, have become very desirable places to live. They attract clean, information-based industries, like software designers, not only because they have great amenities (such as neighborhood elementary schools of 200 to 400 students, all of whom can walk or bike to school and practice), and a great sense of community. They also have the value of sus-tainability. For the same reason that people in California choose to pay higher electric rates for power from renewable/sustainable resources, people also place a higher value on a community that is sustainable. When we start getting charged carbon taxes for gasoline, these communities will easily be able to cut way down on driving, because they are already moving that way.

What do these case studies and history have to teach us about substandard subdivisions? Well, first was something about the old, truly traditional communities that grew up all by themselves, by individual property owners doing what comes naturally, where the main mode of transportation is walking or biking. Houses, some with several apartments or rooming houses, all with front porches, sidewalks and big trees, are mixed with small businesses and small retailers in blocks that are 400 feet square, near Main Street. The buildings are harmonious because of their size, their face to the sidewalk and the sense of a community sharing. Their streets are clearly outdoor rooms for the neighbors and visitors, first and foremost, because the residents created them that way for their own use, one unique street at a time.

The "new urbanism" towns that I saw had a certain over-studied charm, but were too master-planned, too rigged if you will. That is partly because they are totally new and completely designed by monument-seeking big names who work with big developers on new subdivisions in "greenfield" sites, a relatively blank canvas where they get to decide everything, all at once. What the substandard subdivisions have going for them is that they are more like those small towns that grew up from a bunch of homestead or town lots, each with an owner-builder. We seldom hear about them because no big name is looking for credit. But existing communities that have just changed their assumptions about land use and transportation have been not only very successful at transformations toward sustainability and livability, but their transformation has been cheaper and more satisfying, as the neighbors on each street do their own exterior decorating: creating pedestrian and bike/pedestrian cut-throughs and alleys and starting businesses like child and elder-care, hairdressing, and home-office services, expressly to serve each other by shortening or eliminating car trips from their own neighborhoods.

What is required to make transformations come naturally is changed assumptions about transportation. The "old paradigm" is that people drive cars for everything - thereby turning all open space into sprawl and making every public space hostile to un-carred humans - because they want to, and that any effort to change that behavior is "social engineering." But lately there has been a lot of research into the hidden subsidies provided for automobiles. They amount to at least several thousand dollars per year: from 1/3 of the federal highway funds that come from general taxes to the subsidy in all infrastructure costs provided to people who live in low density areas by people who live in high density communities. When California went about deregulating electric service, they couldn't deregulate the distribution system, because the subsidy required for maintaining power lines for big suburban lots (provided by high density areas), if removed, would have made those subdivisions completely unaffordable. And the same principle is true for roads, water lines, and all other linear infrastructure. Having your road to yourself, while insisting on your right to zoom through other neighborhoods, is mooching, big time. In our secret heart of hearts, it seems, we all want to get to be the greedy jerk.

The actual cost of each and every parking space ranges from $100 to $400 per month, including on-street (a parked car pays no gas taxes), in a lot, or in a parking structure. Each car requires up to ten parking spaces out there at shopping centers, schools, and anywhere else we go. Free Parking? Never. A hidden subsidy of car use, paid for in everything we buy and all fees, taxes, mortgages, and rents. What we know now is that we have created overwhelming social engineering for car use, and that if we had to pay the costs directly when we used or parked our cars, we wouldn't. Sustainable development would take care of itself. Those who could not afford cars would have great access to everything, because that would be most of us, at least most of the time, so self-supporting public transit and walkable/bikable, neighborly, mixed use communities would develop naturally, just like they did before cars.

The way we estimate traffic is also "the big lie." People will oppose a store, elementary school or beauty shop in their neighborhood because it "creates traffic." WRONG! This particular b.s. is a classic example of the tunnel vision of transportation engineers, in which every "trip" is by definition a car trip, and of exactly the same distance of every other car trip. The average suburban home in a single use district generates ten one-way "trips" per day, the average day-care 79 trips per 1000 square feet, the average hardware store 700 per acre, etc., according to the "Trip Generation" manual of the Institute of Traffic Engineers. But in a mixed use neighborhood, those trips probably wouldn't be by car, and if they were, they would be short trips. In low density, single use zoning those would all be car trips and all long.

If you put a deli, a convenience store, an ATM and video store in the same building as an industrial employer, the number of trips generated would still be the sum of all those uses, but most of those trips would never leave the building - and the employees would be more likely to use public transit because they wouldn't need their cars to do errands every day. But the way we write our codes, we assume that putting those uses together like that would not only produce the same amount of vehicle miles traveled (vmt) as if they were each a mile apart, but that the parking lot would need to have as many spaces as if the employees were driving from the job site to the deli down the hall for lunch. This is observably and logically ridiculous, but it is part of how our low-density single use codes engineer us to choose and subsidize car use and traffic congestion. It would be funny if it weren't a major cause of global warming.

Health professionals, as well as real estate investors, are catching on that cutting the car trips to elementary schools alone, by making elementary schools within walking or biking distance, makes residents more economically fit and more physically fit. Inactivity and poor diet are second to cigarettes as a cause of death. Parents spend an estimated two hours a day driving themselves and their children, replacing natural exercise time with sitting in traffic. Children are raised to know the inside of the family car, but have no concept of geography because they have no personal experience of it; they view their own neighborhoods as a TV-like window screen at best, hostile territory at worst. Ironically for the many substandard subdivision residents who have beaten themselves against the State Department of Education's brick wall - unsuccessfully trying to locate schools where the children can walk or bike to them - the Hawai`i Department of Health, under Jack Lewin, was one of the first government entities in the U.S. to sponsor workshops on Livable Communities as a basic health issue.

How have communities changed their transportation/land use assumptions to better reflect reality and sustainability? Surprisingly "if you build it they will come." If you don't widen roads and you do put in dedicated bus routes that get you there faster than car routes, people will choose buses. And the buses will create the density and mixed use needed around the bus stops. The best way to do it is DURING growth, when growth arranges itself around the transit, bike, walk system. Remember , the land use pattern is the result of the transportation system in place when growth is occurring. The places that have most successfully demonstrated this are places like Ottawa, the capital of Canada, where 60% of the trips to downtown are by bus. Why? When Ottawa started growing rapidly in the 30s, they created lots of express-bus-only roadways. The buses circle a neighborhood and then get on the bus road to downtown. No transfers, no sitting in traffic. The growth arranged itself around those bus routes.

In Curitiba, Brazil, according to U.S. News and World Report, "Though Curitiba has a higher number of cars per capita [than Sao Paulo]...Seventy five percent of the city's commuters use public transport and traffic has declined by 30 percent since 1974, even as the population has more than doubled." Once again, buses. Why buses? Because you can afford dedicated bus routes as the growth is occurring, before you can afford to trains or subways. Curitiba also planned for land uses along the bus routes. Another thing both places do is solve the problems that make buses slow. They make cheap buses act like expensive trains. Dedicated lanes or roads. Protected loading platforms. You buy your ticket to get into the loading area and then multiple doors open for 30-second loading and unloading, and this could include wheelchairs and bikes.

If you widen roads, people will drive more and sprawl into farms and forests. If you provide convenient, fast, efficient dedicated bus, bike and walk routes, people will ride, bike and walk, and will cluster themselves into real villages, in city and country. That's all well-documented. The vision choice is that simple. After that it is a matter of design to make the choice work.

The sustainable choice is also cheaper. Central transit corridors, with public facilities and services clustered along them, would allow outlying areas in the subdivisions to reasonably stay more undeveloped, more like real country, the roads private and little improved. There are now many successful models and examples of transformational policies for more sustainable, walkable, bikable, livable communities. Far from it being "too late" the substandard subdivisions are prime for such transformation.

It is especially sad that in Hawai`i, political co-opting of reform buzzwords - like sustainability and empowerment - has been used to stifle real reform, so change has come to be viewed as an impossibility. Elsewhere, real land use/transportation reforms for sustainability, made ten years ago, are now yielding huge economic and environmental dividends.

There is a huge difference between the old transportation mindset - the conviction among traffic engineers that the function of transportation improvements is to provide the capacity to move people and goods around - and the new land use/transportation paradigm - that the function of transportation improvements is to provide access between the destinations of people and goods in a manner that contributes to health, safety, equal opportunity, environmental protection, prosperity, and community diversity.

Communities that make the transition to Livability become more than just desirable places to live. They attract the kind of small, clean, globally competitive industries that provide great opportunities for the next generation, and they have become more competitive in the real estate market than the commuter suburbs that have been the almost exclusive money-maker of residential real estate developers for forty years. The substandard subdivisions are prime for transformation to Livability, and have more than 80,000 low-priced parcels on which "the little guy" can directly benefit from being part of that transformation. If the substandard subdivisions achieve Livability, with their own schools, soccer fields, medical centers, shopping and jobs, the older communities need not be paved out of existence to accommodate the traffic from the substandard or new subdivisions.

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