Will Showers at a Worksite Encourage Bike Commuting?

By Dom Nozzi

It is common for planners, activists and (some) elected officials to think that we should require an employer to install showers at a worksite to encourage bicycle commuting. In some instances, a proposed project that will generate large numbers of car trips will “greenwash” itself by voluntarily installing showers to make the point that they are effectively reducing the number of car trips their project will generate.

But as a lifelong bike commuter and someone who has spent much of his life researching bicycle encouragement literature, I can unequivocally state that showers have little if any impact on a person’s decision to bike or walk to a work place.

Sure, it would be nice to have showers at a work site. But I have never known ANYONE who decided to bike because a place had showers. Or decided not to because of an absence of showers. And the literature points this out.

As an aside, I spent most of my adult life bike commuting in very hot Florida summers, and have never felt as if I was noticeably sweaty at the office (even though I sweat more than most).

I suspect that a reason why some people mistakenly believe that showers can influence large numbers of employees to become bike commuters is that as motorists, they imagine that bicycling in places like Florida is not possible because of how much sweating would occur (and that the employee would therefore be dripping with sweat at the place of work). Few realize, though, that bicycling just a few miles, even in the Florida summer, is not much of a sweat problem at all – particularly because it almost always happens in early morning hours when it is cooler.

For what it’s worth, the effective ways to convert larger numbers of motorists to bicycle or pedestrian (or transit) commuters include parking cash-out (giving employees the option of “cashing out” their work site parking space for a higher salary or a bus pass, or a free bike, etc.), priced parking for motorists at the work site, and creating more opportunities to live in proximity to the work place.

Besides showers at the work site, other ineffective — yet common — ways to create more non-car commuters include bike lanes, bike paths, bike parking, employee recognition certificates, and bike-to-work days.

Again, I am NOT suggesting that the above ineffective tactics should not be used. What I AM saying is that by themselves, they are much less effective than commonly thought.

I am certainly in favor of businesses installing showers. I might even recommend that larger employers be required to install showers. Similarly, I strongly support requiring the installation of sidewalks where they do not exist. Not because I think sidewalks will meaningfully increase walking. But because, like showers, it sends a message this the community supports and encourages walking and bicycling. And dignifies the bicyclist or pedestrian, who are otherwise marginalized, trivialized and otherwise treated like misfits and outcasts to be ignored.

Is it not time to start getting serious about transitioning to Plan B in anticipation of Peak Oil or other possible economic crises that loom on the horizon? An inevitable time when nearly all of us will be commuting without a car?

Isn’t it time to start installing the necessary Plan B infrastructure? In THAT sense, it makes sense to start requiring showers. But let’s not kid ourselves about their effectiveness in our current situation.

 

A Pedestrian Call to Arms: A Manifesto

By Dom Nozzi

Each year, America experiences an outrageous carnage due to car crashes. In 2011, 4,432 pedestrians were killed and 69,000 were injured in traffic crashes.

Such bloodshed is incompatible with a civilized society. Are we too barbaric to do what is necessary to end this slaughter? Will we continue to blame the victim?

For several decades, there have been organized advocacy groups for bicycling. For transit. For environmental conservation. For local businesses.

But there is no group lobbying for the needs of pedestrians.

This is very bad news for the health of cities, because particularly in a town center, the pedestrian is the design imperative.

Below is a manifesto I have written that I hope is a step toward rectifying this ruinous disregard for the pedestrian.

 A Pedestrian Manifesto

Our community strives to protect and promote a walkable lifestyle as its design imperative. We believe that future development in areas of our community intended to be walkable should make walkability the primary emphasis of design. It is the lynchpin for the quality of life in the walkable areas of our community, for a quality transit system, for safety, for travel choice, for affordability, for human scale, for civic pride, for sustainability, for public health, for environmental conservation, and for the protection and enhancement of property values.

Given these overwhelmingly beneficial outcomes for a walkable community, we have adopted the following manifesto which, to the extent possible, should be followed in all actions taken by the public and private sector for projects in the areas that out community intends to preserve and promote as walkable.

Most imperatively, improving walkability (and civic pride, comfort, convenience and sociability) means scaling down spaces in places we intend to be walkable. This “human-scaled” need acknowledges that in American cities, our walkability problem is that we have TOO MUCH space. Too much distance. Not that we have too much in the way of parks or squares or plazas or other “open spaces,” but that we have buildings that are set back too far from sidewalks. Too many “sea of asphalt” parking lots. Roads that contain too many travel and turn lanes. Too much distance between the home both neighbors and the corner store.

Our first and most important task for creating the walkability that people the world over love in places like Rome, Siena, Paris, and Venice, is to create human-scaled city spaces – particularly in our town centers. A large number of roads need to be put on a “road diet” by removing travel lanes and calming down (slowing) the speed of cars so that streets are welcoming, safe and sociable. Buildings need to be pulled up to the streetside sidewalk. Parking lots need to be shrunk in size—preferably by replacing some of them with active buildings, and moving more of them to on-street parking spaces. Streets need to be gracefully enveloped by street trees. Houses need to be mixed with shops and offices.

Most of these design practices were followed for most of human history (in America, up until approximately World War II). It is time to start returning to that tradition.

Neighborhood Streets

In general, the following principles shall be used:

A. Streets should be two-way. Existing one-way streets should be restored to two-way operation.

B. Streets should be modest in width. Turning radii should be modest in size.

C. On-street parking should be encouraged to the extent possible over off-street parking.

D. Design speeds should be relatively modest.

E. Emergency service and public service vehicle needs should be secondary to the quality of life and life safety needs.

F. Particularly in areas affected by spillover parking, parking should be priced (metered) or allowed only by permit. Pricing should be calibrated for 85% occupancy, and the revenue returned to neighborhoods for neighborhood improvements.

Larger Regional and Main Streets

In general, the following principles shall be used:

A. Streets should be a maximum of 3 lanes in size, and those which are larger should be reduced to 3 lanes.

B. To promote permeability and walkability, mid-block crossings should be designed at regular intervals in locations near walkable neighborhoods and in town centers.

C. Traffic signals are preferably post-mounted and should be relatively modest in height.

D. Design speeds should be relatively modest.

E. Turning radii for these streets should be relatively modest.

F. On-street parking is the preferred form of parking, and parking meters used to achieve an 85% occupancy rate. Revenues from these meters should be used for the neighborhood where the meters are placed.

G. To the extent possible, these streets should contain raised, low-maintenance medians.

Street Lights

In general, the following principles shall be used:

A. Street lights should be relatively modest in height and historic in character.

B. Street lights should be full cut-off.

C. Street lights should maximize full color spectrum, such as Halogen.

D. Because they are the most invisible color in the landscape, street light structures (and other public equipment) should typically be black in color.

Sidewalks

In general, the following principles shall be used:

A. As soon possible, the community should fill remaining sidewalk gaps in neighborhoods.

B. Sidewalk gap filling should be a significantly higher priority than sidewalk repair.

C. In town centers, the trajectory of sidewalks should be rectilinear rather than curvilinear.

Building Disposition in Town Centers

In general, the following principles shall be used:

A. Buildings should butt up to the sidewalk, face the sidewalk with a main entrance, contain sufficient windows along the sidewalk, and have a first floor that is at least 10 feet in height.

B. Buildings should be parallel to the street, rather than rotated.

C. Buildings should be encouraged to be at least two stories in height and mixed in use (retail, office and residential).

D. High levels of building ornamentation should be encouraged.

E. Auto parking should never be in front of a building.

 Homeless Population

In general, because the homeless/panhandling population is an important impediment to walking, the following practices should be employed:

A. Minimize or reduce the number of free meals provided in town centers.

B. Enforce the “no sleeping in public parks” law.

C. Use park facilities that discourage sleeping.

D. Consider adopting a “no smoking” law for parks and other public spaces.

Street Trees

In general, the following principles shall be used:

A. The community should install and maintain a dense, formally aligned, large, canopy trees along streets.

B. Trees of the same species or at least the same size and shape should be used along individual streets. Tree diversity should only be established, if necessary, from street to street.

C. Tree pruning along power lines should be consistent with practices described in “Trees in Urban Design,” by Henry Arnold (1985).

Parking

In general, the following principles shall be used:

A. To the extent possible, and as soon as possible, existing surface parking lots in and near town center neighborhoods should be converted to buildings.

B. Multi-family housing developments in and near walkable neighborhoods should “unbundle” the price of parking from the cost of the housing so that those who choose not to own a car are not forced to pay for expensive, unneeded, ugly, unwalkable parking.

C. Parking requirements should be relaxed in and near walkable neighborhoods. “Minimum” parking regulations for new development should be converted to “maximum” parking requirements, for example.

Summary

By adhering to these design guidelines, our community will be dramatically safer, more pleasant, more instilled with civic pride, more physically fit, more sustainable, more equitable, more affordable and more prosperous. These guidelines are essential if we ever hope to be able to dramatically reduce the utterly barbaric, unacceptable number of pedestrian injuries and deaths we experience each year.

Parking and Urban Design Tactics for Creating a New Urban Village

By Dom Nozzi

A large percentage of American communities have experienced an enormous amount of dispersed suburban sprawl. Unless we are to eventually need to abandon and perhaps bulldoze such unsustainable development (probably a more likely outcome than most realize), we need to talk about retrofitting drivable, unsustainable sprawl development with something more compact, walkable, transit-friendly and sustainable.

Indeed, the creation of “activity centers” (an utterly terrible yet common term referring to efforts to create multiple downtowns or town centers in a community, rather than the traditional, centrally-located downtown) is being discussed by academics and city councils throughout the nation.

Commonly, the vision is to transform a conventional, car-based strip commercial shopping center (that largely consists of a huge surface parking lot and giant roadways serving it) into a walkable, mixed use places (what I will call an “urban village”).

One of the first questions that tends to come up in such discussions is “What about the parking??”

First, it needs to be understood that it is not an immutable law that all residents living at such a newly-created urban village will forever want or need a parking space for a car (or even have a car).

As a matter of fact, we are seeing car ownership and use leveling off and sometime declining around the nation – particularly with the “Millennium” (younger) generation.

Believing that the provision of suburban parking is forever necessary is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we provide that level of excessive parking, we actually induce many to want more parking and more cars than they would have wanted had we not enabled such car ownership and use with excessive “free” parking. After all, surface parking makes walking less likely, and the resident has a vested interest because they have already paid for the parking spots we have forced them to own. Excessive suburban parking regulations also kill any chance of having the developer provide the necessary compact residential development, because more compact residential development is, by definition, no longer compact when we must add the enormous amounts of acreage required to fulfill suburban parking rules.

Walkability is impossible when seas of asphalt separate destinations. Surface parking dramatically increases walking distances, and obliterates vibrant and walkable urbanity by creating dead zone gap tooth “no man’s lands.”

“Unbundling” the price of parking from the price of residences in a new neighborhood is an effective financial incentive for reducing car ownership and use, because some residents will opt not to own or use a car if they are able to opt for housing that is lower in cost due to the lack of provided parking.

Some argue that unbundling the price of parking from the price of the housing is impractical, because there will be “spillover” parking by people using a space they did not pay for. But there is an easy solution for this concern: Enforcement of parking regulations at the development via parking permits or parking meters. Despite the conventional wisdom, there are a surprisingly large (and growing) number of citizens who want the option of being able to pay less for housing in exchange for not having parking provided. This is particularly true in cities where a healthy supply of bicycling, walking and transit options are provided. It will also be true if the new urban village is properly designed with human-scaled mixed use, walkable design.

Any “minimum” parking requirements that a community uses (for example, many communities require at least four parking spaces per 100 square feet of retail development) should be converted to parking MAXIMUMS. Why? Because the big risk over the past several decades has not been that a developer will provide too little parking. In large part because most financers for new development insist on the provision of abundant parking as a condition for financing a proposed development, developers tend to provide TOO MUCH parking. Too much parking is particularly a problem if the design objective is to create compact walkability and reduce neighborhood car use.

On-street parking is desirable and tends to be priced in an urban village.

The new urban village should liberally allow shared use of parking by multiple residential and commercial developments in the village. One way to do this is to create parking that can be leased, rather than obligating all land residences and commercial to have their own parking.

If a developer insists on wanting to provide excessive amounts of suburban surface parking, they must be denied approval in the same way as a developer proposing to, say, develop a smokestack industrial use in their residential neighborhood.

For the relatively modest amounts of parking that must be provided at a new urban village, nearly all (if not all) parking should be in multi-story garages that are wrapped with residential, retail, and office “liner” buildings. Any surface parking that needs to be provided should be behind buildings, and buildings pulled up to the streetside sidewalk.

If a prospective resident of a new urban village wants free and abundant parking, they should be told that there are plenty of other, more suburban places where they can opt for that lifestyle in the community.

 Other Essential Ingredients for a Walkable, Compact Village

Streets should have shorter blocks (200 to 500 feet). For relatively long blocks, cross-access pedestrian ways between buildings can be created. Streets also benefit by being paired with alleys. Proactively overlay a street grid with small block sizes before development is proposed. Another way to keep walking distances relatively short is to not allow fences to cut off non-street access to adjacent parcels. Fences used should not exceed three or 4 feet in height along a sidewalk (anything higher inhibits neighborly conversation and pedestrian enjoyment of street-facing building facades).

When streets passing through the proposed center are 4 lanes or more in size, they need to be necked down (road dieted) to no more than 3 lanes.

Intersections must be kept relatively small in size so that they are pedestrian-scaled. No more than one turn lane in a given direction, relatively narrow travel lanes, and small turning radii.

Continuous left turn lanes are to be discouraged in the village. Raised medians with turn pockets are to be encouraged.

Raised crosswalks, when feasible and appropriate, are desirable to slow car speeds and increase pedestrian visibility.

Street (including lane width) and turning radii dimensions are small and slow-speed.

Street lights should be pedestrian-scaled so that light bulbs are no more than 14 feet in height. Taller lights create a highway ambience and induce higher car speeds.

Bus bays are inappropriate in a compact, walkable center due to loss of pedestrian scale and increased pedestrian crossing distance.

Sidewalks have straight, rectilinear trajectories rather than curvilinear, suburban trajectories. Curvilinear trajectories, by adding unnecessary distances to walking, are annoying and patronizing to pedestrians. They are mainly benefitting motorists, who obtain a more pleasing view as they drive along a street with curving sidewalks. They also increase the likelihood of dirt cowpaths being formed by pedestrians seeking the shortest route.

Visually prominent gateway features at the entrances to centers are highly desirable to clearly signal to motorists that they are entering a low-speed, walkable setting that requires attentiveness.

Mixing residences with offices, retail, recreational and cultural activities substantially reduces walking and biking distances, and increase 24-hour vibrancy and safety. Relatively high residential densities and commercial intensities are also important, and for the same reasons. Emphasize attached housing rather than detached, single-family housing in centers and along major streets.

Buildings should be at least two-stories in height for more of a sense of place, a sense of enclosure, mixed use opportunities, and better adaptability to change over time.

Should the community have any regulatory barriers to infilling existing parking with buildings, those barriers need to be removed. Similarly, the community needs to exempt the proposed new urban village from landscaping requirements, as such requirements tend to require too much spacing for compact walkability. Ample landscaping belongs in the drivable suburbs.

While common because of their high visibility nature, gas stations should not be allowed at street intersections.

Building setbacks need to be modest in size. At intersections, a sense of place is achieved by requiring buildings to abut the back of sidewalks. Lot sizes should be relatively small in size, which often requires the community to reduce the minimum lot size required in its land development code. Each of these design features is an important way to create charming human scale that pedestrians tend to insist on and enjoy.

The community sign ordinance should require relatively small signs for retail and office development. Small signs help signal a low-speed, pedestrian scaled setting.

Summary

People that desire to live in walkable, compact living arrangements seek a setting that is conducive to such a lifestyle. That setting features low-speed, narrow and human-scaled streets and intersections, very short walking distances to most destinations, buildings pulled up to the sidewalk to create enclosure, and a vibrant experience (in contrast to deadening expanses of parking and large building setbacks). The market for higher density housing will be very weak and unsustainable if such a walkable setting is not provided.

Existing housing, employment, or land use patterns should not necessarily dictate visions for a new urban village if such patterns conflict with community objectives for such a compact village. Similarly, the needs or convenience of regional commuters should not trump the low-speed, vibrancy, pedestrian scaled needs of these new village centers.

Overall, the objective for centers is a drive to rather than drive through experience, a park-once setting, and a design that makes the pedestrian the design imperative.

In the Urban Village, we should be firmly committed to walkable urbanity, where car use is optional, not required.