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The Chicago Suburb That's Trying To Kill the Car (politico.com)
HughPickens.com writes: T. R. Goldman writes at Politico that downtown Evanston, Illinois—a sturdy, tree-lined Victorian city wedged neatly between Lake Michigan and Chicago's northern border, is missing one thing — cars. Or, more accurately, it's missing a lot of cars. Thanks to concerted planning, new developments are rising within a 10-minute walk of two rail lines and half-a-dozen bus routes and the local automobile ownership rate is nearly half that of the surrounding area. According to Goldman, the whole point of the suburbs, reinforced by decades of local zoning laws and developers' plans for a car-centric lifestyle, was that you weren't supposed to live on top of your neighbor, that there was supposed to be plenty of parking everywhere you went and that you weren't supposed to walk anywhere.
"But Evanston had a different idea: What if a suburban downtown became a place where pedestrians ruled and cars were actively discouraged?" writes Goldman. "Beginning in 1986, a new plan for Evanston embraced the idea of a '24/7' downtown, pouring resources into increasing the density of its downtown—a density that also meant decreasing residents' reliance on automobiles. As a compact city, Evanston couldn't compete with the vast sprawling parking spots of the Old Orchard Mall. It had to build a different sort of appeal."
Evanston has gained recognition and reputation for efforts related to sustainability, including those by government, citizens, and institutions and one thing that Evanston does to reduce the number of cars is let individual car owners rent their idle cars to other drivers through an online service. The service is being provided by a San Francisco-based startup called Getaround, and it's facilitated by a two-year, $475,000 federal research grant to the Center for Neighborhood Technology that's being implemented by the Shared-Use Mobility Center. Getaround claims that a car owner can make as much as $10,000 a year by renting out a vehicle and that renters can get a car to use when they need one for as little as $5 an hour.
Sharon Feigon says the new program is designed to test different models for car sharing in communities with different economic characteristics — ranging from low to moderate income communities in the city to more suburban areas like Evanston. "We'll also be surveying people about their use to better understand how it works and whether it actually leads to some people selling their cars, whether it reduces carbon dioxide emissions and vehicle miles traveled," says Feigon. "Car owners can make a little money and feel good that their car is in service to others. We expect 10,000 people will use the service over the two-year test period.''
"But Evanston had a different idea: What if a suburban downtown became a place where pedestrians ruled and cars were actively discouraged?" writes Goldman. "Beginning in 1986, a new plan for Evanston embraced the idea of a '24/7' downtown, pouring resources into increasing the density of its downtown—a density that also meant decreasing residents' reliance on automobiles. As a compact city, Evanston couldn't compete with the vast sprawling parking spots of the Old Orchard Mall. It had to build a different sort of appeal."
Evanston has gained recognition and reputation for efforts related to sustainability, including those by government, citizens, and institutions and one thing that Evanston does to reduce the number of cars is let individual car owners rent their idle cars to other drivers through an online service. The service is being provided by a San Francisco-based startup called Getaround, and it's facilitated by a two-year, $475,000 federal research grant to the Center for Neighborhood Technology that's being implemented by the Shared-Use Mobility Center. Getaround claims that a car owner can make as much as $10,000 a year by renting out a vehicle and that renters can get a car to use when they need one for as little as $5 an hour.
Sharon Feigon says the new program is designed to test different models for car sharing in communities with different economic characteristics — ranging from low to moderate income communities in the city to more suburban areas like Evanston. "We'll also be surveying people about their use to better understand how it works and whether it actually leads to some people selling their cars, whether it reduces carbon dioxide emissions and vehicle miles traveled," says Feigon. "Car owners can make a little money and feel good that their car is in service to others. We expect 10,000 people will use the service over the two-year test period.''
And I utterly despise it. Here's how it works out.
1) They tear down lanes, increasing traffic, and turn them into ugly, overly broad sidewalks and bike lanes that nobody uses,
2) Installing deliberate "baffles" to slow down traffic flow. For example, here on Snorrabraut they have the center lane as an alternating turn lane into every little side street, and the outerlane in each direction also repeatedly turn into turn lanes, so that drivers have to keep alternating between the left and right lanes... with stoplights at each little intersection, of course.
3) "Increasing density" by ripping out all of the parking. This has the lovely side effect of, during busy times, cars that normally would have just parked instead have to circle around for long periods looking for spaces. Great for the environment, that! They usually rip out the parking first and then worry about whether they actually have anything to build there later.
4) "Increasing density" by ripping out public spaces. The hardest one to see go was Hjartatorg, as it had been basically built up and decorated by the city's teenagers, murals covering every square meter of the sides.
5) "Increasing density" by pushing out lower density businesses that people actually enjoy, like entertainment, for high density residential (these days, often hotels or apartments for tourists) and higher profit commercial.
6) "Increasing density" by building "up". The city is covered in tower cranes, each competing to build taller buildings than the last, and all doing their damnedest to block views of the ocean and famous city landmarks.
7) Going hyperaggressive on parking fines. There's even parking meters at the hospital parking lot, and meter readers go around ticketing patients' cars - even emergency room patients. On Menningarnótt they shut down car access to the entire city - which would be fine (it's a big festival), except that they don't provide nearly enough parking even for people at bus stops wanting to catch the buses into the city that they're supposed to take, and then go around ticketing all the cars on the outlots.
8) Building new buildings with insufficient parking, or - latest trend - no parking at all.
And on and on. It's so ridiculous in general, but even more ridiculous here on one of the windiest places on the planet, where winter lasts half a year, where there's almost no sun in the winter, etc.
And for what? So that we can't go places when we're sick or injured? So people can't commute? So that we have to exercise in their proscribed manner rather than our own? (my way to exercise is planting trees and improving my land... screw you, environment!) So that we have to live in little apartments in a city with ever-shrinking public spaces and ever-decreasing view? So that we can use a means of transportation that's 20+ times more likely to get you seriously injured per kilometer than driving, and almost as likely to seriously injure pedestrians? So that we can burn ~40 calories per kilometer biking (significantly more walking) which, at a local average embodied CO2 per food calorie of something of probably around 6g/kcal works out to 240g/km, three times worse than driving alone in a Prius** (even if you lower your baseline metabolism that only saves you about 14kcal/day/kg body mass reduction, far less than you burn to achieve that weight loss**)? Just ignoring the potentially even bigger issues from producing all of that extra food, such as methane emissions, destruction of habitat, algal blooms, pesticide pollution, damm
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
I really do like Evanston... been working here for almost 14 years and I've gotten a chance to see the building boom in downtown during that time. It really is more of a city than a suburb. There's plenty of suburban sprawl too... many tree-lined side streets with a garage for every house, and lots of cars parked along said streets. It's just downtown that is building up so dramatically. The only limit to outward spread is the fact that there's a great big lake along the entire eastern edge of town, a great big city to the south, and already-sprawled suburbs to the north and west.
For many of us that commute to Evanston for work or for entertainment, a car is still a necessity. The surrounding suburbs, and even parts of the city, lack a convenient public transportation method to get there efficiently - multiple slow buses or interchanges between bus and rail. And the big parking lot along the lakefront, also known as Northwestern University, pulls in many cars like mine that have to travel along congested streets. Streets that are poorly plowed at best in winter. I'm fairly certain Evanston has just one snowplow that they loan out to Chicago at the first sign of snow.
The most car-unfriendly development in recent years has been the new system of bike lanes. I'm all for making it safe, convenient, and desirable to use a bicycle to commute and would love to see a bike lane on just about every street. But they decided in some downtown areas to put the bicycle lane next to the curb, between the sidewalk and parked cars. While this is great for helping bicyclists avoid being "doored" by oblivious motorists exiting vehicles, it means that when I make a right turn across a bike lane I have to somehow have kept track of potential bicyclists over the last block and be able to see through the SUV that is inevitably parked at the corner in order to make sure I'm not cutting off or running over a rider.
It really doesn't help that too many cyclists in Evanston are just plain batshit crazy (far more so than those I've seen in Chicago). Speeding along side streets or main streets with no regard for stop signs and little regard for stoplights. Often clad in spandex, hunched over the handlebars as if they're racing to the end of the next stage.