The Price Of The Need For Speed

[M II A II R II K]

The price of speed


21 Feb 2012

By Steve Mouzon

Read More: http://bettercities.net/news-opinion/blogs/steve-mouzon/17502/price-speed

The need for speed devours huge chunks of American cities and leaves the edges of the expressways worthless. Busy streets, for almost all of human history, created the greatest real estate value because they delivered customers and clients to the businesses operating there. This in turn cultivated the highest tax revenues in town, both from higher property taxes and from elevated sales taxes. But you can't set up shop on the side of an expressway. How can cities afford to spend so much to create thoroughfares with no adjoining property value?

- Increasing speed a little bit requires a big increase in the size of curves. At 20 miles per hour, any car can handle a curve with a 15 foot radius, so you'd think that tripling the speed would triple the radius, right? Wrong. At 60 miles per hour, curve radii are usually a few hundred feet, not the 45 feet you might guess.

- Faster roads need wider lanes. An 8 foot lane can handle 20 mile per hour traffic, but at highway speeds, you need 12 foot lanes.

- High-speed roads need wide medians and shoulders because a car can roll hundreds of feet beyond the point of collision or loss of control when it is traveling at highway speeds.

- It makes no sense to use all that land on either side for a two-lane highway, so high-speed thoroughfares usually have at least four lanes, often several more.

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Florence, Italy: The blocks are tiny, and the streets are never much more than hairlines. From this high up in the sky, the intersections look like sharp right angles. This is because Florence was laid out for people and horses, which can turn on a dime. Cars drive on these streets today, but they drive slowly, which is far safer for the pedestrians.

http://www.originalgreen.org/_Media/florence_med.jpeg




Atlanta: The Atlanta interstates are each as wide as 2-3 blocks of Florence. The central core of Florence, from the Duomo to the river, would fit inside the inner box of the interchange. The world was irreversibly changed by the people living and working in Florence who gave birth to the Renaissance. The interchange will never change the world… at best, it gets a small fraction of Atlanta workers to their jobs a bit sooner, barring any accidents.

http://www.originalgreen.org/_Media/malfunction-junction_med.jpeg




Seaside, Florida (same scale as I-95 in Miami)

http://www.originalgreen.org/_Media/seaside_med.jpeg




I-95 in Miami, Florida (same scale as Seaside)

http://www.originalgreen.org/_Media/miami_med.jpeg




green land: has real estate value ~ red land: no real estate value

http://www.originalgreen.org/_Media/miami-areas_med.jpeg




Acreage isn't the only metric of land value. The "front foot," or length of the front property line is another metric of real estate value that is perhaps more useful than acreage. In Seaside, every single foot of frontage is full value, meaning that it either has addresses of private lots along it, or it opens into parks, greens, squares, and plazas.

http://www.originalgreen.org/_Media/seaside-frontages_med.jpeg




green frontages: full value ~ olive frontages: partial value ~ red frontages: worthless

http://www.originalgreen.org/_Media/miami-frontages-new_med.jpeg

[Beta_Magellan]

The comparison of Florence with the Atlanta interchange is a really great piece of rhetoric—too bad the other images he used look almost paint-ish.

[jg6544]

Florence - that little square of streets in the middle is the footprint of the Roman military camp that was the first settlement.

[M II A II R II K]

The Speed Burden


By Steve Mouzon

Read More: http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/cheapways.html

The Cheapway is "the thoroughfare formerly known as the Freeway." The Freeway, of course, was originally designed to run freely in the countryside, carrying people quickly between cities and towns. But when it entered the city, the Freeway metastasized into its evil twin: the Cheapway. It is so named because it has likely destroyed over a trillion of dollars of real estate value around it in the US and drains municipal coffers across the country of billions in property taxes and sales tax revenues. As a matter of fact, most Cheapways destroy substantially more real estate value than the several-million-per-mile that it costs to construct them.

- Now, we really must ask: if the suburban jobs are held mostly by suburban sprawl-dwellers, why do we need the Cheapways anymore? Haven't the cities suffered enough? Isn't it time to tear them down? John Norquist has been asking that question for years as champion of the Cheapway tear-down, beginning in Milwaukee when he was mayor there. He has now gone national with this cause as one of his roles as president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. It is far beyond the scope of this blog to show precisely how much value is lost; that sorely-needed study would best be handled by a university and could take years.

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East New York Street, Indianapolis

http://www.originalgreen.org/_Media/indianapolis-w-chart_med.jpeg