From the pinnacle of Amsterdam Central station, as seen from my hotel room last month. I'm guessing it's from the Deco era, early 20th century. There's an exuberant optimism about European rail architecture of that era that needs to find new expressions.
Note: I'm back in Sydney, but detritus of the just-completed round the world will probably continue showing up here for a while.
My Munich transit notes will take a while to settle, but meanwhile, Munich's U-bahn station Münchner Freiheit is a must-see for all visitors.
U-bahn lines have associated colors that are reflected in both mapping and signage. (See U-bahn map here). This station is an interchange between lines 3 (orange) and 6 (blue). So the architects had a field day exploring all the ways that orange and blue can converse, or clash. And as if orange weren't garish enough, they invented a peculiar pea green to dance with it.
This is, by the way, a weaved station: U3 and U6 northbound on one platform, and both southbound on the other, to maximize cross-platform transfers. U6 is toward the center of the station in both directions, so to express that you have the blue pillars down the center, with the curious orange+olive on both outside walls, where the (orange) U3 runs.
A mirrored ceiling festooned with semi-protruding panels of flourescent light amplifies the dissonance.
This may well the the brightest underground station I've ever seen, bright not just with brute-force flourescents but with a mirror-intensive design that recycles light. The photons can bounce around pretty much forever.
Munich has several recent U-bahn stations that show some real architectural panache, but this is the only one that's truly fun. Would it get old looking at this every day? I don't think so.
One of this blog's earliest fans was Paul Barter, a transport policy scholar based at the National University of Singapore. Paul's blog, Reinventing Urban Transport, is always worth a look.
Paul and I met for dinner in Singapore last week, a long rambling evening that ended in an outdoor Islamic (no alcohol) cafe, where we watched the Germany vs. England World Cup game amid a crowd who all seemed to have surprisingly strong feelings for one side of the other. (Perhaps, given colonial history, this boiled down to strong feelings for or against the British.) We started with a walking tour of a Singapore that most tourists won't see, but that covers a huge percentage of the island: the regular, repetitive, but efficient world of the Housing Development Board, the single government agency that provides housing for a majority of Singaporeans.
Paul told me to meet him at Ang Mo Kio station on Singapore's rail rapid transit network, the MRT:
Most of the rail rapid transit is elevated outside the CBD, so this is a typical station environment, constrained in its urban potential by the overhead structure. Note the solid mass of bicycles chained to the fence in the distance.
Singapore is still debating the role of the bicycle. Paul tells me that cycling on pedestrian paths is illegal but tolerated, while riding in the street is legal but looks, to me, pretty scary. When Paul and others suggest ways to make cycling safer, they get responses along the lines of: "Cycling will never be popular in Singapore; it's just too hot and humid." There's an odd disconnect here, as the number of bicycles locked to railings at rapid transit stations indicates some demand, and this would seem to suggest some government interest in the safety of those people, regardless of whether bicycles are officially popular. As for humidity, Brisbane shares Singapore's climate for half the year, and in the core parts of Brisbane where there is good cycling infrastructure, cycling volumes are intense.
Paul then led me to the bus interchange for Ang Mo Kio station, which is across the street from the rail station but connected by pedestrian underpass. It's a standard enclosed facility with sliding doors that open only when a bus is there. It's huge, bigger than the rail transit station, with a long chain of berths receding into the distance.
The interchange gives out onto a typical community commercial area.
Which leads, in turn, to truly vast quantities of this ...
The low building in front is a parking structure. This high density has a surprising amount of parking given the transit options and the generally high cost of driving. Paul said that the total number of cars is capped in Singapore, by requiring a permit to own a car and capping the number of permits. Motoring costs are also relatively "unbundled." Paul assured me that the parking for these housing blocks is never just lumped into the cost of housing, as it would be in North American or Austrlasian cities, but must be leased separately.
Still, it's a lot of parking, a lot of cars, and thus a lot of emphasis on big, fast streets:
Our walk took us under the viaduct of the MTR rail transit system, and while it's not Berlin's Stadtbahn, they have tried to make the space useful, as a skateboarding area among other things.
Considerable effort goes into providing completely weather protected pedestrian routes, an effect that produces a repeating pattern of small structures that are vaguely Chinese-looking in their composition:
These towers also have an equivalent of the small corner shop, usually on the ground floor.
These massed housing landscapes are likely to be distressing to a lot of Western eyes, reminiscent, perhaps, of European suburbs that are often considered slums. So it's interesting to see the same architecture used to create a prosperous environment, with many touches that show a clear intention to make a humane and attractive place.
In the end, I'm not Singaporean, so it doesn't much matter whether I like it. The Housing Development Board is Singapore's housing provider not just for the poor but for much of the middle class. Generations of many families have known no other form of housing. It's home. And it certainly packs the trains.
Lately, Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic has been riding the bus. We're seeing more good press for buses lately, as more national commentators focus on urban mobility problems. Friedersdorf's figuring out most of what I've long advocated ...
I've already argued for simplified routes, system maps, and route numbering schemes. Other innovations that you should lobby your local bus agency/municipal government to adopt: dedicated bus lanes, express routes, GPS on the bus, estimated time of arrival signs on bus stops that change in real time, clear signage, and easy methods of payment that don't require exact change.But it's interesting that this struck him as new:
Were I a city planner trying to improve bus service, I'd try to design or exploit a public square where a lot of buses could meet and people could transfer between lines, and invest heavily in that area as a permanent transportation hub.
It would have dedicated bus lanes going into it and out of it, vendors would be invited to sell goods there in an open air market, coffee shops and bars would be encouraged, food trucks would be permitted to park there, a corner would be dedicated to a skate park, a small police substation would sit at another corner -- basically I'd try to have an area where there were always a bunch of people around, a bunch of different stuff to do, pleasant places to sit, lots of places within walking distance, etc.
And the investment, the permanence it implied, would go some ways toward stoking the kind of development that subway stops bring. In fact, a city like Los Angeles where more subway stops are likely in the future would do well to build a future subway stop location as a bus hub now pending future development.
Such places have been tried in America, perhaps not with all these features but certainly some of them. The most successful has been the Portland transit mall, along 5th and 6th Avenues through the center of the city, which was bus-only from its inception in 1978 until light rail was added to it in 2009. This is how it looked in the pre-rail state.
The mall featured many of the urban features that Friedesdorf mentions, though of course they varied along the length of the street according to the nature of the surrounding district. The midpoint of the mall, where it intersected light rail, was the site of the Pioneer Courthouse and Pioneer Courthouse Square.
The Pioneer Courthouse Square is often called "Portland's living room," the absolute center of downtown Portland. So here is Friedersdorf's central square, while the mall constitutes the "bus lanes going into and out of it."
It's interesting that one of the desired outcomes Friedesdorf mentions is "permanence," because this calls to mind the permanence that rail advocates insist comes only from rails in the street. The creation of the Portland Mall, especially in the political context of the 1970s, was a massive statement about the city's commitment to transit, and included a range of high-cost features designed to make clear that this commitment was there to stay.
One telling moment in its history was when the Hilton, which faced the 6th Avenue side of the mall, did a remodel on which they could have moved their main entrance to the other side of their building, where it would have faced a car-oriented street, Broadway. They chose not to, even though the mall gave them only one car lane on a street otherwise devoted to buses. The bus mall was a better front door address. (The flagship store of Nike is right across the street.)
The high-end central bus plaza has been tried at various scales in other American cities. The success or failure of these has depended a lot on how the city views public transit in general, and how well the plaza relates to whatever else is going on. The Spokane Plaza in Spokane, Washington, for example, is a fully enclosed block with bus stops around it. The interior of the block is not just a heated place where you can watch monitors to see when your bus arrives, but also contains commercial spaces, with skybridge connections into adjacent retail and office buildings. This sequence of photos takes you from outside into the ground floor and then up to the skybridge level. (My photos are from 2005; Spokane readers are welcome to send more recent ones.)
Spokane's plaza is unusual for its very central location in downtown. There are similar but less elaborate facilities in Las Vegas, Denver, and Boulder, among other cities. Often, though, these central stations are slightly removed from the center of downtown, hence cut off from its commercial energy, and hence not really credible as centroids of urban life. Bus operators are always tempted to advocate a facility that's optimised for bus circulation and storage, and this always conflicts with what you can accommodate in a place that feels like the center of the city. So often you get outcomes as in Boulder, a bus station under a parking garage on the edge of downtown.
The result is a functional station, and often these are the least-bad
sites given a city's geography and politics. But of course, transit should ideally bring you deeper into
downtown than you can get with your car, whereas a bus station in a
parking garage implies that transit and cars deserve exactly the same degree
of proximity.
The development of downtown bus stations -- especially in cities that do not yet have rail -- can be a critical test of a city's commitment to transit. Spending a lot of money on infrastructure, bus or rail, locks the service into place in a way that is hard to dislodge. The centrality of Spokane Plaza has been controversial in Spokane; there have been many business-driven proposals to move the buses to a less central location. But it has survived, partly because the magnitude of the built investment -- that celebrated "permanence" -- made it difficult to move.
Ultimately, the creation of activity hubs around transit -- even buses -- relies on the city's eagerness to encourage whatever level of commerce the market will bear, in addition to making the pedestrian connections to other commercial activity as strong as possible. It may start with pushcarts, and then grows into permanent retail opportunities. This may correspond to a growth from bus facilities into bus+rail facilities, but there's no necessary correlation between the level of commercial activity and the type of wheels that the transit runs on. Commerce will always be attracted to where people gather, so if people are gathering anyway for a transit connection point, commerce can help turn that point into a place.
Is it true that while everyone loves Portland's regular 200-foot street grid, urbanists are turning away from it as something to emulate?
Daniel Nairn, who just wanted to make a nice nerdy poster about street grids, points me to a fascinating Planetizen article by Fanis Grammenos and Douglas Pollard. It argues that the standard street grid, an easily repeated pattern where most intersections are four-way, is and should be history. The future, they argue, lies in more complex grids where there are a lot of street connections but where 3-way "T" intersections are the rule. It's an excellent article. Read the whole thing.
Grammenos and Pollard indict the standard Portland grid on the following counts:
Now, I'm not an urban design specialist, but I did grow up in Portland, and I've also tried to design transit networks for a huge range of cities. From those perspectives, something's wrong here.
To take the three points:
The crucial point missing from the Grammenos/Pollard analysis is legibility. Grids are easy to remember. They fit our brains. Anyone who's navigated Manhattan knows that the shredded street patterns of Lower Manhattan, below 14th Street, take up far more of your brain than the uniform grid that stretches from 14th Street to beyond 125th Street. In the latter area, which is about half of Manhattan, almost any location is easily described in terms that look like co-ordinates: Second Avenue at 73rd Street, etc. You can hold a huge part of the map of the city in your mind with very little effort. With those simple co-ordinates, your mind can jump to whatever location you choose, and often plot a rational course to get there. In short, the regular gridded area feels conceptually available in a way that the labyrinth of Lower Manhattan is not.
Sydney, where I live now, is more like Lower Manhattan. There are grid fragments here and there but overall the street pattern is sheer chaos:
Three-way intersections are routine, and where these happen on the arterial network, they are always the worst bottlenecks. No mode of transport can expect a reasonably direct path from origin to destination. As a pedestrian I can almost do it, but it's still a complex calculation, requiring me to assess the unique angles and slopes presented by each street or path I might use.
Grids designed for cars inevitably concentrate all the worst features of cars, but I remain unclear on why this means we should abandon the standard grid. We just need to tame it. Vancouver's West End, for example, is a highly obstructed labyrinth for cars, but remains entirely legible to peds and cyclists, who can still follow, and remember, its simple pattern:
It's not all that clear in the Google Earth shot, but most of the streets on this grid don't offer Duany's dreaded "endless vistas." If you look up, you can see the mountains from any north-south street in the West End, but you can't see continuously down the street, unless it's a major arterial. That's because the various obstructions that interrupt car traffic generally include some landscaping, so if you look a few blocks down a street, the ground-level vista is likely to end in some trees. It's very pleasant.
The long side of the Vancouver block (145 m or 474 feet) (generally 500-700 feet) is too long for my Portland-trained eye; with the wrong architecture, it becomes an oppressively long wall. But the point here is that the legibility of the grid is available to the cyclist and pedestrian. It's easy for either of these modes to select a travel path based on just a few considerations -- far less work than the advanced calculus required to plot the most direct path through Sydney.
Finally, standard grids are very, very good for transit. Straight, continuous arterials mean that transit doesn't have to turn. (Every time a transit line turns, it's a little less safe, takes a little more intersection capacity, and increases the likelihood that it's taking someone out of direction.) In this post, for example, I tried to lay a grid route network over Sydney, in which the routes conitnue flowing in the same general direction to the extent that the tortured street network allows. Obviously, it was a struggle:
As I suggested in the last post, the decision to replace the Ottawa busway with light rail may well make sense, but that it should not be an occasion for anti-busway triumphalism, as the busway was never complete; the crucial downtown segment was always missing.
But I also think that design and architecture matter, and I wonder if some aspects of the original busway's design made it hard for people to appreciate.
When I toured the busway in 2006, I have to say I felt overwhelmed, and sometimes a little oppressed, by the design choices. First of all, the whole thing is very, very, very red.
The screaming red color of every non-concrete surface, including the buses, is helpful
if you're trying to find your transit system in a snowstorm, but in all, the
Ottawa busway has a very 1970s look -- a look that lasted about as long
as 1970s hairstyles. Portland readers may note similarties between
that curving awning in the last image and the mushroomy curves of the 1978 Portland Mall bus shelters, removed during
the remodel in 2008:
Design fashions are powerful because they operate subconsciously. To anyone with any awareness of design or style -- which is most of us -- the Ottawa busway feels intensely dated. Modernism, which was current then, feels more brutal now, especially as the New Urbanists re-introduce us to the pleasure of awnings, pediments, and brick paving. Of course, most of Ottawa is a very modernist city, and perhaps the busway fits into that reality ...
... but once people start to find modernism oppressive, they're going to find the busway oppressive too. This is bound to have some
effect on whether the people using the busway see it as fitting into
their city, and their lives, in 2010.
It's hard to know how to do this better. Forty years from now, much of our current design vocabulary -- like our hairstyles and clothes -- is going to look dated. I suppose I'm arguing for conservatism in the fundamental architecture of transit. Lean toward aesthetic choices that have some history, some resonance with aesthetics and values that are more than a decade or two old. Use public art, rather than architecture, for the more daring and confronting elements that may or may not look good over time.
(Public art can also do much to redeem unpleasant architecture of the recent past. See, for example, what the Czechs did to their broadcasting tower after the fall of communism. I don't recall any public art in Ottawa's busway stations, certainly nothing strong enough to interact with the stations' design.)
Brisbane's busway (toured here, here, and here) copied much of Ottawa's, but seems to have gotten this right. The design choices are comforable but not daring. The most innovative idea in these outer stations is the freestanding individual letters of the station name over the entrance. It's catches the eye, but if the next generation hates it it's simple enough to change.
Other ideas in these stations are mostly about new ways of expressing enduring values. For example, the lower level platforms feature a glass wall in front of the structural concrete wall. Between these, inaccessible to vandals, is a narrow planting strip whose plantings will eventually grow to partly enclose the waiting area in foliage. These choices are safe long-term bets for a city that has always valued its lush subtropical setting.
The architecture of the Brisbane busway is a little conservative for some tastes, but transit architecture (again as opposed to public art) probably should be conservative, because our daily exposure to it makes it a powerful element in forming our aesthetic impression of a city.
It's always tempting to make a strong stylistic choice that expresses our vision of the moment, which is what the Ottawa Busway did. But this infrastructure must last for decades. If our grandchildren decide that what we've built is brutal or oppressive or embarrassing, it will make them turn away from an essential element of their city. Better to err in the other direction. If our grandchildren find our transit architecture boring, they can add public art that will make it theirs.
UPDATE: In response to early comments, let me say that my reaction to the Ottawa busway is my reaction. I don't need you to share it, and I'm not implying that people who react differently are wrong. Aesthetics is a space where we are all entitled to our gut reactions to what we experience, and the urban architect's job is to understand those reactions and form ideas that address them. I also agree with several commenters that postmodernism can be as irritating as modernism, which brings me back to the point that a rather than argue over our favorite architectural -ism, we should avoid overinvestment in any particular -ism when designing long-life transit infrastructure.
Engineer Scotty questions why I focus on design here when elsewhere I've emphasised the importance of cost-effectiveness (e.g. in streetcar arguments). The answer, of course, is that regardless of cost every piece of infrastructure has a design, and the design matters. There's no conflict between that observation and a concern for cost-effectiveness. If cost pressures help transit architecture become more conservative, that may not be bad. Conservative shouldn't mean plain or dull, and I don't think it does in Brisbane. But if you aim for conservatism and end up with something people find plain and dull, you can come back later with public art. I suppose you could also come back later and paint everything bright red, if that's your community's taste.
Earlier this year, Berlin's U-Bahn opened its newest segment of subway, a 1.1 mile three-station line connecting the main rail station to the Brandenburg Gate. It's temporarily called the U55, but it will ultimately become part of the expanded U5 (see network map here). From the Gate, the line will continue east under Unter den Linden, Berlin's main processional boulevard, to Alexanderplatz, the former East Berlin downtown and one of Berlin's most important hubs. (From there it will continue to the eastern suburbs as the U5 that already exists.) This is such an important segment for Berlin, both practically and symbolically, that it´s remarkable it´s only now being built. (The Transport Politic reviewed the political history here.)
Continue reading "berlin´s new micro-subway: a short architectural tour" »
Robert Cervero: The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry
A rigorous but readable study of the transit choices made by a range of cities around the world, and how these choices have shaped the city for better or worse.
Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl: Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil
James S. Russell: The Agile City: Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change
David Sucher: City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, Revised Edition
Engaging book on the details of creating welcoming urban space.
Allan B. Jacobs: Great Streets
The definitive book on the ingredients of a great urban streetscape.
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