Which Big City Has the Greenest Transportation Profile?

When I was in San Francisco in October, I met Chava Kronenberg, a bay area transportation planner and Metro Boston native. During our conversation she commented Boston’s quite extensive alternative transportation profile is often overlooked in national discussions. Instead, usual suspects like Portland, Oregon get all the credit for their green transportation systems. I decided to take a look at several transportation metrics to see just how green Boston was among big cities. Could it be the greenest city in America, as she claimed?

The three measures I chose were the overall percentage of workers using transit, bikes, and walking to work. I limited the analysis to the largest 30 “places” in the U.S. Census and used data from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey. Technically this is sample data, but I did not calculate margins of errors since for large cities they are generally small. Also, there’s an extensive and heated debate about exactly how green transit is. Most studies I’ve seen conclude busy buses or trains emit less pollution (including CO2) per passenger than private vehicles, but I won’t wade into the debate here. Here’s what I found.

Transit
For overall transit ridership to work, New York City (55%) and Washington, D.C. (37%) were winners, with Boston in third at 32% with San Francisco (32%) and Chicago (26%) rounding out the top five. Since this metric is for the center city only, I think Boston’s getting a bit short shrift. The region’s truly expansive commuter rail system (it goes all the way to Rhode Island — see below) carries an average of over 138,000 riders a day, more than all but two other similar systems in the nation — New York and Chicago. (Source: APTA ridership report (PDF))

Biking
What about zero-pollution biking? On this measure, the top five are Portland (4.7%), Seattle (2.5%), San Francisco (2.5%), and D.C. (2%) (which launched a bike-sharing system in 2008) and Denver (1.7%). Boston is only a few slots down at #7 with 1.2%. However, the city only recently saw the light and began pursuing bicycle planning aggressively. In fact, in the past it has been named one of the least bicycle-friendly cities in the U.S., although despite this bad reputation ranks way above dozens of other large cities.

The city’s 2009 State of the Hub report (PDF) reports 15 new miles of bike lanes (up from 0 in 2007), 500 new bike racks, a new bike map, and plans for a new bike sharing system moving forward. I should note plenty of smaller cities have larger shares of bike commuters. If Minneapolis were on the list, it would rank second with 3.5% of its commuters biking to work. If it were included, Boston’s neighbor Cambridge would be 5.8%, easily topping Portland.

Walking
Walking is another green mode available to most travelers, often overlooked for more exciting trains and bike facilities. However, making a city walkable can be tricky, as it depends on a subtle combination of good public facilities, urban design and density, and mixed land uses. On this measure, Boston tops the list at 14%, with Washington, D.C. just behind at 11.7%, and the rest of the top five New York (10.1%), San Francisco (9.52%), and Seattle (8.6%). It turns out some of the factors that make Boston such a bad city to bicycle — congested streets and a dense street grid — make it excellent for walking. Walking is so popular the city boasts an active walking advocacy organization — WalkBoston — and extensive trail networks along the harbor and through parks.

Next, I created a composite score for all three indicators. For each indicators, the cities were ranked with 1 going to the city with the highest (best) value and 30 to the worst. I then added the rankings together, weighing each equally. The lower the resulting score, the better. This score gauges the diversity of the mix, and isn’t an objective measure of pollution output. In this measure, Washington, D.C. ranks first with a score of 8, San Francisco and Boston tie for 2nd at 11, and Seattle fourth with a score of 15. New York, strong on transit and walking, falls to an overall place of seventh due to it’s low biking score (16th with just 0.7% of commuters reporting biking).

What can we conclude from this simple comparison? First, as Chava suspected some very bike friendly places like Portland may not have many transit riders or walkers. Any evaluation that stresses diversity, like this one, will rank them lower than older cities with well-developed transit and street networks. And although it comes as no surprise to me, Washington, D.C.’s high ranking may surprise some. Indeed, it is the result of many factors: excellent “bones” in a good street and sidewalk grid, decisions by city leaders in the 60s and 70s to stop as many highways as possible and invest heavily in transit, lots of government-related jobs concentrated downtown, and a city government aggressively pursuing improvements to bicycle, walking, and transit infrastructure in recent years.

Finally, I think Boston’s high walking score and surprisingly high biking statistics (despite little infrastructure and bad weather) show it is somewhat underrated. But is it the greenest city in America? That’s for you to decide.

South Africa Trip Photos

So far, my trip to South Africa is going great. I won’t have the opportunity to write much here until after I return in July, but I thought I would share a few highlight photos.

Our studio class is examining housing and economic issues in a small town about two hours from Cape Town called McGregor. Its boosters claim the town is the “best preserved 19th century town” in the Western Cape, however it is also facing a serious housing crisis.

The town sits nestled in a mountain valley:

Here’s are the five studio team members, as well as some students who have been working with the South African Heritage Resources Agency to document the town history:

McGregor is something of a mecca for so-called “earth building” technology in South Africa built using adobe or cobb. This home was being built by a local business owner using local materials (the earth is from the site) and local people with experience in the building techniques.

This man is stomping cobb:

These are historic homes, perhaps 100 years old:

Here is a government-built toilet, shared by the residents of 5 tin shacks (not seen, to the right) and the home to the left. These residents are lucky, many shack residents have no plumbing whatsoever.

In McGregor, perhaps a quarter of the total population live in tin shacks and pay roughly $20 a month to the land owner as rent. Millions more live in massive shantytowns surrounding Cape Town, Johannesburg, and other South African cities. (More on this later)

We worked with the students to survey the community and consider the design and location for new government-subsidized housing:

After spending a week in McGregor, we have returned to Cape Town to start work on the report.

We took the train to Simonstown to see the famous African penguins:

As well as took a drive around the peninsula to visit the Cape of Good Hope.

Molo Cape Town!

Tomorrow I’ll be boarding a flight to Cape Town, South Africa, where I’ll be spending the next month studying abroad. Our group will be completing a studio report on a small, 200-year old town outside of the city.

While Cape Town is renowned as a fascinating and beautiful place, I think I’d like any place where the top item on the city website is an announcement about the process of “updating and rationalising its spatial planning policies and frameworks, in order to simplify the planning environment and more importantly give direction to the City’s long-term development.”

I plan to write a bit here about the trip before I return in early July.

The photo was taken by my friend Michael at the Cape of Good Hope during his visit to Africa last year, and molo means “hello” in Xhosa, one of South Africa’s 11 official languages.

APA Conference

I will be in Philadelphia this weekend from Friday, 4/13 to Monday, 4/16 to attend the American Planning Association 2007 National Planning Conference. I will be attending the “Revolutionize Citizen Participation Using Internet Technology” session on Saturday and the student reception that evening, as well as a variety of other sessions. Let me know if you will be there.

My Vacation in Links

I just returned from visiting my girlfriend Libby in Michigan and parents in Maine. In Michigan Libby and I stayed at the Inn on Ferry Street, ate a Coney dog, saw a Tigers game, browsed the shelves in John King Books North, and spent time in Ferndale and Royal Oak. I noticed construction has begun on the long vacant Book-Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit, and there seems to be a lot of other development along the Woodward Corridor. In Maine, I went to the Yarmouth Clam Festival, had a lobster roll from Bayley’s, and biked on a Maine segment of the East Coast Greenway. I also saw Tom, who’s been doing lots of work on his house lately.

On the plane to Michigan I read Justice Thomas’s extremely interesting dissent in Kelo v. New London (the 2005 Supreme Court Case where the court held economic redevelopment qualified as a public use under eminent domain law), where after arguing for an originalist interpretation of “public use” he throws in a paragraph about how eminent domain has been used to displace poor and black communities, concluding that “Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the Court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.” I first read about the dissent on this blog post on blackprof.com which contains Emma Coleman Jordan’s analysis.

I also read an article published in the Journal of Urban History in January by Blake Gumprecht examining the geography of college towns by using Ithica, New York as a case study. I found the article quite interesting and I think there are many similarities between Ithaca and Ann Arbor. Gumprecht describes the various communities of the “highly segregated” college town including the status-seeking greeks, NIMBY faculty neighborhoods (“You don’t want to live next door to an undergraduate student house. One property, one bad apple, can cause a whole flight.”), and the familiar student ghetto with both modern and dilapidated rental housing. Describing the development of Ithaca’s Collegetown, Gumprecht throws in this tidbit: “The city encouraged development by temporarily suspending building – high limits and parking requirements. Over a ten-year period, more than a dozen apartment buildings, capable of housing 1,70 people, were built.” (p. 255) How’s that for pent-up demand? The article is available online here: “Fraternity Row, the Student Ghetto, and the Faculty Enclave.” (PDF)

On the topic of reading, I also finished a borrowed copy of “The First Days of School.” Although mostly relevant to K-12 teachers, it did contain some tips I’m sure will be useful for the class of 18-year-old freshman I’ll be TAing this fall. Ironically, it was in Maine where I discovered the book “Saving the Neighborhood: You Can Fight Developers and Win!” at a church book sale. The book is a NIMBY handbook written by a DC resident and published in 1990. The examples of citizen activism include a petition to stop the construction of an office building on Wisconsin Avenue in Northwest, and the entire book seems full of DC-area examples.

Memorial Day Weekend in California

My friend Emily got married this weekend at the Carmel Valley Ranch in Carmel, California on the Monterey Peninsula. A group of us from Greely High School made the trek to Carmel from all across the country. The ceremony was beautiful and it was great to catch up with old friends. I put the photos I took in this set on Flickr.

See the rest

Fine Dining in the Exurbs

It turns out the hottest new restaurant in Montgomery, Alabama isn’t exactly close to downtown. It’s in a strip mall across from a gated community way out at the fringes of the sprawl (I mean way out – beyond working farms.) At least they put this fountain out in the parking lot as a token to the lacking urbanity.

And how was the food at Garrett’s? In my uncultured opinion, excellent. My shrimp and scallops served over risotto was delicious and the wine list filled the back of the menu with selections ranging up to $300. In fact, the restaurant was so well done, I nearly forgot I was in a strip mall.