Infrastructure
March 6th, 2010
Last month, I had the opportunity to visit Bogotá. As late as a year ago, I had never expected to visit Colombia, as it was not on my radar as an interesting - or safe - place to enjoy some time away. But a family wedding brought me here, and many of my preconceptions went out the window. The people are friendly, the countryside beautiful, and the security much improved. (It was especially nice to be so far south at a time when even the US south was suffering from a lingering cold snap.)
Bogotá, the nation’s capital and largest city (with a population of about 8 million), is also one of the world’s highest cities, with an elevation of 2600 metres. The city is spread out on a north-south axis, As Bogotá has grown, so has its transportation headaches. Like most Latin American cities (even including those with heavy-rail metro systems), the principal mode of public transit are private minibuses, which travel along all the major roads with the route posted on the windshield, merely a long list of neighbourhoods and landmarks the unscheduled service stops at.
Huge fleets of minibuses, stopping anywhere they are flagged down, aren’t exactly the most efficient mode of transport, though it can be convenient (and cheap) for passengers. Combine those buses (of varying age, upkeep and tailpipe emissions), with trucks, motorbikes, private cars and other street traffic, in a city surrounded by mountains, and you have a recipe for a smoggy, congested, mess. So the city, under the leadership of bold, clever (and sometimes near-dictatorial) city officials began to address it with a three-pronged attack: buses, bikes, and bans.
During the last decade, Bogotá took the lead of Curitba, Brasil, and began rolling out an advanced bus rapid transit system, called TransMilenio. TransMilenio solidified the Latin American tradition of high-concept BRT systems (which has been replicated in Mexico City to augment its already expansive Metro system) with a complex web of routes operating in exclusive lanes and serving fare-paid platforms in simple, modular, stations.
March 3rd, 2010
There was an interesting article in the Star recently (with a misleading headline) about how Chicago’s chief financial officer arranged leases on profitable city-owned infrastructure with private companies, and so raised billions of dollars of capital for the city. These assets included some parking garages, all the city’s parking meters, and the Chicago Skyway, a 7.8 mile toll bridge and road connecting two expressways.
Leasing is certainly a better option than selling valuable city assets outright. The city raises needed money, and then, eventually, the assets return to the city and it can either start managing them again and get the revenue directly, or re-lease them.
It’s not ideal, though. Leases tend to be very long term (e.g. 99 years), so it’s not much different from privatization in the short term. And it might not make a lot of economic sense to sell or lease an asset that makes good money (such as Toronto Hydro), as economist Jim Stanford explains in the article:
“Think of Toronto Hydro,” said Stanford. “The city typically earns an annual profit of about 10 per cent on its equity investment. Some of that (but not all) is paid to the city as a cash dividend; but even the profits that are retained inside Toronto Hydro are still new wealth for the City.
“If you sell off an asset that earns 10 per cent, in order to pay down debt (or avoid new debt, which is equivalent) on which you pay 5 or 6 per cent interest, have you made a good decision? Obviously not.
“Your balance sheet is no stronger: debt is lower, but so are your assets.”
On the other hand, reading the article (especially the mention of the Skyway), I wondered whether it might make a sense to set up a lease on city assets that don’t earn any revenue but have revenue-generating potential, with a private company that is able to earn revenue with them. In return, the city could get a big dose of capital funding. I am thinking of the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway, which were handed over to the city to manage (and pay for) as part of the Harris government’s downloading.
February 22nd, 2010
An old street sign in the foreground, with a newer metric speed limit sign and the Disco Road waste transfer station in the background.
Disco Road, a four-lane industrial road in northwest …
February 10th, 2010
EDITOR’S NOTE: Spacing is pleased to again partner with Heritage Toronto on their ongoing Building Storeys exhibit at the Gladstone Hotel that has been extended until April 25. A collaborative effort by Heritage Toronto and members of the photography groups the Shadow Collective and the DK Photo Group, Building Storeys is a visual documentation and anecdotal exhibit of the city’s heritage building and sites. This is the second in a series of posts on Spacing Toronto connected to the exhibit, and is by Wayne Reeves.
The recent furore over a developer’s attack on a “John M. Lyle” house near Casa Loma highlights one argument used to preserve buildings: a structure is worth keeping because it’s associated with a major architect. Minor buildings rise in value because they teach us about the working range of important designers like Lyle.
Rather more interesting are those cases where minor architects design great buildings. Toronto’s pre-eminent example is Thomas Canfield Pomphrey and the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. Who was he, and how did he get such an iconic commission?
As befits a minor personality, no golden archive of letters, journals and photos has been found. Pomphrey’s military service file contains the basics: born, November 29, 1882; birthplace, Wishaw, Scotland; height, five feet six-and-a-half inches; complexion, dark; eyes, blue; hair, black; religion, Presbyterian; marital status, single; died, March 8, 1966.
The son of a stationer/printer, Pomphrey grew up 20 miles southeast of Glasgow and studied at the elite Hamilton Academy. By 1900, he was apprenticed to architect Alexander Cullen in Motherwell and attended classes at the Glasgow School of Art. Highly respected, Cullen had a prosperous practice which included many public commissions, including hospitals, schools, court houses, police and fire stations, libraries and municipal offices.
February 4th, 2010
what’s up is down and vice versa.
Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.
February 1st, 2010
The Star Ferry passes in front of Hong Kong’s electric skyline
Hong Kong is a ceaselessly amazing case study in crowd management. With space at an absolute premium, central parts of the city have relegated the pedestrian environment upwards, in an effort to meet the needs of both pedestrians and the buses and taxis that monopolize the city’s roads. Pedestrian infrastructure here is a futuristic monument to efficiency.
While pedestrian overpasses are common throughout the city, the centrepiece of the system is found in the area simply referred to as “Central.” Here, the Hong Kong government has mandated new buildings be connected to the overpass system and throughout much of the central business district pedestrians come into little contact with the ground. It is Toronto’s PATH system realized in a warm climate. As with the PATH, some buildings are better at accommodating the pedestrian flow than others, and signage can be patchy. You can really only properly negotiate the system when you learn to stop looking for signs and just go with flow.
The most impressive part of the system, however, is clearly the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator.
January 26th, 2010
The famous shopping street Nanjing Road in Shanghai, China
On a recent trip to China I discovered that one of the most striking features of Chinese cities, at least to the eye of a Spacing reader, is the difference in the pedestrian environment. In the midst of an upheaval of historic proportions, Chinese cities are caught between a rush to the car driven, bourgeois lifestyle of the west, and the pedestrian and cycling practicalities of its recent past. The Chinese paradigm for urban design in the country’s sprawling new districts seems committed to separating vehicle and pedestrian traffic, both through barriers and grades, in an attempt to preserve the walking culture while accommodating the car. Many interesting design features result.
In Shanghai and Beijing, it is the norm is to have sidewalks cordoned off from the roadway with barriers forcing pedestrian traffic towards overpasses. While pedestrian grade separation is most common at intersections, in Beijing it is also quite common mid-block. Beijing has adopted a car-dependent design of very wide avenues with multiple degrees of separation. Down the centre, several lanes of heavy traffic crawl through congestion while a low speed access road, parking and wide sidewalks occupy the storefront side of a barrier fence. Pedestrian flyovers here almost always have one steep staircase and one very gradual. The overpasses also often provide stairway connections to bus stops, a considerable investment in bus infrastructure.
What this setup gains in easy access for motorists it loses in attractiveness of the pedestrian environment as the pedestrian is distantly removed from the other side of the street. It also must cause obvious difficulties for the disabled. In many ways, it really seems that the human scale of the city has been lost, and it is not uncommon to hear Beijingers complain about the loss of the old city.
January 19th, 2010
On a long, lonely drive, highway destination signs are a welcome friend. They assure us that as we press on, we are working towards a goal and that we will eventually find a place where something tangible awaits.
As with most urban infrastructure, there is a story in the details of how these signs are designed. For example, on Highway 401 west, a sign in Whitby states that you are still 51km away from Toronto. In less than half that distance however you will cross the Rouge River and be welcomed to ‘Ontario’s Capital’ raising the question of just what exactly that distance is measuring.
According to the MTO, the distance marked on the signs is determined by the route required to get to the seat of government of the identified municipality. In this case, the sign in Whitby is not telling you that you are 51km away from entering Toronto but that you will have to drive 51km to get to Nathan Phillips Square. In the case of municipalities that lack a formal City (or Town) Hall, the distance is measured to a point called the City Centre; determined by calculating the geographic centre of the built up region.
January 12th, 2010
The Twitterverse recently led me to an interesting blog post that pointed out how, in the Bourne movies, the Jason Bourne character “uses public infrastructure as a superpower.”
A battered watch and an accurate U-Bahn time-table are all he needs for a perfectly-timed, death-defying evasion of the authorities. … Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour.
The writer contrasts this with a character like James Bond who is backed by plentiful resources and so uses powerful, private high-tech gadgets to pursue his ends.
It makes sense — Bourne is a man with almost no resources, and public infrastructure is built to give those who have few resources a range of potential activity comparable to those whose resources are plentiful.
January 8th, 2010
GO Transit is in the throes of major expansion. Examining how the system’s stations influence their surroundings, and how this, in turn, affects the suburbs, can provide a glimpse into the future of the GTA.
As an example of the potential for what GO transit could do for the suburbs, Oakville Midtown is fertile fodder for the imagination. Oakville’s midtown provides several unique and highly desirable characteristics, including a large wooded ravine, natural heritage, and large-scale public land ownership. The exciting redevelopment plan for Oakville’s midtown is an example of how enhancing the areas around GO Transit stations (an initiative central to the Ontario government’s Places to Grow Act) could help fix the suburbs while at the same time solidifying the feasibility of the region’s existing transit infrastructure.
Oakville’s Midtown Core development is centred on the Oakville GO station, in the area bound by the Sixteen Mile Creek, the QEW and the Oakville rail yards. The Midtown plan calls for a redrawn street grid, new civic facilities, an educational campus, and conversion of surface parking into two large garages. The area could host upwards of 5,500 new residences and around two million new square feet of office and commercial space by 2030. Designed to create a focus for the neighbourhood, the civic centre proposal includes a new town hall, marquee arena, and public square.
