Are Urban Babies Multimodal?

A few months ago, a friend of mine who lives in New York received a book at her baby shower, Urban Babies Wear Black. It is a picture book of the supposedly typical activities and sights that an urban baby will see and experience: practicing yoga, visiting the museum, and, moving around the city in various forms of transportation.



I was reminded of this book a few days ago when a friend in Austin mentioned that he and his wife would likely have to buy a second car now that they are expecting their first child. They have not needed it until now; because, living in Central Austin and both working downtown, they have been able to move around by walking, carpooling, riding the bus, and using supplementary forms of transportation such as Car2Go. But, now that they will have an additional passenger to transport, they are worried that it will be too difficult to continue navigating the city in anything other than a car.

Their dilemma highlights the time-penalty of parenting in suburban cities. Parents spend a disproportionate amount of time driving their children from home to school, school to soccer practice, soccer practice to piano practice, piano practice to a friend’s house, and then, finally, home. The logistics and sheer amount of time involved in planning a multi-step trip using the Austin bus system Cap Metro can be overwhelming – if you can reach your destination in the first place.

• In my experience, Google Maps’ Public Transit option does not work as well in Austin as in other cities such as Boston and Washington, DC where a live-feed showing current bus locations is available both online and at many bus stops. 
• Car2Go, the car sharing program allowing one-way trips that I praised in my previous blog post, may not be an option for adults traveling with very small children, because Smart Cars are two-seater cars. It is therefore not surprising that during the month I have used the bus in Austin, I have seen only two small children on it.  

Photo Credit: Kramalot

If you are in the same situation as my friend – thinking about starting a family but not sure how to retain your freedom of movement in a city that does not easily accommodate any form of transportation other than the car – see below for four ideas on how to continue leading a mostly multimodal lifestyle with small children in a city like Austin.

1. Identify 3-5 services and amenities that need to be located within a 10-minute walking or cycling distance of your home in order to free you from dependence on the car. Examples include: a daycare, an elementary school, a playground and/or park, a grocery store, the pediatrician’s office, etc. Work with an urban realtor to identify neighborhoods that meet these criteria.   
2. When traveling with your child on the bus, prioritize destinations that do not require a transfer. Similar to air travel, the act of transferring from one bus to another with small children can be almost more of a hassle than it is worth.   
3. Once your kids are old enough, consider purchasing a tandem bicycle or adding an extension to your commuter bicycle, so that you can safely cycle to nearby destinations as a family. 
4. When your kids start school, work with the school administration and the PTA to launch a Safe Routes to School Program to designate safe ways for students to walk or cycle to and from school. Once a route is identified, consider joining with other families in the neighborhood to organize a walking or cycling school bus to and from school.

Please offer additional suggestions in the comments box.

Filling the Gap

Weather can make or break a trip across town using alternative forms of transportation – i.e., walking, cycling, bus, etc. – if you don’t have options.

Last week, I traveled to a morning meeting on the bus without a problem. It was a nice morning – sunny, low 70’s. I sat on a bench in the shade – a must in the Austin, Texas sun – for a few minutes while I waited for the bus to arrive.

When I arrived at my destination in South Austin, I walked through a cool, shaded residential neighborhood, arriving only a few minutes later than if I had driven there.

The next stage of my journey, traveling from the meeting location to my co-working space, Conjunctured, was not as pleasant. The weather had changed over the intervening hour and a half – and, not for the better. I found myself standing in 90+ heat at an unshaded bus stop on a loud, busy street with no prospect of a bus arriving for at least 20 minutes.

Not excited about losing part of my workday to another experiment with public transportation in Central Texas, I was on the verge of wishing I had driven our family car to the meeting, when it dawned on me that I could use car2go – one of several car sharing options in Austin. I tend to think of Zipcar when both my husband and I need to drive somewhere at the same time, because it worked so well when we lived in Cambridge. But, car2go was the right option in this situation, because it allows one-way trips.


So, I checked car2go’s website on my iPhone (check out their mobile apps here), found an available car parked less than a block from the bus stop, headed its way, hopped in, and arrived at conjunctured before the bus I was waiting for would have arrived at the bus stop.

In cities like Austin, where many buses run on 30, 45, and 60 minute schedules rather than the 10-20 minute schedules seen in cities with higher ridership, supplementary options like car2go fill an important gap that could otherwise discourage car owners from thinking of the bus system as a viable option for intown transportation.

The fundamental question of when it makes sense to take the bus rather than a form of transportation that you can control – e.g., driving, walking, or cycling – lies in being able to determine whether you can plan ahead to fit your schedule into the transit system’s schedule.

To wit, I rode back home that afternoon from my co-working space on the bus without a hitch. But, that was because I checked the bus schedule ahead of time and organized my work schedule to arrive at the bus stop (shaded, with a bench) several minutes before its scheduled arrival. If I had missed the bus, I probably would have used car2go a second time that day rather than wait in the heat for 45 minutes until the next bus was scheduled to arrive.

Nature, Hidden in Plain Sight

I was intrigued by a headline that came out of the “Walking and the Life of the City” Symposium held last week at NYU: “Walking: It’s What You Do Once You’ve Parked Your Car…”

According to presenters at the conference, research has found that we process more information about our surroundings when we walk to reach a destination than when we use other forms of transportation. This makes sense, because pedestrians move at a much slower speed than even cyclists.

However, another discovery I have made since I started this blog is that we discover different surroundings when we walk, particularly in comparison with driving or taking the bus.

A Case in Point

Before moving to Cambridge, MA in 2010, I lived in Central Austin for five years, frequenting the same grocery store that I have returned to now that we have moved back to town. From the street, the shopping center where the grocery store is located looks like a heavily built-up mega-block development, including a hospital, a medical office building, and a number of retail stores in addition to the grocery store.

View of One Entrance to the Development

While the development’s parking lot has more trees than most suburban strip shopping centers, there is no safe way for pedestrians to cross it without walking in the path of cars.

Typical Scene of a Pedestrian Crossing the Parking Lot

A safer design would have designated pedestrian-only pathways, so that shoppers could travel between their cars and the store without worrying about being run over.

Example of a Pedestrian Pathway Crossing a Different Parking Lot in Austin

Before I started walking to the grocery store, I had always reached it from the parking lot. So, I naturally assumed that the entire development was similarly un-pedestrian-friendly.

Imagine my surprise when I accessed it for the first time by walking in from the back and discovered a park hidden in the middle of the mega-block,

 complete with a series of wetlands to capture and clean storm water

and a group of athletes stretching under a massive oak tree.

Closeup of Athletes Stretching in the Shade

Since I discovered the park, my trips to the grocery store have taken on an added dimension. And, in spite of the heat, I prefer to walk there; because, by entering from the parking lot, I now know that I am missing out on an opportunity to spend a few minutes surrounded by nature, a rare occurrence in the middle of the city.

Imagining a New Role for Rooftops in Omaha

I just returned from spending a few days in Omaha, Nebraska attending a conference and visiting a friend (an architect) who lives and works in the revitalized downtown district known as the Old Market.

While I was in town, she hosted a design exercise on her apartment building’s rooftop terrace posing the following problem: How can rooftops play a larger part in encouraging an active, urban lifestyle in cities like Omaha?

Photo Credit: April Rice

View from Rooftop Terrace

Inspired by the fact that the view from the rooftop makes destinations appear closer to each other than from the ground, the designers imagined installing a new way to travel through the city using public pathways connecting one rooftop park or vegetable garden with the next.

Clearly, for the rooftop to play a more active role in urban life, it needs to be seen as accessible from the street level. The High Line park in New York City, which converted an elevated railroad track into a linear park, has worked hard to install visual cues from the street level that entice passersby up to the floating park. One idea in the design exercise envisioned a mechanism to lower rooftop garden plots to the street level so that city restaurants and residents could purchase their vegetables directly from a rooftop farmer.  I saw another attempt to connect the street level with a rooftop terrace on Saturday: painters installed on a rooftop terrace overlooking the Farmer’s Market.

Like the High Line, these painters may represent the beginning of a trend — building density by expanding activity beyond the street level up into buildings and to their rooftops.


POSTSCRIPT
A few notes on how my friend has organized her daily routine to increase transportation flexibility:

• While she owns a car, she uses it mainly for trips to areas of the city too far to ride her bicycle and for longer road trips. 
• She parks a commuter bike at work and a road bike at her apartment. That way, she can cycle directly from her office to her gym or other activities in the afternoons. As a side note, her office also stores one corporate commuter bike to encourage staff to take an active form of transportation to lunch and meetings. 

• But, mostly she walks—back and forth to work (½ mile); to the two small grocery stores within a block or two of her apartment; and, to the restaurants, bars, and shops in the Old Market.

Change of Scene

My journey begins at home. The location of one’s residence is arguably the most significant factor in how easy or difficult it will be to travel around on a day-to-day basis in something other than a car.

When we moved back to Austin, we chose to live in the center of town in large part because the block size and streets were designed at the human scale (as opposed to the car scale). We also looked for a location that was surrounded by amenities within a walkable or bikable distance.

Experts say that most people will walk or bike 10-15 minutes to reach an amenity such as a coffee shop, restaurant, grocery store, etc. Of course, those experts don’t necessarily live in Austin, where the temperature can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 6pm on a summer evening. I will address that particular challenge in a future post.

For now, it is enough to compare my old street in Cambridge (left photo below) with my new street in Austin (right).

For a few months while we are settling back in, we are the beneficiaries of a movement in Austin to increase density by allowing garage apartments to be constructed along back streets and alleyways.

From the photo of the alley behind our furnished apartment, you would never know that we live right in the thick of things. And, to add to the feeling of living in the country…

Our landlords keep a chicken coop below our apartment.


















Our apartment is perched among birds and squirrels running through the oak tree canopy.

And, we have traded the noise of the city for birdsong in the mornings and evenings.

 

Our new home is definitely a change from the hustle and bustle of Harvard Square. It remains to be seen whether I will be able to keep the number of car trips I take to a minimum in my new surroundings.