New City, New Routine (Part 2 of 2)

When I started spending half of my time in Houston, the following list of questions helped me move beyond its stereotype as the quintessential driving city to identify the options for reducing my dependency on the family car:

1. Where are you now, and where are you going? In an expansive city like Houston, this question is fundamental. If you are considering joining a carpool to commute to and from work, but your office’s location requires a car to attend meetings or go to lunch, a carpool may not work for you. In my case, my home in Houston is too far from my office to consider using alternative transportation for my daily commute. On the other hand, my office is located in Rice Village, a dense, mixed-use retail center. So, once I arrive, I can walk anywhere I need to go.    
2. What modes of transportation are available, convenient, and safe? Houston’s options for alternative transportation are relatively limited, although expanding. 

• Walking is an option in some neighborhoods, but the city is so spread out that it is not viable as a primary mode of transportation.
• The bus system, Metro, is making efforts to court new users through the light rail system. And, a public-private partnership recently launched a free bus route downtown called the Greenlink. However, the overall system continues to suffer from a public perception of inefficiency and inconvenience.
• Houston’s car share options are limited to “by the hour” rental cars and companies like Relay Rides whose members share their personal cars with each other. 
• On the other hand, it offers public access to more electric vehicle charging stations than many U.S. cities.
• The City recently launched a bike share program downtown. But, its scope is so small that it is only convenient for people who live and/or work downtown. 
• All in all, cycling appears to be the best choice in the city core, because it allows longer travel distances than walking, and it is more convenient (and, possibly, safer) than taking the bus. The only down side to cycling is the low percentage of streets with dedicated bike lanes. However, the Houston Bikeway program is slowly enhancing the cycling infrastructure.
3. What kind of transportation are other people using? Whether walking, cycling, or taking the bus, increasing the number of users often results in increased safety—both in terms of reducing car collisions and reducing the risk of crime. 
4. How much time, money, and effort are you willing to invest in an alternative mode of transportation? The answer to this question will vary from city to city and from person to person. Based on my responses to the above questions, my best options for reducing car dependence in Houston include: 
• living and working in areas of town that offer safe options for walking and cycling and a safe link between the two; 
• walking to services and amenities that are close to home and work; 
• cycling during the day to destinations that are slightly farther away; and, 
• using a combination of cycling and the light rail to travel to and from downtown. 

In order to meet these criteria, I would need to move closer into the city core, and I would need regular access to a bike. Neither of these requirements are realistic investments at the moment. So, for the time being, I have limited my attempts to reduce car dependence in Houston to taking advantage of the walkable nature of my office’s location.

In spite of the fact that I haven’t been able to meet my original goal of dramatically reducing car dependency in Houston, these four questions have given me a better understanding of what options are available today—and what might become available in the future. This exercise has also prompted me to start looking more seriously at the cycling infrastructure in Austin to see how it might fit into the mix of transportation options I use in that city.

Try using these questions where you live and travel. And, let me know if they helped you identify new ways of moving around the city, or if they just reaffirmed your initial assumptions. 

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.

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.