Oslo does it right

It’s always gratifying to see a planner’s sketch of the ideal city street materialize in concrete, steel, and vegetation.  These photos of Dronning Eufemias Gate in Oslo, Norway taken recently by a colleague (alas, I wasn’t there) show how a multimodal boulevard (vehicles, transit, bike lanes, enhanced pedestrian realm, landscaping) can look in real life.  The street in question is part of a redevelopment scheme colloquially called the “Barcode Project” for the geometric profile of its high-rise buildings.  

This particular street follows the mandates of the Oslo Street Design Manual (available here), which is worth a look by anyone grappling with urban design issues.  The Design Manual is notable, among other things, for insisting that street design support the city’s goal of zero emissions:  “In 2030, Oslo aims to be a city almost without any emissions of greenhouse gases. The transformation of Oslo into a climate-adapted zero-emission society will help to create a healthy, pleasant and efficient cityscape without extensive social differences and with cleaner air and water.”

         

The Design Manual also notes, by the way, that it is much easier to fit all these desirable design elements into a new street, rather than retrofitting them into an existing one.  Don’t we know it!

Overshooting ourselves in the foot

The past two years have been enormously frustrating for those of us in the US who believe that climate change really is an existential issue, including those of us in the transport planning world who believe we should keep it at the center of our work.  The current US administration has enthusiastically halted all the slow progress we have made in transport policy reform and is going full speed in reverse.  I see too many signs of resignation, apathy, and even – in some places – capitulation in response to these destructive policies.

A new United Nations report should stir even the faint hearted back to action.  “Limiting overshoot: Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return” (report available here, a good summary here) lays out the blunt but unsurprising truth that the world is not going to meet the climate change mitigation goals adopted by the world’s leaders a few years ago.  And, folks, that means that things are going to get a whole lot worse before they (maybe) get better.  Some of the negative consequences of global warming may be irreversible, so getting back to “normal” may not even be achievable.  And all the ambitious strategies worked out a few years ago won’t be enough to stabilize the situation, let alone improve it.

Still, we are not helpless.  In the transport sector, the old answers are still the right answers:  mitigation and adaptation.  

The report calls for the “immediate implementation of measures that reduce

global GHG emissions and slow the rate of warming,” followed  by “sustained and deep decarbonisation towards net-zero emissions” and “sustained net-negative CO₂ emissions to reduce climate hazards.”

Guidance for the transport sector is unfortunately not very specific, but one key recommendation is to deploy “low-carbon” technologies to “lock in long-term emission reductions while avoiding new carbon-intensive infrastructure.”  I interpret this to mean:  Electrify the transport sector!  Stop adding freeway miles!  Build transit and walkable/bikeable communities instead!  Solid advice for us all.  Lots more work to do.

Riding the KC Streetcar

I had the opportunity recently to spend some time in Kansas City and to revisit the KC Streetcar.  The city – and the streetcar – were bustling with activity spurred by World Cup visitors.  I’m happy to report that the streetcar looks great.  I used it several times and found it to be clean, well-maintained, and efficient. 

There’s a reason the KC Streetcar is often considered the most successful streetcar in the U. S. (making the somewhat fuzzy distinction between streetcars and light rail).   It’s frequent, it’s free, and the 6.5-mile route it follows (mostly Main Street) connects many of the major activity centers:  the riverfront, the downtown loop, the Power and Light District, the Kaufmann Center concert hall, Union Station, Crown Center, Liberty Park and the World War I Museum, the art museum complex, Country Club Plaza, and the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC).  If you stay at a hotel on Main Street (as I did) you can get to most of the places a visitor would want to see without a car.  (You will need a car to get to some places, e.g., a Kansas City, Kansas barbecue joint and the ballpark – one of the most poorly placed baseball parks in the country.)

The KC Streetcar is – for all practical purposes – what the Europeans would call an urban tram.  Its main drawback is that most of its route does not have a dedicated lane, so it can be very slow if stuck in traffic, or if someone decides to double-park on the streetcar tracks while running in to pick up a pizza.  The current line includes recent northern (to the riverfront) and southern (to UMKC) extensions and more are in the works.  I’m looking forward to riding the KC Streetcar as it continues to improve and expand!

 

Has TRB Bent the Knee?

 

Sadly there is reason to believe that TRB – the Transportation Research Board – has bent the knee to Trump and has backed away from research that offends MAGA’s ideological purity.

By way of background, TRB is an arm of the National Academy of Science and is the leading sponsor of research in the U. S. in all aspects of transportation.  Its signature Annual Meeting in January in Washington draws up to 15,000 academics, public sector professionals, and consultants in the field to share the latest research results and best practices in every transportation topic from the arcane mysteries of asphalt mixtures to the latest designs in high-speed rail stations. 

In recent years the TRB Annual Meeting had begun to be effervescent with the work of scholars and practitioners confronting  how to reformulate transportation policy and programs to promote a sustainable future in an age of climate crisis and  how to reckon with years of negligent treatment of communities of color and begin to repair the urban fabric rent by destructive highway projects.

This year – quickly and silently – that changed.  The Annual Meeting proceeded as if the topics of climate change and racial justice had never been raised.

What exactly happened?  The events at TRB are recounted in stark detail by Alex Karner,  Dana Rowangould, and Jesus M. Barajas, respected scholars in the fields of planning, engineering, and environmental science, in their recent article entitled “U.S. Transportation Research at a Crossroads” in the journal Transportation Policy (link here but with a paywall; the preprint version is available here without a paywall).  According to the authors, the landscape in academia is grim.  “Ideologically driven directives from the federal government are rapidly remaking the landscape, reducing the total amount of research funding available, controlling the topics eligible for funding, subjecting institutions of higher education to increasingly draconian controls over hiring, curriculum, and financing, and erasing key sources of scientific data.”  TRB has apparently succumbed to this pressure, having “canceled over 20 research contracts in response to presidential executive orders that target so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.”  TRB also “ implemented major institutional and procedural changes, undertaking a dramatic restructuring behind closed doors nominally to adhere to federal directives” and then “signaled their intent to prohibit research presentations that do not align with federal priorities at the 2026 TRB Annual Meeting.”

I have been involved in TRB for 40 years: attending Annual Meetings, serving on committees, presenting papers, participating in special conferences, and peer reviewing submitted papers.  These changes are completely out of character with the TRB I have known.

Personally, I find ignoring our responsibility for mitigating the transportation sector’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change to be professionally irresponsible and turning our backs on racial justice to be morally repugnant.

Now this is not to say that there was absolutely no content on these topics at TRB.  There were some informative papers – if you knew where to look.  By the time of the 2027 Annual Meeting perhaps the watchdogs will be more thorough in cleansing the program of content they dislike.  Or perhaps the pendulum will have swung back toward more academic freedom.

What can be done?  Karner et al. suggest various tactics, including working from the inside to urge TRB to change course, seeking other national organizations to pick up the slack in sponsorship, and building “new, more resilient networks for research, collaboration, and public impact.”

In the meantime, scholars and practitioners have already begun to hold “fringe” events around the Annual Meeting, where forbidden topics can be discussed.  Smart Growth America’s Transportation Camp (details here) has actually been going on for several years.  One of the newest fringe events is Crossroads: A Transportation and Equity Convening (details here).  Perhaps publishing by samizdat is in our future.

Emily Lieb's "Road to Nowhere"

Emily Lieb’s new book, “Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore,” provides another sad chapter in the long saga of the destruction of urban neighborhoods caused by U. S. freeway planning.  This time, though, there’s a twist:  the freeway never got built!

Lieb tells the story of Rosemont, once a stable, middle-class Black neighborhood on the west side of Baltimore which had the misfortune of lying on one of the  likeliest  alignments for laying out an east-west freeway through the city.  Through many ups and downs and changes in alignment, ultimately nothing got built in Rosemont and the whole concept of an east-west freeway was dropped.  To the east of Rosemont, however, one strip of buildings got bulldozed and a poorly connected segment of highway (now signed as U. S. 40) was built, known locally as “the road to nowhere.”  Although Rosemont won a reprieve from the bulldozer and the freeway, there was still plenty of damage caused by property taken by eminent domain and by the generally chilling effect of a dashed line bisecting a map of the neighborhood.  The long dance with freeway death put Rosemont into a social and economic decline from which it never recovered.

This long and dismal story could have a redeeming epilogue, although that hangs in the balance.  

Baltimore’s planned Red Line light rail line would follow more or less the alignment of the old East-West Freeway, with a Rosemont Station.  Unfortunately the Red Line project was shut down by former Governor Larry Hogan after it had already gotten to the approved Environmental Impact Statement stage.  Governor Wes Moore has restarted the project, but it is still unfunded, with an uncertain future.  Sadly, the transit project – which would be enormously beneficial to the city by providing a high-quality east-west transit service as well as by tying together a disjointed transit system – seems to be having as many twists and turns and dead ends as the earlier highway project.

Only a few years ago transportation professionals were beginning to face up to the legacy of neighborhood destruction caused by urban freeways and were engaging in formulating visions of “reparative transportation” projects, exemplified by the Biden Administration’s Reconnecting Communities program.  All of these policies and projects are now under the dark shadow of the Trump Administration.Thank you to Emily Lieb for telling the story of Rosemont.  It is a compelling narrative, filled with stories of human suffering (and persistence), political intrigue, and engineering hard-headedness.  

It’s up to us to write the epilogue.