Rich Mintz  

Cam Booth surfaced this map of the Chicago transit system overlaid on a map of the New York subway, with the lines showing in white. The surprising thing here, as Booth notes, is not the extent of the Chicago system, but the density of New York’s.

I’m sitting on a Delta shuttle from O’Hare back to New York (on which a toddler, roughly 2 years old, keeps shouting “Party!” over and over for no apparent reason), and I feel I should write something brief about two unexpected developments: the recovery of Delta from its turn-of-the-millennium squalor, and the consistently pleasant airport experience provided by the city of Chicago.

First, Delta. (And i realize that this flight is operated by Shuttle America, but they’re carrying the Delta livery and flying as part of an integrated system, so hear me out.)

My memory is faulty, but I’m pretty sure this Delta Shuttle i’m flying today is the one that used to be the Pan Am shuttle, and so once upon a time it had some glamour, but Pan Am closed down in 1991 or so (I flew it on its final weekend, from Mexico City back to Los Angeles) and for most of the ensuing dozen years the shuttle service was increasingly dismal. A decade later, when I was living in Atlanta and Delta was my hometown airline, I rooted for them partly out of pride, but the Delta flying experience was pretty glum around the turn of the century: sullen flight attendants, poor inflight service, cracked upholstery and broken armrests, unreliable departures and arrivals.

Then things started to change for the better, 7 or 8 years ago. Some of it had to do with Delta Technologies, which has always run a good logistics operation and for more than a decade now has run a great website, along with excellent kiosks and other electronic customer services. But that can’t explain it all, because some of the magic is back, too. The staff, by and large, seem happy again, even at La Guardia (the sullenest in the national network of sullen airports). The uniforms are brighter. I’m flying on an Embraer jet that smells like it just came out of the factory last week. There’s free beer and wine in coach, for those who are into that. For about the 5th time in a row, we’re arriving on time. And on this Chicago flight, I paid what I think of as a competitive airfare — well under $400 round trip, booked just 2 days before.

Now, yes, yes, I know, not mainline service, Shuttle. But still. My recent encounters with Delta mainline have also been positive. (Incidentally, Hartsfield-Jackson is looking good. It’s still one of the best-run airports in America.) In general, dealing with Delta these days, you have the feeling you’re dealing with a competent organization. And as small a thing as that sounds, when we didn’t reliably have it for all those years, its absence was felt.

Now, the Chicago airports. You already know I love Midway. And for my entire adult life, everyone I know has loved to hate on O’Hare. But why? Yes, it’s big, that’s a given. And it has its bad days. But the food and beverage options are excellent (lentil salad from Argo Tea on my tray table), there’s some interesting retail, and the city has put a lot of money into airport arts. Not to mention that you can go door-to-counter from the Loop in less than an hour for $2.25 on a single train. In the Delta gate area today, seating was ample and well-lit, there were electrical outlets all over the place (including USB charging stalks) — nothing to complain about. I even saw a TSA supervisor scolding a TSA agent for a small customer-unfriendly infraction (cutting in line during a customer service encounter).

I was hoping to rent another bike on this visit to Chicago, but it wasn’t destined to happen. The weather has been miserable! I know, I know, 45° is not “miserable”–but when rain is spitting sideways at you in a chill wind, it doesn’t put you in the mood to split hairs.

I did, however, get to experience three different modes of Chicago transport today: the 156 La Salle bus, the Metra Union Pacific North line, and the CTA purple line express. As I said before, to a New Yorker, the CTA elevated rail lines are adorable, but the system really works. Places like Evanston are knit into the urban fabric very effectively, despite the relative distance from the central city. And $3.50 (or $2.25 on the CTA) is a remarkable bargain.

As usual, I’ve eaten well here. Nothing particularly significant, no famous restaurants or celebrity chefs, just a series of consistently good ordinary meals. I also had my first fried cheese curds (no, Dragon Dictate, not “fried cheese Kurds”), which I believe makes me a real Midwesterner.

Not much more to report. Just another pleasant 48 hours going about my life in an interesting city.

So my trip to DC so far hasn’t been that great so far — it took me almost 7 hours (3 hours and 30 minutes longer than normal) to get from Penn Station to the DC line. In fairness to Amtrak, only 2 hours and 45 minutes of that delay was their fault — I timed the trip to get off in Philadelphia and meet with someone in 30th Street Station, then get back on the next train. Which tonight I learned not to do, not because it shouldn’t theoretically work fine 99.9% of the time, but because the 0.1% of the time that it doesn’t work out, i.e., today, is so annoying. Not the fault of the fellow I was meeting, who rolled with the punches and was patiently and cheerfully waiting in the Cosi right where he said he would be, even though I kept getting later and later and later.

Due to signal problems outside Newark, everything was backed up, and my train into Philadelphia got in an hour and 20 minutes late… and my train out of Philadelphia left 2 hours and 40 minutes late, which doesn’t make that much sense, given that theoretically it was just running a couple of trains behind. In fact, the Regional after mine came through first, probably because it was a through train. So another of the things I learned is that railway logistics is an art as well as a science.

Another thing I learned is that when you build systems with single points of failure, and you overload their capacity, and you don’t invest in them in 50 years, you get cascading failure: one stretch of signal goes out, and trains back up from Richmond back to Montreal.

Yet another thing I learned (from my seatmate) is that the transit system in Australia (Australia! the only country on Earth more absurdly spread-out than ours) puts ours to shame, and the woman who said so was fully aware that the Northeast Corridor is the best-served rail route in the United States.

Finally, I learned that you can eat well in 30th Street Station! I had a beer and a chicken arepa in the Bridgewater Pub, served by a waiter who cheerfully accommodated my folding bike with panniers on so I didn’t have to take it apart and fold it up.

With the news that the DOT has approved the release of $47 million in TIGER II funds to underwrite the Atlanta streetcar project — effectively greenlighting its construction — I took a closer look at the project.

The TIGER II grant application (PDF) makes a compelling and systematic case for the value of the streetcar, which ties in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood on the city’s near east side with the central core, and also connects the Centennial Olympic Park attractions through Fairlie-Poplar to Woodruff Park and Georgia State University. It’s less than 3 miles of track, but it’s effectively a circulator for the hundreds of thousands of people who pass through downtown Atlanta each year; combined with MARTA service from the airport, it makes it even easier for conventioneers to “do” Atlanta in a satisfying way without a car.

In the short term, the winners will be the merchants of Fairlie-Poplar (who will see increased tourist traffic), Georgia State, and the Auburn and Edgewood corridors. But over the long term, this demonstration project — which is almost certain to meet ridership expectations, given the volume of tourists and conventioneers downtown without enough to do — will whet the city’s appetite for attractive, short-headway above-ground transportation options. The grant application suggests that future extensions are likely to be fundable via the county transit tax assessment.

Even in this first phase, the route will reach almost to the edges of Grant Park, Cabbagetown, and Inman Park (with a stop at Auburn and Jackson, at the edge of the Old Fourth Ward). In fact, from the house I lived in in Grant Park in 1999, for my occasional trips downtown it would have been a shorter walk to the streetcar than to MARTA at King Memorial.

I haven’t written anything here in quite a long while, chiefly because I’ve been busy living (which I think is the point of all this, isn’t it?), but I have been feeling the urge to get back into the swing of things. So I’ll start small, with this short post about my weeklong visit to London earlier this month.

It was a business trip, so many of my expenses were paid, and I was there for seven full days and nights, which gave me the sort of opportunity to experience the city that I’d never had on any of my previous half-dozen or so visits. Indeed, I went into the week with a very, very sketchy mental map of London, and now have a very clear one — at least of the central and eastern parts where I spent the most time, Mayfair to Hackney or thereabouts.

I vastly preferred the bus to the Tube — the Oyster card works the same on both, maps and signage at the stops are exceedingly clear, every stop is clearly announced, and from the top of a London bus you can actually see what you’re passing through. (Only once in the week did I see a single bus stop without a full complement of maps; entertainingly, it was when waiting for the night bus with a group of logic-impaired drunks, who took forever to decide whether to walk in the direction of Old Street or Shoreditch High Street. Shortly after they left, their bus arrived.) And London is proof that clearly marked bus lanes (separated or not), enforced with lane cameras, make the bus an efficient choice even in heavy traffic. Londoners complain about
TfL, but it seems exceptionally well-managed to me. I even got to ride the East London Overground line, which has barely been open six months.

Most of the week I was at our office, in Clerkenwell, with some limited tourist time in the evenings — which I mostly spent shopping and orienting myself with regard to the central landmarks, though I didn’t do much in the way of touristy things — but I spent the Sunday and the Saturday roaming from Soho to Islington to Brixton trying to see things a bit off the tourist path. I spent a lovely afternoon in Stoke Newington with my new friends Graham and Keri, eating gourmet fish and chips and sipping espresso beside a neighborhood high street. And I took myself to Brixton, expecting — well, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I got felt more or less like Flatbush, only with a well-stocked Marks & Spencer and vastly better transit connections. Here’s a map of my Saturday adventures.

If you want more of this (God help you), including dozens of photos, take a look at my Twitter feed for the week of 13 September.

In a stroke of great good fortune, I get to go back to London next month, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say.

Just saw this work with my own eyes — Broadway, along with the north side of Union Square, is in the process of being reconfigured as planned. And some new motorist signage has gone up in the last couple of days, too — in Clearview, my favorite signage typeface. This will be a great safety improvement, especially right at the corner of Broadway and 17th, where I personally have been almost run over at least three times.

…namely, that “if your aim is to attract people, food and drink are the main attractions,” in the words of Philip Myrick of the Project for Public Spaces.

The occasion is this story about cafe life in Portland — you can read it. Myrick’s point is that if you want people to organically gather on the streets of your neighborhood, you need food and drink, suitable for all ages and stages in the community, sold and served in a way that lets people consume them in an organic fashion outdoors or visible from the street.

All true. But argh!

I don’t disagree with any of this, it’s all true, and I mean no disrespect to the exceptionally committed people at PPS — my reaction is more a sense of frustration and missed opportunity that this isn’t intuitively obvious, that it has to be said, and re-said, and re-re-said every decade or so, to every generation. If you, dear reader, are just figuring this out now, what have you been doing to your own downtown for the past 25 years? And how many young people have you driven away, how many working-age people have you effectively locked in their office buildings all day for how many days/weeks/years, how many old people have you consigned to spend their waning days sitting in their apartments (or, worse, sitting on a bench in the mall) because there’s nowhere worth going to?

Let’s get with it, America!

Anyone older than about 60 who grew up in a healthy community probably already knows that food is at the center of everything social. Nevermind community events like church socials and picnics — every town over a thousand people had a drugstore, with big plate-glass windows and a soda fountain or lunch counter, once upon a time, where you could see people going about the private business of eating in a semi-public way. And even younger people know it, if we’ve lived part of our lives in a healthy big city. I was living in the newly minted municipality of West Hollywood when the first round of modern artisanal coffehouses appeared in the early 1990s; the moment cafes started to appear, whole new populations began to use the street. Nothing has driven the sidewalk re-revitalization of Santa Monica Boulevard over the past decade more than streetfront dining.

Closer to home, think of New York: the most transformational change to the streetscape in the five years I’ve been here has been the simple addition of lots of chairs and tables all over the place, including in what used to be traffic lanes in the middle of Times Square. People want to sit down and, very often, eat and drink, in public. What are the healthiest public spaces in Lower Manhattan? One of them is Stone Street, which today is given over almost entirely to street dining. (Photo above: the pop-up cafe thrown up by the DOT on nearby Pearl Street last month.)

Or look at the opposite case. I was on a message-board thread this week about Fulton Mall, the tattered retail strip in downtown Brooklyn that (due to the volume of people passing through, and the lack of local alternatives) commands among the highest retail rents in New York City, despite the fact that nobody can stand it. Sure, Fulton Mall is filthy and disorderly and way too crowded, but if you’ve ever been to, say, the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles, you know that filth and disorder and crowds are not sufficient to make a place unlovable. There’s something else. And something landscape designer Gil Lopez said on the list reminded me that one of the reasons everyone hates Fulton Mall is also one of the most obvious: there’s nothing to eat except junk, and there’s nowhere to sit down and eat it!

Urban walkability is a chicken-and-egg problem. In many cities, municipalities and businesses don’t invest in relatively cheap promoters of pleasant walkability (better sidewalks, street furniture, pedestrian-oriented displays — nevermind things like zoning changes and parking reconfiguration that require political will) because there’s a perception that “nobody walks.” And people are disinclined to walk because there’s a perception that “walking is unpleasant.”

Which is why I’m always excited to see signage like this in American cities, in urban cores and near transit stations and so forth. (This photo courtesy of John Massengale.)

Actually, that’s London, which isn’t an American city, and of course they do it better than we do, but increasingly it’s showing up here, too. Like in this photo — you can see a large, easy-to-use city map on the oblique (left-facing) side of the kiosk at right, which are placed all around the central core of …

… Montreal. Doh! But I swear, Americans are catching up, at their typical slow-but-steady pace. And the quality is improving. WMATA just announced that they’re improving their walk maps in Metro stations. A sample (click map image to enlarge; download full map, 2.7 MB PDF):

That map’s too busy, but it’s a lot better than the current iteration. We need more of this — this sort of thing is part of the evidence people need that changing their longstanding behavior is a rational thing to consider.

“A funny thing happened on the way to the Cheesecake Factory,” writes Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, about the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles. “The economic collapse has also managed to freeze downtown’s transformation from sleepy to energized — and freeze it at a particularly appealing spot.”

Like most positive assessments of LA’s urban scene throughout my life (including some that have come out of my own mouth over the years), this one seems like it’s reaching a bit — in particular, I don’t think the spaces among all those downtown microneighborhoods are so “easily [navigable] on foot or on a bike” — but the fundamental point he’s making is right on:

Gentrification has decelerated in several parts of downtown into a kind of limbo, leaving them sufficiently changed to feel newly vital but not enough to seem overexposed. At the same time, plummeting housing prices and the conversion of several ill-fated condo projects into rental buildings means not only that the area is continuing to attract new residents but also that it may see a more compelling mixture of people — more teachers and designers, fewer real-estate speculators — than it did when forgettable two-bedroom units were selling for $800,000.

Something similar is happening in New York. Nevermind the neighborhoods that shouldn’t have been gentrifying at all, and wouldn’t have been if the market hadn’t gone crazy. Whole desirable swaths of the city — including parts of Manhattan, like the Financial District where I live — have become living choices again for people whose means are within the range of “ordinary.” And the projects representing the worst of the excess (on the Williamsburg waterfront, and the far West Side) are mostly in trouble, and at the very least have had to ratchet back the most odious of their marketing in order to attract a broader range of clientele.

I pay more to live here than I was paying in Brooklyn — but if rents hadn’t tumbled a year ago, I wouldn’t have considered it. And there’s a much wider range of people living down here than there was two years ago — and a lot wider than a few blocks away in Tribeca, which has managed to hold its position as the most expensive neighborhood in the city.

I enjoyed my visit to downtown LA last spring, and can see the evidence of revitalization everywhere. It was exciting, given that I don’t think I ever knew a single person who lived or played downtown in the first 30 years I was alive. No one would be happier than me to see the central core continue its upswing, so I’m glad to see Hawthorne shining some light on the things that are worth paying attention to.