Game review: Bus

 

Bus, one of a number of games from Perplext that come in two-inch tall boxes, is a fast-playing affair with an approach to public transit that is unlike any city I've ever visited. The prophet Jarrett Walker calls these systems flexible transit, as opposed to fixed lines. Buses on fixed lines, in places like Cedar Rapids or New York or St. Petersburg or Washington, follow the same routes all the time, and it's up to the riders to figure out the best paths to their destinations. 

Example of a fixed line in St. Petersburg, Florida:
The Sun Runner runs the same loop, over and over again

With flex routes, on the other hand:

You can summon a flexible service just as you would summon a taxi, and a van or small bus will come to you, or at least very close to you. Unlike a taxi, though, it may still pick up other people during your trip, and there are usually restrictions on where you can use a flexible service to go. (Jarrett Walker, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives [Washington: Island Press, revised edition, 2024], p. 49)

The buses in Bus are not like Uber or paratransit, in that there are specific stops where they pick up and drop off passengers. What differentiates them from fixed route systems is that where they go from each stop depends on the optimal arrangement of passengers' chosen destinations. 

This approach can help the transit vehicle avoid time-wasting maneuvers such as driving into alleys and cul-de-sacs. The path of the vehicle may still be meandering, but it is less so than if it was going to people's doors. (2024: 53)

Flexible systems work at low densities, like outer-ring suburbs and rural areas, where demand for transit is very low. 

The productivity of flexible services is usually under five boardings per hour, and most estimates of the theoretical maximum put it below ten.... The low maximum capacity means that if too many people want to use the service, the transit authority has to deploy more vehicles and drivers, which raises the cost of operations. The only alternative is to make the service less flexible, by turning it back into something like a fixed line. (2024: 52)

Ready for a game of Bus?

In the game of Bus, the secret is the town is very small, with service covering four square blocks, and only 15 potential passengers. There are three places for passengers to board (the white circles marked "BUS" in the picture above), and six possible destinations (the colored circles). So, there's no wandering around county backroads, but routes need to be improvised by players, and re-imagined every time they pick up another passenger. I think that could potentially frustrate a real live passenger, but the competition between buses--the green contraptions shown in the picture below--encourages efficient routes and timely dropoffs.

Bus game in progress

Playing the Game

Passengers come in pairs, are picked up at the bus stop and then taken to their color-coded destinations. Each passenger card has, in addition to its pair of passengers, a number indicating the "speed limit," the maximum number of spaces the player can move with each turn. For example, the top card shown in the picture above--the one that's shown right-side-up--has a blue passenger who wants to be taken to the blue dot on the grid, and an orange passenger who wants to be taken to the orange dot. The larger number "3" means the player driving those passengers can move three spaces (or less) with each turn. The smaller number "3" above it is the number of points the card is worth at the end of the game.

Drivers can pick up passenger cards any time they stop at a bus stop, as both buses are in the picture above. The most I've had at one time is two cards' worth (four passengers).  Since routes are flexible, picking up a second pair of passengers can affect the optimal order in which they're dropped off. The key, says the website, is "absolute efficiency," not feeling sorry for a passenger you've been toting around for a while. By the way, it doesn't specifically state this in the rules, but when I play the buses must drop off passengers on the side of the street with the colored dot indicating the destination. No reckless running across these streets, as I've seen people do in real life, even on stroads like 1st Avenue East by Lindale Mall.

The game ends when one player completes five passenger cards. Then points are totaled. I tend to try to get cards with high speed limits, and ignore the points, to my later disadvantage, I'm sure. In my experience, games can be completed in less than 15 minutes.

Evaluation

I'm not sure this is the best training module for an actual bus driver, but it does get a person thinking about public transportation, albeit a rather esoteric (in my experience) kind of system. For some smaller towns, this might even inspire a better way to do transit!

The variable "speed limits" will amuse anyone who's ever driven or ridden a bus. Except for Bus Rapid Transit routes, buses move at the speed of traffic, and stop when the other vehicles do as well as to pick up additional passengers. Maybe the variable speeds during the game illustrate how a huge issue for efficient transit is our society's over-reliance on private vehicles?

Video section

One of the best songs ever about transit (3:24):

Bus instructional video (5:36):

SEE ALSO: Taras Grescoe, "Time to Buy a Farecard," High Speed, 18 April 2025

Urbanist Goodreads: What Else is Going Down Besides All This S**t?

 

Chuck Marohn isn't freaking out. Maybe I shouldn't either?
(Source: strongtowns.org)

NOTE: In the innocent days of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads, annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I dabbled in the format myself to analyze the impact of COVID on the future of cities; here's an example from June 2020. Now, with a runaway U.S. executive breaking the government for the purpose of retribution (Donald Trump) and/or amassing money and power (Elon Musk) and/or an ideological vision (the Project 2025 crew), and states like Iowa micromanaging localities whenever they feel like it, what is left for urbanism to think about? Quite a bit, it appears.

"Growth Ponzi Scheme Leaves Virginia Town with $34 Million Dilemma," Strong Towns, 6 February 2025

[Strong Towns grew out of planner-engineer Chuck Marohn's doubts about the rationality of some of the projects he was being hired to do. His doubts became a blog and podcast, which became an organization, which has become a movement with chapters ("local conversations") all over the world. Marohn spoke in Iowa City in July 2015.]

Strong Towns takes us this week to Purcellville, Virginia, a small town near the border with West Virginia, but not terribly far from Washington, D.C. The story reflects a theme that has been prominent throughout Strong Towns' decade-plus existence: a town can't afford to maintain infrastructure it had built when it was hopeful about growth. "I'm just saying the funds were there when the town was growing like crazy," says Liz Krens, the town's Director of Finance. Like a Greek tragedy, none of their current choices--borrow $34 million? defer maintenance?--is good. Maybe a federal grant would solve their problems, but counting on that is not responsible.

This week's Strong Towns posts also address the limitations of traffic cameras and a local group in Maine that resisted the state's plan to widen a highway through their town.

Robert Steuteville, "Hurricane-Ravaged City Bounces Back with New Main Street," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 4 February 2025

[Public Square is the online journal of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which has been promoting a return to compact, mixed-use development since they gathered in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1993. Their most recent conference was last May in Cincinnati. CNU's membership includes planners, architects, and local officials; I am none of these, but they let me in anyway.]

The lead story this week celebrates the recovery of Panama City, Florida, which won a Charter Award at the 2020 conference, following Hurricane Michael in 2018. The award-winning plan is now being enacted, centered on a restored Harrison Street, which has again become the heart of the city. With better design, street trees and slower vehicle traffic, along with a new central plaza, the core of the city has been restored to life. “There’s a growing collection of wedding photos on the circle on Harrison Avenue,” crowed lead designer Victor Dover. “No one was getting a wedding photo on the main street before.” Note that implementation was expedited by federal COVID relief funds. 

Other current Public Square stories include an urban boulevard replacing a freeway in Toledo, proposed mall redevelopment in Michigan, and a foundation specializing in wildfire recovery, as well as a post arguing for attention to housing supply and affordability in "15-minute city" projects.

Addison del Maestro, "I'm an Antisocial Urbanist Living in the Suburbs, Ask Me Anything," The Deleted Scenes, 4 February 2025

[Addison del Maestro writes about design and a whole bunch of other stuff from his base in suburban Virginia. He's Catholic by faith and conservative by politics, which makes for unique takes on urbanist issues.]

This reflective post starts with the irony that del Maestro identifies as an urbanist while living in a suburban community. "I’m not quite sure," he confesses, "how these abstract ideas I hold about housing and community and not putting up walls around places and not being exclusionary intersect with living in an actual place with actual characteristics with actual people who were “buying” those characteristics when they bought homes here." It's gotten to the point where he feels like arguing with visitors who admire his neighborhood! I can relate, doing my urbanist writing in a large-lot neighborhood with no commercial establishments for blocks. How much change can he (or I) advocate when most of our neighbors presumably prefer the current characteristics?

This week, del Maestro's wide-ranging blog also covers reuse of old buildings, eccentric product design, and materialism, as well as his own set of goodreads.

In 2018 I would take the Silver Line to McLean
for 1 Million Cups Fairfax

Ryan Jones, "Commuter Rail to Loudoun: The Next Chapter," Greater Greater Washington, 7 February 2025

[Greater Greater Washington is a website with an urbanist mission: "racial, economic, and environmental justice in land use, transportation, and housing." They focus on the D.C. area (which extends to Baltimore and sometimes Richmond). I've been personally very attached to Washington since my semester there seven years ago.]

Jones tells the story of founding a group to promote extension of metro Washington commuter rail service westward into the Virginia suburbs (maybe as far as Purcellville!). He discusses budgeting, positive effect on road traffic, and advantages over building out the Silver (Metro) Line. Their next steps is to speak to town councils in the region. "By building a consensus town by town, we hope to gain momentum to get an official feasibility study commissioned by Loudoun and Fairfax counties in partnership with state and regional agencies..."

Besides opinion posts, Greater Greater Washington also includes their "Breakfast Links" collection of local goodreads, urbanist news from other parts of the country (including a bicycling promotion program in Denver) and opportunities to get involved around the DC area.

Pete Saunders, "Why Call It 'The Rust Belt?'" The Corner Side Yard, 2 February 2025

[Pete Saunders is from Detroit, and now lives in Chicago. He is an important Midwestern voice in a movement that can overfocus on the fast-growing towns on the coasts. His attention to black and working class experiences of cities make his voice especially valuable.]

This piece is less about policy than about nomenclature. Sanders embraces rather than resents the term Rust Belt for what was once the industrial Midwest (think Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and all those little cities in eastern Ohio, maybe Pittsburgh). It can symbolize what it could be, "a term roughly synonymous with the legend of the phoenix, the mythological bird that rises from the ashes of its deceased predecessor." Like London, which emptied out after the Romans left in the fifth century but in time became one of the leading cities of the world, the Rust Belt (or Lower Lakes, if you prefer) can rise from its knees and become something else entirely.

Stacy Mitchell's book

And there's more! 

• Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance was quoted extensively in a Washington Post article on the reslient role of small businesses in the American economy, despite apathy (at best) from national elected officials. (Did you know local restaurants now last slightly longer than the average small business start?) 
• The Active Towns podcast, hosted by John Simmerman, presents a video on a "bike bus" in Montclair Township, New Jersey. 
• Happy Cities reports on a survey in Seattle finding "a remarkable relationship between street edges, building facades and pro-social behavior," suggesting a role for city design in human sociability.  
• Kristen Jeffers's latest salutes Rev. Andrew Wilkes, a pastor in Brooklyn who shows the influence of faith on urban issues like gentrification.  
• Planetizen reports the California High-Speed Rail Authority anticipates running trains between coastal cities and the Central Valley in five to eight years.

So there ya have it--urbanists are thinking about urban stuff: infrastructure and how to pay for it, rebuilding downtown, small business, public transit, cycling, trains, and shaping values which I guess includes branding. None of them even referenced national political dysfunction.

Friends, it does my soul good to think about all these people thinking about how to improve their places. It takes considerable nimbleness to negotiate around personal differences, not to mention state and national interference. I hope that what doesn't kill us will in time make us strong. But I'm still concerned that conditions for building prosperous, resilient and inclusive communities are becoming harder each day. Keep the faith, I guess.

Future prospects for our cities

(Source: vecteezy)

In the quarter-century of years beginning with "2," one of the biggest phenomena in America (and other areas of the West) has been the resurgence of central cities. After more than half a century of losing ground to suburbs, cities are "back" with lower crime, new commercial and residential development, and cultural cachet. This is in the main good news: cities are gardens of social diversity as well as economic innovation, and use natural resources more efficiently.

Challenges remain. The resurgence was particularly noticeable back in the years 2005-2015, but even then was felt unevenly across American cities. In super-successful cities like San Francisco, attracting new residents sent real estate prices skyrocketing, resulting in displacement and homelessness; other cities like St. Louis have struggled to catch the wave at all. Particularly since 2020, changing work patterns have left downtown areas with swaths of unused office space at the same time they're struggling to house people.

🚄

A panel of experts convened by the Urban Land Institute (Nyren 2024) commends public-private partnerships, specifically ventures aimed at transforming downtown land use from commercial to residential. Andy DeMoss of the Chicago firm Bradford Allen began with:

They need to focus on the core issue, which is addressing the work-from-home movement. Anything else is most likely not going to be impactful enough to move the needle. Also, a number of city departments are not fully back in the office yet themselves. They need to push their workforce to be downtown, at least three to four days a week, to set an example for the private sector.

Since cities themselves can't force workers back to the office, they can try to create 24 hour areas. They can work on attracting recreational visitors (natural spaces, retail, and entertainment, along with better parking and public transit), as well as getting more housing built in mixed use projects near transit. Chicago, Cincinnati, Miami, New York, and Fayetteville, Georgia, were touted as successful examples. Sheila Ross of HKR in Atlanta summarized:

We need to find ways to activate these spaces year-round, ensuring they remain safe and enjoyable even without events. We have to plan for every day--not just game day. Additionally, the lack of affordable and market-rate housing is a significant challenge, compounded by parking minimums that restrict diverse housing development. Downtowns need equitable access. We must consider how to transform wide, car-centric roads into more human-friendly spaces that can accommodate light rail, bike paths, and spillover activities from local businesses.

🚄

Cities need to work with private entities to build financial and political support for any development, because cities aren't really in control of their own finances. Although when private firms are doing most of the driving, the projects are likely to reflect private profit more than public interest, the alternative is reliance on the national government as well as the states, some of whom are actively hostile to urban areas. In the face of Donald Trump's return to the White House, a Brookings Institution panel speculated on his administration's impact on a variety of urban issues. Trump has famously promised to punish cities that oppose his agenda, and indeed a lot of his support seems to be based on inflicting pain. Can anything move forward in these times?

The most optimistic submissions argue that local leaders can find ways to connect what they need with Trump's priorities. Adie Tomer's section on construction argues that momentum on projects begun during the Biden administration, as well as bipartisan interest in new housing, creates opportunities for federal-local cooperation: Understanding what Trump administration officials want--and persuasively making the case for local projects--could be worth millions of dollars for many communities. It's wise to make calls to newly appointed officials, listen to agency-hosted webinars, and consume any other information that can help make submissions as attractive as possible. 

He likes building, doesn't he? Possibly
President Trump can be sweet-talked into supporting infrastructure projects,
like this reconstructed intersection in Cedar Rapids

Other pieces of a similar bent talk about policies that can help working class and nonurban constituents, including Annelies Goger on work-based learning, Joseph W. Kane on infrastructure projects, Molly Kinder on workforce issues related to artificial intelligence, and Tracy Hadden Loh on strengthening opportunity zones and access to community capital. (I'm not seeing this sort of thing at all here in Iowa, though, where for years Republicans have appealed to working class and nonurban rage without addressing their economic issues.)

Other pieces from the Brookings survey argue either that Trump's ideology will need to bend to practical local imperatives--William H. Frey on immigration, Xavier de Souza Briggs on antidiscrimination and diversity, Manann Donoghoe on climate via industrial policy disaster relief and local innovation--or that momentum behind certain policy directions is sufficient to sustain those policies in spite of Trump's opposition. Hanna Love argues that while the U.S. Department of Justice is sure to lurch towards the punitive, States can enact their own legislative reforms and investigations into police accountability, and importantly, many of the preventative investments needed to improve public safety are under the purview of local governments. Similar hopes are expressed by Mark Muro on sustaining local technology development, and Joseph Parilla on CHIPS and Science Act funds.

Derecho, August 2020:
The climate won't wait for the next election

The most pessimistic pieces involve the administration's ability to act, or to choose not to act, unilaterally, in ways that impact localities. These include Farah Khan on protecting marginalized communities, Robert Maxim on connecting underrepresented workers to the digital economy, Andre Perry on sustaining the growth of the still small proportion of black-owned employer businesses, and Martha Ross on deportation and "downstream effects." Maxim, for example, argues Growing the number of underrepresented workers in the digital economy will require new [congressional] investments in digital skills development and digital infrastructure, increased access to capital, and more robust place-based investments into underrepresented communities. And Congress remains the most essential actor for investing in tribal communities because of its so-called "plenary power" over Native nations.

🚄

It surely will be difficult for cities to find allies in their dealings with the administration, whether their approach is cooperative or defiant. Pete Saunders (2024) argues cities always struggle in the face of American anti-urban bias. Individualism has been baked into America since the Founding, he says, beginning with how the Confederation Congress chose to organize the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River won in the War for Independence (accessible to speculators, centered around farms). As a result, America struggles with doing things that work toward the common good, and has a firm belief that improving the lives of individuals is the best way to improve the common good. Therefore:

American cities seem almost incapable of capitalizing on their assets, of routinely and easily making the case for greater investment from the federal and state levels of government. We struggle to make public transit investments. We struggle with implementing good placemaking practices. We struggle with undoing bad urban policies, and instituting good ones.

🚄

If we can't agree to fund public transit or build enough housing, we're definitely not going to get to the cities Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber imagine in their book Cities Made Differently (MIT Press, 2024). The executive version presented on the blogs Wiki Observatory and Naked Capitalism offers four visions, the most appealing of which is the City as a Family, "a city without any strangers, where everything is shared, and everyone looks after each other. There are no shops, no money, and no danger at all" (Dubrovsky and Graeber 2024). The result would be the common good, with the catches that historical communes frequently devolved into dictatorship, and while America suffers from an excess of individualism, having too little autonomy would be bad as well. Two other cities--the City of Greed, and the City of Runners, whose endless competition seems closest to our contemporary experience--are dystopian, and offer tendencies to be avoided. The fourth, Underground City, is a challenge to human physiology, as many noted in the comments.

Source: Adananette

Prediction is fraught with unknowns, but it's safe to say the city of 2029 will probably look, feel and act a lot like the city of 2025. If in the interim policies are enacted to make the rich even richer, and to reduce the problem-solving capacity of government at all levels, as seems most likely, they will be felt most immediately at the margins of society, and will only be widely impactful over time. Still, the path we are on does not seem resilient, and missed opportunities are likely to be rued later. 

Book review: The 15-Minute City

 

Carlos Moreno, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet (Wiley, 2024), xxii +276pp.

"The 15-minute City" has become a widely popular concept and widely used phrase, especially after it was adopted by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to guide that global city's ongoing development. The phrase sprung from the mind of Carlos Moreno, a native of Colombia who is now professor of systems technology at the Sorbonne, when he was attempting to humanize his approach to technology-based city design.

Although I was a pioneer in the emerging field of "smart cities," I saw technology as a powerful lever but no longer as an end in itself. My definitive break with technology-centered approaches came in 2010, when I decided to turn to urban service design as an essential methodology for transforming our cities.... 

[Drawing on the work of Jane Jacobs] My approach has refocused on the design of urban services that meet the needs and aspirations of citizens, putting people at the heart of the debate and integrating fundamental thinking on the geography of time, rhythms, quality of life, and chronotopia--a spatio-temporal concept in which the intersection of place and time creates unique and dynamic experiences in a given environment. [Moreno 2024: 89]

The idea that resulted was that of a city "in which the essential needs of residents are accessible on foot or by bicycle within a short perimeter in high-density areas," or a somewhat larger perimeter in less densely populated areas (p, 14). By reducing the need to commute long distances in cars, the approach is intended to reduce human stress on the natural environment like climate change, but also to reduce the difficulty and time people spend getting places, and to improve individual quality of life and social connection. 

The first third of the book seats the idea in the history of western cities, as a response to the disruptive impacts of cars, Euclidean zoning, and most recently the coronavirus pandemic. These disruptions are familiar to anyone who studies cities, but the story does bear retelling. After 75 years of sprawl we find that "Proximity plays an essential role in lifestyle change and city transformation. The concept of the '15-minute city' and '30-minute territory' is at the heart of this new urban lifestyle..." (p. 13, italics mine). 

It sounds like urbanism! Moreno's multi-faceted approach is indeed similar to that of Jeff Speck, Charles Montgomery, and Jan Gehl (who wrote the forward to The 15-Minute City), as well as not-yet-famous me. Moreno's main contribution is the convenient metric, though at his Congress for the New Urbanism address last month he warned against overfocusing on the number 15.

Carlos Moreno at CNU, May 2024

As we approach mid-book, then, we're set up for a series of examples where the 15-minute city concept has been translated into policy. And we kind of get that. Beginning with Paris (chs 10-11), we go to Milan (ch 12), and then to Detroit (ch 13) and Cleveland (ch 14) in the US, then to Buenos Aires (ch 15), already an admirable array of cities in different situations and parts of the world. The array seems to be the entire story, though, because while we would like to know how cities overcame obstacles to achieve good outcomes (or in the case of Cleveland, which has just begun under Mayor Justin Bibb, what it plans to achieve), we pretty much just get long descriptions of issues and short lists of achievements: Buenos Aires replaced some of its excess of roadways with plantings (Calles Verdes, pp. 186-188); Sousse, Tunisia, adopted a comprehensive plan that included considerations of times and distances travelled, with positive results on a variety of measures (pp. 195-200); Melbourne plans to redevelop a failed mall site (pp. 208-209). Pleszbew, Poland, has built "buffer car parks linked to train and bus services" (p. 221), but I don't know what those are if they're somehow different from regular station parking lots.

When I think of my own town, I think of all the aspects of the problem I wish this book had addressed: How do you assess the problems and potential of your city? How do you overcome inevitable public and interest-group opposition? What are the obstacles to successful formulation and implementation of 15-minute-city-inspired policy? (Speck's book in particular does a much better job of this.) Once the policy is in place, what are some useful measures of success? What are some ways cities have responded to complex or changing facts on the ground? (I think of the presentation on the complicated history of  Barcelona's superblocks I heard this spring.) Some of these are considered in chapters 10 and 11 on Paris, but even then only to a small degree. I'd have preferred four meaningfully detailed cases to a dozen quickies.

At CNU last month, Moreno seemed baffled by the political outrage his viral phrase has inspired. (The first video that came up on an Internet search described 15-minute cities as "the new reservations.") A second edition of this book might address this opposition in a practical way. By "practical" I don't think you're going to convince auto manufacturers and oil companies to be cool, and there's really nothing to be done about the cultural attachment to a car-dependent lifestyle, which is intimately connected to climate denial. But as anyone knows who's engaged even a little with city development, people are more afraid than hopeful about any change that will affect them. Moreno can go on about "happy proximity," but many of us outside of big cities aren't used to any kind of proximity. In Iowa, I'm lucky if someone agrees to share a lap lane at the YMCA pool. One street south of mine, people got everyone to sign a petition against a sidewalk on the south side of the street, including 35 homes on the north side that already had a sidewalk. A new chapter that holds people's hands and assures them everything will not only be okay, but joyously so, and coaches advocates on how to talk to the anxious masses, would be a good addition.

Linin' up at Dunkin', November 2021:
How many of these drivers want to live in a 15-minute city?

Thinking about Cedar Rapids also illuminates why Moreno does not want to fixate on a number. There's more, as he would be the first to tell you, to purposeful walking and biking than measuring radii. According to Google maps, a 15-minute walk is about 0.7 miles. I live reasonably close-in, but all that's within that radius is an elementary school, a credit union, two dentists, a grocery store that's closing in a week, several churches, and two fabulous parks (Bever Park and Brucemore National Historic Site). 

Getting on a bicycle means 15 minutes is roughly equivalent to 3.0 miles, which expands my reach to all of downtown, Kingston Village, New Bohemia and Czech Village. Besides all the bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and museums--and hair salons, which New Bohemia has in spades--I am within three miles of the middle school and high school my boys attended, two Hy-Vee Grocery Stores, Bruegger's Bagels, CVS, Walgreen's, two hospitals, Coe College, Mount Mercy University, Cedar Lake (destination attraction in process), and the 16th Street Dairy Queen. When the casino comes, as currently seems inevitable, it will be within three miles as well. But in our town of "happy motoring" (phrase lifted from James Howard Kunstler), not every three mile bike trip is an advisable one. Some of those places require the non-driver to ford huge parking lots, and I won't be riding on Mount Vernon Road any time soon!

Mt. Vernon Road SE, fall 2024: getting in this zone requires a car

So, three cheers for the concept, although I won't be living in a 15-minute city any time, and one and a half cheers for the book.

Book review: City Limits

 

Megan Kimble, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways (Crown, 2024)

I can't believe there was a day when people were like, you know what we should do? Tear down all the businesses and houses around our downtown. That seems smart. Let's do that.

--BETH OSBORNE, Transportation for America (Kimble 2024: 202)

This is an even better book than I expected. At its heart it is the story of grass-roots movements in three Texas cities--Austin, Dallas, and Houston--in opposition to Texas Department of Transportation plans to widen interstate highways through the centers of their towns. Those stories are well-told, including accounts of public hearings and interviews with participants on all sides. Results of their efforts were mixed, but demonstrated the importance of community input.

Megan Kimble (from her website)

Besides that, City Limits has two features that make it valuable to those of us who don't live in Texas. (Remarkably, I have not been to any of the three cities!) The first is to describe early in Part I the context in which the current controversies exist, that being the story of the Interstate Highway System. President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously championed that system, but explicitly as an inter-city road network. Apparently without his knowledge, the program aggressively included highways built through cities as well, including all three of the Texas cities discussed (see pp. 27-34). 

The intra-city highways typically obliterated many blocks of existing black neighborhoods and lowered the quality of what remained. This experience was seen with I-90/94 in Chicago, I-94 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and probably your town as well. 

"Before" picture from Dan Ryan Expressway hologram
(my photo at National Museum of American History)

(In Cedar Rapids, without a substantial black population, I-380 plowed through a working-class white neighborhood, and its huge right of way remains an obstacle to development on the west side of the river.) She also discusses highway removals in San Francisco and Rochester, with possibly more to come.

The second feature of the book that is relevant to readers in and out of Texas is hearing directly from those affected by intracity highway construction and expansion; these conversations make up much of Part II. We meet Lockridge Wilson, whose Dallas neighborhood was cleaved by I-45, which he now uses to get to work; Elizabeth Wattley, who managed restoration of Dallas's historic Forest Theater before she found it in the path of I-45 expansion; Elda and Jesus Reyes of Houston, who rally their mostly Spanish-speaking neighborhood to defend their homes against I-45 expansion; Angel and Michael Leverett, who live in the Austin suburb of Kyle, reliant on I-35 while choosing employment that will somewhat minimize their commutes; and dozens more. Their stories add dimension to the policy problem, and though neither you nor I are likely to meet any of these people, there are stories just like theirs in the places where we live.

Berm view: 3rd St SW, looking up at I-380

Kimble concludes the book on a hopeful note, but there really are no clear signs of what the future will bring for intracity highways. We need to stop doing what we've gotten used to doing, as well as undoing some of the damage where we can. Their social and environmental costs are hard to ignore, and their financial costs are prodigious, though maybe not as visible as other areas of government budgets. ("I don't think federal taxpayers should be subsidizing the costs of [mass-transit] systems," Baruch Feigenbaum of the Reason Foundation tells a congressional hearing (p. 99), conveniently overlooking that highway infrastructure too is "subsidized.") Land costs, too: outside of the city, but the junction of Interstates 80 and 380 was recently redone to correct a serious problem with the original design, and the footprint of the new interchange is at least as large as the entire downtown area of Cedar Rapids including Kingston Village. (I have it 1.35 square km for the interchange... 

...1.3 square km for downtown-plus-Kingston including the river.)

However, the obstacles to change are huge. It seems expressways are one policy where powerful economic interests are at one with the cultural interests of the Republican party base. This is particularly true in Texas, where private motor vehicles are as sacred as teaching Christianity in public schools, opposition to abortion, closing the border, and free access to heavy weapons (see page 12 of the Texas Republicans' new party platform; for perspective on that platform, see Tumulty 2024.) Neither Texas Governor Greg Abbott nor Transportation chair J. Bruce Bugg have a background in transportation, but they know what they like, and it involves adding lanes (p. 9).  Heck, even in New York, there are limits to how much the interests of local residents can match up with those of commuters.

1960s highway protests in Washington, ultimately successful
(my photo at Anacostia Museum)

A recent Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Samuel Alito (cf. Howe 2024), though it dealt with congressional districting, raises a lot of doubts about whether disparate racial impacts can stop highway expansion as they were in Houston, without an explicit statement from planners that the highway was intended to harm blacks. The costs we've sunk into building expressways also inhibit change: in the long run, public transit is more scalable and less harmful, but at present adding highway capacity is easier.

We've been making a mess of things for 75 years, and now we've built our cities and our lives around coping with it. The way forward is far from simple or clear, but Megan Kimble has given us a good introduction to the issues involved.

SEE ALSO: Dan Allison, "Lawsuits Against YOLO 80," Getting Around Sacramento, 4 June 2024

Joe Cortright, Driven Apart: How Sprawl is Lengthening Our Commutes and Why Misleading Mobility Measures are Making Things Worse (City Observatory, 2010)

Freeways Without Futures 2023 (Congress for the New Urbanism)

Local Policies for Inclusion

 

Palmer House Hilton, site of the Midwest Political Science
Association conference

Policies adopted by local governments directly impact the inclusion of immigrants into political life, according to a paper by Samantha Chapa, a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Houston, presented at the 2023 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Ms. Chapa analyzed 31 policy choices of various cities, and found mixed but positive impacts on first and second generation immigrant participation in the 2020 general elections. She argued that pro-inclusion policies can provide both resource effects (e.g. jobs/employment) and interpretive effects (e.g. communicating a sense of welcome), both of which increase community ties for newcomers. 

Samantha Chapa (from uh.edu)

Her work is pertinent in this era of increased diversity and attention to immigration, and the expectation that these will only increase with future economic and environmental developments (See Steuteville 2021). Most places in America today reflect a historically white majority in their political and economic power structure. Some of our most diverse cities are also the most stratified--Washington, D.C., for example, where the median wealth of white families is something like 50 times that of black families. These cities can choose to try to maintain or broaden the voices in their community. (They can also try to be an enclave or a fortress, but let's not go there.)

Samantha Chapa commended the work of Welcoming America, a Georgia-based organization that advocates "inclusive communities becoming more prosperous by ensuring everyone belongs." They go on:

Whether it's due to the economy, immigration policies, or climate disasters, communities experiencing an influx of newcomers may not be prepared, causing misunderstanding and tension, and in some cases, outright violence and hostility. But when communities recognize the value [in] being truly welcoming and intentionally work toward the inclusion of newcomers, they can create a culture and policy environment where all residents feel empowered to work with each other in strengthening the social, civic, and economic fabric. When we find strength in our diversity--and actively resist fear and division--we can build a resilient community that fully harnesses the talents, skills, and contributions of every resident so that all can thrive.

Source: welcomingamerica.org

In other words, you can spend scarce resources keeping newcomers down and out, or you can work with them to build strong resilient places--a point I've made here, more than once. Welcoming America's Welcoming Standard includes seven goals, including attention to "leadership and democratic spaces," full use of the education system, leveraging all talents in the local economy, and diversity training of public safety staff.

That genuine inclusion requires more than merely ending policies of exclusion was shown the following night at the Gene Siskel Film Center, mere blocks from the site of the MPSA conference. The Australian documentary film "You Can Go Now" highlighted the struggles of aboriginal peoples after generations of usurpation and exclusion. 

Artist and activist Richard Bell, portrayed in "You Can Go Now,"
speaks to the audience after the film

One longtime activist stated towards the end of the film that there had been genuine legislative progress, particularly during the administration of Prime Minister Paul Keating (1991-1996), but that now many conditions were worse than ever for aboriginals. It's one thing to change laws, and by no means a small thing; but it's quite another matter to address socially ingrained alienation, suspicion, fear, and concentrated poverty. 

Other papers on the MPSA's Race and Local Politics panel--held Friday morning at 8, but well worth getting up for!--explored areas of local government policy where cities could opt (or not) for inclusion. Aliyah Jenille Mcilwain of Michigan State University found that support among long-time black residents of Detroit was not as high as one might expect for a state project to replace I-375 with a more urban-style development. I-375 when constructed displaced 130,000 mostly minority residents; maybe current residents see the new project as another chapter in policies being imposed upon them from outside? This is a widespread problem with planning and land use policy making, documented in a new study by the Urban Institute (Lo, Noble and Freemark 2023).

Gustavo Francisco Novoa of Columbia University and E. Grant Baldwin of UCLA (with three co-authors) looked at districting for city council elections. Most local government use at-large elections, with 8 percent (including Chicago) using districts and 9 percent (including Cedar Rapids and Washington, D.C.) using a mix of at-large and district seats. Nonwhite representation on city councils increases with the use of districts, but as Novoa showed with a Monte Carlo simulation, a lot depends on how local governments choose to draw the districts.

Which is pretty much where those of us with some power and privilege stand now: a choice of how we're going to face the future. Competitively or cooperatively? Inclusively or exclusively? Sustainably or exploitatively? For the time being at least, the choice is ours.

PAPERS CITED

E. Grant Baldwin, Dan Butler, Adam Michael Dynes, and Michelle Torres, "At-Large Elections and Descriptive Representation in U.S. Municipalities"

Samantha Chapa, "Inclusion and Participation: How Local Policy Affects Political Participation"

Aliyah Jenille McIlwain, "Reconstructive Reparations? A Survey of Government Performance and Perceptions in Southeastern Michigan"

Gustavo Francisco Novoa, "Coloring in the Lines: The Determinants of Majority Minority Districts and Descriptive Representation in U.S. City Councils"

Other panel participants were Athena M. King and Paru Shah.

SEE ALSO:

"The Neighboring Movement Comes to Cedar Rapids," 19 July 2022 

"Can Cedar Rapids Be a 'Receiver City?'" 28 December 2021

Happy City (The Game) and the Happy City

Having spent fall semester teaching from Happy City by Charles Montgomery, I can not imagine a more appropriate Christmas present than Happy City, a new game for ages 10 and up from Gamewright. Thanks to my wife Jane--who has also used Happy City in a class--for this astutely-chosen gift!

Happy City has no relationship to Montgomery's book. He is not mentioned in the game materials or on the website, so I assume the coincidental titles are exactly that... coincidental. Even so it practically begs for comparison, which I am about to undertake. Keep in mind, though, this card game is aimed at children; if you're cruising the Internet looking for someone slagging a children's card game, you should definitely check out Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series on YouTube. You will not find that tone here.

On the other hand, the book Happy City, while accessibly-written, is a book for adults who have a tolerance for complexity and counterintuitive research findings. It would be hard for the most brilliant designer to translate Montgomery's argument into a game for the whole family intended to be played in under 30 minutes.

Playing Happy City

Happy City is a game for 2-5 players. Play goes in order of how recently each player has in their actual life traveled to another city. Each player starts with a mildly-profitable store, and from that attempts to build a city with high population and high citizen happiness. Each building is represented by a card; the game ends after one player's city has ten cards. The winner is the one with the highest overall score, determined by multiplying the population score and the happiness score. 

Source: gamewright.com/product/happy-city

The key to building your happy city is to maintain a positive flow of income, so that you can buy the features that will bring in people and/or make them happy and/or add to the city's income. The buildings come in several categories. Players are encouraged to draw from a mix of categories, though they may not use more than one of the same kind of card. Some examples:

• Happy Market: 1 coin of income (paid at the beginning of each round of turns)
• house: cost 1 coin, 1 population point
• apartment complex: cost 3 coins, 2 population points
• high-rise: cost 6 coins, 3 population points
• library: cost 2 coins, 1 happiness point
• repair shop: cost 5 coins, 1 population point, 2 coins of income
• restaurant: cost 5 coins, 1 happiness point, 2 coins of income
• casino: cost 7 coins, 2 happiness points, 2 coins of income
• ski resort: cost 8 coins, 3 happiness points
• steelworks: cost 1 coin, -1 (yes, -1) happiness point, 1 coin of income

I'd give our library at least two happiness points!

In time, with the right mix of card/building types, players can pick from a selection of bonus building cards (e.g. Superhero Central, Happywood Studios, Unicorn Ranch), which amp up both population and happiness scores. An expert version of the game has more bonus buildings and more complicated scoring.

Evaluation

Happy City does a very good job of modeling a number of factors related to city development. The primary importance of income, making it a prerequisite to any actual building, is a good way to put fiscal realities at the forefront of our considerations. The folks at Strong Towns will be gratified that all income in the game is locally-generated. We are not relying on federal or state grants to grow our cities.

Calculating the final score by multiplying happiness by population is a good way to model the interaction of those two factors. A small number of people experiencing a lot of happiness is an enclave or an exclusive club. A large number of people experiencing low happiness are existing in a place, not citizens of it. A large number of people experiencing a lot of happiness is a happy city.

Casino, Las Vegas NV

A third good point is, even though the city is developing in a centrally planned non-organic way, at least the planner/player is responding to values that have been established externally (presumably, in the economic market or political arena) rather than by themselves. Players are not Robert Owen or Le Corbusier or Marshal Tito constructing our own utopias, but working with preferences expressed by others. Last time I played, I added a casino to my city, not because I believe they're in any way productive, but because I needed the income and the happiness points. (For the record, I think the game vastly overrates casinos and sports stadiums on both counts.) 

Besides all this, you can't really sprawl or do exclusionary zoning with only ten cards.

The biggest difference between Happy City and Happy City is how each understands happiness. The game's  high happiness scores for leisure and entertainment facilities suggests the authors equate happiness with personal fun and pleasure. Montgomery's book goes into considerable detail in questioning that sort of premise, describing in chapter 2 a more long-term feeling of well-being, and later arguing that extrinsic motivators like fun things to buy or visit are overrated by people as sources of happiness. It's intrinsic motivators like health and social connection that endure and contribute to feelings of well-being. As Mitchell Reardon, a senior planner at Montgomery's firm, told the Shared Space podcast in March 2021: 

We are social creatures, yet for decades city planning has sought to divide us. We're just trying to knit this back together, and COVID has really underlined how critical that connection is.

Shared streets, like at Washington's Wharf,
are essential to experiencing that place

Urbanists like Montgomery spend less time on the commercial and industrial features of a town than on whether or not they're connected. In Walkable City [Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011], three of Jeff Speck's four components of walkability deal with the experience of the walk--does it feel safe? comfortable? interesting?--and only one with the walk's destination. Jane Jacobs spends the first three chapters of her landmark The Rise and Fall of Great American Cities [Modern Library, (1961) 2011] talking about sidewalks. In part two, she articulates the prerequisites for urban success--mixed primary uses, small blocks, some older buildings, and concentrated population--none of which have to do with what specifically goes on those blocks or in those buildings. Toronto-based 880 Cities, which aims to  make cities "great" for 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds, focuses their efforts on "your community's streets and public spaces." And so on.

Street musician on pedestrian-only Knez Mihailova, Belgrade

Montgomery devotes the middle third of his book to assembling neuroscience research and lived experience on how happiness can be designed. Creating spaces for informal gathering, often out of infrastructure previously devoted to cars, attracts people and helps build social connection and trust (Montgomery 2013, ch. 7). He quotes Jan Gehl: What is most attractive, what attracts people to stop and linger and look, will invariably be other people. Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities (p. 150). In a society where so many people drive to work yet experience daily unhappiness doing so (pp. 179-181), anything to enhance the opportunities to cycle or walk will improve the city's happiness. So will anything to help those on public transit, "the most miserable commuters of all" (p. 193). Finally, opportunities for refuge and experience of nature will relieve stress and restore our souls (ch. 6).

Boyson Trail, Marion IA

These aren't simple push-button interventions, either. They require a lot of trial and revision, and attention to different people's lived experiences in different places. That makes sense; after all, cities are "problems of organized complexity" (Jacobs [1961] 2011, ch. 22). It follows that any attempt to model all the complexity at the level of a two-dimensional board game is going to fall short, so let us not cavil at Happy City, which after all is a fun and quick play, and which gets a lot of the city right.

Just let's don't confuse amenities with happiness.

SOURCE: Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013.

SEE ALSO: 

"Big Amenity and the Problem of Uncertainty," 2 July 2016

James Brasuell, "City-Building Video Games for Planners," Planetizen, 25 December 2022 [if video games are more your thing than card games]