Even though this subject has been heavily researched, I am surprised that little efforts have been made to change the way food distribution and food accessibility are monitored. The Center for Urban Pedagogy has made a great video that sheds light on some of the social, economic, and consumer forces that combine to create the foodscape of South Bronx. This half-hour video is a must see for anyone interested in learning about the factors involved in deciding what food is distributed in urban areas.

Sorry, I was unable to embed the video, but you can watch Bodega Down Bronx here.

Have you ever wondered what one of the most impoverished cities in America looks like? Now you can. Rocky Mount, NC was recently named one of America’s top 10 impoverished cities by Forbes Magazine and as someone who is familiar with the area, this is not surprising.

According to Forbes,

Poverty may once have been worst in the Deep South. And cities on the border with Mexico are plagued with poverty. But the recession — and the decline of American manufacturing — has left Rust Belt cities with comparable levels of poverty. The problem is concentrated in these three regions. All 10 cities on our list are southern cities, border cities or declining manufacturing centers.

The bottom fifth in Rocky Mount earn less than in other southern cities on this list Macon or Albany. Unemployment for 2008, even before the worst of the recession, was already elevated. It has since risen further to 13.8%.

Obviously Rocky Mount was not always this bad. None of the cities listed in the Forbes list have always been in poverty. In fact most of these cities were once leading manufacturing cities and places of interest.

Geographically, Rocky Mount is in an ideal location. Developed right along the Tar River, Rocky Mount is located just between the Piedmont and Coastal Plain regions of North Carolina. The Coastal Plain transitions to the Piedmont region along the fall line, a line which marks the elevation at which waterfalls first appear on streams and rivers.  Historically, being on a fall line has been crucial for development. The point at which ships were forced out of a river due to rapids, rocks, or change in elevation created a perfect scenario for settlement. Since a fall line creates physical features such as rapids and waterfalls used for water power, early manufacturing settlements often developed along this line.

Rocky Mount’s most notorious industry was the Rocky Mount Cotton Mills, build right on the bank of the Tar River. The cotton mills here were one of the first constructed in the state of North Carolina, dating back to 1816. As the cotton industry grew after the Civil War, the cotton mill experienced rapid growth and as a result, Rocky Mount became a leading manufacturing city in the south. As a side note, the cotton mills also supported a residential village for employees, which is still around.

The Wilmington and Weldon Railroad was built about 2 miles east of the mill in 1845 and became the main connection for Rocky Mount to the outside world.

The advent of the railroad did not cause an immediate boom for Rocky Mount. One important innovation it produced, however, was the establishment of Rocky Mount as a point of departure for travelers from the north and south. The Raleigh-Tarboro stage route (roughly highways 95 and 64) passed just below Rocky Mount which became the logical debarking point for railroad travelers wishing to proceed east or west. [Via]

I’m not a photographer. Apologies to all.

Streets have a need for mixed primary uses, and Jane Jacobs says that “most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.” This makes walking through a city easier and faster. It also helps isolated neighborhoods, which are apt to be socially abandoned. Isolated blocks or neighborhoods will have a negative social, physical, and economic impact on the city. In The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jacobs presents a detailed analysis of the blocks in New York City, of which I will spare you the details. Jacobs summarizes by saying:

I bring up this problem not merely to berate the anomalies of project planning again, but to indicate that frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighborhood. Frequent streets are not an end in themselves. They are a means towards an end… Like mixtures of primary use, frequent streets are effective in helping to generate diversity only because of the way they perform.

So the means by which short blocks and frequent streets work (bringing together a mixture of users) and the results they accomplish (growth of diversity) are inseparable. As Jacobs says, the relationship is reciprocal. Here are some pictures of shorter city blocks created by alleyways and frequent streets in Philadelphia. The result is appealing aesthetically  and also appealing functionally. I spent hours walking through these neighborhoods. Enjoy.

Oh, also I found via Bricoleurbanism a visual of urban form/fabric drawings in 9 cities, which does a great job of visualizing the fabric of the different street networks.

There are dozens of these neat alleyways which create smaller and very walkable city blocks. Unfortunately I was only able to take a few pictures, but I have plenty of pictures of urban vernacular architecture in Philly that I plan on posting very soon.

The next location of my abandoned spaces project seems to be state owned property of the NCDOT. This entire block of Campbell St. in Wilmington is lined with mostly charming buildings that are full of character. It also looks like the state boards up their forgone buildings really well. How am I supposed to get inside these? Suggestions?

Here are some images from an abandoned building that was a shipping center. It is huge, spanning the entire block of North Front Street and Brunswick Street down to Nutt Street. I can’t imagine how valuable this land must be.

Here are some images of a very interesting building on the corner of 16th and Queen St. I spoke with a nice gentleman who is leasing the building next door and he told me that this building use to be a military hangar and the arched section in the back was once twice as long, extending into what is now a parking area. I’m not sure when the hangar area was shortened to its current length. I will have a lot more to say on these places later, as I am currently writing an essay on the value of public space and the effects of abandoned places in an urban environment.

Here are some images from part 1 of my abandoned spaces adventures. I am in the process of writing a much longer essay on the issues of urban spaces and abandoned urban areas. Before I’m done with it I hope to have visited and taken pictures of several more spots similar to this one in downtown Wilmington. I’ve done a lot of research on this area and I’ve learned a lot, but if you know anything about the area around 800 Surrey St. just south of the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, let me know.

The Cape Fear Skyway is a proposed 9.5 mile roadway/ 165-187 foot cable-stayed bridge that would connect New Hanover and Brunswick Counties. It would also be the region’s first toll roadway.

This project has already gone through countless changes, but as I understand it now, the Skyway would connect U.S. 17 in Brunswick County to the intersection of Carolina Beach Road and Independence Boulevard in Wilmington. The precise route will be determined later in the planning process. According to news station WWAY, “Previous plans for the bridge would cut directly into the Brunswick County subdivision, Snee Farm. Wednesday, two new ideas were proposed. They would bypass residential areas, and go north of the Brunswick Forest subdivision. Brunswick County officials are generally in favor of those plans.”

The need for newer and improved transportation in this area is crucial. The project is intended to relieve congestion on the aging Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, which is apparently considered functionally obsolete by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, and offer an alternative for commuters between New Hanover and Brunswick counties. If you don’t see a need for improved transportation in this area or replacing a functionally obsolete bridge, I’m sorry. I really don’t think this is an issue that needs defending or justification.

I’m fascinated with how big this project is suppose to be. Currently, the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge is about 65 feet above the water and the proposed bridge would be 165-187… that’s a big bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge is only 135 ft above the water and the Golden Gate Bridge is 220. Granted, the Skyway will not compare to the total span of either of these bridge. According to the Star News, “Earlier proposals called for a 225-foot high-rise bridge, but consultants said their research indicated that a lower bridge might be able to accommodate the cargo and cruise ships that would use the river in the future.”

The purpose of me writing is to encourage Wilmington residents to write the planners and council members (of both New Hanover and Brunswick County) to encourage them to act quickly and effectively on this project. We’ve all seen what can happen when projects sit for too long… i.e. the “convention center” - yes, it’s in quotes because it is not worthy of the title; it is nothing more than a high-school gym or a church function hall. In 3 years, Wilmington will have outgrown this hideous, bland piece of architecture and the problems will be multiplied. I’m fed up with all the bickering and ignorance regarding growth in a city. If you want to live in a dying city where you will not have to deal with issues like convention centers, hotels, and bridges connecting adjoining counties, please move to Idaho. (On a side note, I would really love to visit Idaho and I have nothing against it. I’ve heard it’s a beautiful state with incredible natural beauty.)

There is a meeting on the matter on October 28 at Wilmington City Hall.

Achieving sustainability in a city or urban region is difficult, and achieving any degree of sustainability in an developing country seems unattainable. In the book Urban Geography: A Global Perspective, Michael Pacione notes that sustainability, as related to the city, is expressed at two levels. The first is global and involves a range of issues concerning the long-term sustainability of the Earth’s environment and the implication for urban life.  The second, according to Pacione, involves the possibility that urban life may be undermined from within because of congestion, pollution and waste generation, and their accompanying social and economic consequences.  Pacione goes on to say that sustainability can be viewed in five dimensions: 1. Economic sustainability; 2. Social sustainability; 3. Natural sustainability; 4. Physical sustainability; and 5. Political sustainability.   Using these five dimensions as a measure of sustainability, it becomes clear that a sustainable city must do much more than support itself financially or physically. Because many developing cities are not sustainable, they are not capable of being maintained or supported. A developing city’s lack of internal maintenance and support can create horrible global situations, which could eventually have a direct impact on many developed counties.

Global population demographics now support the claim that the 21st Century is an urban century. As Director of the London Design Museum, Eyan Sudjic writes: “The world is changing faster now than ever before. The dispossessed and the ambitious are flooding into cities swollen out of all recognition. Poor cities are struggling to cope. Rich cities are reconfiguring themselves at breakneck speed. China has created an industrial powerhouse from what were fishing villages in the 1970s.”   Historically, large cities such as London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo have distinguished themselves by their wealth, yet the current state of the world’s largest metropolitan areas is much different as an increasing number are found in developing countries.
Because of the appeal of wealth and better jobs, many people in developing countries are moving to larger metropolitan areas. This attraction to cities accounts for the migration of one million people per week into urban centers, resulting in the congestion and pollution that is commonly associated with large rapidly developing third world cities.

The United Nations Development Program conducted a survey of city mayors in 1997 to list and rank urban problems as they correspond to a city’s sustainability. The problems were: unemployment (52%), insufficient solid waste disposal (42%), urban poverty (41.6%), inadequate housing stock (33.8%), insufficient solid waste collection (30.9%), inadequate water/sanitation facilities (28.4%), inadequate public transportation (26.2%), traffic congestion (22.3%), poor health services (21.5%), insufficient civil society participation (20.9%), inadequate education services (18.9), air pollution (17.4), urban violence/crime/personal safety (13.5%), discrimination (women. ethnic, poor) (6.8%).

Jakarta: The City In Review

Perhaps no other global metropolitan area in the world exhibits the extremity of problems outlined by the UNDP survey as does Jakarta, the capital, financial, and communication center of Indonesia. Reducing the rate of Jakarta’s population growth has become a national concern, and this concern also reflects global trends in sustainability.  Jakarta’s extreme growth paired with its inadequate urban design and resources have created a city that is not sustainable in the areas of transportation, sanitation, pollution, infrastructure and environment.

Figure 1: Map of Indonesia. The geographic location of Jakarta in Southeast Asia allows for tremendous potential.

Designated its own province under the name of Daerah Khusus Ibu Kota, Jakarta has the greatest population in Southeast Asia and is the sixth largest metropolitan area in the world with an estimated 17 million people.  Originally founded as Batavia in 1619 by the Dutch, Jakarta was a colonial city until Indonesia gained independence in August, 1945.

In her book, Jakarta: A History, Susan Abeyaskere notes that in 1951 there were only 47 trucks and 600 handcarts available to collect rubbish in the city of Jakarta. Of the trucks which were available, about one in six was out of action and in need of repair. For the entire city there were only 60 men and 4 trucks employed to empty privies. There are also problems of infrastructure and public services. For example, in 1954, this city of nearly two million people had only 84 public restrooms, none of which had water.

Just as in the 1950s, Jakarta’s urban problems today are still critical. For example, the article “One hundred work day program of new Jakarta’s governor reflects Jakarta’s urban problem” by Deden Rukmana cites a commentary piece by Wilmar Salim published by The Jakarta Post on November 3, 2007 saying:

The root causes of Jakarta’s problems are centered on population pressures and environmental deterioration… around 111,000 people move from Jakarta to its neighboring cities annually, as many as 123,000 migrants come to Jakarta every year from other places in the country. Unfortunately, many people who move from Jakarta to Bekasi, Tangerang, and Depok still need to commute to Jakarta everyday for work. Traffic jams at notorious bottleneck areas of the inner city toll road; such as at Cawang and Tomang are everyday phenomenon… migrants from other regions are trying their luck in the big smoke. Many are jobless, homeless, unskilled or uneducated and often end up on the streets, begging, scavenging, or working casually, and living in slums. Many probably didn’t think of the consequences of moving to a big city before coming to Jakarta, but the image of the capital city as a place of opportunity may have persuaded them to come and just try their luck.”

Transportation

Jakarta is plagued by numerous transportation problems, all equally crippling in the mobility of the residents of Jakarta. Despite the presence of many wide roads, Jakarta suffers from congestion due to heavy traffic, especially in the central business district. In fact, it would be appropriate to say that because of the presence of many wide roads, Jakarta suffers from congestion due to heavy traffic. The massive amount of people on the roads paired with limited infrastructure creates many dangerous situations. There is limited aid in infrastructure when transporting more than 17 millions people. Furthermore, in recent years the number of motorcycles on the streets has grown almost exponentially. The large amount of small motorcycles on the streets creates much of the traffic, noise and air pollution that plague Jakarta and add to its lack of sustainability.

Figure 2: Jakarta is notorious for traffic problems. Despite having wide highways, the large influx of people and popularity of the automobile creates many crowded streets.

According to Lucy Williamson of BBC News, “Only 2% of Jakartans use public transportation at the moment. Car users, meanwhile, are growing at a rate of 10% a year. This problem is not local to Jakarta; it is a global concern that should be treated with critical care. Unless something is done, analysts say, the city will become completely gridlocked in the next few years.”  To reduce traffic congestion, a new TransJakarta bus system was introduced. The TransJakarta service operates on a special bus-line called the busway. “The busway network is optimized for busy city routes and is a relatively effective alternative for travel in Jakarta.”  Some cities, such as Curitiba, Brazil, have adopted amazing public transportation solutions to alleviate some of their transportation problems. It would be in Jakarta’s best interest to invest in a similar system.

According to the Bangkok Post, Recently “The Jakarta city administration on launched its first-ever river taxi service, marking the beginning of a planned large-scale water transport system aimed at reducing traffic snarls in the Indonesian capital.”  However, there are numerous obstacles to this project including “large amounts of garbage in the canals, unpredictable water levels and low bridges.”  The Bangkok Post article later notes that for years, the city administration planned to build a subway system, which today exists only on paper, and construction of a citywide monorail has barely begun but is already facing funding problems.

Pollution

A byproduct of traffic is, of course, air and noise pollution, for which Jakarta is especially notorious. Budi Hartanyo, professor of public health at the University of Indonesia, claims that traffic in Jakarta is responsible for 70% of the nitrogen oxide and particulate matter in the city’s air. Respiratory inflammation accounts for 12.6% of deaths in Jakarta, twice the rate of the rest of the country. Before 2001, 35% of Jakarta’s elementary school children had lead levels higher than WHO (World Health Organization) standards. This has been reduced to 3% as leaded gasoline has been phased out. However, benzene, a known carcinogen, is on the rise. The city itself is a major health hazard.

According to the Mega Cities Project “Open dumping constitutes the most common form of waste disposal. Scavengers called City Cleansing Dinas handle 35% of the total daily amount of solid waste.”  Anton Lucas reports that:

“Jakarta produces as much as 6,250 tons of rubbish a day. It does not have enough trucks to collect all the rubbish, let alone enough space to put it. For 17 years the Jakarta administration has used a 108 hectare tract of land in the neighboring municipality of Bekasi as a dump. The Greater Jakarta area produces 25,000 cubic meters of solid waste daily, 4,000 cubic meters from traditional markets alone. The sobering fact is that 70% of the waste is organic and that some 1,400 cubic meters end up in Jakarta Bay everyday.”

As mentioned earlier in The United Nations Development Program survey of mayors, the problems for cities that are facing rapid urbanization have been defined as poverty and slum formation, sanitation and health, housing, traffic, air and water pollution, urban violence and public safety. For Jakarta, improvements in many areas are needed for the city to become more sustainable. According to Heinke, these areas of improvement are employment, education, reproductive health, housing, human rights, sanitation, clean sources of water, urban agriculture, no-car days, and recycling.

Housing

Due to the rapid growth in population and need to constantly replace temporary dwellings, housing is considered to be one of the most serious issues in Jakarta. The government has made some effort to mitigate the housing problems that plague Jakarta by constructing low-cost housing. For example, the United Nations notes that Jakarta has an annual demand of approximately 200,000 units, and the government has addressed this problem with programs like the Kampung Improvement Program, which seeks to improve public facilities such as water supplies, communal bathing and shower facilities, and roads.  However, despite plans and programs that implement change, housing continues to be a problem for Jakarta. The quality of the buildings in Jakarta varies widely. More than half the structures are temporary or only semi-permanent. Encarta online says that the most common types are single-story structures made from wood and, occasionally, bamboo mats. Single-family detached or semidetached houses made from brick, cement, and wood, with tile roofs are commonly found.

With more housing comes the increased problem of electricity and plumbing. Encarta Online says that electricity supply has expanded to meet the city’s most basic needs and most houses now have electricity for lighting. However, water supply and sewage disposal in Jakarta are still inadequate.   Less than half the households use piped water for drinking. Fewer still use piped water for bathing and washing, and only a small part of Jakarta is served by piped sewers and many homes lack septic tanks.

Jakarta Leadership in Government

For cities to become sustainable, the citizens play an important role, but the political leaders of the city also have a huge impact of the city. In his article “Cities on the Edge of Chaos, Sudjic writes that:

“Cities are made by an extraordinary mixture of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators. They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary. The cities that work best are those that keep their options open, that allow the possibility of change. The ones that are stuck, overwhelmed by rigid, state-owned social housing, or by economic systems that offer the poor no way out of the slums are in trouble. A successful city is one that makes room for surprises.”

Abeyasekere notes that Jakarta’s first President, Sukarno, was in fact one of these “bloody minded obsessives”. In fact, Sukarno had a particular obsessiveness about Jakarta. Abeyasekere, quotes one of President Sukarno speeches as:

“Comrades from Jakarta, let us build Jakarta into the greatest city possible. Great not just from a material point of view; great, not just because of its skyscrapers; great not just because it has boulevards and beautiful streets; great not just because it has beautiful monuments; great in every respect, even in the little houses of the workers of Jakarta there must be a sense of greatness… Give Jakarta an extraordinary place in the minds of the Indonesian people, because Jakarta belongs to the people of Jakarta. Jakarta belongs to the whole Indonesian people. More than that, Jakarta is becoming the beacon of the whole of mankind. Yes, the beacon of the New Emerging Forces.”

Even though Sukarno lost power in 1967, his obsessiveness about Jakarta, while easily bordering “bloody minded obsessiveness”, was necessary for Jakarta’s transition to independence and is just as important if Jakarta wants to become sustainable. However, despite inspiring leaders and creative solutions to some of these urban problems, the future of Jakarta does not seem to be sustainable.  With 70% of air pollution caused by automobiles, Jakarta has crossed the safety threshold and the health of its citizens is suffering as a result. Infectious Parasitic Diseases (IPAs) are still on the rise, and with about 50% of the houses lacking natural ventilation and lighting, internal housing climates are often humid and unhealthy. Most of the Kampung people who took part of the Kampung Improvement Program are still using kerosene stoves for cooking and burning their garbage, causing more air pollution. According to the Mega-Cities Project “The water supply system does not reach the majority of the Kampungs, and the City Administration’s sanitation system leaves 25% of Jakarta’s garbage uncollected.  Granted, Jakarta has seen many improvements, but since housing density is so high, and people continue to migrate to the city, it seems somewhat impossible to control the shantytowns and unsafe housing.

Clearly, the five dimensions of urban sustainability that Michael Pacione references are not working together in Jakarta, and just as Jakarta’s population continues to grow, so will the world’s population. The globalized city is a new type of city, and despite the numerous attempts to transform these cities into sustainable places, it will be difficult. Future actions taken by politicians and city dwellers will have a direct impact on the sustainability of cities. Achieving sustainability in a city or urban region is difficult, and with more than half of the world’s population living in cities, it’s important that the inhabitant of Jakarta and the world try take into account factors that will help aid in urban sustainability.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I first saw the trailer for “Radiant City” I had never heard of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. Le Corbusier and the Radiant City is a response to a group of thinkers called the Decentrists, who believed the primary result of regional planning would be to decentralize great cities, thin them out, and disperse their activity into smaller, separate cities or, better yet, towns. Even though Le Corbusier also had some very backwards views on urban planning, he made much more progress than the Decentrists.

The Decentrists were considered the experts. They were the educated planners who were given authority to introduced many devastating ideas into city and regional planning. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs says:

But in the schools of planning and architecture, and in Congress, state legislatures and city halls too, the Decentrists’ ideas were gradually accepted  as basic guides for dealing constructively with big cities themselves. This is the most amazing event in the whole sorry tale: that finally people who sincerely wanted to strengthen great cities should adopt recipes frankly devised for undermining their economies and killing them.

Most of America’s infrastructure has been built within the last sixty years or so, and unfortunately, the planning and architecture is not going to last. Most of the neighborhoods are turning into glorified slums that are traps for energy consumption. But now for stunning news from the White House: we actually have a US president who understands the connection between land use patterns and energy use. Several months ago President Obama gave an interview to five columnists aboard Air Force One en route to Chicago:

I would like to see some long-term reforms in how transportation dollars flow, and I’ll give you just a couple of examples. I think right now we don’t do a lot of effective planning at the regional level when it comes to transportation. That’s hugely inefficient. Not only does it probably consume more money in terms of getting projects done, but it also ends up creating traffic patterns, for example, that are really hugely wasteful when it comes to energy use. If we can start building in more incentives for more effective planning at the local level, that’s not just good transportation policy, it’s good energy policy. So we’ll be working with transportation committees to see if we can move in that direction.

I can’t wait any longer to become involved. My decision to go back to school for urban planning (M.U.P.) has been finalized by my resignation at my current job. My biggest fear, however, is turning into something like the Decentrists. Some planners are as bad as the SEO experts and Marketing gurus that scour Twitter. A planner is not necessarily an authority on a city but most planners love cities enough to try to understand how they work. I’ve got a lot to learn. Wish me luck.

As usual, Jacobs makes a great point. Automobiles and cities can work together, it is just that city planners do not know what to do with automobiles in cities. Since most cities have recognized the mistake of planning the city around the automobile and not the person, many have sought solutions to manage the growing problem of traffic congestion and the social, economic and environmental questions presented by continued urban sprawl due to auto dependence. One solution many cities have adopted is a rise in public support for increased public transit as a practical strategy to alleviate environmental concerns, reduce transportation infrastructure costs and ensure fair, affordable, and reliable transportation choices for individuals. However, not all cities have taken this route in mitigating transportation concerns, take for instance Wilmington, NC.

Unfortunately, part of my job involves shuttling people around an island. It might sound neat, but once the novelty wears off, it’s not. Most of the people I shuttle fly into Wilmington from someplace like Long Island, Boston, or Toronto. In fact, a lot of the people I shuttle don’t own a car. This summer I brought four different groups to the closest Wilmington bus stop operated by the WAVE Transit so they could visit downtown Wilmington. An hour later I picked them up. According to the visitors, a couple busses whizzed by, but no bus stopped for them. The stories were the same across the board. Waiting for a bus in 95 degree weather and 90 percent humidity without a place to sit and without shade was Wilmington’s way of saying please, please, please don’t even think about riding one of our buses. We will hope for rain and then laugh at you. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, here is a small (2 mile) section of the current state of Wilmington’s bus stops.

Now, consider other cities in the same situation. With a little over 55,000 people, Chapel Hill has about one-half the population of Wilmington but it is twice as dense. Chapel Hill has be able to use it’s density as an advantage and create a decent public transportation system. Higher density is important in creating an easily sustained and reliable public transportation systems, and it is also necessary in creating beautiful public spaces that are easily walkable with fewer cars. And honestly, it makes life more convenient and engaging by providing many amenities within close proximity to you and to each other. Usually, popular urban places are high density places, low density zoning causes more sprawl, and as you can tell by looking at any DOT’s budget, low density areas are more expensive to build and maintain. There are thousands of other cities (many right here in North Carolina) who provide a service that I do not get. Instead, my tax dollars go to (repeatedly) widening roads which lead away from the city.

According to the city of Calgary and their transportation planning department,

Extensive research identified that cities characterized by low-intensity development and widely separated patterns of housing, employment and urban amenities, are usually highly auto dependent and have relatively low utilization of transit, walking and cycling. Conversely, cities that incorporate compact, mixed-use, walkable development patterns are more likely to accommodate a higher proportion of trips via walking, cycling and transit than by private automobile.

It seems clear that establishing a high quality and reliable transit service is pivotal in creating inviting, vibrant and economically sustainable cities. If you take another city’s transit service and measure it’s success, it usually requires excellence in the quality and the frequency of service, the range in the locations and service choices, and the duration in hours of operation.

Again pointing to the city of Calgary’s transportation plan, they have created key strategies to achieve a better experience for their riders.

One of the key strategies to achieve this objective is to create a hierarchy of mixed-use nodes and corridors, which is closely integrated with frequent, highly reliable and comfortable transit service and incorporates well-designed streets thus balancing the requirements of all travel modes (walking, cycling, transit, goods movement and private autos). Another important direction is to achieve a better balance of new growth between established communities and new greenfield areas to maximize opportunities within the nodes and corridors hierarchy and allow for complete communities to develop. This enables the achievement of population and employment thresholds necessary to support enhanced service levels and new transit corridors and ensures the effective delivery of essential municipal services (e.g. transit, roads, recreation etc) to new growth areas.

So, Wilmington, what’s your move? Will you continue to blatantly encourage the use of automobile traffic in a city that already sufferers from overcrowded roads by not improving your public transportation, or will you make a few small changes that will go a long way.

Here, I’ve already found some benches that you can install if you aren’t ready for a full-fledged bus stop. Below I’ve also included a couple of visualizations just so you know there is plenty of room available - that is unless your saving that space for the next time you widen the road. I know that if you had no other choice than riding the bus, you probably wouldn’t want to stand while waiting about an hour for your ride. Really, it’s the small things. I would love to see my tax dollars go to something I am proud of.