Make No Small Plans

Jacques Gréber's Parkway Plan. Wikipedia

This will be a start–but that’s all it will be: a start.

The architect and city planner Horace Trumbauer is credited with one of the classic lines of city planning: “Make no small plans.” Trumbauer’s approach to the discipline, combined with the dominant influence of Paris’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts, led to one of America’s first major homegrown urban traditions: the City Beautiful. It was in this City Beautiful spirit that the Frenchman Jacques Gréber designed the Ben Franklin (née Fairmount) Parkway.

It was to be many things. A boulevard linking ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.

City Line Avenue, Part 1

So here we go.

Yes, I live along City Line Avenue, and like locals near and far I know there's always a Line in City Line, official designations to hell. The current state of City Line is a weird sort of urban-suburban mishmash. It's got beautiful and not-so-beautiful garden apartments, but at the same time it's got a totally autocentric assortment of '50s-'80s office parks and strip malls, the youngest of which is a power center with a Target. It's still got Philly's Saks, but the luxe quotient is going down, and has for some time: since, in fact, King of Prussia went upmarket in the late '80s and attracted Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom over a hapless center city. And with Route 1 being a primary funnel from parts Main Line way to the Schuylkill Expressway, it's a traffic nightmare.

But it could be special. It's a key link. It lies between the Ridge Avenue string of Manayunk, East Falls, and Roxborough, and the heart of the Main Line strung along Lancaster Pike, from Overbrook through Wynnewood, Ardmore, and Haverford towards Bryn Mawr (with 'Nova lying just beyond). Bala village lies just off it: an immaculately preserved commercial heart. Its communities, both urban and suburban, are exceptional in character and quality; even Wynnefield's urban heart deserves investing in. It is, in short, a perfect link for reurbanization.

City Line Avenue was never a perfect form of a suburban strip, the way e.g. Bethlehem Pike in Montgomeryville or Old Lincoln Pike in Langhorne are. Urban nodes have always existed around Overbrook and Bala stations. This offers bones for reurbanization. It has the three components of life--residents, jobs, and wares--and so offers a strong framework for densification.

How to do it? 1. It is the city line. A unified zoning code along both sides will aid efforts to reurbanize. 2. Impose a height limit--nothing too strict, but enough to ensure that megalomania for height doesn't take precedence over infill. 80 ft. (that's eight stories!) should be plenty. 3. Pay attention to the street. The avenue is the heart, and axis, of urbanization. To do it right, the avenue--on the surface--needs to provide access and movement for all forms of transportation, in a comfortable fashion. Extending a trolley line from 69th St. here (and beyond?) will help cement the district's newfound importance. And: 4. Get rid of excessive parking!

Property line to property line, the avenue varies between 80 and 130 ft. It's at its widest as it's dropping down the hill towards the Schuylkill. Normally, the width from sidewalk to sidewalk is just 85 ft. But the carriageway has four 11.25-ft through lanes and a 15-ft center turning lane, making it alone 60 ft. wide. For the carriageway, we want 4 10 ft-wide traffic lanes* and a reserved 20-ft transit median for light rail. (If the median need be wider, the through lanes can be narrowed to as little as 8.5 ft., perhaps.) Along the sides we want (a) a nice deep sidewalk (say 10 ft.), (b) a bike path on at least one side, and (c) some nice street trees, possibly in their own planting strip.


This is where the problematics come in. We can't narrow the traffic lanes any further, unless one wants to provide a completely segregated traffic or transit passage**, and so we've got to share something. We want the light rail to go fast and not be stuck idling at lights, so sharing through lanes with it is out; we've already road-dieted the through lanes as far as we can sanely go. We will thus have to integrate pedestrian and bike passage at those points of greatest compression (where the road is narrower).

We do not want any takings which involve demolition. This is wasteful. Minor takings of obsolescent setbacks, mostly in the form of small parking lots, may be useful for providing space for a full bike track. Another possibility is to create a pinch point where the road is narrowest, at 54th and City Line, which includes some preservation-worthy ca. 1920s structures as well as a large dorm (Lannon^ Hall) and some more recent rather forgettable constructions which are nevertheless part of St. Joe's campus^^.

So--where the road is narrowest, at 80 ft., we'll have 40 ft. of road lanes, a 20 ft. light rail line, and two 10 ft. sidewalks with trees in planters^^^. When we have 90 ft., we'll add at ten-ft, two lane physically separated cycle track to one side (likely the City side: the setbacks there aren't broad enough to be subdivided into building plots). And finally, at 100 ft., we can have the trees in their own green strip rather than planters. The trees, we'll assume, are London Plane or some such with nice deep root systems which will make maintenance easy.

This is, however, just the look of an urban boulevard. Next time I think about this we'll talk about urbanizing the existing built form.
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* What, you want to halve the lane count--are you mad? City Line already sees an AADT of, as far as I can tell, ~80k (or 20k/lane). That's a lot. Yes, the light rail should help reduce that, but we're going to still have to assume an AADT of 60k+. The narrower lanes actually slow traffic down some; this will also increase total road capacity by an incidental amount. If you still don't like it, I've got a shiny but über-expensive expressway tunnel option.
** Either a subway or an el, read. Certainly the full buildout could take one; judging by bus congestion, it could even today. But such options are very expensive, and there isn't a network to tie it into at the moment--although one would exist under Philadelphia2050.
^ Née Borgia Hall. It was renamed over the summer.
^^ A bigger administrative building holding these offices would be a wise move, as would another large dorm in the space freed up.
^^^ Since where the road is narrowest also happens to be by St. Joe's campus, we can also have the cycle path veer off into it for a while.

Wynnefield Heights 2: Creating Connectivity

A few days ago, I began this series with a critique of Wynnefield Heights' present conditions. The two major issues the neighborhood suffers from are a lack of interconnectivity and a poor built form. So, for this post, I am looking to make the Heights more interconnected. This is done through (a) a full streets and paths plan and (b) a transportation plan. The streets and paths ("connectivity") plan of course governs where new streets and paths need to be built, while the transportation plan governs how mass transit service runs through the Heights.

Connectivity Plan

Building Blocks
Wynnefield Heights, as it currently is, is highly disconnected, broken by arterials into a series of superblocks later split into subdivisions and towers-in-parks. From the five points at the center of Wynnefield Heights, where Monument and Ford Roads and Conshohocken Avenue all meet, no fewer than four of the radiating blocks are superblocks (see Figure A). Two of these are occupied by the mammoth Belmont Filters water plant; one is occupied by a row of towers-in-parks punctuated by a megachurch; and the last, by the Belmont Behavioral Health Center and a large Methodist facility constituting a former orphanage and a major assisted-living center.

Figure A: Current Road Network. Note disconnectedness.

Assisted-living centers, in fact, pockmark the neighborhood: besides the Methodists' Simpson House, there are also the Salvation Army's Ivy Residence, the Jews' B'rith Shalom and the more nondenominational Park Tower and Bala Nursing and Retirement Center, as well as Inglis House just across Belmont Avenue in Belmont Village. These centers have grounds of varying sizes, yet frequently have to be designed around in order to accommodate the goals of densification and urbanization here by the top of Fairmount Park.

Figure B: Road network additions (in red) help cut the superblocks down to size.

Two interventions are needed to remedy this situation: the establishment of new streets to break the walls of the superblocks down (Figure B), and the establishment of new paths to interconnect in a non-automotive capacity, particularly into Fairmount Park (Figure C). Road additions, in particular, are engineered to follow the path of least resistance: they follow alignments that either (a) remain in the public realm, (b) run along property lines, or (c) follow existing access roads (particularly in the towers-in-parks) as much as possible. By contrast, trail network additions are engineered to be more picturesque: they wind around the backs of buildings and connect disconnected fragments of the road network, and also provide pedestrian access to both the City Line and Falls bridges, neither of which currently has anything near adequate connectivity for anybody who doesn't drive, and seeks to convert a deep glen in Fairmount Park next to Neill Drive--according to a 1910 topographical map of the park, Roberts Hollow--into a hiking and picnicking area as well as restore former Fairmount Park drives Midvale and Steinberg Avenues to use.

Figure C: Multi-use trails (in yellow) to be added in and around Wynnefield Heights.

Both networks intermesh to provide a reasonably high level of neighborhood connectivity (Figure D). While certain curvilinear elements remain in this plan, pedestrian access points now come in the hundreds, rather than thousands, of feet; absurd superblocks are chopped down to size; and active park uses are bought to the section of Fairmount Park which cuts deepest into the neighborhood (i.e. Roberts Hollow).

Figure D: Streets and trails intertwine to provide greater interconnectivity.

How to Make It Happen
These extensions necessitate an expansion of the public realm in Wynnefield Heights. While there has only been one traditional way to extend the public realm--acquisition via eminent domain--in Wynnefield Heights, two other opportunities besides present themselves. These two are simply to build where the property is already public and to work out an agreement by which towers-in-parks allow public access on their already-existing streets in return for alternative compensation--such as density bonuses or a tax break. This latter method is employed as the predominant method to break up the Northern Superblock: instead of using eminent domain and transferring all the necessary private drives to the public realm, eminent domain is used only where major modifications need to be made to offer accessibility, while these public-private agreements--sort of like the City leasing rights to the existing private drive--ensure access into the heart of the superblock.

Another issue is the extreme grades from the plateau down to the Schuylkill--a drop of some 200 feet. A bridge is planned for over Roberts Hollow between tentatively-named Country Club Road and Neill Drive; this bridge allows a cutoff for people wishing to access eastern Wynnefield Heights without passing through the five points or dropping all the way down Neill Drive and winding all the way back up Conshohocken Avenue. Getting good trail access around this hollow will be tricky.

Transportation Plan

Figure E: Desire lines and proposed mass transit connections between Wynnefield Heights and the three nearest major universities. A large percentage of the occupants of multifamily housing in this neighborhood come from one of these three institutions.

Current bus transit in Wynnefield Heights is adequate for most purposes. However, it lacks a few key interconnections--particularly to nearby Philadelphia and Temple Universities. (See Figure E.) Furthermore, this lack of a natural Temple connection, coupled with the lack of a strong bypass of Roberts Hollow, forces the 38 bus to go out of its way and traverse a most circular routing of Wynnefield Heights. The long-term transportation strategy is, thus, to run an extension of either the 3 or 39 across the Strawberry Mansion Bridge and through Wynnefield Heights, improving Temple University access; and to reroute the 38 via the new cutoff around Roberts Hollow, described above; additionally, instead of heading to Wissahickon Transfer, the 38 would head up Schoolhouse Avenue past Philadelphia University and terminate instead either at Lyceum in Roxborough, Wayne and Chelten in Germantown, or at the Queen Lane Regional Rail station (see Figure F).

Figure F: First phase of a transit plan. This network uses the 38, 39, 40, and 65 to access every important Heights location.

In the long term, however, consideration must be given to the viability of a light rail line along City Line Avenue; were this to be implemented, the City Line bus patterns would be significantly altered, affecting the Heights tangentially. A bus terminal facility at the corner of Monument and St. Asaph's would replace the overlapping termini loops the 39 and 40 would have in Phase 1. The 40 would either follow Monument straight up, or run along Belmont to Ford, to make this terminus; the 39 would run up Belmont to St. Asaph's and follow that route thence. Light rail would make current 1and 65 service west of City Line and Presidential duplicative, and so the 1 would terminate at this new Cynwyd anchor, and the 65 run through it and along St. Asaph's through Bala Village and then back down towards Wynnefield. (See Figure G.) Commuter buses--currently the 44--would of course, however, continue to follow City Line; they do not have the frequency expectations of the light rail, frequent network, or crosstowns.

Figure G: A longer-term outlook for Wynnefield Heights transit. On this map, the prospective light rail line is labeled "100".

Conclusions

Wynnefield Heights, as it currently is, is a highly disconnected and suburban neighborhood. By improving street and pedestrian interconnections, and by re-examining the bus network, the Heights can be a far more interconnected--and hence urbane--place to live.

Next time I will talk about built form modifications in Wynnefield Heights.

In the Pipeline

Just because I haven't been posting doesn't mean I haven't been working on stuff! Here are some projects I'm hoping to publish in the near future...

1. Continuing "Neighborhood Mystique"...actually, what I want is for somebody like Plan Philly or Naked Philly to pick it up and pay me to write it. Next stop's Belmont Village.
2. Analyzing SEPTA's route changes. This should be up early next week.
3. John had some good comments on the MARC proposal. In light of these ideas, and other connections that need to be made, I'd like to work on the structure of the system some more.
4. I walked up to the Cynwyd* Trail last week and boy was I amazed. A linear park 30 feet wide and they're managing to fill all of it with trail! How is that even possible...? Criticism of excessive infrastructure, obviously, in the works.
5.Criticism of BRT. My general critique is that it's much too amorphous, it tends to be competitive with other modes more often than complimentary, and that it's often politicized by anti-rail factions who cite (illusory) cost reductions. This is spurred in large part due to Human Transit's recent BRT-love, and is not to say there isn't a place for it so much as to say it hasn't really found its place.
6. Talking about challenges and opportunities of the West Chester and Octoraro branches (the latter goes to Chadds Ford and eventually the Herr's plant down in Nottingham).
7. Talking about integrating the Reading and Quakertown proposals into a unified network. The current disunified way these proposals are being worked on undermines the considerable strength, via economies of scale, that unifying them together would offer.
8. A Center City frequent grid network. Developing a schematic has been troublesome for me. Well, coming (as I do) from an Illustrator background, Inkscape has been troublesome for me.
9. Improving service frequencies on crosstown buses that connect with the Broad Street Line.
10. Building a commuter bus network. One of my ideas is to turn some disused space near 30th Street Station into a commuter bus terminal for SEPTA and NJT. This would help cut down on the excessive number of bus routes along Market and consolidate service in such a way to make it easier to build on more.
11. The Lower East Falls, Wynnefield Heights, and Parkway plans are still in development. Actually, I haven't really worked on them (lazy...). I would really like to finish at least one soon.
12. Last, but not least, I want to ask the question, why is ridership so low at Bala station?
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* KIN-wood.

In the Pipeline

I've had some ideas for blog posts for a while, but haven't been executing for the past couple of days. However, hopefully (maybe) look for these in the coming days:

(1) A post on the hierarchy of parks, from the neighborhood square to the main city greenspace;
(2) A post on Roman-style house construction viz. setback construction;
(3) Finishing my series on the Loop Network (Philadelphia2050);
(4) Concerns with the new zoning code and the comprehensive Philadelphia2035 city plan;
(5) Taking a look at transportation centers in Philadelphia and how they can be improved; and
(6) Whatever else is on my mind.

What will happen? We shall see!