This is not the suburbs

Does this look like the suburbs?

Clark Street. From Daley Plaza at the heart of the Chicago Loop, it heads north along the Gold Coast and ambles through Lincoln Park and Lakeview on the way to Wrigley Field. 

This is not the suburbs.

The Clark Street corridor is a walkable urban neighborhood that we’ve been treating like sprawling suburbia—like a place to drive through rather than a place to live.

The largest unmet demand in American real estate is for walkable urbanism—neighborhoods close to downtown with high-quality (rail) transit service and lots of amenities within walking distance of home. There is plenty of demand for a few such neighborhoods in Chicago, too.

There are too many people living in the Clark Street corridor for it to be efficiently served by a transportation infrastructure that prioritizes through traffic and parking over transit and biking on every single street. What works in the more sprawling, auto-dependent neighborhoods to the west doesn’t work near the lakefront. There’s no reason we should continue to treat all of our 814 streets as though they were all the same, when they’re obviously not. There’s plenty of room for some variety in Chicago—for a few streets that prioritize pedestrians, or cyclists, or transit over cars. When it comes to streets, we could use a little more choice and competition.

The good news is that we have enough density in the Clark Street corridor to justify having one street that prioritizes commuter transit and shopping over driving and parking. It's the densest place in the city. We’re lucky to have enough density for world-class transit, for great neighborhood shopping in a pedestrian environment, and for car ownership to be an option rather than a necessity. We can spend less on car loans, gas, insurance, maintenance, and parking and more on real estate and restaurants. We could be wasting less time stuck in a car than anyone in Chicago—and spending more time at the beach or the bar, the zoo or the Cubs game, with our families and our friends.

Time for greatness

The density of a city and the transportation infrastructure that serves it generally evolve together. As population density changes, the infrastructure adapts to provide an appropriate, cost-effective, efficient mix of options for getting around town.

From its founding through the 1950s, the city of Chicago became increasingly dense. It was planned and developed around the largest network of streetcars that has ever existed. There was an electric streetcar line on almost every street, and there could be no development without one. 


In the 1950s automobiles and buses replaced streetcars and the city's population began to decline, sprawling out into the suburbs. Taxpayers fled, while spending to build and maintain roads ballooned as we replaced streetcars with the most expensive and least efficient transportation option on the menu: the private car. The result is some of the worst traffic congestion in America. While the suburbs have continued to grow, by 2010 the population of the city itself had declined to its lowest point since 1910. 


But things have begun to change again. For many, the dream of suburban living has evolved into a nightmare of traffic congestion, parking lots, and strip malls. It's boring. People have been moving back downtown for the convenience and the culture. Dynamic companies have begun relocating to the city center to attract a creative workforce that favors urban living. It's more fun. 

The transportation infrastructure needs to accommodate and encourage greater density and continued economic development. We need a growth-oriented strategy that brings more people and fewer cars into the Loop every year--more commerce and less congestion. The system we have today was designed for the era of suburban flight. It’s out of sync with the future of Chicago. 

It’s time for an upgrade to a modern transportation infrastructure that’s in time with the great city we are becoming. 

Greatness.

Mediocrity.

Greatness.

Reverse Option Analysis

My antidote for the status quo bias is the Reverse Option Analysis. That’s where you reverse the positions of the status quo and the proposed change. You treat the proposed change as if we had been living with it for generations; you treat the status quo as if if were a proposal for something new.
Ready?

How would we view a proposal to change from a status quo of electric streetcars in dedicated lanes to a new system of diesel buses stuck in traffic?

The Reverse Option Analysis makes the status quo bias obvious: people accept buses in traffic not because it’s a good strategy but because it’s the status quo.

The Status Quo Bias

How come no one ever has to make an argument in defense of the status quo?

I spend a lot of my time making an argument for change—for designing smarter systems and investing more responsibly. How come those of us who want change have to work so hard to make a convincing argument, while advocates of the status quo get to just sit back and shake their heads?

There’s a good reason, actually. It’s the status quo bias.

The status quo bias is a good thing. It’s essential to our ability to survive and thrive. Our instinctive conservatism—our preference for keeping things the way they are—protects us from incapacitating self-doubt and the misery of regret (did I marry the wrong guy, choose the wrong career, buy too big a house?). It relieves us of the burden of constantly reassessing our past choices. It keeps us from becoming mired in thoughts of what might have been and allows us to get on with our lives, to make the best of what we have.

But as an advocate of change, the status quo bias is my biggest problem.

Good enough is the enemy of better.

The status quo bias is that look people get on their faces when they realize that I’m rethinking what they’ve always accepted as the natural state of things. They look at me like I’m asking, Are you sure you’re happy in that marriage? Are you sure that’s the right job for you? Didn’t you overspend on that house?

They can recognize that there’s a problem with the role of cars in our city. They can acknowledge that other cities have undertaken major changes that have fixed that problem, and that—theoretically, at least—we could do it too. And still it is inconceivable that we would do anything at all about it. There’s a gap between “we should” and “we won’t”: it’s the status quo bias.

It’s the status quo bias that allows people to confidently dismiss progress with the phrase, “That would be great, but it’ll never happen.”

The status quo bias serves us well from day to day, but it’s a liability when we’re deciding how to invest billions of dollars in taxes, making decisions that determine what assets and liabilities taxpayers will own for generations to come. Big, strategic decisions (more highways, parking lots, and congestion or a modern electric tram in every neighborhood?) deserve an unbiased, objective, critical thought process.

For public-policy decisions to determine how we invest in energy and transportation infrastructure, we should adopt the following practices:

(1) Acknowledge the natural status quo bias in ourselves and others, and make a conscious effort to be open-minded and creative in our thinking in order to compensate for the status quo bias;

(2) Be just as critical and demanding of the status quo as we are of proposals for change, so that we make a fair and rational comparison between them; and

(3) Consider the Reverse Option: for example, how would we view a proposal to change from a status quo of electric streetcars in dedicated lanes to a new system of diesel buses stuck in traffic?

Is Chicago dense enough for streetcars?

People look at picturesque images of European cities with families walking together on pedestrian shopping streets, businessmen stepping aboard sleek electric trams, and well-dressed women biking to work in heels. They say, "It's just completely different there. There must be some good reason why we can't have that. We're too spread out, our cities were made for cars. We can't afford great public transit."

What if, in fact, every street in Chicago was originally designed for streetcars and pedestrians? What if it turned out that we had more population, more density and more traffic congestion--more reason to invest in walkable, transit-optimized streets--than they do? What if the every-man-for-himself approach to transportation planning turned out to be the most expensive option on the menu, and we ended up spending more time and money getting where we need to go than everyone else?


Strasbourg has one-tenth our population and less density. In 1994 they fixed their urban congestion problem and boosted their economy by replacing cars and buses on many downtown streets with modern streetcars that also connect commuter suburbs to the core. These light-rail vehicles rocket through the countryside like wind-powered bullet trains, then glide slowly and safely through the city's residential and shopping streets.

Clark Street: a good place to start

Most of the many new streetcar lines being developed in the U.S. are primarily business and property development initiatives rather than transit projects. They go in as catalysts to spark growth in underdeveloped neighborhoods. Revitalizing cities with infill development on vacant urban parcels instead of investing in more suburban sprawl is good. But it’s a long process, and one that takes great vision, political will, and long-term commitment from major stakeholders.

The Clark Street streetcar project is easier.

It’s the low-hanging fruit in the modernization of Chicago’s transportation infrastructure. It’s a good place for a starter line not because it would have the greatest positive impact on the city, but because Clark Street is the easiest place to demonstrate how a great a modern streetcar can be for a neighborhood.

The people are already here, and they’re already taking transit. We’re already spending a lot of money providing them with buses stuck in traffic.

Some neighborhoods in Chicago (like Lincoln Park) deserve streetcars because they already have the density and ridership to motivate upgrading to a more efficient mode than buses stuck in traffic. Other neighborhoods (like the near South Side) are vastly underdeveloped in light of their outstanding locations, and these are ripe for the kind of development seeded by streetcars that we’ve seen in Portland’s Pearl District.

Because of how diverse Chicago is in terms of population density and development potential, we should expect to see streetcars serving different purposes—maybe even along a single line. The Clark Street line might continue south through the Loop, swing past McCormick Center, and along Cottage Grove to Hyde Park. The north half of the line would be primarily a transit efficiency and congestion reduction project, while the south half would be primarily a neighborhood development and revitalization project. 

We might some day see an entirely different third type of streetcar project along Milwaukee Avenue. Instead of building a tremendously expensive express train between the Loop and O’Hare Airport, we could build a modern streetcar line on Milwaukee and convert the Blue Line to express service. That would cost about one-tenth as much as building a new heavy-rail express train. And the Milwaukee Avenue streetcar would provide much better transit service than the Blue Line: travel times would be similar, but the stations would be at street level right in the neighborhood instead of elevated and in the middle of the highway. The new streetcar would boost property values and business all along the line. 

The next generation

The stats
From 2001-2009, among Americans aged 16-34,
Driving is down 23%
Biking is up 24%
Transit use is up 40%
Among those with a household income over $70,000, transit use is up 100% and biking is up 122%.
Source
Article about the report


Recently a friend told me about her son’s trip with some friends to a national park out west. They took the train. I thought that was an indication of their environmental awareness, but no—she said they took the train so they could play the whole way.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but young people today don’t want to do one thing at a time. They don’t want to make separate trips for everything. They don’t want to begin and end their day with an hour of sitting behind the wheel looking at the bumper in front of them. They want to be able to work, relax, or connect with friends on the way to work. They want to be able to shop on the way home. They want to live upstairs from a fun restaurant, down the street from a great bar, and around the corner from a movie theater.

The next generation will take transit not because it’s green but because driving is boring. They’ll live in walkable urban neighborhoods not because it’s fashionable but because being dependent on a car is such a hassle. To these kids, the idea that they would have to work the first two hours of the just to pay for owning, fueling, insuring, maintaining, and parking a car, which they would be stuck sitting in for a further two hours of the day just to get to the office and back, all so they can live in a suburban development where there’s nothing to do, is plainly insane.

What they want is to live in a streetcar neighborhood. The streetcar is a catalyst for economic development—the kind of development based on convenience, efficiency, comfort, and a socially interactive and vibrant urban lifestyle.