Elevated Rails to Skytrains

The Elevated Transit Rail system is not a new type of transit solution, but for many cities it is an “un-preferred” one. Specifically in many western cities, elevated mass transit rail systems were some of the first rail solutions for mass transit. The idea is a simple one; build railways elevated above the roads so that they will not interfere with road traffic below. Earlier on, these elevated railways were technically more feasible than underground railways, and were also cheaper to build.

Elevated Subway in NYC- Photo credit: Flickr user jag9889

"L" Train in Chicago - Photo credit: Flickr user MD111

Difficulties came with these elevated railways after construction, when residents began to see them as blight within their community. Specifically the older railway systems such as the elevated subways in New York City or the “L” in Chicago are quite unappealing – at best. Not only are these tracks very loud, but they depress views from buildings along thier path and are much more vulnerable to the weather such as rain or snow.

NYC Subway being cleared of snow after a storm

With these observations in mind it is curious to note that there is a very successful and

Bangkok BTS or "Skytrain"

somewhat beloved elevated railway in the developing world, known as the Skytrain. The Skytrain or BTS is located in Bangkok, Thailand and consists of two lines and 25 stations. It was named the “Skytrian” by the press during the planning process and since its inception, construction and completion has become one of the preferred and well-loved modes of transportation in Bangkok.

An Earlier Version of the Skytrain Map

Skytrain Elevated Railways

As one can see the Bangkok Skytrain looks vastly different to earlier elevated railways and it is based on these differences that it has grown to be successful. With over 500,000 daily trips on the skytrain, the BTS is financially sound enough to cover daily expenses of operations. What makes the Skytrain an interesting success story is the acceptance and general public interest in the system. While elevated railways in other cities could be looked upon with frustration, the monorail design, quieter trains, sleeker construction and looks, connected elevated “skywalks” from the stations to neighboring buildings and relative cleanliness and efficiency of the rail line has led it to success.

View from one of the "Skywalks"

The Skytrains themselves are also very easy for tourists to use; they contain Thai and English signs and announcements, are relatively inexpensive (compared to Western systems – but are certainly expensive for lower income Thai workers) and have air-con and video screens playing music videos and commercials inside the trains.

Skytrain Signs and System Map

Many stations are connected to extensive “skywalks” connecting the Skytrain to malls, offices and residence buildings. There are many small kiosk-like shops and stairs and escalators at many of the stations to the street level.

Skytrain Entrance

The success with the Skytrain can also be noted for a few other important factors. In the 1990’s when the system was envisioned and constructed, Bangkok was world-renowned (and probably still is) for its extensive traffic and congestion. Any type of relief was greatly appreciated. Next the BTS is strategically located in an area of “New Bangkok” – a relatively recent development of the Bangkok Skyline. The newer office buildings and residences lacked the same community or sense of protective outcry that there would have been if the skytrain was built in the “Old Bangkok” area; near most of the city’s famous temples and monuments. The BTS lines also are connected to an Underground Subway Line (MRT), a Bus Rapid Transit line (BRT) and another elevated line running express to the International Airport (SRT) creating an integrated mass transit system to get around large sections of the city.

A Map of the Current Skytrain System with MRT (Underground), BRT (Rapid Bus) and SRT (Express Rail) run lines shown

Currently there are extensions under construction to lengthen both Skytrain lines and a second express elevated rail line (managed by a different organization – SRT) that will hook up with the Skytrain. The impact of these other mass transit systems and lines on the Skytrain’s use and functionality is beyond the scope of this post but it is interesting to see how some cities can not only use but can fully embrace elevated rails.

-Adam

Urbanization News: July 8

Rankled: This week’s featured news story is from Polis, which posted an excellent critical piece about city rankings:

“The regurgitated notion that New York, London, and Tokyo sit comfortably at the peak of the “global city” hierarchy has little bearing on the activities of the street cleaners, shop owners, artists, and residents who populate these places. Or does it?”

The post raises that questions not only the metrics used to rate “top” cities, but also mentions recent research on how cities deemed to be the best can also hurt other cities by drawing away businesses and workers, and “world-class” cities also tend to have higher degrees of inequities.

Melissa has written about and critiqued city indices in past posts too, check them out here and here.

Urban Evolution from Revolution: Der Spiegel describes how while the future of the Yemeni capital hangs in the balance, what started as a sit-in has evolved into a 3-4,000 organized tent city.

New to the Tube: The Economist reports on the London Tube‘s new map that’s supposed to be more geographically accurate – but will it be easier to use? The article gives a nod to NYU-Wagner professor Zhan Guo’s recent paper that made headlines last month in the UK from showing that the (now) old map tricked 30% of passengers into taking longer trips than they needed to. If you’re in London, let us know if the new, squigglier map has made your commute any faster.

2014 Transport Goooools: TheCityFix reports that the Inter-American Development Bank and other donors are making huge investments in Brazil’s infrastructure, especially the transport sector, in advance of the 2014 World Cup.

Building Binge?: As Chinese cities like Wuhan are racing to developing new infrastructure, the New York Times reports new worries about understated risk of loans to local governments.

Two Wheels Good, Two Wheels Bad: This Big City proposes that better bike networks are a positive feedback for other qualities that make for more socially sustainable cities. With that in mind it’s sad to hear local media reporting from Toronto that “The war is over, the car has won.” That’s true in another sense, according to the New York Times’ Economix blog, which speaks to the huge direct subsidies and indirect social costs cars pose on cities, which trump the benefits cities receive from cycling.

UNEP Map: Slum Population of Africa

Usually Asia and not Africa comes to mind when we hear about rapid urbanization.  UN-HABITAT however, warns that over the next 40 years Africa’s urban population will triple. With this trend in mind the results of Riccardo Pravettoni’s map below seem quite startling when one considers how many of Africa’s urban residents already live in slums.

Riccardo Pravettoni at UNEP/GRID-Arendal, a collaborating centre of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), uses pie charts to visualizes the share of urban populations living in slums –   areas defined as lacking infrastructure such as permanent housing, piped water and sewerage systems.

- Melissa

Source: UNDESA via maptd

Real Time City: LIVE Singapore

MIT’s SENSEable City Lab presents “LIVE Singapore!,” a series of five different perspectives of flowing real time data in Singapore.  The exhibit is composed of: multi-dimensional maps… showing the movement of crowds, taxis, airline passengers, the cityʼs fast changing microclimatic conditions, the islandʼs electricity consumption, as well as shipping containers passing through the worldʼs largest trans-shipment sea port in real-time.

The project was developed as part of the Future Urban Mobility research initiative at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).  According to the projects leader the exhibit is:

…just the beginning of something that aims to develop into an open platform for the management of urban realtime data and the engagement of developer communities in writing innovative applications for the city.

Although this exhibit looks visually striking, the true test of the project’s success will be in how this information is actually shared with citizens.  In order to have a “real city” of flowing data, Singapore and MIT’s SENSEable City Lab should make the open platform for this data available not just for citizens to view in the internet but also to use and edit on other platforms.  Needless to say it will be interesting to see how this data-rich city works with MIT as this project unfolds.

LIVE Singapore! will be on display at Singapore Art Museum from April 8th until May 1st, 2011. Read more from FlowingData.

- Melissa

Container Ship Activity

Mobile Phone Useage

Photogenic Cities

Have you ever wondered how photogenic your city is?  Eric Fischer created a series of maps, ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each city.  He use  geotagged photo information from public Flickr and Picasa folders to create these maps. Here are his top five cities:

1. New York City

2. London

3. Paris

4. San Francisco

5. Berlin

The complete set ranks 100 cities across the world.  Fischer does offer one disclaimer to his ranking system though:

This is a little unfair to aggressively polycentric cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles, which probably get lower placement than they really deserve because there are gaps where no one took any pictures.

Besides considering the general urban form of polycentric cities shaping where we take pictures, it is also very interesting to note that the top tweleve cities are all in North America and Europe, with Hong Kong appearing at #13.  Leading me to wonder how would these rankings look if data from popular photo sharing websites in Asia was also included in Fischer’s maps?

- Melissa

Mapping Shacks in Uganda

UN-HABITAT and Slum/Shack Dwellers International have joined forces in Uganda on a pilot project mapping land occupancy in urban slums based on actual patterns of occupancy rather than parcel boundary. This project is part of a larger effort by the Government of Uganda and the World Bank’s Cities Alliance to introduce poverty reduction measures through land reform to cities across Uganda.

Read more about it here.

- Ariana

Urban Form in Shanghai vs New York

Berlin

New York

Istanbul

After last week’s post Comparing Urban Form and then seeing these amazing comparative maps by French artist Armelle Caron I was inspired to investigate urban form a little deeper.  One description of Caron’s work says,

Caron strips cities of their spatial context. Roads and rivers become irrelevant, districts and parks disappear. The relationship between built-up areas and empty spaces is obliterated. The city is hung out to dry by its smallest constituent parts. The cartographic compact – maps, however imperfect and partial on paper, are reliable real-world guides – is nullified. The city is un-mapped.

As a New Yorker that spends a large portion of my time studying Asian cities, and traveling to them whenever the opportunity arises, I am always curious as to why some of my favorite artistic interpretations of comparative urban form never seem to compare Asian cities with western cities.  This stark contrast based on shear size of Asian cities compared with Western cities seems an exciting enough reason to further explore their urban patterns. So I decided to use Open Street Maps and some basic Photoshops skills to compare city blocks in Shanghai’s Pudong district (on the eastern side of the river) with lower Manhattan, since both serve as financial districts. Of course my maps are not as in depth of a study as Caron’s deconstructed cities but you can still notice a striking difference between Shanghai’s massive new development in Pudong (east portion) with the Bund and other historic development in Pu Xi (west portions).  Even more striking though is that even the blocks of Pu Xi seems large compared to lower Manhattan.

Shanghai

Manhattan

After walking the massive blocks of Pudong this summer I was not that surprised when I realize that one block in Pudong was the same size as about 6 blocks in Lower Manhattan.  What is surprising though is to consider what the size of these city blocks may mean about the density of these cities if future development mirrored these sections.

Melissa

City Beautiful: Art as map. Map as Art.

This week’s City Beautiful lets my current urban planner self wax nostalgic with my undergrad art history major self from so long ago – together we’re going to indulge in a little exploration of how cities, photography and geographic information collide into Google Street View. Street View objectively surveys a physical place for us, but the roving mechanical eye can’t help but snap people and the marks they leave on their urban canvas. Let’s look at this from a couple of perspectives: first, how Street View can document art in the process, and then how it can become an art form in and of itself.

Last week was the grand unveiling of  Street Art View, art which is brought to you by the energy drink Red Bull and their Brazilian marketing firm Loducca. Basically it’s a Google map interface that uses crowdsourcing to pinpoint locations in the world where you can check out street art when you’re supposed to be working or studying – I found this one in Rio de Janeiro:

Red Bull empowers you to help create the “world’s largest art collection” with them – it’s a neat idea and fun to look at, but I’m not really buying the art collection spin. Let’s call it what it is – a lot of low-res photos of graffiti used to market fizzy syrup that tastes like strawberry Nerds. It’s also an ironic “collection” given graffiti by nature isn’t particularly collectible, nor does it generally want to be. At any rate, it’s still cool to cruise around Rio’s streets looking at what Brazilian urban outsider artists are painting on walls and buildings.

Shortly before Red Bull declared itself the grand collector of outsider art, Google itself edged into the world of fine art with the Google Art Project. This uses Street View technology to let us “walk” around in the galleries of the world’s finest museums (or those in the U.S. and Europe, anyway). I tried it out and was mostly annoyed, unable to navigate out of the Rijksmuseum’s gift shop. After bailing on Amsterdam I did fly over to Florence and sat on a bench admiring Botticelli’s Venus in the Uffizi:

For the most part Street View is a cold survey of the world, but it can’t help but capture what people in it are doing – artists are virtually walking the streets in search of a decisive moment, but appropriating it from Google.  Sure, this type of work might elicit the “seriously – this is art?” reaction to some, but how is it all that different from traditional street photography? Whether walking or clicking down a street, an artist still combs through mundane scenes in search of composition and expression. After flipping through a lot of these photos, you start noticing something eerily quiet about them. Solitary figures, blurred faces with identities intentionally erased by facial recognition software, some surprisingly painterly, many others depicting unfortunate events. Here are a few.

Michael Wolf is a photojournalist by trade and takes actual photographs of his computer screen with street views on it. He has series from New York and Paris – this one is from Manhattan:

Montreal artist Jon Rafman’s work is probably my favorite – there’s something almost intimate about the scenes he selected from across the globe, many of them gritty social commentaries hearkening back to the hard-boiled street photography of post-war America – drugs, guns, accidents and such:

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture series is a recent initiative that focuses on crumbling American cities like Detroit and Camden. His selections are mostly quiet, lonely scenes like this one from Fresno, California:

If you know any other artists or projects that are appropriating Google’s appropriation of our cities, please do share in the comments or email me at amy.faust [at] nyu.edu.

Amy

Ring Roads!

Ring roads are not loved by all planners, but the are certainly fascinating when compared across the world on this poster by Rice University’s School of Architecture: Rings Roads of the World.

Melissa

Urban Form at the Center of Egypt’s Revolution

Tahrir Square, in downtown Cairo, remained the center of protests that led to the ousting of Mubarak on Friday.  The New York Times published a interactive map yesterday that displays how the protest and police clashes too shape, literally, over the last few weeks.  This map and time line is awesome for anyone that is interested in how the urban form of downtown Cairo provided space for the revolutionary events over the last few weeks.

Melissa