A Sunday Drive in Zanzibar

After landing in Zanzibar for a brief work trip and confirming that it was indeed an actual place, the first thing I noticed was a refreshing lack of traffic compared to Dar es Salaam. The next thing I noticed was that the tree-lined streets are traveled by many more bikes and motorcycles than automobiles. Then, within five minutes of leaving the airport, we passed by the scene of a motorcycle accident.

Zanzibar’s population is growing at a worrisome pace – Stone Town, the main city, is a crumbly but beautiful remnant of Zanzibar’s Persian past, but outside of the historic area you see the sprawling unplanned settlements common to expanding cities on the mainland. While the government is challenged to keep up basic services as the population grows, an effort to improve road conditions is apparent and most of the main ones are in pretty good shape. But the combination of population growth, more cars and smooth roads is leading to a tragic record on road safety even the President himself recently addressed.

Being a short visit to several villages around the northern part of the island, I didn’t have a chance to do any cycling myself but did spend some quality time from the back of our van watching and photographing the road late on a Sunday afternoon on our way back to Stone Town. As the sun started to set the roads were active but not so much with car traffic – most people were cyclists or walking. This particular road was in good shape and I was told had been recently tarmacked, but given the overwhelming majority using it for non-motorized transportation it surely didn’t seem that this was given much consideration in the design for its upgrading.

 

While overtaking a truck piled high with freshly-cut sugar cane, you get a peek that everyone up ahead is on foot or a bike, stretching across both lanes. There is a shoulder but it’s quite narrow considering the number of people using it.

Again, open road ahead, many people on the move but not too many with motors.

The next few photos are taken from my window as we zoomed past in the van. The pace of cycling is an easy one – mostly old Chinese steel-frame bikes, sturdy and good for hauling stuff, but not built for speed. People (mostly men) rode with bundles of firewood, veggies, and sacks of charcoal (and women) on the back. This contrasted with sparse but aggressive traffic, mostly trucks, daladalas, and boxy vans like ours. The images below look peaceful and pastoral, and the scene really was – but keep in mind I’m observing it from a vehicle going 50-60 mph.

I wasn’t able to find any decent data on how many people bike, walk and drive in Zanzibar, but it was clear that a lot of people bike, and they’re pedaling on smooth but aggressive roads. I also don’t know much yet on the details of the Decade of Action for Road Safety that kicked off this year (sponsored by the U.N. and WHO), but it’s timely and making a very needed connection between transportation and public health. I’m hoping that it includes not just traffic enforcement and awareness for drivers, but is also pushing for engineers and transport planners to taking a good look at who actually uses roads when investing to improve them – and that “improvement” means “safer” along with “faster”.

~Amy

This is cross-posted from my new blog on cycling in Tanzania, Cyclopology. All photos by author.

Urbanization News: July 29

Pop Up to Permanent: The Globe and Mail features cities in North America and Europe that have embraced the idea of pop-up projects as a planning tool to rethink public spaces. The image above is from Times Square in New York, a “pilot” project that closed one of the city’s most chaotic streets to car traffic, a change that’s feeling pretty permanent these days.

HSR Crash Update: The New York Times reported that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao admitted last week’s high-speed rail crash that killed 39 people was the result of a serious design flaw – not only did a signaling device malfunction after a lightning strike, but inadequately-trained workers also failed to notice.

Extortion, Violence Cripple Bus System: In more unfortunate transit news, TheCityFix reports that thousands of residents in Medellin, Colombia are without bus service due a driver strike to protest inadequate protection from extortionist gangs. A longtime bus driver was recently murdered after refusing to pay an extortion fee, setting off the strikes.

Master Plan in Abu Dhabi: The National outlines a new master plan for two suburban communities in Abu Dhabi,  which would work to connect communities divided by a highway, promote walkability, and integrate them with the growing Abu Dhabi metro area. The revitalization would cover one of the oldest Emirati communities in the United Arab Emirates.

Green or Greenwashing?: The UK released a new national planning framework of its own that attempts to cut red tape, safeguard the environment, and prioritize sustainable development. Green groups, however, claim the lofty language obscures that the framework would actually jeopardize environmental protection and make carbon-intensive development projects easier.

Dealing With Density 1: Last week we featured a story about public housing in Hong Kong – this week the Wall Street Journal offers a personal view into the crisis of overcrowding, the trend of subdividing already small apartments, and the challenge of providing housing in the city of seven million.

Dealing With Density 2: While in Hong Kong more people are fitting into smaller spaces, the Guardian UK reports on Moscow’s controversial plan to double the city’s size to relieve crippling congestion – a plan that would destroy forests, summer homes, and relocate hundreds of thousands of rural residents. Moscow’s population has grown by 200,000 people per year since 2006.

Nixed Signals: The Times of India reports that Gandhinagar, the only city in the state of Gujarat that has no traffic lights or stop signs (but lots of roundabouts), is getting its first traffic booth as the number of cars on the road has grown unmanageable.

Urbanization News: July 15

That snazzy promo video is for this week’s featured urban happening, “The Just City: A Ford Forum on Metropolitan Opportunity” held in New York yesterday. Sponsored by the Ford Foundation, it brought together “Civic leaders and policymakers, urban designers and entrepreneurs [to] explore how fairness, opportunity and equity can serve as the defining features of this new era of urbanization.” NYU-Wagner adjunct planning prof Solomon Greene, also a fellow at the Open Society Foundations, offers some remarks on Bruce Katz‘s talk in this video. The lineup was an impressive one of thinkers and practitioners doing visionary work in their metropolitan area.

And our picks of the week’s news on cities and urbanization:

This Week in Waste: A pair of articles discusses innovative strategies for what to do with waste as cities grow. This article from PRI features a hydroponic farm in a Chinese lake that gets fertilizer for its leafy greens from sewage dumped in the water from the city of Kunming (photo below, courtesy of PRI). This dispatch from India via Live Mint critiques Delhi’s privatization of waste hauling, especially where Pune offers an example of a rapidly urbanizing city implementing a zero-waste strategy that’s working both for people who sustain their livelihoods from the waste stream and for the environment too.

My city’s modal split is better than yours: The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy opened up nominations for the 2012 Sustainable Transport Award – hurry up and nominate the city where you love to commute! Right now you’re up against Seville, Minneapolis, Cape Town and a few others – Guangzhou won last year, so you won’t have to compete with their awesome BRT and bike share.

“They put a bullet through the train”: In last week’s news we reported that donors had pledged big bucks for inter-city transportation infrastructure in Brazil in anticipation of the 2014 World Cup. Long a transport investment darling of the donor community, Brazil might not be quite as sexy as previously thought – Reuters reports that an auction that opened up this week for bids to build a bullet train between Rio and Sao Paulo (this one a major project for the 2016 Olympics) failed to attract a single bid.

The “Forgotten Front”: This Big City reports on the desperate situation of water in Afghanistan – being in turmoil for decades, infrastructure and institutions needed for a reliable and safe water supply have suffered greatly. “Around 73 percent of the population relies on improvised and inadequate facilities to supply water, while water sources are becoming increasingly polluted and overexploited in places like Kabul.” Find out more in this report from the Centre for Policy and Human Development at Kabul University (photo of the Kabul River below courtesy of IRIN, see a slideshow here). And just in case you were scratching your head too, the U.S. alone has spent about $19 billion just in development aid in Afghanistan since the war effort started.

Everyone should count: Cities Alliance released a new report this week, “The Urbanisation of Displaced People.” It examines how conflicts and wars lead to a unique form of rapid urbanization as people flee their homes and seek refuge in cities – because many refugees and displaced people end up as permanent residents, the report makes a  case for planners and development practitioners to account for these populations in plans and programs.

A critique of Ed Glaeser?!?: James Howard Kunstler, in his witty weekly “KunstlerCast” podcast, critiques Ed Glaeser’s ideas on urbanism. He sees Glaeser’s vision  in his lauded book Triumph of the City as backward-looking and too sweet on skyscrapers.

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.

The Intersection of Advocacy and Ad Hoc Traffic Counts in Toronto

Urban planning is one of the few policy areas that invites community members to participate in the process, and offer insights and criticism on city plans. This is what drew me to the field to start with – I am really intrigued by the way community members can use the tools at their disposal to participate in planning their cities.  During my graduate degree I was introduced to other facets of planning I hadn’t previously considered, including the critical role of data.  Through an internship with New York City government and a Capstone consulting project for IBM City Forward, I’ve come to appreciate good data, and have become surprisingly sensitive (even offended!) by bad data.

As city governments around the world are trying to create more livable cities, in part through redesigning streetscapes, they need to do so in a way that values data. And if they don’t, citizens are increasingly equipped with planning methods that will call them out on it.

The “John Street Corridor Improvements,” a joint project between the City of Toronto and the local Entertainment District Business Improvement Area (BIA),  is a story that illustrates the intersection between advocacy, planning and data. The John Street project is intended to improve the pedestrian realm on a small but central street in Toronto’s Entertainment District and major cultural corridor. Despite having the worthy objectives of making John Street a pedestrian destination and more conducive to outdoor events, the case goes to show that without good data, advocates will take it upon themselves to get it right.

Left: Map of John Street study area. Right: Image of John Street | Photo credit: boldts.net

A second public meeting was held on June 16, 2011 to discuss the design options that are being considered for John Street (Spacing and UrbanToronto.ca both have great synopses of the project), which included design elements such as sidewalk extensions, removing curbs and parking lanes, reducing the street to one traffic lane, as well as the  obligatory “do nothing” option.

One of several design options for John Street | Photo credit: Urban Toronto

Shortly before the meeting, though, local cycling advocate and all-around civic participation champion Dave Meslin pointed out some fishy figures with the City’s baseline survey:

City of Toronto's mode share data.

The numbers begged some obvious questions: First, why was the cycling count so low? Anyone who is familiar with John Street knows that the bike traffic is more substantial than the city’s 2% figure. Second, why are the counts for cycling traffic static, while the counts for other modes shift over the course of the day and throughout the week? After not getting any good answers from the City, Meslin rallied some friends and they held their own tally – twice – and found that the numbers were, as expected, completely off. The chart below compares the City’s data with what Meslin’s ad-hoc transport planners found:

The top row shows the numbers from the City's original survey, the bottom row shows the findings by Meslin's team.

Persuaded, the City of Toronto issued the following statement to Meslin and his group of volunteers:

“On the City’s behalf, I’d like to thank you for the effort that you have put in to supplementing our counts with new material gathered in the past weeks…..We agree it was inappropriate and incorrect to have used the 2% figure for weekday peak hours.”

This redesign is a smart and creative plan, and as a Torontonian who as worked, walked, biked, driven, and certainly partied on John Street I’m looking forward to a new look for the street. But integrity of baseline data is critical, no matter how well-meaning the objectives of any plan – it informs the direction of the project, and helps planners identify unique characteristics of the study area and foresee mitigation measures that may need to be explored.

For example, had the baseline study revealed unusually heavy cycling traffic on John Street that would be displaced by the new design, then perhaps the streets east and west of John should have been included in the study area and proper bike lanes installed there to catch the overflow.  Inaccurate data not only compromises the project and runs the risk of future planning issues, but it also undermines the integrity of the study and potentially the public’s trust in the project – as John Street exemplifies.

Another critical piece here is the role of advocacy in planning.  The planning process is one of the few formalized avenues for public participation.  The requisite public consultations allow members of the community to contribute to plans, and help to revise and refine urban designs.

The story of John Street Corridor Improvements and cycling advocates is a great example of how the intersection of planning and advocacy can be done in a positive way.  To be sure, the goal of the project is to improve the pedestrian realm, so perhaps bike lanes are inappropriate in this case, but I think the actions of both the city and advocate were handled in an ideal way:  Meslin engaged his peers to put the City’s data to the test, and the City responded constructively (at least the second time around). The John Street example serves as case study of positive interaction between cycling advocates and the City.

~Christine Paglialunga

Guest contributor Christine Paglialunga recently graduated from NYU Wagner’s Master of Urban Planning program.  Her interests are in community participation and advocacy in planning.

Urbanization News April 15

This weeks featured story is Life after the Meltdown: A Visit to Japan’s Nuclear Ghost Towns. Cordula Meyer in Odaka, Japan, reports on how tens of thousands of people have fled their homes after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant. “Since then, the area around the reactor has become an exclusion zone. Some former residents are now returning to salvage possessions and to say goodbye to their homes forever.”  Many wonder if the nine cities that have been evacuated will ever be repopulated. Read his whole story from Spiegel and view a slide show of the ghost towns.

Seoul Gives Bike Subsidies to Commuters “Seoul, South Korea recently announced transportation subsidies for bicycle commuters… The City also announced plans to repair abandoned bicycles and rent them at no charge to commuters in order to encourage bicycle use… the Seoul Metropolitan Government has been in the process of installing 88.3 kilometers (54.9 miles) of bicycle lanes over the past two years and improving bike lane management systems.” Read more from the City Fix or the Korea Times.

Will Bombay Choke the Queen’s Necklace?  “Marine Drive in Bombay, better known as the Queen’s Necklace, is one of the most beautiful waterfronts in the world.  That’s why it is so depressing to learn that the Maharahstra state government seems to want to destroy it.  Per DNA India, the state’s chief minister,  Prithviraj Chavan, is meeting with Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh to gain approval for the six-lane structure, which Chavan says will be “built on stilts.” Read more from Legal Planet and DNA India.

This week MIT’s SENSEable Cites Lab held a Forum on the Future of Cities Here is a description from their website: “Join leading thinkers from around the world to discuss pressing issues of urbanization and a wave of new distributed technologies. Over the next few decades, the world is preparing to build more urban fabric than has been built by humanity ever before. At the same time, new technologies are disrupting the traditional principles of city making and urban living. This new condition necessitates the creation of innovative partnerships between government, academia, and industry to meet tomorrow’s challenges including higher sustainability, better use of resources and infrastructure, and improved equity and quality of life.”  Read more from their website.  Videos and pictures of the event should be up soon also.

City Beautiful: Subway (sound)Tracks

When taking public transit most of us prefer  to block out the squeaks and dings, the gum smacker in the next seat, and the screeeeeches of tracks, tourists and babies – we tend to pipe our own soundtracks directly into our ear canal and watch the city go by in peace. But maybe we’re missing out on something, the little rhythms produced by hulking trains moving people around, the soundtrack created unintentionally by transit infrastructure itself?

New York Public Radio’s Remix the Rails contest chose a winner last Friday – they invited musicians to “transform ordinary subway sounds from the New York City subway into extraordinary music.” Below you can take a listen to the winning entry from Lucas Carpenter, called “This is the Train” (impressive if you can listen without a side-to-side head bob):

In a more conceptual project combining transit data and sound, Google designer Alexander Chen’s Conductor project took New York subway lines, animated them, and turned the moving “trains” into a pluckable  instrument:

Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop.

See it in action here (give it a minute to get going):

The design is based on Massimo Vignelli’s elegantly abstract 1972 subway map, which some loved, some hated, but most agree that regardless of its utility for not getting lost it does look pretty cool.

Massimo Vignelli's 1972 Subway Map | Courtesy of Visual Complexity

Granted, New Yorkers spend a lot of time on the subway and it’s quite loud underground, but have musicians and designers in other big cities turned noise into anything ipod-worthy?

~Amy

 

Mobility: Kolkata’s “Tram to Oblivion”

Kolkata, population 15 million,  is one of the densest cities in the world.  So far less than two percent of people have cars,  but as ownership rises like in the much of India cars pose a particular issue in Kolkata: there’s very little space to put them. Only 6% of land is road, compared to 23% in Delhi for example, a comparatively teeny amount of space to move millions of people. Add to this India’s only tram system, which has snaked through the narrow streets since the 1880′s but in more recent years has had to compete with cars, buses, and autorickshaws – and it’s slowly but surely being nudged out of the right of way.

Kolkata's tram. | Photo: Flickr user Avik Pramanik

The Center for Science and Environment (CSE) tells the demise of Kolkata’s trams, a story of  nostalgia, neglect, a fight for precious little street space and what mode should have the right to claim it. Author Sayantan Bera indicts the city for allowing the system to become the “tram to oblivion” – with so many people needing to get around, and infrastructure already in place, how could a seemingly viable form of public transit be phased out as the city continues to expand?

Built in the 1880’s, the first tram cars were pulled by horses (much like the New York horsecarts around the same time):

Life size horse tram model at Kolkata's City Centre arcade | Photo: Flickr user H G M

The trams were electrified in 1905 and remained  a fixture in the daily rhythm of the city through most of the 20th century. As Bera writes,

Till the early 1990s, trams used to cater to a variety of passengers. The first car at 4.40 am was a fixture for those catching an early morning train at the Howrah station. A little later, the pious would crowd trams for a bath in the holy Ganges. Then came schoolchildren escorted by doting mothers. Later in the day lawyers and babus would rough it out on crowded trams to reach the office-hub at Dalhousie square. Trams were the lifeline before autorickshaws, buses and metro became the priority.

The tram’s failure has many reasons: old cars that haven’t been replaced for decades plus sweltering heat made for an uncomfortable ride, the infrastructure has been neglected for years, services were cut for “repairs” and never reopened – the list goes on, but the tram hasn’t been modernized for a lack of funds or simply ignoring transit needs. It’s more an intentional shift in what transportation modes are prioritized.

For example, much of the tramway used to run on lines embedded in dedicated patches of grass:

Tram right-of-way. | Photo: Flickr user jcdl

That strip of earth and grass basically said tramways belong to trams and the people that ride them. But these were ripped up in 2004 and paved over to make more room in the narrow streets for cars and buses – so the trams run in the middle of the road and people have to dodge traffic to get to them.  The photo below shows a stop  where passengers have to stand to board the tram with hardly any physical separation from traffic:

Tram halt on Kolkata street. | Photo: Sayantan Bera

It’s a striking case of how street design impacts mode choice:  almost immediately after the grassy patches were erased and automobiles given more right to the right-of-way, ridership plummeted. As a longtime tramway employee plainly put it in the CSE article, “Why would people want to risk their life to catch a tram?” Seems logical.

Funds have poured into an expensive underground metro system (India’s first and built without international assistance) and the streetscape has changed to prioritize buses and cars over trams, so investments in transportation infrastructure are there. Some claim that modernizing the tram and realigning it to the side of the road so that passengers can board without fearing for their lives would be a fraction of the price, pollutes less, and serves more people – and makes a lot more sense than piling cash into the underground metro or catering to private automobiles in an already packed city.

Tramway and taxis. | Photo: Flickr user chopr

If you’ve taken a ride on Kolkata’s tram it would be great to hear your experience, and if you think the tram is worth saving. Check out CSE’s photo gallery too if you’re a lover of trains and want to learn more about tram drama.

~Amy

City Beautiful: Bikes Continued

Inspired by Amy’s post, I decided to seek out a project I heard about a while back from various different sources. Bicycle Portraits is an effort to photograph “everyday South Africans and their bicycles.”

As someone who has traveled to and around South Africa a total of four times since 2005, I can say that biking has definitely become more popular in the past six years. On my first visit to Cape Town it would never have occurred to me to bike between the picturesque and disheveled neighborhoods that characterize that city full of paradoxes. But this time around (I just returned from two weeks there last month) I was close to astonished by how many people I saw biking around not just for pleasure but as what seemed like a growing form of transportation.

With that in mind, this project will (hopefully) grow in popularity with bicycles themselves!

- Ariana

City Beautiful: Bikes of Burden

This week’s City Beautiful is dedicated to images of people carrying improbable loads of stuff on bicycles. Our thanks to Urban Observatory for inspiring the idea, with a recent feature on French photographer Alain Delorme’s  surreal series of Shanghai cyclists balancing superhuman cargo on trikes.

As an urban biker I’ve watched in awe at what people here in New York and other cities manage to haul through traffic with two wheels, people power, a little ingenuity and a lot of balance (I think my biggest cargo was a giant roll of bubble wrap, which is comparatively weak). While exploring these images, though, what emerged was something more than just the comedy and skill of biking with awkward items. There are also powerful connections between migration, labor, and the bicycle as a livelihood necessity.

~Amy

Alain Delorme’s staged photographs of migrant workers in Shanghai are serenely absurd and simply beautiful – they touch on the complex intersection of production, consumption, and the rapid expansion of Chinese cities (see the rest here):

The sculptural skyscraper of boxes above isn’t incredibly far from the truth, as in this documentary photo taken in Beijing (via Reuters):

Shifting to a little European cycling history, for over a century French onion sellers have been pedaling from Brittany to peddle their produce in the U.K. – before World War II over 1400 “Onion Johnnies” would load up strings of Brittany’s distinct onions from the French countryside and sell them door-to-door in British towns and cities. Flickr user seat2j captured this present-day Onion Johnny in London:

Photographer, writer, and epic bike trekker Gregg Bleakney spent some time a few years ago training with the Colombian national cycling team – you can see several photos from Bogota at Dutch Bike Co. Seattle. The image below is of a little repair shop that popped up along one of Bogota’s many bike lanes. Looking at the couple riding by in the background, “bike commuting” takes on a slightly different form:

Some of Bleakney’s newest work comes from two and a half months on photo assignments in India. This slideshow features some of his shots from the project “Portraits of India on Two Wheels,” inspired from observing delivery cyclists in Mumbai. It contemplates how for  300 million Indians bikes are a necessity for work, but also laments that cycling culture in the city might be lost as cheaper motorcycles are accessible to more people: