A good read on Mother Jones: Pushing Poor People to the Suburbs Is Bad for the Environment.

An excerpt:

"For the urbanist movement to be worthy of its name, the end result has to be that a higher percentage of Americans are actually living in central cities, and that the residents of both cities and suburbs represent the full spectrum of American life."

Something to keep in mind as well-to-do West Enders try to sink a major housing proposal in Bayside.

Make middle-class housing legal

A lack of new housing in the walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods of the Portland peninsula is one of our biggest barriers to creating a more sustainable region. Thousands of households all over New England would love to live in a city like Portland where it's possible to live well without an automobile — and in spite of this demand, virtually no new middle-class housing has been built in the central city during the past decade.

Why should this be? I have a column in today's Portland Press Herald looking at some of the reasons our city's becoming increasingly unaffordable, and here's the short version: our current zoning laws make it mathematically impossible to build an affordable home in the city.

Go to any planning meeting and you’ll see that the people complaining about taller buildings and parking issues are almost always well-off. Unlike the working poor, they have the leisure time to attend long planning meetings and influence zoning policy. Our “public process” is inherently biased against progress and the people who need housing the most.

That’s why it’s so important for those of us who possess the privilege of being able to participate in these civic discussions (this means you, opinion page readers) to maintain some perspective about how our bourgeois desires in urban design weigh against the greater needs of our most vulnerable neighbors.

Shadows from taller buildings, or finding free storage for your four-wheeled private property – those are First World problems. Dozens of your neighbors living in the shelters for want of stable housing: That’s a real-world problem, and we need to work harder to solve it.

Northwestern 'burbs get new express bus service

The Portland region just got its first new bus route in nearly ten years with the addition of the new Lakes Region Bus Service from RTP, the regional paratransit provider.

The service is modest, with only four round-trips per day and six stops along the route at town centers along Route 302. And with the possible exception of a stop at the end of Main Street in Raymond, most of the bus stops aren't in walkable locations.

Still, with a 30-mile span, the new bus could make a big difference in helping residents of Windham, Raymond, Casco and Naples drive less and save a lot of money in commuting costs.

The bus comes with some nice amenities, including free wifi and bike racks. For the rest of December, the service will be free; thereafter it will cost $3 for a one-way fare.

With only six stops, the bus will effectively offer express service into Portland at speeds comparable to driving. It resembles somewhat the existing ZOOM bus service from Portland to Biddeford, and I'd suggest that it might benefit from common branding with that service in the future.

Here's the route and schedule information. For detailed stop locations, visit rtprides.org/lake-region-bus/.

Sundays on the Boulevard

Over the summer, a sewer construction project kept most of Baxter Boulevard closed to car traffic — but it remained somewhat accessible to bike and foot traffic. It became a popular place for people to recreate next to Back Cove, especially on nice weekends, and now that the construction is almost finished several organizations including Portland Trails and the Back Cove Neighborhood Association have asked the city to consider continuing the street closure on Sundays.

Tonight, City Council's Transportation, Sustainability and Energy Committee is meeting tonight to discuss the idea of closing Baxter Boulevard between Vannah Avenue and Payson Park every Sunday from 9am to 4pm. It has the city staff's support but it sure wouldn't hurt for a few ordinary members of the public to show up and tell councilors that they like the idea.

The meeting starts at 5:30 in council chambers on the 2nd floor. It's the 4th agenda item after some pretty basic on-street parking rule amendments that probably won't take very long — I plan to get there around 5:45.

Here's the full agenda for tonight's meeting, and here's a detailed description of the proposal [PDF document]. In a nice touch, city staff are proposing an exemption for food trucks to be able to park on the closed street to feed hungry joggers and cyclists.

Asphalt requiem

Construction crews have had a busy summer in Portland tearing out pavement. 

Up on Munjoy Hill, a repaving project along the Eastern Promenade re-arranged the curbs at the entrances of Cutter Street and at Fort Allen Park to reduce crossing distances for the neighborhood's foot traffic. In this photo taken shortly after the construction was done, you can see where the pavement used to be as the brown spot where the new grass hasn't quite grown in yet. 

The old intersection seemed to have been designed to let tractor-trailer trucks make the curve at high speeds; the new one acknowledges that Fort Allen Park doesn't get a lot of high-speed cargo deliveries. It's a lot more pleasant for everyone — even for motorists, who get more time to enjoy the views by slowing down.

There's been a smattering of these spot improvements around town this summer. On St. John Street, they tore out a lane of pavement in front of the Union Plaza strip mall and planted it with shrubs, trees, and boulders. In this photo you can see the old curb (which they left) in the middle, and the newly 2-lane St. John to the right. 

On Park Avenue between St. John and Deering Avenue right now, they're tearing up the parking lane at key intersections to build wide landscaped esplanades. Here's near Hadlock Field:

...and at Deering Avenue, the new curb extensions will create shorter crosswalks between Parkside and King Middle School:

Around the corner on Valley Street, some urban-renewal-era road widening has been rearranged with some nice new landscaped median islands.

Before (in 2011):

And today:

Aside from looking nice and making the streets safer for everyone, these projects are saving the city some real money. The Valley Street and Eastern Prom projects were done in conjunction with regularly-scheduled repaving projects. Moving the curbs and paying for the new landscaping wasn't cheap, but the costs were substantially offset by reducing the amount of square footage that ultimately needed to be covered by new asphalt. 

And from here on out, just from these modest changes, City of Portland taxpayers will save real money every year in reduced snow removal costs, less street sweeping, reduced asphalt maintenance costs, and less stormwater runoff from pavement. 

Where should new bike racks go?

The Portland Bike and Pedestrian Advisory Committee is crowd sourcing potential locations for new bike racks in Portland. If there's a spot where you wish there were more bike parking, add a marker to the map:

Portland Maine Locations Where Bike Racks Are Needed

Tiny illegal streets

The City of Portland's "technical manual" spells out precise engineering standards for the city's streets: they need to have two 14' travel lanes, 6 feet of grass on either side, and 5' sidewalks. These standards were spelled out decades ago, when automotive travel was the top priority in street design. Freeways use 14 foot lanes, but most of the city's historic streets have 10' lanes. The extra width lets motorists speed through neighborhoods with a minimum of attention paid to their surroundings.

This, thankfully, is finally being reviewed for changes in accordance with the city's new "complete streets" resolution. And a good thing, too, because a number of the city's best neighborhood streets are completely illegal according to the old standard. With new, more flexible rules in place, the city might gain more great places like these:

Tate Street, West End:

Summer Street, West End:

Dermot Court, West End:

May Street, West End:

Maple Street, downtown:

South Street, downtown:

Oak Street, downtown:

Casco Street, downtown:

Locust Street, East End: