Local politicians and businessmen are all hot and bothered about kicking the Nothern Beltline into high gear. Their enthusiasm for the project seems to revolve around three claims:
1) economic development
2) ease congestion
3) everyone else is doing it, so we should too (the parental admonishment about “if everyone jumped off a bridge” leaps to mind)
Let’s take these one by one, shall we?
While you’d think the principal reason for building an interstate grade highway would be transportation purposes, this seems to be a distant second on the minds of the beltline’s boosters. No, they seem much more preoccupied with the promise of economic development. A recent study estimated $7.1 billion dollars in economic output (spread across up to 30 years). Rather than getting into the nitty gritty of the analysis provided by this study , I’d like to ask a broader question about highway construction as an engine for economic growth: how does it work? A quick survey of research found that it often doesn’t. A study (pdf) by UC Berkeley concluded that “economic
growth observed near highways could be a redistribution of growth that would have occurred elsewhere” and went on to argue that while there is a clear pattern of growth occuring along highways, many times that growth is simply being channeled along the highway corridor rather than another part of the region. It should be noted the study was commissioned by the pro-beltline group Coalition for Regional Transportation, itself a part of the Birmingham Business Alliance. Given the above, such economic forecasts of wild profits and economic gains should be taken with a considerable grain of salt.
There is also a more fundamental problem with highways as economic development tools: they’re unsustainable. I don’t just mean unsustainable in the environmentalist sense, but also in plain terms of consumption and demand. This leads to the second argument in favor of the northern beltline: it will ease congestion. As has been mentioned before (LINK), increasing lanes has not been shown to reduce congestion. A Texas Transportation Institute study looked at metro areas that added increased roadway capacity versus those that did not. It found that “areas that exhibited greater growth in lane capacity spent roughly $22 billion more on road construction than those that didn’t, yet ended up with slightly higher congestion costs per person, wasted fuel, and travel delay.” The explanation for these results is primarily one of induced demand.
Source: Texas Transportation Institute
So if adding new lanes and highways isn’t the answer, what is? The biggest reductions in congestion and vehicle miles traveled have been achieved through a combination of congestion pricing, increased mass transit service, and a shift in urban form toward more compact, walkable neighborhoods.
Too bad we don’t have any walkable urban neighborhoods that could use investment in this town…
Oh yes, and the final explanation for why we should risk serious environmental impact, continue to neglect an already developed urban infrastructure, and replicate disposable development? According to Senator Shelby: “We are the only major city, major metropolitan city that has half of a beltline around it. We got to finish it”. After all, Atlanta has a beltline that circles the city and Houston has gone concentric with their beltlines! And as two of the most congested cities in the country, these are clearly the sorts of models for traffic management we should emulate.
On a more philosophical note, Shelby’s rush to emulate outdated approaches to transit planning (overzealous beltway construction) is symptomatic of exactly the sort of behind the times attitude that has plagued Alabama for years. While other cities like the aforementioned Houston, Dallas, and Charlotte have shifted towards investment in more diverse transportation strategies like mass transit and reducing auto travel demand (even Atlanta is changing things up), Alabama plods along obliviously expecting new highways to fix in Birmingham what they haven’t anywhere else.
Lest you think I’m blowing this out of proportion, witness an outsider’s take on the beltline approach to transportation:
Birmingham’s continued decline is at root a consequence of it’s acquiescence to the economic strategies of least resistance. To the extent is has succeeded in revitalizing itself, it has created solutions based on it’s own assets and potential (the growth of UAB and Healthcare as one example), not lowest common denominator development strategies. Birmingham can do better. In an era in which anyone can build new strip malls and roads, Birmingham could activate its historic neighborhoods, superb building stock and environmental amenities, assets which Atlanta and Charlotte can’t match. It can follow Portland’s example and refuse the short-term gain of a cheap highway and instead put into place investments that will return much more in both economic gains and quality of life.
Or we can build another Best Buy, Michael’s, Movie Theater, and Home Depot.
A veritable holocaust of books has been in front of Green Cup Books for at least three days now. I don’t usually post about the multitudes of trash, offal and generally unnameable refuse to be found on Birmingham’s streets, but as a bibliophile I couldn’t let this one go. Green Cup Books shuttered its doors months ago, but I presume the property managers finally decided to evict the bookstore of what remained of its inventory. This is a public embarrassment not only to the city, but should be to J.H. Berry & Gilbert Inc. as well. Not only is this on public display for all sundry, but it is also directly across the street from the new Cityville development and directly next door to Bare Hands Gallery.
At the very least, these books could have been donated instead of dumped into the public right of way for the city to clean up. Fascist illiterates.
This demonstrates a profound contempt for public space and the pedestrian right of way. As usual, Birmingham is an innovator of new ways to publicly humiliate itself.
The Nazis were also avid defacers of books.
Just in case JH Berry wasn’t aware, there’s a clause in Birmingham’s technical code (not that anybody ever enforces this) that was written to preserve the integrity (again, not that City Hall gives a rip) of sidewalks and the public right of way:
“3201.2 SIDEWALK OR STREET OBSTRUCTIONS
Public property shall be maintained clear of any and all obstructions, including among others, posts, and columns, unless approved by the Department of Planning and Engineering.”
There is a special circle in Dante’s Inferno for people who burn books. Take that to heart.
I know I lambaste everyone else for visionary, harebrained ideas, but I couldn’t resist this one. This scintillating gem of an idea came to me as I was working on a fictional scene set on the Rainbow Viaduct in which our hapless hero contemplates jumping onto the tracks below. He wants to imitate Quentin Compson’s dive into the Charles River from the Anderson Memorial Bridge in “The Sound and the Fury,” until he realizes that there’s no water in Birmingham. The poor bloke can’t even drown himself properly. Alas, thanks to Big Brother Google Earth, I’ve supplied our fictional despondent hero with a virtual canal that he can happily jump in.
The conceptual design of the Railroad Park calls for a linear greenbelt connecting the park to Sloss Furnaces via the First Avenue North railroad cut. What if we left the depressed railroad beds where they are and converted them into a short canal for pedestrians?
While discoursing ad nauseum about the shortcomings of the Magic City, my colleague and I have frequently cited the absence of a major body of water. I suppose we must hold the Elyton Land Company culpable for not providing future generations with an ocean.
The depressed railroad beds extend roughly four blocks along 1st Avenue South, with its westernmost terminus at 20th street and the eastern terminus at 24th. These railroad beds – rife with refuse and debris, and frequently tenanted by vagrants who sleep under the viaducts – could be waterproofed and reinforced to support the weight of water that would allow them to be retrofitted into fake canals. A linear canal would not only contribute to the proposed linkage of the Reservation Park to Sloss Furnaces and Pepper Place, but would also provide what landlocked Birmingham has long been cited as being bereft of: water. Landscape architect Frederick Olmsted, who designed Birmingham’s first park system, theorized that urban park systems that incorporated water had a regenerative and holistic therapeutic effect on the city’s inhabitants. Olmsted was drawing upon a very a long hermeneutical tradition around water as a symbol of life and regeneration. Water has been represented in mythology and religion (water in the trans-cultural Flood Myth was used to cleanse the earth of its sins) as possessing a restorative and cleansing function.
After living in Boston, and experiencing the Charles River on a daily basis, and as one whose hometown is a landlocked city, I am apt to concur with him. Even Pittsburgh, an industrial city with which Birmingham has many affinities, has a major river running through it. The number of gallons necessary for such a canal could be quantified by determining the volume of the linear canal and converting the units. The section of First Avenue South that runs parallel to the canal could even be closed off for pedestrian traffic or, at the very least, since there are arguments against the effectiveness of pedestrian-only boulevards and thoroughfares, a road diet could be implemented to foster pedestrian safety and access along the length of the canal and restaurants could potentially occupy some of those vacant storefronts. Now, if only there was someway to extend the length of the canal all the way to Sloss….
Since this is the Heaviest Corner (not just any corner either, but the Heaviest Corner on Earth), and not the city planning department, there actually is a way to extend the canal system west of the interstate and all the way to Sloss.
Note that the adjacent disused industrial grayland instantaneously becomes additional greenspace along the canal cut.
Close up of the proposed canal surrounded by parking lots out of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.”
The Indianapolis Central Canal functions as a pedestrian boulevard bisecting the western quadrant of the city. These diehard pedestrians look happy as a clam to be in Indiana City.
Before….
After!
The canal seamlessly integrated into the Railroad Park design. If Birmingham can put a man on the moon (i.e. Vulcan on Red Mountain), we can build a canal. Build it and they will come!
A CAP billboard at the corner of 16th St. North and 19th Ave. North. Not only is the sign barricaded behind a fence, but it is also completely out of scale for a pedestrian context.
Somehow this message is just affronting, given the context.
Sited just west of I-65 on 8th Ave. North in the West End, this heroic portrait of America’s greatest living political pundit is surrounded by “Children of Men” style urban blight.
Rush Limbaugh welcomes you to Bombingham as you speed down 1st Ave. North from the west end of town. The Leer Tower crumbles in the background. On the same parcel is the tire warehouse by I-65 that went down in a conflagration a few months ago.
With the understanding that I am probably developing a reputation as a kvetching naysayer of new development (which is primarily a rhetorical strategy to provoke people into considering the other side of the proverbial coin), I’d like to question the Westin Hotel proposed by National Ventures Group of Atlanta, Georgia.
Atlanta’s Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel. This cylinder is ready to blast off for outer space.
A rendering of what Birmingham will be getting.
Also note that gorgeous parking deck attached in the background.
Aside from this being a totally insipid design (it looks more like a UAB hospital building than one of Westin’s typically futuristic designs), and without getting into the economics of the megaproject paradox, the use seems redundant. How often does the BJCC’s Sheraton Hotel actually book every room it has available? Meanwhile, all 350 rooms of the Jefferson Hotel/Cabana/Leer Tower remain empty. The Regions Plaza has yet to be redeveloped into the proposed Marriott hotel. The Regions Plaza, which is slated to be redeveloped as a hotel, sits atop the site of the former Tutwiler Hotel. Here’s the cyclical, regressive evolution, the alpha and the omega of this site: Tutwiler Hotel –> Regions Plaza –> Hotel again. Yes, the Tutwiler was demolished, only to be replaced by another proposed hotel years later.
I’m not proposing a neo-Luddite agenda, or that Birmingham should continue cutting the grass on its myriad vacant lots. I want to see Birmingham resurrect itself as much as anyone else (probably more so), but I don’t want to see the city stuck with boondoggles, or hoodwinked by developers of Dubai-style megaprojects. And the city has a history of being seduced by boondoggles. While it is almost certainly too late to propose a smarter alternative to this megaproject, the question remains: how many hotels does Birmingham really need?
Biddle-Warren Bicycle Company, located on 4th Ave N. circa 1912
When the League of American Bicyclists ranked states according to bicycle friendliness, Alabama scored dead last. Birmingham in particular was listed as one of the worst cities for cycling by Bicyclist Magazine. Similarly, Birmingham fails to even show up on the radar of a list of 140 Bicycle Friendly Communities.
Birmingham must be awful for cycling then huh? Except that it’s not. I’ve lived in two cities that get alot of press for being cycling havens (#4 Seattle and # 11 Austin, respectively), but I first started cycling in Birmingham. While Seattle definitely has the edge on Birmingham in terms of culture and infrastructure support, I’d say Birmingham easily beats Austin on several grounds.
Let me start off by talking about why I like Birmingham for cycling so much. First, downtown Birmingham has wide streets and low traffic volume. It also has a pretty nice grid, allowing for multiple routes to get from place to place. University Ave is a drag on a bike, but go one block North and it’s a breeze. Birmingham is also relatively flat when you take Red Mountain out of the equation, and in the event you have to scale it, then shift your gears or walk up the hill. I never understand why it became such a crime to walk up a short climb like Red Mountain at 20th Street. Another nice thing about biking in Birmingham is that the weather is never absurdly hot or cold or rainy. When I first got to Austin a friend described biking in summer (which lasts about six months) as similar to having a blowdryer six inches from your face. That’s about right. The last thing that made Birmingham a great place to bike for me is that it’s interesting. Somewhat subjective, sure, but I found the character of the city really opened up at the pace of a bike ride in a way that Austin and even Seattle don’t. Also, the new pavement downtown is really nice (I’m jealous is wasn’t around when I lived there).
Maybe it’s some of those qualities that kept the people biking in the picture above, taken in front of Biddle-Warren Bicycle Company in 1912. That’s right, downtown has it’s own bike shop way before Cahaba Cycles or Bob’s Bikes. Here’s a nice shot of the interior:
While Birmingham’s newer areas (Hoover, Vestavia, Trussville, etc) are generally bad for biking, is this really any different than most cities in the sunbelt? in the US as a whole? Even with all the infrastructure that Seattle has put into place in the form of bike lanes and such, its newer development also tends to be too spread out to be as efficient for cycling.
Birmingham scores poorly on cycling rankings because it lacks an organized and institutional approach to how it accomodates cycling, but is that a good measure of cycling quality? The bike lanes touted in Austin are regularly used as parking spots for cars, throwing cyclists back into the lane that motorists are even more certain cyclists don’t belong in. After all, there’s now a lane for “them”, so motorists should get their lane “back”. And the occasional antagonistic behavior that I felt in Birmingham from motorists (including one guy who followed me from the place where we had a confrontation all the way back to my house yelling out of his window at me) is just as pronounced in Austin (anecdotally speaking). Seattle is certainly nice and all, but I’m not going to pretend that month after month of drizzle and resulting road grime, changing clothes, extreme hills etc didn’t make me take the car or bus more than I would have otherwise.
For me, Birmingham was an excellent place to learn how to bike and to bike on a daily basis. It could certainly be better. For instance, grade-separated bikeways on arterial roads that don’t have a good alternative road or alternative greenspace routes (280, greensprings, and Highway 11 come to mind). Better education of police, motorists, AND other cyclists about what constitutes safe and legal cycling practices would also be helpful. Programs to encourage those new to cycling like bike maintenance classes and route maps are also fantastic (great work is being done on this front by Bici Coop).
Planners and bike activists often set up the cycling issue as something that requires specialized, custom solutions designed only for cyclists. But while that’s certainly true for some things, many of the things that make for an effective cycling environment are the same things that make for a good urbanism in general (slower moving traffic, pedestrian friendly street networks, building orientations, etc). Similar to the idea that “we need more people who ride bikes and fewer cyclists“, I would argue that we need more people worrying about good urbanism in general and fewer worrying just about bike facilities.
By that logic, the compact layout, wide and well-connected streets, and accommodating weather are much more meaningful indicators of how Birmingham fares as Bike City USA than the number of miles of bike lanes it contains.
I was recently dismayed to read in the Birmingham Business Journal that Birmingham still has not recovered from its “dome neurosis.”
As someone who played baseball for seven years, I do not flippantly bemoan the fact that developers are apparently considering a baseball stadium west of 14th street in the general vicinity of the Railroad Park. This would not only require the demolition and relocation of the Merita Bread Company, and would entirely botch the ambiance of the Railroad Park, but would also introduce voluminous traffic into the downtown area. Birmingham has one of the highest single passenger driving rates in the country. Without a viable mass transit system the traffic congestion produced by a baseball stadium would be phenomenal.
Oriole Park, for example, has nearly 50,000 seats. Fenway Park in Boston has just under 40,000 seats. So, hypothetically, if a Birmingham stadium had at least 20,000 seats (a conservative estimate), that means approximately 15,000-20,000 vehicles would require parking. In Boston, when the Red Sox play, most fans take the MBTA subway, which is often so overwhelmed by the influx of people that the system becomes distressed. A comparable situation in Birmingham is untenable. A second prospective site for development is the former Trinity Steel plant, which is in dire need of redevelopment, but the construction of a baseball park downtown – when Birmingham ran the Barons out of town in the 1980’s because it refused to invest in the team then – is a zero-sum game.
The Hoover Met seats 10,000. A comparable stadium downtown would have at least that many seats, probably more. Note the colossal number of parking spaces: is this really what Birmingham needs?
Historically, most of the downtown baseball stadiums were built in relatively healthy, functional cities (San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, etc.) that were able to provide basic public services and amenities before investing in megaprojects like a baseball stadium. Birmingham, however, cannot even deliver basic public services such as parking meters. Although a baseball stadium might seem improbable because of Birmingham’s financial woes, the truly frightening fact is that a public-private developer partnership could actually bring it to fruition. Birmingham’s chronic, unmitigated inferiority complex causes it to emulate the worst features of other southeastern cities like Atlanta. The developers rationalize a baseball stadium with unscrupulous claptrap about “revitalizing” the downtown. If developers want to revitalize downtown, then invest in the extant downtown infrastructure. I understand that the Lyric Theater has been in need of restoration since 1958. The Lyric could be “revitalized” for the fraction of the cost of a baseball stadium. But, the fact is that developers like this do not want to “revitalize ” downtown in a sustainable way, but want to convert it into a Summit-style shopping center for the weekend amusement of suburbanites. For those who live downtown and in Southside, the benefits of a baseball stadium are few.
The Birmingham Business Journal article avers that “Birmingham’s long-suffering downtown needs a jolt of energy – and 300,000 baseball fans descending on the area in the spring and summer would have a major financial impact. Just ask any of the cities across the South and across the country that have downtown minor league stadiums.” Three-hundred thousand fans descending upon downtown Birmingham sounds like a recipe for disaster. Baseball parks, which are dedicated to a single, monolithic use tend to sit empty much of the time (not to mention the prodigious amount of energy they consume) and therefore contribute very little to the surrounding area in the off season, in the same way that the BJCC is a vacuous concrete wasteland when it is not being utilized. As the article tacitly states, the stadium would be underutilized in the fall and winter.
I go off the radar for a month or so and look what happens. Chik-fil-a, then the Fire Station, and a whole lot of press about both. There’s been plenty of great coverage by B’ham Architect and others, so I won’t rehash either story. Anyone who’s lived in an urban place (people in jones valley, this applies to you) realizes that a drive thru in an island of walkable urbanism and the demolition of culturally and architecturally significant places in favor of some quick cash for the city and a pelham-approved drug store design is absurd. So I won’t waste my time on those who don’t get what all the fuss is about.
Instead, I’m interested in how things like a drive thru, a miami-style box, and the general erosion of urban fidelity happens without more people going to the mattresses about it. With voter turnout at 26% last election, it’s fair to say apathy is one issue. And certainly not everyone is interesting in nerding out about urbanism like some people. But with so many fired up about the aforementioned recent issues, there is at least a core of residents very much interested in what happens to the city. So why then does it seem like outrage in Birmingham only comes when the property is fenced off and the demolition crews show up?
Although Birmingham has been the subject of study for its neighborhood participation program put into place in the 1970’s, when it comes to land use changes – the very changes that can most impact how a neighborhood functions and feels – there is a lack of information exchange between those departments in the city (council, planning dept, public works, etc) and residents. Neighborhood associations are assumed to fill this void, but neighborhood associations are often insular and at times parochial. Information about what changes are happening to a neighborhood should be available to all residents, not just those that have the time and inclination to join a neighborhood association. There needs to be multiple avenues of communication and the dissemination of information for the public to have a chance at being a part of the decision-making process.
There are many cities that get this. In Seattle, every proposed land use change requires an 18×24″ yellow sign be posted on the property in question. For larger projects that require any sort of environmental review, a large billboard sign must be posted on the property. These signs include simple diagrams/maps, a description of the project, and how the public can get involved. In addition, the Seattle Department of Planning and Development clearly spells out exactly what the zoning approval process is and even offers tips on how to most effectively get involved in the decision making process.
The Seattle Public Process
The Birmingham Public Process
Bad development happens all the time in Seattle (those in B’ham can be thankful the dreaded four-pack hasn’t spread to the South yet), but the process ensures that the public has a legitimate chance to weigh in on decisions. Birmingham, by contrast, lacks this basic process.
Without such a process, it’s no wonder that historic buildings get razed for parking lots, domes become the city’s excuse for a economic redevelopment strategy, and buildings that no one but the developer wants in the neighborhood end up flying through the permitting process intended to represent the public welfare.
Focusing on Walgreen’s or Chik-fil-a or Eleventh Ave or Terminal Station or the dome or the streetcars that were ripped up or the original reed books or the capri or any number of other fiascos is a preoccupation with symptoms rather than diseases. Birmingham needs an overhaul in how it is governed by public officials, how citizens are engaged in the process, and how both communicate with each other.
The dialogue and activism shown over the last month is itself encouraging in Birmingham. But unless the energy stirred up over recent issues is channeled into changing the sorts of deep structural flaws mentioned above, corrupt politicians, ill-conceived plans, and personal agendas will continue to trump any kind of renaissance or even preservation for Birmingham.
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