I left off a couple weeks ago talking about breaking our dependence on fossil fuels. While some of this is accomplished by finding other energy sources, much more of it is accomplished by reducing overall energy demand. This post will discuss one way to do this: enabling consumers to shop via mass transit.
There's several parts to this. One is for mass transit providers to provide routes that go to, or at least through, shopping centers, so that people can shop without having to drive to the shopping mall. For example, in Chicagoland, that would mean extending the north end of the Blue Line to Woodfield in Schaumburg, and extending the south end of the Blue Line to Oak Brook Terrace, or even all the way through Lombard. As both Schaumburg and Oak Brook/Oak Brook Terrace are already home to several large employers this would also help with moving people to their employment. Another idea is to extend the Yellow Line to Old Orchard.
I recently heard that Skokie is offering deals to try to get people into its "downtown" area. Here's what I find interesting. Skokie has several shopping districts: the aforementioned Old Orchard is an upscale boutique mall that seems to be doing quite well despite the present economic depradations. There's also a modest but apparently doing-pretty-well shopping area on Dempster near the north terminus of the Yellow Line. However, that's not the "downtown" that Skokie is talking about. They're talking about the area around the intersection of Oakton and Lincoln -- which is almost deserted these days. Why? It's hard to get to. There's not a lot of parking, the roads in that area are congested and hard to use, and there's no good mass transit options. Ironic, when you consider that the Yellow Line crosses Oakton about a thousand yards away... it just doesn't stop there. Adding a stop on the Yellow Line near Oakton would do wonders for Skokie's downtown, but despite the CTA and others talking about doing this for years it hasn't yet happened. So not only would this help reduce energy usage by having people use the Yellow Line to get to Skokie's shopping district instead of their cars, but it would boost Skokie's overall economy, to boot. If there's a downside here, other than the expense of building and maintaining the station and the extra five minutes it'll take for the trains to pass through because they have to stop at the station, I don't see it.
On the radio today there was a short blurb about the CTA contemplating building grocery stores inside CTA stations; this has also been covered in the Chicago Tribune. This is a great idea for enabling consumers to do daily commerce without additional transit expenditures, although, of course, there's the difficulty of getting the groceries home afterwards. And that's actually one of the main obstacles to pedestrian shopping: getting your loot home.
There's a solution to this, of course, and it's not a new one. It wasn't that many years ago that you'd go to the store, pick out what you want, and the shopkeeper would bundle it up and have his son (or some other employee) drop it off at your house later that day. Of course, this was before everyone had a car. Well, we need to go back to this model, or one like it. Go to the mall, buy all the stuff you want, then when you're done, if you have more stuff than you can carry home on the train, you go by the delivery services center and, for a moderate fee, they'll dispatch it to your home on whatever timetable fits your schedule and your budget. Yes, you will pay a bit more for it, but on the other hand if such services were pervasive, you might be able to get by without even owning a car. The IRS now allows a deduction of 58.5 cents per mile for business use of a car; that suggests that owning a car costs about $7000 a year, or $19 a day (assuming a relatively typical 12,000 miles per year). That leaves quite a bit to pay for delivery services, even after mass transit fares. And the delivery service can achieve economies of scale as well as logistical advantages that you can't. We could even eventually build a robotic delivery service that can take packages and deliver them to our houses for us, depositing them in a secure receptacle so that even if we're not home nobody will be stealing our stuff.
There's several parts to this. One is for mass transit providers to provide routes that go to, or at least through, shopping centers, so that people can shop without having to drive to the shopping mall. For example, in Chicagoland, that would mean extending the north end of the Blue Line to Woodfield in Schaumburg, and extending the south end of the Blue Line to Oak Brook Terrace, or even all the way through Lombard. As both Schaumburg and Oak Brook/Oak Brook Terrace are already home to several large employers this would also help with moving people to their employment. Another idea is to extend the Yellow Line to Old Orchard.
I recently heard that Skokie is offering deals to try to get people into its "downtown" area. Here's what I find interesting. Skokie has several shopping districts: the aforementioned Old Orchard is an upscale boutique mall that seems to be doing quite well despite the present economic depradations. There's also a modest but apparently doing-pretty-well shopping area on Dempster near the north terminus of the Yellow Line. However, that's not the "downtown" that Skokie is talking about. They're talking about the area around the intersection of Oakton and Lincoln -- which is almost deserted these days. Why? It's hard to get to. There's not a lot of parking, the roads in that area are congested and hard to use, and there's no good mass transit options. Ironic, when you consider that the Yellow Line crosses Oakton about a thousand yards away... it just doesn't stop there. Adding a stop on the Yellow Line near Oakton would do wonders for Skokie's downtown, but despite the CTA and others talking about doing this for years it hasn't yet happened. So not only would this help reduce energy usage by having people use the Yellow Line to get to Skokie's shopping district instead of their cars, but it would boost Skokie's overall economy, to boot. If there's a downside here, other than the expense of building and maintaining the station and the extra five minutes it'll take for the trains to pass through because they have to stop at the station, I don't see it.
On the radio today there was a short blurb about the CTA contemplating building grocery stores inside CTA stations; this has also been covered in the Chicago Tribune. This is a great idea for enabling consumers to do daily commerce without additional transit expenditures, although, of course, there's the difficulty of getting the groceries home afterwards. And that's actually one of the main obstacles to pedestrian shopping: getting your loot home.
There's a solution to this, of course, and it's not a new one. It wasn't that many years ago that you'd go to the store, pick out what you want, and the shopkeeper would bundle it up and have his son (or some other employee) drop it off at your house later that day. Of course, this was before everyone had a car. Well, we need to go back to this model, or one like it. Go to the mall, buy all the stuff you want, then when you're done, if you have more stuff than you can carry home on the train, you go by the delivery services center and, for a moderate fee, they'll dispatch it to your home on whatever timetable fits your schedule and your budget. Yes, you will pay a bit more for it, but on the other hand if such services were pervasive, you might be able to get by without even owning a car. The IRS now allows a deduction of 58.5 cents per mile for business use of a car; that suggests that owning a car costs about $7000 a year, or $19 a day (assuming a relatively typical 12,000 miles per year). That leaves quite a bit to pay for delivery services, even after mass transit fares. And the delivery service can achieve economies of scale as well as logistical advantages that you can't. We could even eventually build a robotic delivery service that can take packages and deliver them to our houses for us, depositing them in a secure receptacle so that even if we're not home nobody will be stealing our stuff.
Light rail can't, in most cases, replace more that a percent or so of urban automobile traffic.
ReplyDeleteCuriously, I do most of my shopping either on foot, using a bus or by bicycle. But, then, I don't live somewhere that has been in a self-reinforcing cycle of car-centric urban design for the last 40-50 years.
ReplyDeleteI would always shop by foot when living in downtown Washington, DC. There was a grocery store a few blocks away, and if I had more than I could carry, I had a little fold-up cart. And for things other than groceries, I had the subway.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with shopping by train is, what do you gain? There will be two types of people - those who can walk to the station (many in the center city, but fewer in the suburbs), and those who drive. The ones who can walk, great. But the (in my estimation based on DC) 65%-90% who have to drive, will likely save no time by driving to the station than by driving to their local supermarket.
I agree that one of the purposes of mass transit is to link people with commercial districts, and systems that don't are very poorly designed. (I'm looking at you, Charlotte.) However, I'm not sure adding grocery stores to the stations will add much; are there really that few grocery stores in walking distance of the station already? Or am I missing a point?
Mass transit is only one part of the solution. City planning is another. The layout of most American cities and highways occurred during the era of cheap oil. Contrast this with Europe's winding roads and little villages which were laid out hundreds of years before the automobile.
ReplyDeleteI think designing a modern city from scratch for energy efficiency would be fascinating.
I read your posts on removing ourselves from the world of oil and I agree 100%. However the problem I have with the move is there is no real answer to what the avg person does in the next 10 - 20 years while the change is being done. Watching light rail being put into the Phoenix area, It's obvious that unless you live on the route itself,at least in Phoenix, that like the bus system, it will be of little real use to the citizens as the heat is murder. No matter what we do, there is going to be a need for oil for all types of transportation, You can't force people to live in cities, at least in America.
ReplyDeleteI don't claim to be in the know of how much oil there is. 109k for a car is obscene, however there is a real alt that when used for local travel is zero emissions, and is going to be released in the US in 2010, and at less then 20k it is well within most Americas pocket books, is the compressed air car MDI
At 35 miles on a single charge it is fine for most commuting and should be, in my opinion, be the new focus for anyone who really is concerned not just with the price of fuel but also our environment.
Hey Kelly--I'm a sporadic lurker, and just til now I didn't realize you were a fellow Chicagoan! :::adds you to my blogroll::: "Downtown" Skokie is....interesting. In fact, Skokie as a whole is a fairly-comical hodgepodge of civil-engineering plans, FAILs, and what-were-they-thinking's. Dempster and Lincoln, Gross Point Rd, Old Orchard, the area around the Dempster Yellow terminal...if they could do like Niles did, and have a free shuttle or something of the kind, maybe they could manage to bring some sort of sense of cohesiveness to all the random shopping/transit options. Hell, throw Village Crossing in there, and you've got a party. :) (Of course, I'm in Hyde Park now myself--lots of transit, ZERO for shopping. I miss being somewhere you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a grocery store....)
ReplyDelete