This is an excellent post. My office has limited transit, I live 20+ miles away, and my job often requires me to move around during the day - so a car is necessary. When I think about where to get lunch (and there's nothing near my workplace), going into the city is just worse than going somewhere near the Beltway. I can go to somewhere with easy parking and get back to my office in ~30 minutes (10 there, 10 to get the food, 10 back), but if I went into the city (also about 10 minutes each way), I'm risking a potentially lengthy search for parking plus a variable length walk depending on where I actually find it. (Or paying $10 in a garage to get a $10 sandwich.) When I have to, you know, make it back for a 1:00 pm meeting, it's just not a realistic option.
My options are much more limited (and worse overall) because of this, but it's a basic fact, and it results in just not even considering a trip towards the center each time I want something to eat.
I'm not sure if this can be solved, or is worth solving. My office is not going to get good transit any time soon, maybe ever. And they're not going to build parking in the city that would give me confidence on a lunch schedule.
If they did build enough parking to accomodate you, it would eliminate the city! The whole point of a city, IMHO, is that it's accessible by foot, bike and transit (and I think this is a point where I differ from our host).
I'm not the previous commenter, but if I were to try to read Dan's mind, I might quibble with your assertion that these interesting suburban places you catalogue are urbanist if they are inaccessible to urban people without cars. If one's definition of urbanism is at its core about walkability and access, then the adaptive re-use you catalogue in your work is certainly interesting, but perhaps this "urbanist spirit" could be more accurately described as a "bottom-up spirit."
Of course from a Strong Towns perspective, bottom-up problem solving inherently leads to urbanism, and so I see the implication that you're making - that the culture of adaptive re-use of these places in the DC suburbs have the latent capacity for (or "spirit" of) an urbanist renaissance. But one could quibble about whether it's fair to label latent potentiality for urbanism as the same thing as urbanism in itself.
So not so much a disagreement of values or directionality, just in defining of terms (:
I endorse this comment, this is an excellent explanation! To expand on it a little--I think of urbanity as a function of both population density and raw population. So, for example, a walkable small town like the one's you've highlighted in other posts can be thought of as somewhat urban, but it's inherently limited. On the other end of the spectrum, a place like Jacksonville or Dallas is at best somewhat urban, despite its size, because of its car dependence, which puts a pretty hard upper limit on the number of humans that any given square mile will hold. A place becomes more urban as it becomes both more populous and more dense; that means lots of walking, but it needs to be supplemented with public transportation and biking as the physical size of the city grows (and of course there's the challenge of shipping goods etc)
I had the same experience as that intern when I first lived in DC 30+ years ago, and to a certain extent, it's still how I experience cities (I grew up in and still live in NYC, family never had a car). If something wasn't accessible by Metro - because who could figure out bus schedules before Google Maps? - it might as well not exist. The legacy of that is that, despite regular visits to my mother in Arlington, VA (Rosslyn), I didn't make it to Eden Center until last year, despite it being exactly the sort of place I would enjoy.
This is an excellent post. My office has limited transit, I live 20+ miles away, and my job often requires me to move around during the day - so a car is necessary. When I think about where to get lunch (and there's nothing near my workplace), going into the city is just worse than going somewhere near the Beltway. I can go to somewhere with easy parking and get back to my office in ~30 minutes (10 there, 10 to get the food, 10 back), but if I went into the city (also about 10 minutes each way), I'm risking a potentially lengthy search for parking plus a variable length walk depending on where I actually find it. (Or paying $10 in a garage to get a $10 sandwich.) When I have to, you know, make it back for a 1:00 pm meeting, it's just not a realistic option.
My options are much more limited (and worse overall) because of this, but it's a basic fact, and it results in just not even considering a trip towards the center each time I want something to eat.
I'm not sure if this can be solved, or is worth solving. My office is not going to get good transit any time soon, maybe ever. And they're not going to build parking in the city that would give me confidence on a lunch schedule.
If they did build enough parking to accomodate you, it would eliminate the city! The whole point of a city, IMHO, is that it's accessible by foot, bike and transit (and I think this is a point where I differ from our host).
"I think this is a point where I differ from our host."
Why do you say that?
I'm not the previous commenter, but if I were to try to read Dan's mind, I might quibble with your assertion that these interesting suburban places you catalogue are urbanist if they are inaccessible to urban people without cars. If one's definition of urbanism is at its core about walkability and access, then the adaptive re-use you catalogue in your work is certainly interesting, but perhaps this "urbanist spirit" could be more accurately described as a "bottom-up spirit."
Of course from a Strong Towns perspective, bottom-up problem solving inherently leads to urbanism, and so I see the implication that you're making - that the culture of adaptive re-use of these places in the DC suburbs have the latent capacity for (or "spirit" of) an urbanist renaissance. But one could quibble about whether it's fair to label latent potentiality for urbanism as the same thing as urbanism in itself.
So not so much a disagreement of values or directionality, just in defining of terms (:
I endorse this comment, this is an excellent explanation! To expand on it a little--I think of urbanity as a function of both population density and raw population. So, for example, a walkable small town like the one's you've highlighted in other posts can be thought of as somewhat urban, but it's inherently limited. On the other end of the spectrum, a place like Jacksonville or Dallas is at best somewhat urban, despite its size, because of its car dependence, which puts a pretty hard upper limit on the number of humans that any given square mile will hold. A place becomes more urban as it becomes both more populous and more dense; that means lots of walking, but it needs to be supplemented with public transportation and biking as the physical size of the city grows (and of course there's the challenge of shipping goods etc)
I had the same experience as that intern when I first lived in DC 30+ years ago, and to a certain extent, it's still how I experience cities (I grew up in and still live in NYC, family never had a car). If something wasn't accessible by Metro - because who could figure out bus schedules before Google Maps? - it might as well not exist. The legacy of that is that, despite regular visits to my mother in Arlington, VA (Rosslyn), I didn't make it to Eden Center until last year, despite it being exactly the sort of place I would enjoy.