This year, Chicago celebrates the centennial anniversary of the publication of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The Plan, now considered an ur-text of urban planning, was conceived with the greater metropolitan region in mind, and identified six cornerstones of development: highways, rails, parks, systematized streets, civic centers, and the lakefront. Over the several decades that followed, Burnham’s vision transformed not just Chicago’s visual landscape, but its social and psychological portrait as well.

To honor the anniversary, the city asked local architects, planners and landscape architects to issue proposals for large- and small-scale developments for the new century.  The results are startling—alternately haunting and comic, they offer both sweeping answers to systemic ills and imaginative exercises in, for example, an “umbrella of magnetic energy” that “powers public transportation.” (Below, see an overview of 9 striking proposals.)

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The news last week that the U.S. government would distribute $90 million in grants for maglev planning studies excited those who see the technology as the future of transportation. Rather than relying on steel rails, maglev trains float down the line about a half an inch above the track surface, kept aloft by powerful electromagnets. They consume less energy and move faster than normal trains because they are not affected by ground friction; their rights-of-way, meanwhile, cost about the same to build.

Though researchers have been exploring the concept for decades, maglev is a relatively new technology; the first floating train didn’t open to passengers until 1979, when Hamburg exhibited a short 50 mph line for six months. In 1984, a slow maglev train in Birmingham, England commenced operations between the airport and a nearby rail station, but it was shut down after a decade of unreliability.

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Calgary is building a $20 million bridge for walkers and bikers. It spans the Bow River, was designed by Spanish starchitect Santiago Calatrava, and somwhat resembles a cigarette cookie.

The tubular structure (both literally and in ’80s surf-speak), is a stylistic departure for Calatrava who’s best known for soaring, sail-like structures. The Peace Bridge, by contrast, doesn’t reach or command–it feels more humble, like a caterpillar stretching to span a small rift. Part of that humility is it’s small structural footprint, projecting more than 300 feet across the Bow River without any in-water supports. The red is certainly a bold addition to Calatrava’s usual whitewashed look. We question whether we, um, like that particular choice… but points for boldness.

On the functional end, city officials expect the bridge will see around 5,000 crossings a day in its first year. They’re planning it particularly with commuters in mind.  At this point, 10 percent of Calgarians (?) already get to work on foot or bicycle and that figure is expected to grow. The Peace Bridge offers quick and easy access to the downtown business district. Over the next 25 years, city planners expect the downtown population to double, from 30,000 to 60,000.

The project, which is scheduled for completion next year, isn’t exactly cheap — construction alone will cost $15 million (Calatrava’s fee is another $2 million). The city seems happy though: They are budgeting a similar amount for another bike/ped bridge at a different point along the Bow. The design contest for this new structure was announced just this week.

More images of the Peace Bridge after the jump:

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A phenomenon that has been dubbed “Ad Creep” continues apace with our public structures as more and more are being rented out for branding and messaging. In India, for instance, a support column of a highway overpass has just been turned into a bone to hawk some pharma product called Sandoz, which turns your skeleton into concrete or something.

It reminds us a bit of KFC’s attempt to brand pothole repair in Louisville and a handful of other US cities by filling them and then spraypainting their logo on repaired roads. (Get it–”filled”? Just like you, after a yummy fried chikken dinner!)

Animal and  Copy Ranter have been documenting the phenomenon come up with some interesting examples. In Chicago, for instance, there’s an ad for Lay’s chips that creates the effect of potatoes growing out of the roof of a pedestrian passage in an “L” station. It seems to have a somewhat startling effect for transit passengers (pic below).

Somewhere over in Euroland, they have equipped swings at public playgrounds with ropes thick enough to tether a battleship and then placed an public service ad on the seat announcing that 20 percent of kids are fat (which, frankly, sounds low to us).

In Israel, there’s another public service campaign that makes inventive use of sewer grates to bring attention to the hunger–empty plates stacked in the gratings as if it were a dish rack. It’s an inventive idea,  and raising awareness of hunger is nice… but it strikes us as not unlikely that some poor old people or rambunctious kid might not see these small breakable objects on the ground in the middle of a busy pedestrian thoroughfare. Likewise, in Mumbai a sewer grate has been turned into an abacus to promote the cause of numeracy (pics below).

A German airline is selling space on the wings of it’s planes, leading to a creepy ad that makes it look like some guy is clinging to the outside of the aircraft, bringing to mind a certain Twilight Zone episode starring a certain young William Shatner.

Meanwhile, in New York City, your taxi seat belt has been brought to you by the good people at Milky Way. Please remember us for all your junk food needs if you happen to appreciate having this device available to save your life. (Photo below)

Green Sheet argues that inventive ads like the femur-as-highway-support-columns might be a good way to pay for infrastructure investment. By contrast, most advertising industry commentators seem to be appalled by the intrusiveness of the campaigns.

Honestly, though, the intrusiveness seems to be more of a concern in theory than in practice. These campaigns are amusing mostly because they’re so hamhanded and ridiculous (the extra-think ropes on the swings standing as example A). As long as the attempts to brand our public structures look anything like these, we’re not overly concerned.

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A few more samples after the jump

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Here’s a question: why would a consumer culture reject a technology that makes one of our most basic human functions more comfortable and hygienic? After all, Americans are voracious in their appetite for novel products when it comes to everything from drinking water to cleaning the floor. But given the opportunity for a more hygienic and comfortable means of doing our bathroom business, all of a sudden we’re intent on sticking with bathroom technology from the 19th century. Why?

This is the very question that Japan’s largest toilet-maker is trying to answer. The company offers various models that do all kinds of lavish things to and for the user. While they’re ubiquitous in Japanese households–until recently, more common than PCs–”smart” potties have failed to catch on in the US market.

A typical Japanese loo, for instance, would do some or all of these things for the user:

* Cleanse “front and back” with three separate streams of water
* Dry “front and back” with air blowers
* Warm the seat
* Automatically put down the seat (a feature cleverly dubbed the “marriage saver”)
* Illuminate itself with a programmable nightlight
* Monitor medical conditions by preforming urine tests
* De-ionize the air to remove odors
* Play a soothing waterfall or birdsong soundtrack “to drown out embarrassing noises.”

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Mine is 1,117 gallons per day, as calculated by the H20 Calculator. Frankly, that’s much bigger than I would have thought, even if slightly below the US average of 1190. But my living arrangements are hardly typical:

* I live in an apartment and have no lawn of any sort

* I don’t own a car (so no washing)

* My shower is “low flow”

* My dishwashing habits are a bit erratic — which must add up to some water savings

Sure, I leave the water running while brushing my teeth and I don’t “let it mellow” as the website so artfully suggests–but still, 1,117 gallons a day? That’s enough to fill a small pool a couple times a week. Where does it all come from?

The overwhelming majority of this water use–one discovers upon reading the personalized analysis–is a result of eating meat and dairy products (as I do). That alone works out to more than 500 gallons, or half the total. Eating plant products uses another 500 gallon, but that’s not exactly discretionary…

Does PETA sponsor the calculator or something? No–it’s a pretty impressive coalition that includes The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. There doesn’t seem to be an institutional bias against carnivorism.

That said, the site’s takeaway–intentional or not–can be neatly summarized as: Meat and dairy production are so water intensive that that choice dwarfs any other basic lifestyle choices or attempts to conserve. Including “letting it mellow.”

Secretaries of Energy are just like us! They’re on Facebook too, compiling their hobbies and likes and dislikes and throwing up a few old photos, including the one where they’re next to a celeb.

By “they,” we mean Steven Chu. Who we admire. But today we know more about him than we ever expected to–or perhaps even wanted to.
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For instance:
* He likes biking and doing crosswords with his wife Jean and is “trying to learn golf.”
* He used to wear those big low-on-the-cheeks double-bridged glasses that hipsters wear now–and wore them pretty well actually.
* He shows good high-low range in his choice of quotes, from an inspiring but highly speciesist one from William Faulkner about how human beings are the best things ever to a Yogi Berra classic about taking the fork in the road.
*”My career has not gone exactly as planned.” (Wow, us too!)
* He planned to be a theoretical physicist but got sidetracked into experimental physics. He won a Nobel Prize anyway. (Never mind.)
* He graduated from HS when he was 18, so didn’t exactly follow the Doogie Howser-style accelerated academic plan.
* Jean is brilliant too, holding a PhD from Oxford–presumably the one founded in the Middle Ages, not “Oxford” the Internet diploma mill.
* His musical tastes are “Classical, some opera”–thankfully not a Dave Matthews fan or something.
* He took a meeting with Brad Pitt and is still a little bit aglow over it.
* He looks nervous when he’s talking to his boss.

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Gavin Newsom has announced a very intriguing plan: all city agencies in San Francisco must conduct an audit of wasted land and compile a list of places that could be used for community gardens. So, for instance, median strips and empty lots and myriad other municipley-owned wasted spaces might become places where local residents can grow cauliflower and snow peas.

According to the SF Chronicle:

It’s also unclear how much land could be converted into community farms. The Public Utilities Commission has thousands of acres outside San Francisco that could be used, and the Real Estate Division and the Recreation and Park Department own some unused parcels in the city. [...]

Newsom made the announcement Wednesday at a junkyard-turned-farm in West Oakland that could serve as a model for how land could be converted in San Francisco. A stone’s throw from BART, it used to be home to old cars and one angry dog, but now is run by the nonprofit City Slicker Farms.

We’ve looked at urban farming here at the Infrastructurist, and, frankly, some of the wilder schemes involving high-rise greenhouses and floating agri-colonies and so on  are just stupid — mere catnip for “green” fantasies. (We’re not living in Hong Kong under some kind of war blockade. We do have ample land for growing food. Why pretend otherwise?)

But the kind of urban gardening that does make a lot sense involves using our spaces more efficiently. It’s not really an economic proposition. City Slicker Farms, for instance, grows 2,000 pounds of food a year, which is negligible amount. But you’d have to be a real jackass not to feel elevated by the sight of public land being used by the public for something that improves everybody’s health and quality of life and strengthens a sense of civic ownership of communal spaces.

And, yeah yeah, it’s San Francisco, which will cause at least half of America to roll its eyes. But at least it’s not Boulder or Berkeley!

Let it not be said that we don’t make anything in this country anymore. As of today, we’ve made a streetcar.

The vehicle in question was unveiled in a ceremony on streets of Portland, Oregon, where it will go into service with a fleet of Czech-made brethren. The city’s much-admired streetcar network recently got $75 million in stimulus funds for an expansion. On hand for the festivities today were DOT chief Ray LaHood and transportation savvy Oregon congressmen Peter DeFazio and Earl Blumenauer. (The latter dignitary, whose sartorial trademark is a bow tie, today donned a straight tie to “mess” with Sec. LaHood.)

Local company Oregon Iron Works made the machine at a nearby factory that employs hundreds of skilled laborers. The company has a pending order from Portland for a half dozen streetcars and one worth $26 million from the city of Tuscon for seven more. OIW aims to get at least 60 percent of its parts from other US companies and to help seed an urban transit industry in Oregon.

Since about 1950, building modern streetcars has been a lost art in this country. OIW decided, based on the success of Portland’s streetcar line, to try to rediscover it and claims that their product is already of a higher quality than European competitors.

Sec. LaHood, Rep. Blumenauer

If our Spidey sense is right–as, well, it usually is–this company and Oregon have seized an incredibly valuable first-mover advantage in what could prove to be an important domestic industry in years to come. After American cities tore up streetcar tracks and junked their rolling stock en masse in the middle of last century, dozens of are now planning or considering a new system. With oil at $70 a barrel in the depths of brutal global recession, our guess is that number will only grow in the years ahead.

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It’s tough to know what to think about this rail proposal that politicians in Michigan held a hearing about this week. (We wrote about the plan here a couple of months ago.)

On one hand, it’s a solar- and hydrogen-powered levitating pod train being built to a half empty city. On the other hand… well, who isn’t rooting for stuff to happen Michigan at this point. If they can get someone to cough up $2.3 billion for this mad contraption, more power to them.

People do seem to be treating the proposal–which would link Lansing, Detroit, and Ann Arbor–with some degree of seriousness though. The company behind it claims they have enough loot to build a prototype by next year and that if the state will grant easements for the tracks alongside three highway routes, then they can secure the rest of the funding. The plan apparently is to get it done with private capital (as the proposed Desert Xpress linking Vegas to West Coast meth capital Victorville would do).

There are some arguments among purists about whether it’s a good idea to run passenger rail lines along Interstates. We tend to be of a bit more pragmatic frame of mind: if you can secure the right of way, run the trains into the city centers at both ends of the line and avoid major legal tie ups, then all other quibbles ought to fall away. Because here in the US, finding a way to actually get anything done is always the Great Defeater of Projects these days.

From Michigan’s standpoint, it’s a roll of the dice, but that hardly seems unwarranted these days. If all the state has to pitch in is some land that’s empty now anyway–hell, build the thing and see what happens.

UPDATE: Good stuff on this at Transport Politic. There’s all kinds of nuttiness going on here.

The word “infrastructure” generally refers to built systems that we rely on to get around, obtain clean water, flush away our poop, and have electricity to watch reruns of “Everybody Loves.” It is, for the most part, a rather human-centric set of structures.

But what if we began to think about infrastructure in a more expansive sense–one encompassing other occupants of the local landscape? This happens in a few small ways now (fish “staircases” on dams come to mind), but it’s usually just to mitigate the bad effects on other creatures of something we’re building. Now consider the idea of taking it further, and actually creating positive infrastructure specifically for the benefit non-human urban entities.

This is the intriguing notion that underpins a plan to build a 40-foot structure in the English city of Leeds that would (in theory anyway) serve as a kind of rooming house for wild creatures like songbirds and foxes by replicating the livable spaces of the forest. A local business group sponsored a competition and choose a winner, a 26-year old whippersnapper named Neil Oxlee, based on his “striking” design. Though, frankly, it’s tough to get “striking” from the photo–young Neil’s model looks more like a science fair project, what with all the green pipecleaners coiled around it.

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Though air travel represents only about 3% of total world emissions, traffic is increasing quickly even as concerns over climate change multiply. To make matters worse, because airplanes fly at high altitudes, they give off large amounts of nitrous oxide, which is estimated to produce double the warming effects of carbon dioxide.

Plane travel is more energy efficient than car travel per passenger mile, but far less so than going by train, leading some advocates to push for the outright elimination of airline flights. But with transcontinental and transoceanic flights still facts of life and few options for their replacement, environmentalists, government regulators, and manufacturers are considering improvements to aircraft that will reduce emissions.

Here we’ve detailed a number of advances that may make airplanes a more acceptable mode of transport in a carbon-reduced future.

Waggling Wings

One of the major impediments to reducing the fuel consumption of air travel is drag — simply put, the air resistance airplanes encounter when they’re moving through the sky at up to 550 mph. Winglets, which are increasingly standard on new aircraft, are vertical tails at the end of each wing. They allow airplanes to reduce drag during takeoff and they provide additional lift.

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The punsters at the SENSEable City design lab up in Cambridge have named their smarter-than-you’ll-ever be interactive bus shelter the “EyeStop” (nudge, nudge).

The sleek structure allows you to do the sort of exciting and useful things you might do on an iPhone, but without an iPhone and while you’re waiting for the bus. So, for instance, you might browse the web (keep it clean, kids!) or plot your journey. But the EyeStop also allows you to monitor your exposure to airborne pollutants, watch in real time as the 73 sits motionless in a traffic jam, and post an electronic notice about your cat that just ran away. This is not just cool — it’s 21st century cool.

Mind you, this is not a science fiction bus stop — a prototype has already been installed in Florence, Italy (and officially presented by a man known as the “Obama of Italy.”)

We could snipe about the fact that “EyeStop” is a less than ideal name since peoples’ eyes tend to be darting around in interactive environments and there are vague connotations of death attached to “stopped” eyes — but, look, that’s probably just being too literal and besides we’ve done it already.

On the warm fuzzy side: Buses are a tough sell since many people tend to view them as downmarket and depressing. We surveyed some exciting new bus designs on a while back on this site and really anything that can jazz up the bus experience a bit is a good thing. It’s also important for cities to start making real-time bus locations available to users — the EyeStop does this, so bravo on that.

Plus it only costs $120,000, which is cheaper than we would have guessed. (Admittedly, it would have been a wild guess.)

Okay, SENSEable city folks, nice work. Your next challenge: blow our minds with a park bench.

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In the days of yore, if you were a city official and wanted to fix a pothole, you’d just send out a road crew to do it. A typical squad of four men could repair five of them in the course of an average day, including breaks for lunch, coffee, and scratching their butts.

Now things have changed. There is a futuristic new machine called the pothole killer that allows one person–who never has to get out of the truck cab–to “hot patch” 100 potholes in a day.  (Watch the video for details.) In other words, the machine makes human labor nearly 100 times more efficient in repairing damaged roads. Fixing a pothole the old way: $70; Fixing a pothole the new way: $3. Technology at work, children.

The company that makes the device, Patch Management, also claims that repairs made by the Pothole Killer last four times longer than those done by old-fashioned “throw and go” technique (i.e. what road crews generally do).

Great, right — saves money and makes roads last longer? In a “gee whiz” sense, yes. But the question has to be asked: Isn’t infrastructure repair one of the main strategies we’re using to create jobs? Since the Pothole Killer is functionally a job killer, it might make sense to hold off using it on a large scale until this whole recessionary unpleasantness is behind us.

In the meantime, perhaps Colonel Sanders will take up some of the slack.

UPDATE: Our friend Jim Foti at the excellent Road Guy blog alerts us to this informative graphic explaining how the Pothole Killer works its magic.

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In Motor City, land of disused structures, an overgrown old rail line has been excavated and turned into a spanking new bike thoroughfare. While, technically, it is more a “greenway” than a “freeway,” there are entrance and exit ramps and multiple lanes separated by yellow lines. (Perhaps to make disused auto executives feel comfortable riding on it, now that they have plenty of free time to explore their community?)

The ribbon cutting ceremony, which took place yesterday, fell conveniently into National Bike Week. Though of late the path had already been seeing some action from pedestrians, stroller-pushing parents and, um, “graffiti artists” according to the Detroit Free Press. So the great battle of use vs. abuse is now underway.

The Dequindre Cut, as the route is called, is only 1.2 miles long, but it is seen as an early section of a planned 100-mile network of greenways that might eventually make Detroit less horribly tragic and depressing than it is today–a city defined by “open spaces” instead of “abject abandonment.”

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Isn’t this the kind of stuff that Sean Hannity mocks?

But the House of Murdoch seems to be turning over a new leaf by quite earnestly urging it’s viewers to ride the bus because it saves gas. Which, you know, it does: 1.8 billion gallons a year according to the spot. That figure (who knows where it comes from) is equivalent to about 4.5 days of national consumption — or slightly more than a 1 percent savings over what we’d be using if we all drove everywhere all the time. It would be much better to have an ad that contextualized how small 1.8 billion gallons is compared to the amount of gasoline we could and should be saving with transit use, but we’re not holding our breath for that version.

As the Overhead Wire points out, Fox didn’t exactly bury this wee hours programing — they ran it in the middle of American Idol (which I’ve never seen, but my great-grandkids tell me is popular).

Boris Johnson, now Mayor of London, premised much of his 2008 campaign on the reinstatement of a bus. Johnson argued, using his rival Ken Livington’s own words from a decade before, that “only a ghastly, dehumanised moron would get rid of the Routemaster,” London’s famous double-decker bus. If he were elected, the candidate promised, he would reverse his rival’s decision in 2005 to replace the Routemasters with articulated “bendy-buses” Londoners had come to love to hate.

Indeed, one of Johnson’s first acts as mayor was the constitution of a bus design competition which encouraged independent designers to consider how a new Routemaster would look and feel. The winners - architects Foster and Partners and carmaker Aston Martin - developed a brilliant concept for a new double-decker bus that would radically redefine how customers get around London.

The vehicle, while modeled in form on the iconic Routemaster, would be technologically advanced. The glazed roof would be covered with solar panels to help power the bus. On each side would be large LED signs providing customers detailed information about the route and its destinations. Finally, access would be provided not only by the open rear door that made the Routemasters famous, but also by a central handicap-accessible door. For the comfort of passengers, the seats would be covered in leather and the floors in wood. The bus remains a concept, but London will soon commission the next generation of double deckers with the ideas generated by the competition in mind.

All over the world, in fact, the bus is being reinvented. Far from the sturdy but utilitarian mainstay with little of the romance of streetcars or the luxury of private automobiles, several new bus models are some of the most fascinating and technologically advanced vehicles in the world right now.

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Are you part of that special breed of Americans who want to bring the text of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with them everywhere they go? Are you part of that special breed of Americans who own iPhones? If you answered yes to both questions, take a moment to download the “Transparent Gov” app. It gives you several helpful breakdowns of stimulus spending and then in each case steers you directly into the relevant text of the bill, which you can explore for hours on end until your scrolling thumb cramps up and your eyes dry out.

For instance, if you tap the $300 billion “discretionary spending” bubble on your screen and then the “Interior and the Environment” line, you’ll quickly have about 80,000 words of text on your tiny little screen. Did you know the stimulus provisions $15 million for “Wildland Fire Management” at the BLM and that those funds will be available until September of next year? And that there’s another $485 million for “Wildland Fire Management” somewhere else, about 75 paragraphs down, right near a passage about how the Fish and Wildlife Service gets $110,000,000 for construction projects? And so on.

One potential problem is that when scrolling through an endless list of giant sums of money allocated to various programs one is only vaguely familiar with, it’s hard to resist the temptation to start speaking the numbers aloud in John McCain’s voice: “$1.5 million for Mormon cricket control, $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina, …” Not because you necessarily agree with McCain’s mockery and naysaying — but just because you heard him read so much of this stuff.

The top line breakdowns are useful references, but reading ARRA on your iPhone is about as masochistic as human activity gets — and read you’ll have to if you’re looking for something specific, since the app lacks a text search function. Endless scrolling is pretty much the extent of the user experience.

Sound good? Download your own “Transparent Gov” app for free here.

A frequent complaint about the current round of infrastructure investment is that we’re not thinking big enough — that there is no revolutionary equivalent of rural electrification or the Interstate system on the drawing board.

Enter Michigan’s plan for a “hydrogen superhighway.” Whatever else might be said about it, the scheme is–literally and metaphorically–electrifying.

An outfit called Interstate Traveler, LLC is proposing to build an elevated high speed maglev train running between the depopulating metropolis of Detroit and the state capital of Lansing as the first leg of a multi-use national transportation network. The trains would travel at 200 mph along current Interstate rights of way with stations near current highway exits.

The tracks would be covered with solar panels which would supply some unspecified portion of the system’s power via “hydrogen batteries.” The horizontal core of the rail structure would house fiber optic cable, electrical transmission lines and various other utility pipes as a source of substantial revenue for the project.

The cars for the network would be made in idled Big Three factories in the Detroit area and would be part of a broader move toward using hydrogen in a wider capacity to power private vehicles.

Proponents claim the the $2 billion Detroit-to-Lansing line could be build entirely with private funds, if the state and federal governments would agree to hand over use of Interstate rights of way.

The plan, being pushed by four freshman lawmakers in Lansing, legitimately has the feel of a 21st century transportation network. The technology is revolutionary and it’s smartly married with our greatest current transportation asset, the Interstate system. If anything, at first blush it feels *too* ambitious (in the most glorious of ways).

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