Alexander and Associates Inc.

Men’s Health Magazine has put up a ranking of the 100 top cities for social networking and Boise ranks 20th, beating out San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago and New York. Also remarkable: Salt Lake City was 10th. Washington, DC was first. Boise is the smallest city in the top 20.

Interesting figures, but what’s behind the ranking?  Here’s my take as someone who has lived in Boise more than 20 years as a newpaper reporter, public relations professional and social media consultant:

1. Ingrained tech savviness. Micron Technology, the second-largest computer chip manufacturer in the world, started here.  In the early 1970s, Hewlett Packard began a major campus in Boise which developed the laser printer.

2. Suburbanization. Boise and the surrounding areas are built to automotive standards, leaving few public gathering areas; those that exist are usually in the traditional downtown areas. Yet people still crave connection, even if their environment promotes separation, and social media provide that connection.

3. Political activism. Yes, there’s a lot of that in Idaho, both from the left and the right. The Idaho Legislature is a non-stop source of, ahem, ideas that are far ahead of the times, or far beyond them, and people are bound to object to them or promote them.

4. Racial diversity. Another suprise.  Idaho is still pretty white, but quickly becoming less so, and minorities tend to use social media at higher rates than whites. According to the Pew Internet & American Life project, “Among internet users, seven in ten blacks and English-speaking Latinos use social networking sites—significantly higher than the six in ten whites who do so.” According to the US Census Bureau, the Hispanic population in Idaho increased by more than 43 percent from 2000 to 2007.

Of course, there are cities that are more political active, more racially diverse, more suburbanized and that have a more influential tradition of technology. However, the Boise area ranks relatively high in all of these and taken as a whole, I think that’s what explains Boise’s surprisingly high ranking among socially networked cities.

The Boise City Design Review Committee’s treatment of the Simplot family and its proposed 7-acre downtown project is appalling. Besides showing the city’s over-regulation of a good proposal, the delays also highlight the city’s complete ignorance of the 95 percent of Boise that is not downtown.

The JUMP project (for Jack’s Urban Meeting Place), announced in May 2008, is a $100 dvelopment to include a foundation building and new headquarters for Simplot Co. between Front/Myrtle streets and 9th/11th streets. It is intended to be an arts center, meeting space and tribute to J.R. Simplot. In my opinion, it is an inclusive, sensitively designed project that would bring jobs and vitality to downtown Boise. As a public relations consultant for nearly a decade in Boise, and a newspaper reporter for 12 years before that, I saw cases where local governments were helpful and on-the-ball regarding development proposals, as well as obstructionist. This case appears to fall into the latter category.

But what do I know? According to the Idaho Statesman, delays by the city of Boise have reached a point where the Simplots are considering pulling their project, and I can’t say I blame them. After a meeting with Mayor David Beiter (one of over 100 meetings the Simplots have had with city officials), the Simplots completely redesigned the project. After that, the commission came back with a list of 60 changes, all but two of which the Simplots have adopted.

Meanwhile, in the 95 percent of Boise that is not downtown, the city’s lack of interest in redevelopment and good urban design is astounding. The city routinely allows developers to build parking lots between buildings and the street – perhaps the biggest no-no in urban design – and huge tracts of abandoned school sites grow weeds and become eyesores. Thousands of low-income residents remain at risk of eviction from rickety trailer parks, yet the city has studiously ignored them while it obstructs the Simplot project. The Bench’s few remaining historical buildings are routinely razed while Boise City and its historic preservation department show little interest outside of downtown.  The Design Review Commission does a good job at the minutiae of sapling caliper sizes but is utterly unable to see the vital relationships between buildings, streets, affordable housing and people.

The abandoned school sites are good examples of Boise not getting it. Supposedly, the school district was supposed to work with the city to find uses for these properties that would add value to the neighborhoods. At this point, they’re going to become mostly parking lots, with some strip development at the rear. Besides its toothless comprehensive plan, the city shows no interest or vision on the Bench and is overconcerned about Downtown.Children routinely walk to school without sidewalks, yet the city is far, far behind the curve in getting sidewalks in these neighborhoods.

My advice: Defer to the Simplots much more (it really is a good design) and roll up your sleeves and focus on the pressing needs for safe routes to school, urban decay, historical preservation and low-income housing in the rest of the city. This won’t be nearly as much fun as sticking your fingers in a $100 million mega-project, but it will mean so much more to Boiseans.

Trains have strong romantic appeal, but from a functional perspective, they are hopelessly unable of meeting the needs of a modern sprawling city and its residents’ demand for point-to-point flexibility.

That’s starting to sink in, after decades of local planners and wonks hoping for a commuter train system. A story in today’s Idaho Statesman quotes national experts who spoke in Boise, saying a train system faces enormous obstacles here because of track quality, too many crossings, insufficient right-of-way and high cost. However, the experts (at least in the story) didn’t discuss the inherent shortcomings of rail as a transportation technology and how we have done an exceptionally poor job of requiring rail-friendly land use.

The only reason rail technology evolved is because the first machines that could convert matter into motion (steam engines) weighed tens of thousands of pounds. There were no roads to accommodate steam engines, but rails could be built to sustain the massive weight and allow them to move people and goods faster than they had ever moved before. To make up for the lack of point-to-point flexibility, people had to unload the trains and put themselves and goods on smaller, light-rail trains or electric trolleys.

Urban theorists like Kevin Lynch hold the dominant transportation technology determines the built form of a city: ancient cities relied on humans and animals, port cities relied on ships, Industrial Revolution cities relied on the rail and modern cities rely on the automobile. Not surprisingly, entire cities and small towns were designed around the limitations of the train. For a hundred years and more, the system worked.

By the time the automobile began to eclipse the train some 80 years ago, trains had nearly a century of capital and investment behind them, so they remain common to this day. Trains still work well for some things, like moving large volumes of heavy cargo, where train cars can be lifted and moved onto ships and intermodal inconvenience is kept to a minimum.

But trains are hopelessly outmoded in a modern city. True, a rail car would be able to zip quickly past Interstate 84 traffic jams, but could it take people to where they needed to go (downtown, Micron, West Boise office parks, etc.)? People being dropped off near the Boise Towne Square mall, for example, would be left at what is agruably the most pedestrian-hostile environment in Idaho. If only something could take them a little closer to their office park, the system would be much more useful!

For their part, Idaho cities have done virtually nothing to require the kind of urban design necessary for trains: buildings that come to the street, residential and commercial sharing the same property and a nice public realm – you know, the built form of classic Main Street America.

It’s not a question of population. Around a century ago, a commuter rail system operated profitably, albeit briefly, in the Boise Valley, when our population was much smaller. It’s a question of the built form of the city. With the exception of the original downtowns and neighborhoods, Treasure Valley cities are built to automotive scale, with large parking lots, huge streets and a serious lack of sidewalks.

The humble bus, however, bridges these needs nicely. In fact, with a little imagination, we could combine the advantages of trains (route priority) with the advantages of rubber-wheeled vehicles (flexibility). The concept is the Curb Guided Busway, used to good advantage in Adelaide, Australia and Nagoya, Japan:

..the O-Bahn runs on specially-built track, combining elements of both bus and rail systems … Interchanges allow buses to enter and exit the busway and to continue on suburban routes, avoiding the need for passengers to change. Buses travel at a maximum speed of 100 km/h (62 mph), and the busway is capable of carrying 18,000 passengers an hour from the City of Adelaide

The busway is a low concrete trough and the busses are fitted with “guide wheels”

The guide-wheel, which protrudes from the front sides and aligns with the track, is the most important part of the bus when travelling on the O-Bahn. Connected directly to the steering mechanism, it ‘steers’ the bus while on the track and prevents the main tyres from rubbing against the sides of the track.

So, a busway system wouldn’t require an expensive refurbishment of rails or highly specialized vehicles. We could also take advantage of our existing rail rights-of-way, so when a bus crosses over an arterial street, the crossing arms could swing down, allowing the bus to pass, just as they already do with a train. Or, the bus could leave the busway and move about on city streets, something a train could never do. As an added benefit, emergency vehicles could use the busway system.

This still wouldn’t be cheap. We’d have to pave the rail corridors, design new interchanges and educate drivers on a new transportation mode. However, given the obstacles to developing rail and the limited return we’d get for it, a Curb Guided Busway seems like the best bet.

Good work by the Greater Boise Auditorium District and the state for putting in a request for federal stimulus money to finally build a larger downtown Boise convention center.  I did some PR consulting work for GBAD in 2002 and I applaud their persistence in trying to get this important part of our economy in place.

The Idaho Division of Financial  Management has submitted a list of agency and private sector requests for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It’s asking for $30 million for a new convention center in downtown Boise, called the Idaho State Convention Center. The convention center will be on a parcel of land GBAD  owns between 11th and 13th streets on the east and west, and by Front and Myrtle streets on the north and south.

Agencies and companies all over Idaho have submitted $4.75 billion in requests. Smaller projects include $5,200 for doors at Blackfoot schools, while larger proposals include $48.2 million for a new Canyon County Jail, $33 million for wastewater system improvements at the City of Meridian and $210 million by Idaho Wind Energy LLC for a wind farm (hopefully environmentalists won’t oppose it too much).

GBAD has put funding the convention center to voters twice before, where it got a majority of votes but missed the 2/3 supermajority. A deal with a private developer also fell through, although GBAD Chairman Stephenson Youngerman said Oppenheimer Development may unveil blueprints for the new convention center in March. Given all the design that’s been done, this should be a shovel-ready project.

In the interest of public openness – and their own success – I encourage GBAD to announce the request formally, with a news release but not much other fanfare. This would give them a chance to talk about how many people they’d put to work on construction and the obvious economic benefits of having an expanded convention center. The stimulus money is exactly for projects such as this.

I do support the stimulus spending, as long as it’s for capital projects. If future generations are going to pay off a share of the stimulus, we should at least leave them some working infrastructure they will need to sustain their economy. That includes safe schools, good roads and bridges, airports, sewer plants, energy generation and, yes, convention centers