Kisho Kurokawa - World of Image

When I see a sketch by an Italian Futurist Architect or a sketch by Louis Kahn, who is my favorite architect, I feel strong impressions expressed there for the World of Image. The reason I get these strong impressions are because there are messages, like a human touch, hidden behind the sketches - the essential difference from construction drawings. Even if the theme is about architecture, architects’ sketches have the same quality with the World of Image as paintings have"

Kenzo Tange - Logical Feeling

"...architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. Nevertheless, the basic forms, spaces, and appearances must be logical. Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long." – Kenzo Tange, Pritzker Prize acceptance address, 1987

The Secret. The Law Of Attraction.

The Secret. The Law Of Attraction.

Buku ini menarik. Bukan dari isinya yang spektakuler, tapi buku ini semacam kesimpulan besar atau benang merah dari beberapa topik yang juga dibahas dibeberapa buku menarik sebelumnya. Intinya (menurut saya) adalah sifat positif yang selalu dimunculkan dari pikiran kita, diikuti oleh keikhlasan dan ketertarikan hati, akan menarik semua momen positif di alam semesta sehingga kehidupan yang anda inginkan (yang berguna, bermanfaat) akan terwujud. Menurut Budda, Anda adalah Apa yang Anda Pikirkan. Pikiran positif membawa kualitas kehidupan positif. Pikiran positif adalah salah bentuk energi, yang menarik bentuk energi lain yang positif untuk mengarahkan kehidupan anda ke arah yang berguna dan bermanfaat. Inilah yang juga dibahas buku The Law of Attraction.
Apa yang kita pikirkan tentang diri kita sekarang ini adalah bentuk lampau, sejarah. Jadi kalau mengambil analogi, pikirkan 50-60 km di depan anda, maka anda akan mencapai 1000km tujuan anda. Lihatlah satu-dua anak tangga di depan anda, maka anda tanpa tidak disadari benar akan telah menaiki beberapa lantai di atas anda. Kalau ingin memikirkan anda, anda harus memikirkan masa depan.
Buku ini juga menyarankan ‘jangan pikirkan apa yang tidak anda inginkan’ tapi ‘pikirkan dan fokuskan apa yang anda benar-benar inginkan’.
Sesaat setelah kuliah saya pernah ikuti seminar nasional tenaga prana. Namanya juga ITB, jadi harus diilmiahkan. Yang dibahas adalah semua bentuk materi didunia ini adalah sebentuk energi. Penghubung semua materi juga sebentuk energi. Tanpa embel-embel the secret (hehe ini dia namanya marketing branding, all about the passion of being known about something new, the newest). Semua bentuk santet (metafisika) bisa disangkal dengan sebentuk kumparan (fisika), yang tentunya diberi sebentuk energi.
Pernahkah anda pikirkan, bahwa anda pernah mengalami beberapa kali (mungkin sering) keberuntungan? Teman saya pernah bilang saya adalah orang yang beruntung sedari kecil, iyakah..? Sesering anda memikirkan satu keberuntungan, dihayati dengan sepenuh hati (ikhlas) maka keberuntungan akan kembali. Saya pernah, tapi yang menjadi pertanyaan kenapa sekarang tidak sering terjadi lagi? Kehidupan manusia itu semakin lama semakin kompleks (terus terang ini juga karena memori semakin lama semakin memenuhi otak manusia, atau kata lainnya otak manusia semakin besar prosentasenya untuk difungsikan). Catatan: hanya 5% otak manusia yang difungsikan secara alamiah, sisanya secara pendidikan. Jadi..? Mungkin inilah yang mengurangi manusia untuk memancarkan terus menerus pikiran positifnya, dengan kata lain...Fokus kita berkurang.
Satu bentuk untuk membantu kefokusan itu…katanya the Secret dengan cara memvisualkannya. Bisa dengan potongan gambar atau foto tempat liburan yang benar-benar anda inginkan, gambar mobil yang benar-benar ingin anda miliki, atau memimpikannya terus menerus. Ringgg…ring.. Well, saya jadi ingat, salah satu trik di Amway/ 21 Network. Hehe..ini dia bentuk untuk mempertahankan bisnis multilevel marketing. Beberapa kali diminta teman kantor untuk ikut ‘seminar’, tapi semakin lama jadi tidak tertarik. Cara dan triknya saya anggap ok, saat itu saya anggap untuk memperbaiki dan meningkatkan kemampuan pribadi saja, dibandingkan dengan mencari ‘karir mendapatkan passive income’. Siapa yang tidak tertarik dengan energi Uang di jaman kapitalis begini…Hehe. Robert T Kiyosaki bilang…uang hanyalah sebuah idea tentang pencapaian.
Energi visual ini (salah satu bentuk energi positif) pernah dibahas juga disuatu jurnal (di wartakan di Kompas), bahwa dengan membayangkan saja kita berlari, ada efek samping di semua organ tubuh bahwa kita benar-benar telah berlari secara fisik. Wow….Ini yang namanya inti emosi dari Virtual… Suatu saat saya percaya, bentuk fisik kita sekarang ini akan terpengaruh oleh dunia virtual. Yang menjadi pertanyaan..mengapa bentuk energi kita (bentuk fisik manusia) seperti sekarang ini? Boleh dijawab nggak ya…? Menurut saya, bentuk kita sekarang ini seperti ini adalah salah satu bentuk survival. Bertahan hidup. Hidup? Ingat salah satu hukum fisika bahwa energi adalah kekal. Semuanya adalah keseimbangan, atau momen untuk mencari keseimbangan. Kalau boleh dibayangkan..kita adalah setitik energi di suatu titik momen keseimbangan. Terus kalau begitu…energi itu siapa, apa, mengapa? Saya akan yakin “Allahuakbar”. Mungkin bentuk lainnya adalah Buddha, Sang Penyelamat, Yehova (dengan kata lain..Tuhannya agama/keyakinan baik berwahyu maupun bukan). Sorry loncat…jadi ingat kata di TV kemaren, bahwa persatuan itu bukan dengan persamaan, tetapi bagaimana kita memandang dengan toleransi suatu perbedaan.. Banyak istilah, tapi intinya sama….keseimbangan.
So..kembali ke the Secret… (dan the Law of Atrraction), jadikan buku ini untuk menjaga fokus anda. Sip.

Selamat Iedul Fitri 1428

GPhone, Bukan Ponsel Tapi Aplikasi?

Not to lead the market, but to break the single leader.

GPhone, Bukan Ponsel Tapi Aplikasi?
Annisa M. Zakir - detikinet

Jakarta - Google nampaknya masih bungkam soal detail 'project mobile' yang sedang digarapnya. Laporan terakhir menyatakan, proyek tersebut bukanlah proyek pembuatan ponsel, melainkan sistem operasi dan aplikasi untuk perangkat ponsel.

Isu ini mencuat sejak sumber yang dipercaya terlibat dalam proyek ini sedikit memberikan hint. "Poin yang paling esensial adalah strategi Google untuk memimpin karya open source untuk menjadi kompetitor Windows Mobile," sebut sumber tadi dalam harian New York Times seperti dikutip detikINET, Kamis (11/10/2007).

Transportation Demand Management

Transportation Demand Management
A Study Paper by Rez.Nurt

Introduction
Modern efforts to solve the apparent disparity between urban transportation system supply and travel demand can be split into two categories, Transportation System Management (TSM) and Transportation Demand Management (TDM). TSM measures are designed to increase system efficiency through operational improvements, thereby increasing the demand that can be accommodated. TDM measures, on other hand, are designed to entice travelers to use higher occupancy modes, thereby reducing the number of vehicle trips that must be carried by the system.

Transportation Demand Management succinctly is described as being "the art of influencing traveler behavior for the purpose of reducing or redistributing travel demand." The primary purpose of TDM is to reduce the number of vehicles using highway facilities while providing a wide variety of mobility options for those who wish to travel. TDM aimed to reduce peak period automobile trips by either eliminating the trip, shifting it to a less congested destination or route, diverting it to a higher occupancy mode or time shifting it to a less congested period of the day. TDM strategies often worked in conjunction with TSM measures.

History of Transportation Demand Management
Although the acronym TDM has been in use only since the mid 1980s, the concept of demand management first appeared during World War II when drivers were urged to carpool and conserve gasoline. In 1974 the concept became institutionalized as part of Transportation System Management requirement promoted by join planning regulations set by the Federal Highway Administration and Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration).
TDM has assumed a significant role in federal and local transportation policies. TDM is stipulated explicitly in the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1994 (ISTEA); Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990; and numerous local traffic reduction ordinances, development agreements and transportation plans.
In the original regulation, no distinction existed between supply and demand management. Eventually however, TDM became viewed as a separate policy tool, distinct from capacity (supply) management. During the period since the late 1980s, TDM has acquired professional legitimacy and has assumed political viability, while TDM programs have become mainstream through regional ridesharing agencies, transportation management associations, employers, local ordinances and development agreements.

Strategies and Techniques
TDM measures can be categorized in a variety of ways depending on the researcher’s point of view. HC Park in 1989 developed the definition of 66 different TDM strategies into 6 categories, namely traffic constrains, public transportation improvements, peak-period dispersion, ride sharing, parking controls and land use techniques. One of more interesting categorizations was by Rosenbloom. He divided into 18 different techniques into the 4 categories of social, socio-economic, socio-technical, and technical approaches. Ferguson also categorized into 4 steps of the urban transportation planning process, namely trip generation, trip distribution, mode choice and route selection.
Essentially TDM measures are designed with at least one of three primary goals in mind, namely, increasing the use of alternative modes, discouraging the single occupant vehicle (SOV) mode choice, or shifting travel demand to off-peak times or alternate routes.

TDM may focus on:

1. Transportation System
Seems a natural focus for modifying travel behavior through TDM program implementation
2. Activity System (location and land use)
As indirect means of controlling travel behavior
3. Organizational framework (institutions)
As a means to an end and as a barrier to be overcome

TDM strategies include:

1. Public mode support
Publicly provided alternatives to single- occupant- vehicle travel, including services and facilities that encourage and support other travel modes.

2. Employer-based support
Private-sector programs and services that encourage employees to change their commuting practices. Strategies include incentives that make publicly provided travel modes more attractive, disincentives to solo commuting and employer management policies that offer employees flexibility in travel mode choices. At the employment site, typical TDM alternatives to single-occupant vehicles may include carpools and vanpools; public and private transit, including buspools and shuttles; and nonmotorized travel such as bicycling and walking.
TDM programs also may include alternatives that influence the times of day when travel occurs, or if it occurs at all on certain days. These efforts, which usually are referred to as "alternative work hours," include compressed work weeks, in which employees work a full-time, 40-hour week in less than five working days; and flexible work schedules, which encourage employees to shift their starting and ending times for the work day, which in turn shifts their commuting times to less-congested hours of the day.

3. Pricing
Taxing and pricing mechanisms that affect the cost of transportation and thereby provide monetary disincentives to some travel behaviors.

4. Telecommunications
Emerging demand-management solutions that are based on advanced telecommunications technologies. Telecommuting programs allow employees to work one or more days at home or at a "satellite work center", which is often closer to their homes and thus does not require a longer trip into the primary work location.

5. Land-use policies
Potentially the most effective long-term TDM strategies, which have the abilities to shape population density, urban design, land-use mix, travel needs and travel patterns.

6. Public policy and regulation
Restrictions and regulations that govern private vehicle use and provide political support and guidance to new institutional relationships.


TDM strategies include improvements in alternative modes of transportation; financial or time incentives for the use of these alternative modes; information dissemination and marketing activities to promote these modes; and supporting services that make the use of alternatives more convenient or that remove psychological impediments to their use.
Examples of TDM strategies in parking management include:
1. Financial/time incentives, for example preferential parking for rideshares, subsidies for transit riders, and transportation allowances;
2. Priority treatment for rideshares, for example, provision of preferential access and egress to parking lots; and
information and marketing, such as on-site availability of transit schedules, periodic prize drawings for rideshares; and guaranteed ride home programs.
3. Application of site or area-wide cost surcharges or subsidy measures designed to make the relative cost of single occupant vehicle use higher than that for high occupancy vehicles. A typical example of area-wide cost surcharges would be parking surcharges placed on employer and public parking lots that would provide a differential cost structure for single occupant vehicles versus rideshares.

TDM techniques are divided into the following four categories:

1. Stimulation of Alternate Mode and Efficient Mode Usage.
Promote alternatives to the automobile by encouraging persons to switch to other modes of travel such as transit, bicycles, or walking and efficient uses of automobiles
a.) Park-and-Ride service, Shuttle Systems, Pedestrian Systems, Employer Transit Subsidies, Bicycling
b.) High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Lanes, Ride Sharing, Truck Traffic Restrictions

2. Alternate Work Arrangement
Reducing maximum demand through diversion of peak period to relieve many congested area. Congestion is often caused more by concentration of demand for travel within time, rather in space.
a.) Alternate Work Hours: altering the hours employees report to and leave the worksite, and/or the days on which they report to the worksite. Ex: Flextime, Compressed Work Week, Staggered Work Hours
b.) Telecommuting: allows employees to work at a location other than their conventional office

3. Travel Constraint
Discouraging the use automobiles, including strategies designed to either increase generalized cost of travel, or to restrict usage of portions of the transportation network. 4 ways : physical restriction, time penalties, regulatory controls, and pricing methods.
a.) Limiting on-Street Parking and off-Street Public Parking
b.) Allowing developers to provide fewer than the standard number of parking spaces in exchange for promoting other TDM activities, such as ride sharing and variable work hours
c.) Requiring Parking Permits for Residential Areas adjacent to business districts
d.) Increasing Long-Term (commuter) Parking Rates.

4. Land Use Planning
Essential element of any long term effort to reduce or slow the growth of VMT in an urban area.
a.) Controlling population density and development in areas served by transit
b.) Reducing the required building setbacks
c.) Requiring developer to provide bicyclists and pedestrian friendly environment
d.) Encouraging large employers to locate away from city centers and close to residential areas
e.) Encouraging the development of self sufficient towns

Case Studies
Pasadena, California, Local developer only Traffic Management Ordinances (TMOs)

Pasadena passed TMO in July 1986, making it one of the first communities in the nation to embrace the TDM concept as a planning tool and zoning measure within the overall structure of the local development approval process.
Pasadena’s TMO applies to new developments as well as facilities that increase their gross floor area (GFA) by 25 percent or more. Nonresidential developments projected to house 500 or more employees face additional requirement under the TMO. TMO also applies square footage of facilities that would put the development under the ordinance.

The ordinance targets travel impact associated with work trips attracted to new development. Its goals include encouraging the use of alternative modes as well as alternative hours of travel during peak commuting periods. The objective of ordinance is to achieve an average vehicle ridership (AVR) of 1.5, in conformity with concurrent regional air quality regulations, within 10 year time period. AVR is the ratio of total employee person trips divided by total commute vehicle trips attracted to the site.

Pasadena’s TMO is very specific in identifying TDM requirements associated with development projects covered by ordinance. Companies in new developments that anticipate employing 100 or more persons are required to do each of the following:
• Set aside at least 10% of all employee parking spaces for carpools.
• Provide bicycle-parking facilities with the ration 3 bicycles per 200 employees.
• Provide computerized ridesharing matching service through Commuter Computer, the regional ridesharing agency
• Operate commuter information center

For companies in new developments that anticipate employing 500 or more persons in addition to list above must do following:
• Submit a TDM plan to the city for approval
• Provide on-site employee transportation coordinator (ETC)
• Provide adequate access min 7’2” vertical clearances and set aside a minimum of 1 % of all employee parking spaces for vanpools
• Provide loading areas for carpools and vanpools at the primary access
• Provide improvements to bus stops

As off 1997, a total of 43 sites were affected by the ordinance, employing an aggregate total of 13,000 workers, or about 15 percent of the city’s total workforce.
A survey showed that about 28 percent of average employee participation rate affected by the impact of the ordinance to chose alternative modes of travel. It means 72 percent of all affected employees drove alone. The AVR equivalent of this employee mode split is about 1.27, slightly higher than regional AVR of 1.25.

Case Studies
Parking Management in Portland, Oregon.

Portland has one of the most comprehensive parking policies in supporting of TDM in the nation. Portland has good reputation for environmental awareness and a strong planning tradition, attested to by the existence of Urban Growth Boundary.
Portland’s parking policies have been designated to promote mixed-use development in a strong downtown, supporting regional transit and urban growth initiatives. Contrast to most jurisdictions, Portland specifies maximum parking requirements in downtown area with no more than 0.7 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet allowed adjacent to the light rail corridor’s transit mall and 1.0 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet further away from the mall. Public parking facilities in downtown area are owned by city and operated by the downtown business association.
Portland regulates on street parking in downtown area through an extensive metering program. Metered spaces within three blocks of public parking garage have a one-hour limit, while most have a three-hour limit.
Since 1991, Oregon’s statewide goal has been to reduce per capita parking by 10 percent and per capita vehicle miles of travel by 20 percent within the usual 20-year, long rang transportation planning time frame. The Oregon employee commute option rule aims 10 percent reduction in commute trips for employers with 50 to 100 employees and a 20 percent reduction for employers with more than 100 employees. The usual options of alternative modes of travel, parking management, telecommuting, and on-site services are being considered to achieve these goals.

References

Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration. U.S. Department of Transportation. Overview of Travel Demand Management Measures. Final Report. January 1994.

Ferguson, Erik. Transportation Demand Management. APA Journal Report 477. 1998.

Gakenheimer, R., Meyer, M. Urban Transportation Planning in Transition: The Sources and Prospect of TSM. APA Journal. January 1979.

Giuliano, Genevieve. Testing the Limits of TSM: the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Institute of Transportation Studies. University of California.1988.

May, Adolf D. Demand-Supply Modeling for Transportation System Management. Transportation Research Record 835.

Taylor, C.J., Nozick, L.K., and Meyburg, A.H. Selection And Evaluation of Travel Demand Management Meausures. 1996

Weiner, Edward. Urban Transportation Planning in the United States: An Historical Overview. Prager Publisher. Westport, CT. 1999

http://www.dot.gov. Website for Departement of Transportation of the US.

http://www.bts.gov. Website for Bureau of Transportation Statistic.

A Locational Analysis of Starbucks Coffee Locations in Metropolitan Denver

A LOCATIONAL ANALYSIS OF STARBUCKS COFFEE
LOCATIONS IN METROPOLITAN DENVER
A Short Introductory Paper to Excercise Hypothesis of Starbucks Outlets in Denver Area (simulated with GIS ArcView) by Rez.Nurt


Introduction

This report is divided into five sections. The introduction presents an overview of the current tendency of demographics, employment, and housing including their forecast trends in the Denver Metro Area. Section I presents an overview of retailing, a brief history of the Starbucks organization as well as the background, assumptions, and hypotheses developed by our group. Section II presents a description of the methodology employed in this study and the relevant data gathered. Section III presents the regression results and discusses the relationship of these variables to our hypotheses. Section IV is the conclusion, in which the relative strengths and weaknesses of our model and results are discussed. Also in the final section, our group offers suggestions as to how future analyses conducted by students in Urban Spatial Analysis may be strengthened.

The Denver Metropolitan area became attractive to a number of national retailers in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. While the rest of the country enjoyed economic growth in the 1980’s, Denver’s economy continued to struggle.

This introduction presents an overview of some recent population and employment trends and forecasts for the Denver metro area. While the rates of growth are not forecast to continue at rates recorded in the 1990’s to date, rates of growth in the Denver metro area will be strong compared to other areas of the country and thus have a positive impact on retail location strategy.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Historical Trends

During the past five to six years, the local Metro Denver economy has been expanding rapidly. Much of the economic growth has been the result of large-scale construction projects and growth in several sectors of the local economy such as communications, tourism, and services. Expansion of the local Metro Area economy has generated strong population growth as well. Much of the population growth is attributable to in-migration of new residents from outside the state. In 1995, in-migration accounted for 72% (46,000) of the Metro Area’s total population growth, marking the highest level of migratory growth in Metro Denver since 1972. The recently announced relocation of major firms such as Level 3 Communications and Merrill Lynch also contribute to growing population trends. Since the beginning of 1991, the population in the Metro Denver Area has grown by approximately 2.5% annually. This translates into absolute population growth of approximately 50,000 new residents each year.

Recent population growth trends in Metro Denver present a dramatic contrast to the latter portion of the 1980's when population growth increased by less than 1% each year. During this time period, annual population growth in Metro Denver averaged approximately 6,500 new residents each year. During the late 1980's, population growth in the Metro Denver area was negatively impacted by the area's poor economy. As the economy and job market suffered, large numbers of people relocated to other areas of the country. This downward economic trend impacted all segments of the real estate market but has since been overcome and robust growth has been occurring throughout the real estate market, particularly the residential sector.

As with population growth trends, the number of new households formed in the Metro Area has increased during each of the past six years, averaging approximately 18,500 per year. As of January, 1997, there were approximately 854,000 households in Metro Denver. This represents an increase of 112,000 households since completion of the 1990 Census when there were 742,000 recorded households.

Based on the 1990 Census, the average household size in the Metro Denver area was 2.46. It is believed that the average household size in Metro Denver may have decreased marginally since completion of the 1990 Census, although recent Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) estimates indicated that the current average household size in Metro Denver remains at 2.46 person per household.

Forecast Trends

In late 1995 DRCOG completed long-range population and employment forecasts for the Metro Denver Area. Our Urban Spatial Analysis Team (USAT) has utilized portions of the DRCOG forecasts to complete a forecast of household growth for the Metro Denver Area. As of year-end 1996 (which is the most current data available from DRCOG), the population in the Metro Denver area was estimated at 2,129,000. From 1996 through 2000, DRCOG forecasts that the average annual population growth rate in the Metro Area will increase by less than 1%. This translates into population growth of 18,750 new persons each year with overall population increasing to a level of 2,203,700 by the beginning of year 2000.

The rate of economic and population growth in Metro Denver during the next several years is anticipated to decline somewhat from current levels. Many experts have expressed that it may be difficult for the Colorado and local Metro Area economies to sustain the level of growth, which has occurred during the past few years. Several of the following factors may contribute to slowing the pace of current economic growth; decreased in-migration to Colorado, completion of several large Metro Area construction projects, slow / no growth orientation in many local cities and counties, and impacts from decreased military spending. However, even when considering these contributing factors, economic and demographic growth in the Metro Area is forecast to remain very positive. At this time there are no significant indicators, which would signal a significant slowing of the Metro Denver, Colorado or regional area economies. Therefore, the DRCOG long-range population forecast may be too conservative, particularly during the near-term from 1998 through the year 2000.

Based on the DRCOG population forecast, the number of households formed in Metro Denver is expected to increase from a current level of 854,000 to 888,253 by the year 2000. This equates to a growth rate of 1% annually or in absolute terms, an increase of 8,500 new households per year. Beyond the year 2000, it is forecast that 12,000 households per year will be formed in the Metro Area, translating into an average annual growth rate of 1.25%.

The average household size in Metro Denver is anticipated to decline from a current level of 2.46 persons per household to 2.45 by the year 2000. Smaller household sizes have been a trend in the Metro Area as well as throughout the United States for a period of 20 to 30 years and are reflective of demographic and socio-economic patterns. It is anticipated that this trend will continue during the near future. Beyond the year 2000, average household size will continue to decline slowly to a level of 2.41 persons per household by the year 2015. It should be noted that the average household size is based on total population, less population in group quarters (which has averaged approximately 30,000 persons in Metro Denver during the last twenty years). The following table presents demographic trend and forecast information for the Metro Denver area.

Metro Denver Demographic Trend and Forecast Information
1990 – 2015
1990 1995 1996 2000 2005 2010 2015
Population 1,859,000 2,067,000 2,129,000 2,204,000 2,333,000 2,458,000 2,612,000
Group qtrs. Population 30,000 30,000 30,000 30,000 30,000 30,000 30,000
Population in households 1,829,000 2,037,000 2,099,000 2,174,000 2,303,000 2,428,000 2,582,000
Households 742,000 829,000 854,000 888,253 945,791 1,002,270 1,071,369
Average household size 2.46 2.46 2.46 2.45 2.44 2.42 2.41

Source: Non shaded area, DRCOG
Note: Shaded area represents DRCOG / USAT demographic forecasts.
The Metro Denver area includes; Arapahoe, Adams, Boulder, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties.



EMPLOYMENT

Historical Trends

Strong population increases in Colorado and Metro Denver during the six year period from 1990 through 1996 have been the result of employment growth in the region. During 1996, wage and salary employment in the Metro Denver area averaged approximately 1,157,000 and the unemployment rate was 3.8%.1 From 1990 through 1996, the average annual Metro Denver employment growth rate has been 3.21%, which has out-paced employment growth in many areas of the country. Employment growth has increased most dramatically in the construction, retail trade and service sectors of the Metro Area economy. According to data released recently by the Colorado Department of Labor, employment grew 4% in 1997.

Forecast Trends

It is expected that the Metro Denver economy will slow somewhat during the next five years from current growth levels. A decline in the overall level of construction, closure of military related facilities (Rocky Flats) and reduction in military spending are a few factors which are anticipated to contribute to slowing of the Metro Area economy. Further, during the past five to six years, the local economy has been expanding at a tremendous rate. It is unlikely that the current pace of economic growth can be sustained throughout the next several years. DRCOG forecasts that employment will grow to a level of 1,313,300 in Metro Denver by year-end 2000. This represents an average annual increase of 1.6% or in absolute terms, formation of 19,979 new jobs each year. By 2015, it is projected that there will be 1,560,350 jobs in the Metro Area, representing annual job growth of 17,347 or an average annual increase of 1.43%. The following table presents Metro Denver employment trends and projections.

Metro Denver Employment Trend and Forecast Information
1990 – 2015
Employment estimates (1) Employment forecasts (1)
1990 1995 1996 2000 (2) 2005 2010 2015
Total Employment 1,001,000 1,172,000 1,170,000 1,313,000 1,395,000 1,476,000 1,560,000
Unemployment Rate 4.5% 4.0% 3.8% N/A N/A N/A N/A
Notes:
(1) Total employment estimates from the State of Colorado, Employment forecast completed by DRCOG
(2) DRCOG employment forecast information (shaded area of the table) is not directly comparable with State of Colorado total employment information. DRCOG employment estimates and forecast are approximately 2% - 5% higher than those provided by the State of Colorado.

Overall, the rate of population and employment growth in the Metro Area is forecast to remain positive throughout the forecast period, but is expected to decline slowly from current trends. The DRCOG demographic forecasts presented in the previous paragraphs may be too conservative in light of recent strong economic growth in the Metro Denver area which has seen the local economy become much more diverse and competitive on both the national and international level.


HOUSING

Since 1990, the number of building permits issued for new residential units in the Metro Area has been very positive. In 1990 the 5,944 residential building permits issued reflected a near record low for development activity in Metro Denver. However, by 1994, development in the Metro Area had turned around completely with the issuance of 19,900 residential building permits. Building permit activity seems to have stabilized with an average of approximately 19,500 permits issued from 1994 through November of 1997. During 1997 the number of Metro Area building permits issued reflects a 21% increase from 1996 activity. However, the number of building permits issued is expected to gradually decline over the next several years due to predicted slowing of the Metro Area economy as discussed previously. The following table presents building permit information for Metro Denver during the period 1990 through 1997.

Metro Denver Building Permit Trends
Single Family Multi-family (1)
Year Number Percent of total Number Percent of total Total
1997 17,662 76.03% 5,415 23.31% 23,230
1996 15,614 80.98% 3,666 19.01% 19,280
1995 14,923 74.69% 5,057 25.31% 19,980
1994 15,257 76.60% 4,660 23.40% 19,917
1993 14,228 87.54% 2,026 12.46% 16,254
1992 11,567 86.55% 1,798 13.45% 13,365
1991 7,613 97.14% 224 2.86% 7,837
1990 5,459 91.84% 485 8.16% 5,944
Source: Metro Denver Home Builders Association.
Note: (1) Multi-family refers to rental apartment units

The above information is presented as general background data concerning the past and future status of the Denver metro area.

Section I

Retailing is generally accepted as the activity of selling goods and services in small quantities directly to the end user or consumer. Wholesaling is an activity where a bulk shipment is received at a warehouse, divided into many smaller units, and shipped to retailers in a regional geographic area. When considering the organization of the structure of retailing, it is essential to differentiate between retail organization and retail technique. Retail organization or structure relates to the form of management, whereas retail technique refers to the method or selling. There are three major forms of retail organization: consumer cooperatives, corporate chains (including franchise operations), and independents. Each of these organizational types may employ any of the several retailing techniques currently utilized: counter service, self-service, catalog buying, internet retailing, mail-order, and may operate through a variety of retail outlets: stand alone stores, ribbon type clustering, department stores, websites, strip shopping centers, malls, entertainment based retail, and others.

Starbucks Coffee began in Seattle, Washington. The original store had approximately 450 square feet of retail space. The name “Starbuck” was chosen from Herman Melville’s literary classic Moby Dick. Expand History Section----

Starbucks Coffee Co. is a national success story. Since 1990, the company has grown from 84 to more than 1,500 across the country. According to recent publications in several newspapers, Starbucks coffee has a huge staff composed of 20,000 employees, an average of 800,000-a-year cafes and one of the best paid for entry level food service. The company provides health insurance to all employees including part-timers. By its sheer size this store has economies of scale to absorb higher coffee prices better than others peddling lattes and cappuccinos do. This company also is using its brand name as a strategy to sale new products like BIC pencil Co. did when introduced a detachable shaver using its brand name.

The 1, 145-store Starbucks Corp. proved that the public’s fancy for gourmet coffeehouses in not a fluke. But judging by the stock prices of its rivals – all of which are considerably smaller.

In San Francisco, Starbucks run classes back to back bringing from 300 to 400 people nationally every month. In 1996, it had opened a new store every business day, and it opened another 325 in fiscal 1997. Perhaps the biggest concern about the future of Starbucks is that it will not be able to keep it up. However, this company plans to expand to 2,000 locations by the year 2000.

While some caffeine lovers may argue otherwise, gourmet coffee is a luxury good, in that the population served must be of a certain income level in order to justify the expenditure. Consumers have the choice of consuming a $0.75 cup of regular brewed coffee at any number of restaurants or convenience stores or paying upwards of $3.00 for a caffe latte or caffe mocha at a specialty or gourmet coffee haus. What are the motivations that drive the expenditures on this beverage?
Denver Study Area Hypotheses

1. The total number of Starbucks outlets. The total number of retail outlets has expanded in direct proportion to the population of the Denver PMSA.

2. Location Pattern. Locations will be found most often in areas that have high density residential populations, daytime working populations, and substantial evening/weekend populations.
3. As Starbucks coffee is posited to be classified as a “gourmet” product, the locations of stores in the Denver metro area is closely correlated to high income census tracts or DRCOG regional statistical areas (RSAs).
4. Success of individual outlets. Stores which stress pedestrian access over vehicular access have higher per square foot sales figures than do those stores in the latter category.
5 Small business like Starbucks requires strong spatial relationships to other commercial activities to maintain a client base and profitability.
6 Generally, the two chief methods in sitting new small stores are high traffic flow and visibility.


Section II

In the present project, a survey will be the main methodology for collecting data. However, information about “Starbucks coffee-shop in the Denver Metro Area will, also obtain from several publications and from Internet.

In order to prove the formulated hypotheses, our survey will focus in three areas – location and site, management, and customer preferences.

Location and Site data will reveal location patterns of this store within the area of study. It will also provide information about spatial relationships and the environmental aspects of the surrounding areas. For example, we can learn if “Starbucks” is a relatively isolated enterprise or whether its success is based on shared relationships with other business in its immediate vicinity. We will find how site economies as related to traffic and site characteristics including speed limit, side street, space availability, visibility, and other factors will directly influence the profit and success of this kind of business.

Data collected in the second section of this survey will include number of employess, amount of profit per day, the range of hours open to the public, quantity of suppliers, system of ownership and rent. Since rent has a direct relationship to square footage and the attractiveness for location and site selection. The analysis of this information will revel how the market forces and attractiveness of small enterprises work.

Information about preferences and frequency of visits will reach in the third section of our survey. This information will provide a good sense in order to figure what kind of strategies this particular store has been following to establish new business.

Throughout the analysis of the collected information, our hypotheses will be clarified or rejected. These results will be treated later in the conclusion section.


Section III

Regression results.
Show formula: F(x)=ai+bi+ci…..

Today, customers can enjoy the convenience of a new retail format created by Starbucks coffee. According to our study, the hypotheses of strong spatial relationship with other commercial activities to support small business is clarified by the information obtained from different locations of Starbucks coffee located in mall areas and Denver downtown.

In shopping areas, large anchor stores like Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, and Kings attract many activities. As a result, a generative - share - suscipient factor takes place in these areas providing many opportunities for development of small business. These enterprises have to have strong relationship with large stores in order to maintain and support their activities. Starbucks proves our hypotheses because its success not only depends on the quality of its products, but also in the strong spatial relationships that it has with other stores in the near vicinity, principally with large anchor stores with compatible activity.

Starbucks takes advantage of this factor of sharing activities, it also maintains and improves the existing spatial relationships in shopping areas by providing variety. Within mall areas Starbucks has being classified as a convenience store because of the convenient and friendly location, accessibility, easy visibility, and high pedestrian traffic flow.

Denver downtown provides good opportunities to establish small business like Starbucks because of the cumulative attraction of activities, high population density, good advertising, and the renovation of older areas. Here the factor of sharing activities, as well as the competition between activities, and other, strongly influences in the success of business.

According to our study the factor of high traffic flow in siting new Starbucks’ is clarified and reflected in the larger amount of people that visit these small stores every day in the metropolitan area. For example, in Westminster Mall this small store has an average of 350 customers during weekdays and 500 customers on weekends. The high quality of service provided by Starbucks and the acceptance of the public are not alone enough to promote this small business to succeed. Its success also requires high traffic flow, a good site selection, visibility, clever marketing, employee-friendly policies and deep-roasted coffee beans.

The tendency to locate small business in high traffic areas like shopping malls has being a most frequent factor for establishments like Starbucks. From our study we found that generally the newer Starbucks coffee shops in the Denver Metro Area have being located near to bagel stores and bookstores because of the complementary activities and the public demand. According to our study, visibility as a factor in the location strategy has played an important roll in establishing Starbucks. This is suggested by the location of these stores near to intersections of main streets. Principally, in shopping areas this store is reached by car; however, almost all stores in these areas poses a patio improving the environment characteristics of the site and giving a friendly and comfortable space for its consumers. In the case of downtown this store is located on streets of high traffic pedestrian flow and high commercial activity like Larimer Street. In this area because of the high competition of activities, Starbucks has leading in the innovation of new commercial techniques and sharing of activities, locating its stores close to bookstores, bagel stores and providing good condition of comfort in patios and open spaces.

Starbucks has instituted all sorts of mechanisms for its consumers to communicate with headquarters: E-mail, suggestion, cards, and regular forms. It also acts quickly on issues that are supposedly important to young people like using recycling bin and improving living conditions in coffee growing countries throughout international organizations like CARE.

Section IV

Discuss results and make recommendations re: how to strengthen future studies.

Transportation Spatial Impact

I'm almost at my edge to feel tired of Jakarta's traffic jam. Jakarta is managed by uncontrolled willing, the willing to create a more lifeable Jakarta.
This a short paper (again), as my exercise, to concern what the problems are, and to see the problem with planning view. A light smile was in my face when the t-shirt message says 'you are not stucked in traffic jam, you are traffic jam'.

Transportation Spatial Impact
A study in America's city history
A Short Paper by Rez.Nurt

Introduction

“I asked my self two questions : “ For what reason does humanity create and maintain cities?” and “What is the role of transport in cities?”. The cities are an invention to maximize exchange (culture, goods, friendship, knowledge)and minimize travel. The role of transport is to help maximize exchange. Although the answers seemed obvious, their implications for transportation were profound. For example, I concluded that an auto-dominated transport system may destroy more exchange opportunities than it opens up. It became clear that this new way of viewing transport provided a significant breakthrough that placed a whole new complexion on the role of movement in cities.” (Transportation, Land Use, and Sustainability, 1996)

In the current stages in the evolution of urban transport system, post-industrial stage, whereas public and private vehicle still separately taking a part of forming urban spatial pattern and urban function, the highways and railways development have been stimulated and accelerated the disintegrated development among urban, suburban and their fringes. The effect has directly forming cities with suburbanization, widespread development, urban functionalization and decentralization. Much to the contrary, at the earlier stage of pre-industrial the transport technology used pedestrian and draught animal as mediums of transportation. The urban form was still compact formed with route, convergence and some radial transportation system.
During the process of those economic development stages the evolving transportation system has connected the various functional elements of the urban fabric and directed the pattern of urban growth. The evolutionary sequence of the western cities urban development in general is closely associated with innovations in transport technology. The transportation system has been recently seen as a tool of land use planning rather than simply as another part (Christian and Harper, 1982).
As early beginnings of the development of highways in the United Stated in 1900s, from parkways to interstate freeway connection, they have tended to stimulate and accelerate development in suburban area. Most importantly to note here is not whether they might have been a catalyst of development surrounding cities, but the have definitely done spatially concentrate growth or expansion. They have even created some lack on separating space inner cities. Nevertheless, there was a little attempt to make land use pattern directly resulting from that highway building. This problem has been tried to be seen with a more comprehensive transportation approach which can direct urban development toward multiple activity centers rather than to sprawling suburb and urban fringe locations.
The suburbia movement in early this century drew industry and people to the margin area of the city, eliminating the viable downtown into an ignored land and converting extensive green landscape into dispersed garden villages. Over that time industrial and employment pattern have further exacerbated the problem of lost space, the leftover unstructured landscape that is usually away from the flow of pedestrian activity in the city (Trancik, Roger, 1986). Major gaps disrupt the overall continuity of the city form along highways, railroad line, and waterfronts.
The strong dependence on the automobile is the one of the most factors that have been contributed to lost space in the city. Mobility and communication have increasingly dominated public space, that furthermore has consequently lost much of its cultural meaning and human purpose (Trancik, Roger, 1986). Many big cities in North America give as much as 75 to 80 percent their land to be devoted to the storage and movement of automobile. Because of this, buildings are segregated, encompassed by huge open areas without activities based on social interaction. The streets is no longer essential urban space for pedestrian use and becoming as the fastest automobile link. For example, the city of old Boston, Massachusetts, since 1950s has experienced the effect which the elevated central artery cut through the city, fracturing the physical and activities connection between the downtown area and its harbor front. Many historic buildings that a long time had been recognized as orientation and space for gathering people in the city by Bostonian had been demolished for the rational function of transportation rather than aesthetic function.

Early Beginnings of Transportation and Development of City

“Today, nearly one-third of the energy consumed in the United Stated is for transportation, and much of it is for America’s 170 million automobiles approximately one car for two people (sic). The American passion for automobiles has spread throughout the world. Since 1950, the number of cars in use worldwide has climbed from 50 million to over 400 million. By the year 2025, it is expected to reach 700 millions….” (Daniel D. Chiras, Lessons from Nature)

Modern suburb phenomenon had been covered for almost half of the nineteenth century. It was largely a response to accessibility changes produced by advances in street rail transit technology. In the first stage of urban transport system, Pre-Industrial Stage, before 1850s, a city was tightly compacted with rounded pedestrian that connected among other land uses in the city. (Herbert and Thomas, 1997). The compact city made people and activities be clustered within easy walking distance of one another. Wealthier residents did have access to horse-and-carriage transport that provided a privacy life just beyond the edge of built up area. After 1830s the decentralization was reinforced as a trend which spread out suburb rail corridor that made considerable cost and time for upper-income settlements’ daily commuting. The urban pattern changed rapidly as new street rail transit systems increasingly allowed lower income settler to reside outside the older pedestrian city. The horsecar suburbs were constructed surround pedestrian city for a distance more than three miles out from downtown and considered as a band of middle-income housing. After 1890 circular pattern was broken by the appearance of the invented electric streetcar that was capable of speeds more than 15 m.p.h., compare with the only 5 m.p.h.’s horsecar. As a result, vast growth of new areas in the urban countryside created a star-shape pattern as traction corridors were extended in every direction several miles from center of the city. These new streetcar suburb simultaneously emerging urban middle class to gain access to suburb and take advantages of its improved residential opportunities. Much open space was largely available, land prices were cheaper, mortgage money was plentiful, and builders highly built desired single-family house in a garden. The latter as many large manufactures decentralized their factories along radial river and railroad corridors to take the same advantages of suburb area. As far, the suburban middle and working classes inhabited geographically separate social environments, a residential lot still in old suburban rail corridors whereas the life-styles and housing conditions were really different with those in surrounding suburb.
1900s through 1920s was a transitional period in the evolution of suburb. The decline of mass transit and the incline of private transportation in the form of automobiles were the trends that enforced relationship between transportation and intrametropolitan growth. Since the mass product of auto car begun, a new spatial revolution has been formed that shortly begin to create the sociogeographical fabric of contemporary suburbia (Christian and Harper, 1982). The automobile with its sense of independence, individuality, and privacy was a preferable form of transportation.
This huge suburban growth in 1920’s had impacts to overall urban form: the star-shaped metropolis of the prewar period was transformed into a much expanded version of the earlier circular city as the newly accessible interstices between trolley corridors were filled in and as new axial highways in every outlying sector fostered the considerable outward enlargement of suburbia by mid century. Those practices, opening wide new highways between older, crowded streetcar corridors and profitable large residential development, encouraged the congregation of social groups that were widely spaced in the low-density and automobile-controlled landscape.
The centrifugal development of the city after World War II has been still a rise of continuing outing people and activities from the central of the cities. The next episode of automobile suburbanization was made possible by the large construction of highways. The intraurban freeway network has grown up at the same time central of the city has lost its centrality advantages.

Early Beginnings of Street to Superhighways

“The simple answer to why there is growing congestion is that there are more people, with most doing a lot of traveling, and road capacity hasn’t been keeping up. But the simple solution of building more roads isn’t a very good one. Car availability has been growing faster than the population. We have gone from the family car to personal car.” (Bob Walter, Lois Arkin, and Richard Crenshaw, Sustainable Cities - Concepts and Strategies for Eco-City Development)

The relationship between the automobile and the road was not always so direct or symbiotic (Rowe, Peter G., 1991). Private cars seem to have been produced and operated rapidly more than roads. Early automobile and roadway improvements appear to have followed a two-stage model of development (Rowe, Peter G., 1991. During the first stage there was a relative independence between cars and roadway improvements. Most roads were very bad, but many cars could operate with reliability. In the contrary of that, during the second stage, as the number of vehicle and demands for good roads increased, the relationship between both approached the symbiotic qualities customarily presumed today (Flink, 1970).
The prominence of automobile transportation here has two major physical contributions to the American metropolitan landscape: the modern highway and the street forms that serve immediate transportation needs of local suburban sub development (Rowe, Peter G., 1991). The local scale serves the immediate transportation needs of various pieces of the metropolitan spatial mosaic whereas the regional highways hold them together.
A beginning and strong influence on the development of metropolitan road was the parkway. Parkway is defined as a limited-access highway which located through a park, combining recreational areas with the movement of passenger vehicles. Planners created parkways as a good way of giving orderly form to emerging metropolitan areas. Parkways was believed becoming the framework for a new town-and-country community by providing a practical means for a better distribution of population (Nolen and Hubbard, 1937). This formula putting together recreational and circulation were taken further. They might reduce the strain of driving through good highway design and there were evidence of a general long-run increase in land values accruing to neighborhood properties. The right-of-way of parkway originally designed in Boston, the first effort in America toward the end of the nineteenth century, was varied in width from 116 feet to 200 feet. Roadbed widths were reasonable generous at 40 feet, remaining a standard for parkways well into the 1930s. Relatively smooth curves with a minimum radius of 700 to 800 feet were built to enhance the aesthetic experience of moving gently through a large public park. Roadways varied from two to four lanes. Traffic moved in both directions along each carriageway which is a system of one-way roads and loops. Generally a parkway was simply a roadway that was wider and more richly furnished (Newton, 1971).
Highway construction was highly built in the United States spans between 1945 to 1970. 1944 Federal-Aid Highway Act effectively directed a limited system of national highway and then metropolitan expressways as an integral part of that system. An expanding miles of freeway was recommended because of consideration of population centers, rates of metropolitan growth, motor vehicle density, the location of military establishment, farms, and so on. Expressways were clearly seen as a practical means of rationalizing and dealing with traffic problems and city congestion. On that time, in its inference, the government needed bigger and better metropolitan highways so that people could easily partake of suburban life. Outer circumferential loop roads and beltways were crossing the urban sections of interstate highways moving from city center to city center.
In a design framework that closely paralleled with earlier German’s Autobahn principles of internal and external harmony, the principles of highway design had to rest upon landscape principles as well as engineering principles. Flowing gradient and alignment as well as spiral curves were preferred over linked configurations of straight and tangential roadway geometry. Roadside planting was regarded simultaneously as a matter of practically for controlling snow drift or ease of maintenance, for example, and as a matter of enhancing aesthetic values. With postwar advancement in basic highway design, designer, landscaper and engineer continued the parkway traditional into the construction of interstates and urban expressways. After through debating for social and community values, because of economic dictates of rising construction costs and higher land prices tipped the balance away from landscape principles in favor of basic engineering, by the early 1970s the prolific era of new highway expansion was over.

Street Pattern and Urban Spatial Pattern

Street pattern in earlier development of city was a logical extension of irregular form of rural and farm-to-market roads and the survey system grid. The first layout of street followed older pattern, reaching the undeveloped areas of land. The grid system was used to subdivide rectilinear residential and commercial areas. In later layouts, street became specific and more objective, following the need of function, society, topography and the process of design thinking. Functional distinction were made to various kinds of traffic where pedestrian and vehicular were separated. The pattern became often closely to local topography. The width was predicted to anticipate the travel capacities and speeds. Roadway network were shifted from for organizing land to providing transportation service for specific sites and buildings.
The survey system layout theoretically was a regular rectangular established with the fundamental unit of measurement 1 mile on side for the ease of observing the land. Practically then the section line became rural and town-roads. Subdivision was further being made into half and quarter sections, defining more gridwork of roads and streets. This pattern of land parcels was still further subdivided into regular array of rectangular blocks, roughly from 500 to 750 feet in length and 200 to 250 feet in width.
The uniformity of this system sometimes was criticized because its pattern tended to facilitate a vast suburban expansion and provide a crude functional hierarchy for automobile movement. The resulting roadway network and scheme of land parcels produced a four level of hierarchy: expressway, section-line arterial road, quarter-section collector, and subdivision plots of local residential street. Since post World War II, this scheme can be found throughout most of the metropolitan in the United States.
Because of the uniform and monotonous pattern, by the mid 1930s, this system began changing in layouts. Different types of vehicular movement began to be distinguished. Landscape principles were being explored. Wide thoroughfares and boulevards became distinct from small-scale residential side streets and cul-de-sacs. Unsecured grid system in residential area was changed by eliminating through streets almost entirely and replacing them by loop roads. For example, in Radburn Communities, New Jersey, pedestrian movement was completely separated from the roadway network and largely confined to the park areas. The concept of superblock was also developed here which arose earlier in the urban context of garden apartment. Beside its inventing of more new green communities life, in later consideration, difficulties were encountered in providing adequate fire protection with long dead-end street, higher costs per dwelling unit of service delivery and maintenance of common park areas.

Hampstead Garden Suburb, London,1906, culminates the movement towards the establishment of a vocabulary of spatial and architectural elements unusual at the suburban scale. Street were designed to sort out the traffic, to minimize hazards for pedestrians, and to work in combination with its landscape and architecture…the shops that flank the entrance to the garden suburb at Finchley Road, modeled on German medieval town building such as at Rothenburg, provide an urban character to the road and act as monumental gateway to the suburb.

Sunnyside Gardens might be an example that it as a uniquely successful demonstration of how the garden suburb idea can be adapted to the grid typical of most American cities. The site of development was an undeveloped area which had been used by the Long Island Railroad as a train yard for Pennsylvania Station and was a convenient 15-minute subway ride from Time Square New York. (Stern, Anglo-American Suburb)

Another outgrowth revisions to subdivision planning practices during the early automobile era of the 1920s and 1930s was the curvilinear layout of streets. It was made as a response to the perceived uniformity and monotony of rectilinear plans and to a detailed functional consideration of suburban streets. The concept of long block to attain privacy and avoidance of four-way intersection to reduce traffic conflict led to a more organic layout, roughly back to the earlier pattern of the street in early stages of pre-industrial. The conforming route and convergence pattern of animal and pedestrian in early stage of pre-industrial had been changing to the advantageous and marketable reason of curving street vistas and visual interests.
By the mid of 1950s, after the development of greenbelt communities, loop road combined with housing cluster group were applied into larger area which made communities with a recreational focus such as golf courses. One clear advantage of this type, in a low density residential environment, was preservation of huge open space. This had made one developer need larger space to build one community and tend to explore the other natural landscape.
During 1960s when the concept of PUDs (Planned Unit Developments) emerged, single-family housing was changed into a preferable the form of townhouses or apartments. The PUD concept rose and allowed many older suburban areas to be redeveloped. Higher density achieved 50 percent savings in service costs. Length and width of road were reduced by off-street parking layout under its loop and cluster road arrangement.
Further development of street pattern, an effort to refer traditional neighborhood development and pedestrian pocket, can be found at Seaside Project, Florida. The project proposed highly particularized motor courts, off-parking areas, and meandering loop roads as a multipurpose nonhierarchical street grid. According to the planner, generalized network was not only more conducive to a mixture adjacent land uses than the specialized systems of the functionalist tradition but also furthered their social agenda of encouraging social interaction.

Recent Urban Transportation Issues

There’s a deep cleft between what’s taking place in cities and what architects and urban designers would like to see occur there. During the 1960s, we architects felt we could make a difference. We could influence the character of urban development, revitalize downtown, stabilize suburban sprawl. (Safdie, Moshe, The City After Automobile)

Mass Transit System. As more and more people try to live within the same economic event-horizon, something odd happens. In an auto-centric city, the area covered by the road system increases without limit once the population reaches around 10 million. Highway and street rights-of-way must expand to cover all available ground in order to carry the volume of traffic required to keep the entire population within the economic event-horizon. This situation is being approached in the auto-centric cities of the American West and South, where up to 70% of downtown land is devoted to the automobile. Unless computerized highways can increase the traffic density and average speeds, auto-centric cities cannot grow larger than 10 million. Above this size, metro systems become essential.
Sustainable Community. In spite of its new paradigms of designing cities that because of city using more private vehicular, as an effort of making more sustainable communities, New Urbanism movement is still being criticized. A most vocal critic is that New Urbanism can still not impede urban sprawling. The designed communities that by its pioneers laid on suburban areas, can not eliminate amount of travels effectively, although seemingly they are compacted to transit system network.
Free-car City. The industrialized nations made a terrible mistake when they turned to the automobile as an instrument of improved urban mobility. The car brought with it major unanticipated consequences for urban life and has become a serious cause of environmental, social, and aesthetic problems in cities. The urban automobile: kills street life, damages the social fabric of communities, isolates people, fosters suburban sprawl, endangers other street users , mars the city's beauty, disturbs people with its noise , causes air pollution, wastes energy and natural resources, impoverishes nations. The challenge is to remove cars and trucks from cities while at the same time improving mobility and reducing its total costs.

Conclusion:
Better Way to View Transportation and Its Spatial Implication to the City

There is a number of issues in transportation network resulting in urban spatial problems. The development of street pattern, from curve to grid system, and highways connection, from parkways to super expressways, has created many artifacts of the modern era. Its development has influenced the quality of urban spatial. In all cities the close interactive relationship between transportation network, spatial pattern of urban functions, and urban morphology has been long time recognized as a fundamental factor of cities development. They are inextricably linked to each other and to the ultimate form of any human settlement. In that term, the changes in transportation policy and technology imply and effect changes in the way land is used.
The recent Trancik’s lost space problem that we now found in cities is mostly contributed by the automobile factor. Since it is so deeply ingrained in the American way of life, the dependence on the automobile is the most difficult to deal with. Since the automobile has been chosen as a symbol of individual freedom and the city has been built as capital matter, we are never quickly free from the urban spatial problems that is connected with other dimensions of community life. Historically the street built to mainly fulfill vehicle needs, has influenced the development of the city. The streets are as full of capitalism as of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious. Transportation should not be made an issue by itself. It should be connected to the problems of the city, of the social division of labor, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life.
At enormous expense, it would be possible to bury the automobile infrastructure, reclaiming the city surface for people. The cost of putting a public transport system underground is also large but still a tiny fraction of the cost of burying the entire street and highway network of an auto-centric city.
The current rules of the game of urban living may cause the population at least begin to evaluate travel budget seriously. There is no longer the same standards of living, population growth, rising real incomes and unlimited energy supply in the earlier of development of vehicle and highways. Now there are scarce resources, rising demands of environmental and neighborhood quality, inflation, and limited economic and social growth. It will be better if we look at transportation system management rather than freeway building, rapid rail mass transit rather than automobile, commuter-caused congestion rather than appetite of comfort driving in highways, and some comprehensive planning rather than myopic unimodal approach. It is very likely that the combination of a dispersed distribution of population and employment and the dominance of automobile will continue to be a major force in shaping most urban spatial, if we will not lay on travel pattern and transportation development reasons rather than mobility considerations.

Internet Virtual Reality GIS

Google Earth is a breaktrough, following with other excelent 'for free' data bundled up to give people more information to know their environment. This phenomenon of Google Earth was predicted a decade ago. This short paper is to show the emerging ideas coming to more realize the 'true' virtuality.

Internet Virtual Reality GIS:
as an innovation approach in Urban Planning and Design
A Short Paper by Rez.Nurt

Introduction

Traditional planning and design techniques are time consuming, focusing on experts judgement and often addressing superficial rather than fundamental issues due to lack of resources and the poor methods used in conveying the relevant information. Rendered images and more recently photomontages and even computer animations of proposed schemes, formed by Virtual Reality, are bound to the views submitted by the designers (Hall, 1996). Such communication deficiencies can subsequently lead to unsatisfactory designs and will make post construction debates. The other classic problem in traditional planning and urban process is the contribution of decision making to the community. There is much time and ways needed to implement the ideas to reality.
The emergence of Virtual Reality and the migration of GIS to the web is recently the most fascinating innovation providing the key infrastructure to begin building virtual cities which can provide an interactive simulation and analysis environment for planning and designing cities or urban places. The virtual city on the internet supported by GIS technologies will provide urban planners and designers with a computer environment to interface with complex physical and social data which are needed to plan, design and manage cities, along with necessary tools to explore and analyze that data in meaningful and intuitive ways (Dodge, Smith & Doyle 1997). Virtual Reality, GIS, and the internet, the three key components, are gradually approaching the surface in which large scale multi-user virtual environments will be possible. These will lead to the development of large scale spaces for the on-line community to meet, socialize, and then might carry out the business.
This paper draws on literature from the disciplines of the GIS and Virtual Reality, especially in their issues in urban design and planning. The objective of this paper is to discuss in general the innovation of GIS technologies on the net to support the virtual city which is revolutionizing urban design and planning process.


Virtual City, Internet, and Urban Planning and Design

Development of computer network has brought a new concept called cyberspace, or in specific term in urban planning and design it is called virtual city, digital city or cybertown. The definition of cyberspace remains some uncertainties, but in general it means as follow: any types of virtual space generated from a collection of electronic data that exists within internet (Shiode, 1997). The general definition of cyberspace as “an infinite artificial world where humans navigate in information-based space” (Benedikt, 1991) describes its physical existence as a world of computer linked by telecommunication lines. Although its history is practically less than a decade, cyberspace has been growing rapidly through internet and bring a new paradigm of network society for the next century.
Virtual city as a new form of living space generated virtually in the internet relates to urban planning and design in two aspects (Shiode, 1997). The first is the presentation of actual town plans using Virtual Reality. The WWW is exploited as a new means of presenting town plans. Using the internet for providing city planning and design information encourages citizen and public debate, provided that the majority of citizen access to the network. The important point here is the virtual reality is a computer-generated world involving one or more human senses and generated in real-time by the participation’s actions. The real-time responsiveness of the computer to the participant’s action distinguishes virtual reality from other kinds of computer-generated simulations. The participant in a virtual reality is perceiver and creator at the same time, in a world where the object of perception is created by actions.
The second is the definition of cyberspace as a new form of urban space and the contribution to its planning and construction from urban-planner and designer’s viewpoint. On this point the unique spatial characteristics and the present status of cyberspace are being explored.


The city is a powerful metaphor in which most people inhabit are familiar with. The Web, is primarily a visual interface to information resources or that metaphor of the city, with buildings and other infrastructure, is being employed by a number of content providers as a user interface to a range of information, services, and facilities. There are three important distinctions need to be made in the type of virtual city that are currently on the web (Dodge, Smith & Doyle 1997).
a. Web Listing Virtual Cities. This kind of web site is described as a virtual city, but in reality it only contains on-line guides, menus and listings.
b. Flat Virtual Cities. This web site uses image maps of buildings and street as an static interface. Familiar landmarks and buildings are represented as graphical icons to give further online information.
c. Three-dimensional Virtual Cities. This web site uses web-based Virtual Reality technologies to model the built form of cities, to varying degrees of accuracy and realism. These virtual cities are usually navigable in the sense that user can walk around and fly through the scene. Buildings are represented as 3d polygons with textures to add realism. The cities are built usually with Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML).

There are several approaches representing cities on the web which attached the virtual tag within their title. Yet the virtual cities which has effective digital simulation of real-cities that give users a genuine sense of inhabiting an urban place do not yet exist on the web. Research in the field of internet GIS and 3d modeling using VR are creating the foundations for the virtual cities with realistic built-form interface, a richness of geo-referenced information content, and crucially, the ability to support social interaction with other people.


GIS and the Internet

GIS is categorized as the third generation of computer development, followed by the Internet as the next generation. The internet and the World Wide Web have been considered as revolutionary media of communication for the future era. The Web is opening up new forms of computer-mediated communications which allow for new forms of information dissemination, social interaction and collaborative working. Many activities can be undertaken through the Web and the Web is a great possibility to reach customers, clients and citizens respectively.
The rapid development of the Internet, as a place of information dissemination provides researchers and policy-makers with considerable challenges on how best to realize the potential in the pursuit of worthwhile goals. This is particularly so for the planning community with the intense drive to develop GIS further in terms of widening and deepening access to spatial information along with appropriate analytical functionality within the network paradigm of the Web and the browser interface. Most GIS vendors and some commercial spatial data providers have realized that the WWW will be the next-generation GIS platform (superseding the conventional PC and desktop paradigms), providing a powerful medium for geographic information distribution, as well as a particularly lucrative new market to exploit (Toon, 1997). Plewe provides a timely review of the range of proprietary Internet mapping and GIS that serves as an indicator to the degree of academic and commercial interest in the area to date (Plewe, 1997).


GIS and Virtual Reality

In the last few years, research projects that merge Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with Virtual Reality (VR) systems have gained more and more popularity. Several recent developments in computing can be seen as the base for this trend: the widespread use of powerful desktop computers, the re-evaluation of VR as a simulation of reality and the rise of the VRML standard coupled with a wide range of tools that accompany it. By now, it’s possible to locate and classify the research areas that focus on VRGIS (virtual Reality Geographical Information System) applications and to envisage the future direction of this field. Though it must be stated that this term incorporates a wide range of applications - ranging from semi-immersive, low end computing implementations to supercomputer based, highly immersive applications. Nevertheless, it is possible to find common properties and attributes to all those VRGIS systems.
Although the roots of both GIS and VR can be easily traced back into the 70s, the first documented successful fusion of GIS and VR was achieved in the early 90s with a system that depict the Georgia Tech campus area. Since then, the number of application and research projects that involve VR and GIS have increased dramatically. The first wave of VRGIS application was based on high end workstations and even supercomputers due to the intensive computation nature of both fields - e.g. the geometrical computation in GIS and heavy rendering computation in VR (Faust, 1995).
From the mid 1990s, a re-evaluation of VR lead to a major change in the research agenda. The result was that VR is not seen as a method for imitate reality but rather to simulate aspects of it as a sensual form of communication (Gillings & Goodrick, 1996). This change paved the way to the next major development - VRML. VRML emerged from 1995 onwards (Bell et al., 1996) and opened a new direction for the development of VRGIS. By using VRML, the economics of deploying a VRGIS dropped enormously. This development happened in coincidence with the emergence of low cost, yet powerful GIS packages (e.g. ArcView or Mapinfo), thus, enabling researchers who seek a low cost solution to experiment with VRGIS. According to the survey, many new VRGIS research initiatives use VRML (more then 50% of the total number of projects).
In short, VRGIS can be defined as a “traditional” GIS - with its data storage and handling capabilities, and query and analysis capabilities, but with Virtual Reality as the main interface and interaction method. We can think about VRGIS as taking the best of both worlds - VR has evolved as mainly an interface technology and research about it focuses on user interaction issues. GIS is essentially a data storage and manipulation technology - with a somewhat problematic user interface. The problems of balancing between user interface and spatial data functionality constantly appear in many research projects and books on GIS.
But it should be noted, that while VR is inherently 3 dimensional, most existing GIS implementations - both software and databases - are 2 dimensional. As result, current GIS is mainly 2D and therefore the transition to VRGIS is not transparent. Faust described the ideal VRGIS as having the next features:
1. Very realistic representation of real geographic areas.
2. Free movement of the user within and outside the selected geographic terrain.
3. Standard GIS capabilities (query, select, spatial analysis etc.) in a 3D database.
4. The visibility function should be a natural and integral part of the user interface.

In the light of this view it is clear that such systems do not exist yet. Nowadays, the connection between the GIS and VR is a modular, in which the GIS is used to create and process the geographical data, and by using a transferable file format (most notably VRML), the information is passed to the VR package for representation (Berger, 1996). VRGIS solutions are based on coupled systems, with a distinctive GIS module and a distinctive VR module. Currently, the main properties of VRGIS are:
1. The system database is a traditional GIS.
2. The VR functionality is used to augment the cartographic capabilities of the GIS.
3. More and more solutions use the VRML standard, albeit its limitation. As a result, the VRGIS comes with an Internet functionality “out of the box”.
4. There is a trend toward PC based systems, relying on desktop GIS.
5. Loosely coupled VR and GIS software. The graphic data is usually transferred through a common file format, and the synchronization between the systems is based on communication protocol - such as RCP.


VRGIS Projects

It has been in recent years that many research projects in building virtual reality in the field of urban planning and design have been carried out and developed. Models were constructed in order to assist in making the planning and development control process more flexible by providing a means by which planning proposals could be visualized and alternative schemes for a site compared. Developments in the domains of Virtual Reality (VR) and the Internet triggered a series of research projects tackling the issues of interactivity, structuring and management of large urban databases. Over the last few years, designers started utilizing some of the potential of VR as a communication tool both within the design team as well as with clients.
The need for realistic 3d models of urban built form is vital to true virtual cities. There are a small number of research groups around the world who are experimenting methodologies and computing tools for constructing realistic 3d models of large areas of urban built form at the city scale. The Urban Simulation Team at the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, lead by Professor William Jepson, are creating an interactive city model of greater Los Angeles covering over 4,000 square miles. Their simulation system provides interactive navigation and manipulation tools for end-users, allowing the exploration of alternative planning scenarios over both space and time. The real power of their emerging virtual city is that it "...allows the Urban Simulation Team to include virtually everyone in the planning process, expert and layman alike. We have found that designers, architects, developers and consultants are able to identify real problems and remedy those problems long before the first hole on a new development is dug" (Jepson, 1996).
Another team at the University of Bath, lead by Professor Alan Day have developed a great deal of competence in creating large, realistic city models. Their most developed model being of the city of Bath. The model covers several square kilometers of the historic center of Bath and is accurate to the sub-meter level. A considerable amount of realism has been modeled using both geometry and texture mapping. Bourdakis, one of the model's creators, comments that the "...computer models were constructed in order to assist in making the planning and development control process more flexible by providing a means by which planning proposals could be visualized and alternative schemes for a site compared; allowing non-experts to comprehend the implications of proposed changes” (Bourdakis, 1997).
Stephen Kirby and colleagues in the National Key Center for Social Applications of GIS at the University of Adelaide are developing a 3d GIS model of large area of the city of Adelaide. There are several European research teams working on large urban models. For example the ART+COM organization has been working on the Virtual Berlin project using virtual reality technologies to model the city. Also in Germany a joint research project between the Universities of Rostock and Stuttgart is developing 3d GIS for urban planning and design, modeling parts of Rostock. While in Austria, an innovative company called GRINTEC is working on 3d city models, they claim that "For decades urban planning was done by drawing plans and building elaborate models from wood and pasteboard. The Austrian cities of Graz and Vienna are demonstrating that this is a thing of the past - its three-dimensional computer simulations derived from information of the digital city map are revolutionizing the planning process" (Ranzinger & Gleixner, 1997).


Virtual Reality GIS and Urban Planning and Design

Urban planning and design are complex processes encompassing aspects of social, economic, physical and spatial significance. These aspects are not independent, interacting with each other within the urban system, therefore the decision-making process depends on a dialectic relation between them all. The communication among these various aspects is central to urban planning and design. There is clearly a series of communication problems in this field and it has been advocated that computers can offer satisfactory solutions (Hall, 1996). An important issue for facilitating this communication process is to promote data presentation that is informative, accessible and able to successfully present complex interactions, phenomena and underlying expert analyses to professionals as well as lay people through the characteristic of the innovation of VRGIS on the net.
There are some specific purposes to Virtual Reality GIS (VRGIS) related to the field of urban planning and design. The main one is to (re)construct landscape and urban settings that don’t exist - either "no more" or "not yet". The case of "not yet" plays an important role in urban and environmental planning - especially for visual impact of planned buildings and other construction projects (e.g. road, or a bridge).
The other purpose is the visualization of abstract variables, and by that reducing the level of abstraction. This theme is gaining an overall popularity in recent VR applications. However, in VRGIS those applications tend to create a hybrid representation of the "virtual variable" on a background of "real variable". The abstract variable is usually an environmental variable (such as air pollution level) though there are sparse examples for socio-demographic or socio-economic variables.
Another purpose is to improve communication of ideas and concepts in a collaborative process like architectural planning. In this type of process, the VRGIS acts as a mediator, connector and distributor of ideas between the participants. In the GIS realm, the goal is to support users that are "overwhelmingly map illiterate" (Jacobson, 1995). This leads to the next purpose which is the search for an intuitive interface for spatial technology.
Finally, though provocative, one of the identified implicit purpose that led to VRGIS is the "Hammer looking for a nail" (A solution looking for a problem). GIS captures and stores spatial data, and since many developers of VR applications are looking for applications that will be used as a case study, it’s not surprising that GIS is used as a test case. Examples for this type of application appear in scientific visualization, or the CAVE GIS project. Those projects tackle a real problem, but the projects serve as an example of future implementations of a certain technology rather then confronting the problem itself.
Employing VRGIS on the net, the process of decision making in urban planning and design changes. In the future the system of virtual reality will change the society network and change the conservative ways that usually planners and designers think. Generally, internet VRGIS activity for planners and designers of the built environment is facilitating innovative development into three aspects: the first is the dissemination, distribution of information and participation level, secondly, visualization, and the last is analysis tools.



References

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Berger, P., Meysembourg, P., Sales, J. and Johnston C., Toward a Virtual Reality Interface for Landscape Visualization, in: Third International Conference/Workshop on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modeling CD-ROM. 1996.

Bertol, Daniela, Designing Digital Space: an Architect’s guide to Virtual Reality. Published in Canada, 1997.

Bourdakis, V., The Future of VRML on Large Urban Models, Proceedings of the Fourth UK VRSIG Conference, edited by Richard Bowden, 1st November 1997,Brunel University.

Bourdakis, V., Virtual Reality: A Communications Tool for Urban Planning, Proceedings of CAAD: Towards New Design Conventions, edited by A. Asanowicz and A. Jakimowitz, Technical University of Bialystok, pages 45-59.

Campbell, D. A., and Davidson J. N., Community and Environmental Design and Simulation - The CEDeS Lab at the University of Washington in Bartol, D., Designing Digital Space: An Architect’s guide to Virtual Reality, 1996.

Dodge, Martin, Simon Doyle, Andy Smith & Stephen Fleetwood. Towards the Virtual City: VR & Internet GIS for Urban Planning. 1997.

Faust, N.L., The Virtual reality of GIS, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 22. 1995.

Gillings, M. and Goodrick, G., Sensuous and Reflexive GIS Exploring Visualization and VRML, Internet Archaeology. 1996
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Ingram, Rob. Building Virtual Worlds: A City Planning Perspective. University of Nottingham. 1998.

Jacobson, R., Virtual Worlds: Spatial Interface for Spatial Technology, electronic Atlas.1995.

Jepson, W., Liggett, R., & Friedman, S., Virtual Modeling of Urban Environments, Presence, Vol. 5, No 1. 1996.

Plewe, B., GIS Online: Information, Retrieval, Mapping and the Internet. OnWord Press: Santa Fe, USA. 1997.

Ranziger, M. & Gleixner, G., GIS-Datasets for 3D Urban Planning, Computers, Environments & Urban Systems, Vol. 21, No. 2. 1997.

Shiode, Narushige. An Outlook for Urban Planning in Cyberspace: Toward the Construction of Cyber Cities with the Application of Unique Characteristic of Cyberspace. University College of London. 1997.

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Wiggins, Lyna L. and Steven P. French, GIS: Assessing Your Needs and Choosing a System. American Planning Association Journal. August 1991.

Pengguna Vista Bisa Nonton TV Gratis di Internet

Fransiska Ari Wahyu - detikinet
Jakarta - Bagi Anda pengguna Windows Vista, melalui Windows Media Center, Microsoft mulai menyajikan siaran TV Internet dari jaringan MSN dalam versi Beta secara gratis mulai hari ini (28/9). TV gratis yang disponsori oleh YuMe advertising ini diperuntukkan bagi pengguna Windows Vista HOme Premium dan Ultimate yang terdapat Vista Media Center di dalamnya."Microsoft akan meluncurkan uji coba Internet TV Windows Media Center yang akan menayangkan lebih dari 100 jam hiburan dari video MSN, termasuk show, konser musik dan film trailer," ujar Microsoft seperti dikutip detikINET dari Softpedia, Jumat (28/9/2007).Kehadiran TV internet nantinya memungkinkan pengguna Windows Vista Media Center untuk mengakses televisi dan video tanpa TV tuner dan melalui jaringan MSN."Dengan TV internet, pengguna dapat menikmati siaran berkualitas tinggi dari studio favorit dan network di Media Center," jelas Joe Belfiore, Wakil Presiden Divisi Hiburan dan Device eHome Microsoft.Microsoft menambahkan bahwa seluruh isi siaran datang dari video MSN tersebut menyediakan lebih dari 100 jam siaran termasuk episode lengkap pertunjukan TV, konser musik, film berkualitas hingga berita-berita aktual dari MSNBC dan siaran olahraga dari FOX. ( amz / amz )