[Chris Whitis]

Here are some pics of a high-end retail development in Austin called the Domain that might be what you’re looking for.  It has some nice boardwalk areas integrated around existing trees that give it a nice touch.

 

Sitephocus.com – The Domain

[Chris Whitis]

We’ve it quite a few of the sites mentioned in Minneapolis on sitephocus.com and have a pretty extensive collection of images of sites broken down by city. Here’s a link to Minneapolis

[Chris Whitis]

I’ll be in town photographing sites all over the place, but am skipping the meeting. Would love to meet up or if anyone wants to tag along to see some sites, drop me a line. If not a Tweetup, then we’ll see ya at the Happy Hour.

[Chris Whitis]

But the same can be said about highways. They don’t recoup their costs and ‘bleed money’ as well. Why the double standard? If people had to start paying the true cost of highways, they might be much less extensive as well (tolling, raise gas taxes). I have my doubts that the roads would be paved with gold. TxDOT recently did a study that showed their best performing roads in terms of gas tax returns recouped about 60% of cost. That was best case! You can also get into the issue that local road users are subsidizing highway users as local roads don’t see gas tax revenue, yet it’s burned there as well.

We need to be looking at multi-modal forms of transportation if we’re going to relieve congestion. Many transit systems suck because they aren’t comprehensive or linked efficiently with other modes of travel or have zoning in place that would encourage appropriate development along corridors. There’s also too much emphasis on commuter rail/ LRT and feel streetcar systems providing transit in actual urban areas can be very beneficial for urban mobility, current transit planners only seem to focus on how to push transit to ease congestion in auto-centric areas when those areas have chosen the car and all that goes with it.

[Chris Whitis]

I’m not sure how the system has worked out, but our local concrete association has done something similar. The cross-section is porous concrete over washed 57 stone with a pond liner/ membrane acting as the reservoir. The 3/4″ aggregate has ±40% pore space for calculating volume/ capacity. I’ll DM you his contact information and you can check in with him to see how it’s working.

[Chris Whitis]

Do you have his report? I can’t seem to find it. I’d love to see his numbers to back up his statement. Curious if he’s trying to discredit other systems in order to push his.

Here’s some additional info:

MSU – http://www.hrt.msu.edu/greenroof/
“Over the 14-month period the study was conducted, the vegetated roof treatments retained 60.6% of rainfall from 83 measured rain compared to 50.4% and 27.2% for the media-only and conventional gravel ballast roofs, respectively.”

I’m having trouble tracking down the CNT report on Chicago for some reason and can pull the NC State info when I have some time.

[Chris Whitis]

Yeah, the basal system is the one I’m remembering. Haven’t heard any more about it or looked into it further, but am guessing the added weight costs would be of concern with owners. Plus, having a full-time bath tub overhead might scare a few people as well.

[Chris Whitis]

His beef appears to be more of biodiversity of what’s going on in the soil, not related to stormwater. Or at least I’m not gleaning that green roofs have failed in that aspect.

[Chris Whitis]

Sarah,
Are you providing an irrigation system, or are the perforated channels intended to provide the irrigation for the entire roof? If you’re going with a traditional extensive (4″) green roof media, I’m afraid you’re not going to provide any irrigation other than immediately adjacent the channel. Green Roof media typically conducts water pretty quickly and doesn’t generally flow over the surface.

I’m interested in seeing some of the research you’re referencing, Rob. The research we’ve seen typically does a pretty good job at water quality and volume reduction. For WQ, most places are providing credit at 80% TSS and research is there that supports that. The plants aren’t doing the work with filtering, it’s mostly the media/ filter fabric that’s trapping fines (think sand filter).

Volume is trickier and dependent upon the size of the storms. For smaller storms, 1″ or smaller, green roofs have the ability to capture upwards or 90% or more of the rainfall. Granted, this is counting rainfall directly to the roof and not additional flow directed to it. Chicago had been studying volume reduction through test plots and their annual averages were around 65% total reduction. NC State was showing closer to 55%. Even when events overwhelmed the green roof, they’re shown to significantly delay runoff. Don’t know that I’d quantify that as a failure and I’d be interested in seeing those studies.

There was a system being tossed around a couple of years ago that was a flooded green roof system where irrigation was provided by upward capillary action. I can’t recall the name, but basically it maintained a set level of water in a deeper soil media. Of course, that adds a ton of weight to the structure by holding water continuously.

[Chris Whitis]

Here are a few that come quickly to mind:

Tanner Springs Park (Portland)

South Waterfront (Portland)

Epler Hall, Portland State (Portland)
Bioretention and educational component

Citygarden (St. Louis)
Bioswales/ bioretention along cross-streets, permeable pavers in certain locations in the park

Public Square (Nashville)
Park/ Plaza green roof over subsurface parking structure

Not necessarily urban, but the Portland Stormwater Lab is really well done.

[Chris Whitis]

We were in NYC in the spring and the plaza at 55 Water Street (Ken Smith) had a turf panel that was synthetic. The newer surfaces can fool you from a distance and can only tell its fake when you’re up close. I’m betting they chose it for maintenance and also growing conditions due to lack of solar exposure.

55 Water Street @ http://www.sitephocus.com

I’m interested if anyone else has heard this or not, but a local project that has proposed using this in a play park is going to have to irrigate or mist the entire synthetic area due to the high surface temperature from the sun of synthetic fields. I’m not familiar enough to know if this is a concern or not.

[Chris Whitis]

Portland does a great job of creating individual cells that daisy chain together with each cell having an inlet and an outlet. Most of their examples are on pretty shallow grade, though and street in the St. John’s area outside Portland was a bit steeper and you can get a feel for the spacing of the inlets. The most typical inlet erosion protection we’ve seen has been large (2-3″ or larger) pebbles. We’ve tried a paver baffle that has the pavers raised at differing heights to try and break the flow as our MPW was not receptive to loose stone from a vandalism standpoint.

Portland’s BES has a good management manual with curb inlet details. Check out Appendix G for the download. Haven’t looked into it to thoroughly to see if they’re recommending any minimum spacing requirements. Spacing would be dependent on how much area you’re trying to drain and I’d err on the side of more inlets than not.

Portland BES Stormwater Manual

Here are some additional images of various green streets via sitephocus.com.
Green Streets

[Chris Whitis]

Thanks for the compliments, Laith! We’re looking at revising our search set up to include a ‘Search Keywords Only’ search box. Currently on the beta site, when you search for a keyword the site pulls up images that have the keyword as well as that word within the site’s name (ie. park/ Baldwin Park TND).

A feature that’s on the site now to help with searching is the Master Keyword list that’s linked. Additionally, there is a function where you can refine your search to help narrow down the results and that’s located above the thumbnails once you’ve entered a query. Hope that answers your question on the searching.

To your last question, we’re hoping to establish a contributor program that will help us to exponentially expand the reach and content of sitephocus. There’s a lot of details to work out, but that’s the next major addition we plan to include.

[Chris Whitis]

nrschmid,

What we hear from many of our subscribers, and the primary reason we created the site in the first place (besides enjoying traveling and photography), is the time savings of having hundreds of photos that they can quickly browse and are high quality. Time searching various sites in the hopes of finding good, hi res images is a direct cost to their firms or the projects they work on and the savings translate to additional time spent designing or a better bottom line. Just think of how much time is spent looking for images and then think about the typical billable rate. That’s where our users see the biggest benefit.

A few other things we hear quite often are the reduced travel costs (though nothing beats seeing a place in person), having a managed central image library accessible to everyone in the firm anywhere, anytime, and exposure of places from around the US/ world presented monthly.

[Chris Whitis]

Laith,
A fellow LA and I have developed http://www.sitephocus.com as an image library for the built environment. We’re currently in beta mode on a new platform we recently launched and offer high res image downloads through pay-per-image and yearly subscription (unlimited downloads). Registration to the site is free and will keep you up to date on our latest uploads. Currently, we have about 25,000 images from around the world and add 300-500 images per month for our users, so there’s always something new to see. Recent month’s updates include Nashville, TN, Copenhagen, Barcelona, LA, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

This link might get you started – Woonerf search

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line. I’d be happy to discuss the site with you or anyone else.

[Author]

Posts