I think a great example of a good outcome when people give a hoot about stormwater (and other water removal options since it is an low lying coastal island!) and the environment is Hilton Head Island, SC. The town is aggressive or even militant about unnecessary tree removal.<p>The result is really interesting suburban infrastructure that reducing demand on the storm sewer. The Walmart parking lot isn't 5 acres of asphalt -- they left trees in place and have soil buffers with grass or other landscaping. Curbs are designed to direct water flow to those buffers.<p>I live in upstate NY, and even in that very different environment, those types of techniques as well as things like retaining pounds can really improve the situation with respect to flooding. Otherwise, the only way to remediate the impact of the increasing number of high volume thunderstorms is to dig up streets and build cisterns to sudden inflows.
San Francisco has a similar problem to the one described in Pittsburg. We use an old, single pipe, gravity based system that carries both storm water and sewage. When it rains heavily, the system backs up at various bottlenecks. Unfortunately, some of these are in heavily populated and residential areas, which get flooded with human waste. Even areas not at the bottlenecks may see more mild drainage backups.<p>Sadly, SF has done a pretty bad job managing this:<p><a href="http://www.sfweekly.com/news/shit-storm-why-wont-sf-stop-flooding-homes-with-sewage/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfweekly.com/news/shit-storm-why-wont-sf-stop-flo...</a><p>SF's esponse to this problem has shaken my confidence in the city's governance. SF is going in the opposite direction from what is suggested in this article - we are paving over (with non-permeable surfacing) more than ever. The common practice of paving over your front year for extra parking is generally illegal, but like most quality of life issues in SF, enforcement is so rare that the city created an entitlement - and it has become the norm in some neighborhoods.<p>I know some people my chuckle that this particular issue would cause me to question SF's government, considering what is going on. But I think it's the straightforward nature of this - the clear engineering failure, the cause and effect between excessive paving and storm system overflow, the unenforced legislation to curtail it, the massive city budget and projects without adequate funding for critical infrastructure... it's the mundane failures that really drive home how badly SF's government is handling serious problems.
The last time I saw something about these highly porous pavement alternatives, it was pointed out they tend to be very vulnerable to freeze-thaw damage and that this damage also lowers the porosity dramatically. Basically making these kinds of materials unsuitable for urban use outside of tropical- or near-tropical areas. Has this changed?
Or you can build a ginormous cistern beneath the city, as Tokyo did: <a href="https://gizmodo.com/tokyo-has-the-largest-underground-water-tank-in-the-wor-1696967098" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/tokyo-has-the-largest-underground-water-...</a>
There's a related story on Berlin being built into a sponge city. <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-18/sponge-city-making-berlin-cooler-video" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-18/sponge-city...</a>
In Brazil, there’s a capital called Curitiba that use rivers and parks with artificial lakes to control flooding with great success.<p><a href="http://i2ud.org/2013/08/flood-management-in-curitiba-metoropolitan-area-brazil/" rel="nofollow">http://i2ud.org/2013/08/flood-management-in-curitiba-metorop...</a>
anyone who hasn't watched a clip on Tokyo's massive drainage system should check this out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o85teh1vU_0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o85teh1vU_0</a>
Michigan has be fighting a similar fight for the past couple decades. Wetlands were disappearing quickly from development and they realized how important they were to environmental health, essentially turning the state into a sponge/filter. There is a law there now that removal of wetlands requires developers to build a new wetlands elsewhere. They still have 40% less wetlands than pre-european times.
Solutions mentioned are I think referred to as BMPs - best management practices [1]. Regulations exists and there are scientific software tools for tracking and planning [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_management_practice_for_water_pollution" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_management_practice_for_w...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.2nform.com/tools/" rel="nofollow">http://www.2nform.com/tools/</a>
Dig up all the paved streets and replace with soil, with train tracks on top. Adapt vehicle wheels to train wheels and provide platforms on train wheels for the ones you don't adapt. Provide overhead lines to power vehicles adapted to use them.<p>You get 1. drainage, 2. reduction of heated urban micro-climates, 3. elimination of emissions, 4. "driving automation" in the sense that you don't really need to steer something on rails.
The techniques in the article will <i>mitigate</i> the effects of storm water. As was the case in Houston, urban flooding results from global weather events. No matter how Houston had been planned, all the water had to go somewhere and it was going to the low spots. The only counter-factual in which Houston would not have had some flooding is if there was no Houston.<p>Ancient cities in Mesopotamia flooded. Ancient Rome flooded. Cities flood because they are built on or near bodies of water and bodies of water flood. The reason cities are built on or near bodies of water: water is a necessary condition for any city. Water is also an economic engine: fisheries, agriculture, waste removal, transport, trade. This makes flooding a price of doing business.<p>It's not that mitigation is a bad idea. The bad idea is that a city will never flood. Though it is theoretically possible, it is practically unlikely.
Some ideas along these lines (spongy waterfronts) for SF bay area cities at <a href="https://neighborland.com/resilientbay" rel="nofollow">https://neighborland.com/resilientbay</a>
I suspect it's cheaper to simply build a large enough drainage system initially. This is useful if you have already failed and are trying to cope with failure.<p>Still, many people are pushing it because you get more plants not because it's cost effective.