Don't make land a proxy for people

Starrett-Lehigh Building: II. 601 West 26th Street, from Eleventh Avenue and 23rd street looking northeast past the West Side Express Highway, Manhattan. Berenice Abbot, 1938.

A couple of years ago I read a Politico article about bitcoin mining in eastern Washington with this quote: "Most of the surplus is exported, at high prices, to markets like Seattle or Los Angeles, which allows the utilities to sell power locally at well below its cost of production." This is not an isolated occurrence - I read a similar story from Inner Mongolia.

Why would the people running a power company sell the power below cost? They could simply be doing it as a bribe, to buy off a constituency with a lot of political sympathy. They could be doing it because rural incomes are low relative to those in big coastal cities, and the regulators wanted to be nice to people with lower incomes, or to subsidize rural living. Or they could be doing it as a form of compensation to people who might have added risk living downstream from a large dam, or other environmental costs related to the project.

Whatever the reason, they didn't count on bitcoin miners free riding on the cheap power - a form of "jurisdictional arbitrage" over the artificial cost difference. I bet there's a couple other things they didn't count on, and if you've also taken Econ 101, you're probably thinking of the same things, like that they're not providing the same discounts to low-income people in cities, and that these subsidies for rural living are encouraging rural overpopulation, which can have disastrous costs.

The reason is that land is an imperfect proxy for people. Sometimes it works great, and sometimes it fails. And when it fails bad, the consequences can be really disastrous.

Lately I've been hearing calls for an arrangement like the cheap rural power in connection with New York State's proposed legalization of recreational marijuana use. There's a very good reason for this: the drug laws passed by Nelson Rockefeller and others targeted drugs largely used by low-income Black and Latinx people, and they were enforced more harshly on dealers and users from those populations.

These discriminatory practices had an effect not just on the individual drug dealers and users and their families, but on their communities - and I use this word to mean their friends, neighbors and customers, people who owned businesses and charities where they might have spent money if they weren't in prison, and people who might have benefited from other, non-drug-related, work that they might have done.

When the drug enforcement authorities removed people and their productive power from their communities, they reduced the political and economic power of those communities, resulting in neglected housing stock and infrastructure.

So basically, the white elites of New York and their elected representatives screwed low-income Black and Latinx people over for decades. What do we do about it? At a minimum, any of the dealers convicted under these laws who are still willing and able to work should be guaranteed jobs in the field. I'm frankly baffled that I would have to say this: if your business is selling pot, why the fuck wouldn't you hire people who have a documented track record of success selling pot under really difficult conditions?

Okay, so what about the people who can't work, or don't want to sell drugs any more, or who were just convicted of possession? If they're dead, what about their heirs? They should be refunded all the fines and prison fees they've paid over the years, paid a regular minimum wage for any prison employment, and paid damages for unjust imprisonment.

Now here's the tricky part: what about their communities? Their friends, neighbors, customers, the businesses and charities where they might have spent money? The groups whose political and economic power was reduced? The housing stock and infrastructure of the places they called home?

Well, how many of those friends, neighbors and customers are still there? How many of the businesses and charities are still operating? How big was the Black and Latinx population in those areas when they were arrested, and how big is it today? Who lives in those houses now? Who walks the sidewalks and takes the train? To take a stark example, think about almost any block in North or East Williamsburg.

Let's avoid the temptation to blame migrants. Migration is a normal part of human existence. If these pot dealers and users hadn't been unjustly imprisoned they might be retired to Miami or Mayagüez right now. Many of them might be anyway. If they hadn't been economically oppressed, they and their kids might be "gentrifying" somewhere else right now. In any case, can we agree that there's no reason to send our tax dollars to some wealthy white family living in a row house in Williamsburg with no connection to a convicted pot dealer who lived there in the sixties?

Now, here's a slightly more difficult problem. What if it's one of these neighborhoods, like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a lot of the people moving in are middle-class or wealthy Black and Latinx people? They still face discrimination for the way they look and maybe their accents or names, but they haven't been held back by the drug laws. Are they entitled to any of this money?

We could probably continue thinking up different categories of people and the degree to which they should be entitled to any reparations for the Rockefeller drug laws, but the point is that land is an imperfect proxy for people. And when I keep hearing about sending money to affected "communities" and hardly anything about support for affected people and their heirs, I start to smell a bait-and-switch.

This brings me, finally to a transportation issue. Lately, you might have seen some posts about proposals to mitigate some side effects of highway teardowns. Alexander Laska of Third Way Energy and Beth Osborne of Transportation for America wrote:

"To ensure that neighborhoods around the highway receive the benefits of its removal or modification, the project sponsor for any award under this program should be required to establish a land trust or land bank that would receive initial ownership of any property that becomes developable through activities supported by a grant under this program. The land trust would help locals buy the property, preserve and build affordable housing, support the opening of locally-owned small businesses, and preserve greenspace and parks."

As with the case of mitigating marijuana legalization, the goals of this proposal are ones that I support. Having been priced out of three of the New York neighborhoods I've called home, I don't want to see anyone forced to move because rents rise beyond their ability to pay. But I think the proposal, and others like it, are misguided and will ultimately be damaging to the very populations they aim to protect.

This is just one of many proposals that avoid placing the blame for rising rents where it belongs: on the people responsible for restricting the supply of housing, which channels every increase in the quality of life of a neighborhood into a bidding war with wealthy people attracted by that increase, driving up rents.

Osborne is no dummy, and she does acknowledge, in an interview with Streetsblog's Kea Wilson, that the real culprits are the local elites and the intolerant zoning they've established: “But of course, when the supply [of highway-free, walkable neighborhoods] is artificially constrained and demand is extremely high, that creates a really valuable product." But she professes no hope of ever overcoming that intolerance. "You have to actively protect land to make sure that people can afford to stay.”

But as with marijuana legalization and cheap hydroelectricity, protecting land doesn't do much to protect the people affected. This is personal for me: as a child I lived in a neighborhood that benefited from the cancellation of plans for one expressway and the tearing down of another. Now I can't afford to live in that neighborhood. I'm a prime victim of rising rents, unable to live in my childhood home.

Here's the thing, though: a land trust wouldn't have done diddly shit for me, because I wasn't living in that neighborhood when the highway was torn down. I wanted to stay; my parents moved away while the highway was still up, and took me with them. I couldn't even stay in the next neighborhood because I wanted to move out of my parent's apartment and rents were too high for my income. I left the third neighborhood to go to school, and couldn't move back because I'd given up my rent-stabilized apartment.

The neighborhoods I lived in when I was a bit older never even benefited from a highway teardown (although both of them could have). Rents just went up because people in my generation realized that the suburbs suck. A community land trust wouldn't have done much for me in the third neighborhood because once I left I was no longer a "long-time resident." Even if I'd qualified for one in my second neighborhood, it would probably have been oversubscribed, with a gigantic wait list.

Who would benefit from the community land trusts proposed by Laska and Osborne? A subset of residents: those who don't move. Those who never leave the area to go to school, or spend time in another country. Those who never try out another city for a year or two, to realize what they were missing in New York. Maybe those who leave, but who master the practice of subletting, of property management, of gaming the system. And it would probably wind up benefiting wealthier people who move in after the land trust is established.

Basically, the people who benefit from the community land trusts are the same people who benefit from intolerant zoning, from rent control, from community benefits agreements, from community boards: the local elites. Yup, this is just another bribe to local elites to get them to agree to something that they already know would be good for everyone who lives in the area.

Here's the bottom line: If you want to help the people, help the people. You want to help poor people? Send money to people who don't have a lot of money. You want to compensate people for racist policies that sent them and/or their family members to prison? Find those people and give them money. You want to counteract the effects of intolerant land use policies? Fight the intolerant land use policies. You want to compensate people who are victims of intolerant land use policies? Give those people an opportunity to register and send them a cut of rising property values.

Whatever you do, don't make poor people live in poor places to get cheap electricity. Don't give money to people who were never affected by racist policies, and just happened to move to a place where lots of people were. Don't make people stay in the same place in order to benefit from rising property values.

The bottom line is: don't make land a proxy for people.

The anti-bus terminal

The Department of City Planning thinks it would be a good idea to have a bus terminal in the new "Flushing West" district that they're planning (PDF). Apparently at one of their outreach sessions people talked to them about "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street" and the "Need for a distinct central bus terminal." So they said they would "Evaluate siting a mixed-use Bus Transit Center (BTC) near northern and southern edges of the rezoning area."

As this map shows, there are twenty MTA bus lines that converge on Flushing, as well as the #7 subway, the Port Washington Branch of the Long Island Rail Road, and private buses to Chinatown and Sunset Park. There are also private buses to various casinos in the region. Of these, the underground 7 train station is the only one that is at all protected from rain or snow. The buses pick up and drop off at a variety of stops along Main Street, 39th Avenue, Roosevelt Avenue, 41st Avenue and 41st Road.

Because the Flushing West district starts at Prince Street, a block west of the western entrance to the Main Street subway station, the proposed bus station could be as close as the corner of Roosevelt and Prince, 225 yards from the subway, or as far away as Northern Boulevard and the river, three quarters of a mile from the subway.

But is there actually even a need for a distinct central bus terminal? It's a good idea to go over the reasons we have them. City Planning gave only one: "Provide relief to bus congestion from curbside layovers in the downtown." But if we think about existing bus terminals like the Port Authority or Newark Penn Station, they provide value in several ways:

• One-stop shopping for buses. Right now if you're going to Bay Terrace, you can take either the Q13 or the Q28, which is handy because they leave from roughly the same spot in Flushing. But if you're going to Northern Boulevard in Bayside you'll have to decide ahead of time whether you're taking the Q12 or the Q13, because they leave from stops a block apart.
• Easy transfer between buses, and from buses to trains. Right now if you want to change from a northbound Q44 to an eastbound Q13, or from the 7 train to a southbound Q17, you have to walk a couple of blocks on crowded sidewalks.
• Short-term bus layovers. Some of the bus routes (like the Q44) pass through Flushing, but most of them terminate there. It makes sense to start and end as many bus driver shifts as possible at transit hubs, because it encourages drivers to commute by transit. Sometimes drivers need a short break between runs, and sometimes they finish a run early. It's important to have enough short-term bus storage to handle those needs.
• Long-term bus layovers. Demand is not flat for buses; there are rush hours. It is often more efficient to store buses close to the transit hub in the middle of the day instead of sending them to the depot (a two mile trip) and back.
• Avoiding street congestion. One of the biggest time savers for bus riders at the Port Authority is that most of the buses have direct ramps into and out of the Lincoln Tunnel, and don't have to compete with private cars.
• Ticketing, shelter, bathrooms, food and shopping for people waiting for buses.

The first thing to ask is what the current arrangement does and doesn't provide. It does not avoid much street congestion or provide for long-term layovers. According to the City Planning powerpoint, the buses stored for short-term layovers get in the way of buses picking up and dropping off passengers. As I detailed above, some of the transfers require walking multiple blocks through dense crowds, and there are a few problems with one-stop shopping. There is very little shelter for people waiting for buses.

On the plus side, transfers from the 7 train to most of the buses are pretty quick and easy. One-stop shopping for the buses that go on Main Street, Kissena Boulevard and Parsons Boulevard works pretty well, and now that bus schedules are available through Google Maps it's even easier to know which bus is scheduled to leave next. There are public bathrooms and Metrocard machines in the subway station. Downtown Flushing's biggest advantage is in terms of food and shopping. If you're transferring in a hurry you can usually pick up a scallion pancake, a Big Mac, a bubble tea or any of a staggering variety of other fast foods and beverages before the next bus leaves. Within a block of the Main Street station there's a Macy's, a Duane Reade and half a dozen Chinese mini-malls.

So what would the proposed bus terminal provide that we don't already have? Shelter and space for short-term layovers, maybe shorten a couple of the transfers and make one-stop shopping a bit easier. Hmmm, maybe that would be worth it if someone else paid for it...

But note that the terminal proposal doesn't do anything to address the biggest obstacle to bus flow: private cars. And it would make the single most important transfer - the transfer from the 7 train to any bus - at least a block long, and potentially much longer. People currently disperse from the corner of Main and Roosevelt in all four directions to board buses using six staircases and two escalators; the proposal would concentrate them all along one route, accessed by one staircase: the one at the northwest corner.

Some people go to Flushing specifically for the restaurants. Others go for specific shopping and cultural anchors, and stop at restaurants on their way. But if you think about it for a minute, it's clear that the dispersed pedestrian flow from the subway to the bus stops is one of the biggest drivers of business at the shops and restaurants in the area.

There are of course other factors at play, but I wonder how much of the affluence and growth of Downtown Flushing relative to other transit hubs like Jamaica and Journal Square can be credited to this layout, where businesses are on the way in a sense that can't be said of the other hubs. How many people would cease to walk by the Quickly+ on Roosevelt if the B12 terminus were moved west of Main Street? Are the Flushing merchants ready to find out?

Sadly, I'm guessing that they are. That first quote from the City Planning powerpoint, "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street," sounds just like the kinds of quotes that Flushing's elites give to papers. No matter how clear the evidence that the vast majority of shoppers arrive by bus or train, both the old white elites and the new Asian elites seem utterly convinced that anyone who matters comes by car.

Despite what livable streets advocates, city planners and the developers themselves wanted, these merchants and politicians insisted on raising the amount of parking in the new Flushing Commons development to an insane level. They fought bitterly a recent attempt to increase bus speeds through the area by dedicating lanes of Main Street to buses (PDF). The new mall south of Roosevelt Avenue comes with a staggering amount of parking.

It would not surprise me at all if it were a merchant or politician who asked for "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street." This is clearly someone who sees the upper-middle-class white and East Asian drivers as the rightful users of Main Street, and the bus riders, many of them black and South Asian, as interlopers who must be banished to the periphery.

This is yet another situation where we have to ask "who's getting out of the way?" The only way that I could see a bus terminal as an improvement is if it (a) directly connected to the subway and (b) bypassed a large amount of car traffic. No long nasty tunnel like the one to the Port Authority; I'm talking about demolishing a big chunk of one of the blocks at the corner of Main and Roosevelt. I'm talking about bus-only underground ramps from further out on Main, Kissena, Parsons and Northern that flow right into the bus bays and layover garage.

Of course, that would be a humongous cost, and if you're going to dig a tunnel you might as well put in an orbital subway connecting Flushing to Jamaica, the airports, Astoria and Upper Manhattan. None of it sounds like it would justify the cost of construction, so let's drop that, at least for a few decades.

What could we do that's cheaper? In 2012 the Department of Transportation considered reconfiguring Main and Union Streets to provide dedicated bus lanes, and rejected those options because they didn't want to slow down private cars and trucks (PDF). If we really want to improve bus service, we could revisit those options. We could also widen the sidewalks on Main Street to make room for bus shelters.

What we should not do under any circumstances is move bus stops away from Main Street and into the Flushing West area. Transit advocates need to be clear: that is not a bus proposal, it's an anti-bus proposal. The staff at City Planning listened to the anti-bus people; now they need to listen to the pro-bus people and kill any effort to put a bus terminal in Flushing West.

Our third world airport

I remember when Joe Biden remarked that LaGuardia Airport felt like the Third World to him. I remember thinking, "What the fuck is this guy talking about?" I thought about writing something, but my thoughts were kind of messy and it felt kind of hopeless, so I moved on to something else. Now I'm kicking myself.

I generally like Biden. He has a long record of not only supporting Amtrak but riding it himself, although with all his support it seems bizarre that the company would only have one line going through his state, with two stops. And I like how he seems to genuinely speak his mind.

But I've been to the Third World. Dominicans may not like me calling their country third world, but their airport is a bit lacking in the air conditioning department. I think we can all agree that Abidjan is third world, and when I was there they didn't have jet bridges. You get off the plane, go down the stairs and walk across the tarmac to the gate. Not a bad airport, all in all, but not in the same league as any airport I've been to in the United States. LaGuardia has good air conditioning, and it has fully functioning jet bridges.

I've also flown into a lot of airports with good reputations: Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Keflavík, JFK's Terminal 5. I honestly don't see what the big deal is. I like Terminal 5 because they have Cibo. If I could get some fresh vegetables with dip, and a decent ice coffee, to take on the plane at LaGuardia I would be happy.

If I've ever had a problem flying into or out of LaGuardia it's been the crappy bus connections. I hate waiting a long time for a bus to come, and then when it does it's packed with people who got on at the other terminal. I hate how the buses have to fight with all the cars and taxis to get to the curb. I hate how in the winter the curb is blocked by taxis. The Q70 is a big improvement, but there's still a long way to go.

Somehow, whenever people talk about how awful LaGuardia is, they never mention how the buses are blocked by taxis. It's always the low ceilings, and maybe somebody once saw a rat. I've never seen a rat there. I've never noticed the low ceilings, in fact some of them are pretty high. I kind of like the architecture. When I was a kid the Central Terminal would occasionally pop up in my dreams. The new terminals aren't bad for what they are. The Marine Air Terminal is a fucking Art Deco monument.

What would make the biggest difference to me would be a direct train there from Woodside, or even from Astoria (and no, just because it was politically unfeasible in 1995 doesn't mean it's politically unfeasible twenty years later). Andrew Cuomo likes to style himself as the Bold Leader who Gets Things Done. If he really were, he would extend the goddamn N train and tell Gianaris to grow a spine and get on board. But instead we get a proposal for a shitty AirTrain that would dump all the LaGuardia passengers at Willets Point, twenty minutes further out in Queens. That's not boldness, that's cowardice. That's Cuomo running away from a challenge.

What would really make a difference to me would be if we took that four or ten or twenty billion dollars and used it to build a new train along 21st Street and Astoria Boulevard, or the Tribororx, or a Queens Super-Express, or the Subway to Secaucus, or basically any transit improvement that would be used on a daily basis by people who don't work at the airport.

I'll tell you what it is that makes LaGuardia a Third World airport. It's the authoritarian, top-down approach taken by our Governor, and yes our Vice President, who have never come through here or sent staff members to ask what we might want or need. It's the plutocratic approach that puts the optics of the business traveler ahead of the convenience of families going to visit relatives. It's the cowardice of building a flashy AirTrain to nowhere instead of taking on the entrenched elites who want to block a really useful train. It makes me feel like I live in a goddamn banana republic.

(Dragon appears courtesy of the Durian-Project of the Blender Foundation.)

The long game in transit advocacy

While I generally appreciate other transit activists, I’ve criticized plenty of them in the past. Recently I’ve figured out what it is that bothers me most: a lot of them are playing a very short game.

They’re playing up routing improvements and park-and-rides as long as they don't inconvenience drivers, supporting billions of dollars for new roads in exchange for supporting millions of dollars for new buses, promoting a car bridge with the hope of getting a bus lane on it, ignoring existing plans for new subway lines and demanding inadequate bus route plans, complaining about wasteful transit projects with only the barest mention of bloated highway budgets, and declaiming Our Nation's Rotting Infrastructure without setting any priorities for what gets repaired or rebuilt.

All of these strategies reveal an impoverished vision of the world. In this vision, if there is economic equality it means everyone driving to the health food store in their own personal Subaru Wagon – or everyone commuting to work in a packed Transmilenio bus. Wasteful comfort or cheap discomfort.

Usually, the vision is not even that complete. The short game players simply assume that the world will always be dominated by drivers who monopolize the money and the space. Their vision is not compatible with a future where the vast majority gets around by transit. They have no way of dealing with their own success.

What would real success look like? It's not a reworked bus network. It's not an abundant supply of the latest buses. It's not one lane for buses and eight lanes for cars and trucks. It’s not a train tunnel and a highway bridge being built simultaneously with the latest efficient methods. It’s a world where personal motor vehicle use is minimal, and public transit is abundant, safe, comfortable and reliable.

We have to be prepared to put that vision into practice, and that means taking the long view. It means doing some things that may seem inefficient now, but that will pay off in decades. It means taking advantage of the transportation cycle. It means pushing cost-cutters to cut roads, even if that upsets some potential short-term allies. It means pushing big spenders to spend big on transit, even if they waste billions in the process.

Transit setback roundup: I can't even

These past few weeks have been discouraging for me as a transit advocate. From almost every^* level of government I've heard elected (and appointed) officials promoting "roads and bridges," or crappy, uninspiring, unproductive transit, or opposing reasonable transit improvements.

• President Obama going on and on about "roads and bridges," and "infrastructure," and "choice."
• Senators Schumer and Blumenthal bloviating about the safety of Metro-North, without mentioning the safety of driving.
• NEW! Representative Maloney also ignoring the possibility of holding drivers accountable, exploits the tragedy to push $100 million for Positive Train Control upgrades … reallocated from where, exactly?
• Governor Cuomo proposing a budget full of transit raids, park-and-rides, and a mostly useless AirTrain from Willets Point to La Guardia. Oh, and taking $1.3 billion in mortgage fraud settlements for the Tappan Zee Bridge.
• State Senator Gianaris bashing plans to increase subway service to his district based on decades-old conversations.
• Assemblymember Simanowitz and Councilemember Lancman coming out swinging against Main Street Select Bus plan.
• Mayor de Blasio with a transportation plan based on ferries without feeder buses.
• Members of Manhattan Community Board 8 opposing bus bulbs.

* I say almost because I haven't heard anything stupid from a local congressional representative recently. Added: I just heard from Maloney! To the contrary, Jerry Nadler's efforts to promote the Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel project seem to be making progress.

So much crap, so much of it things that transit advocates have discussed for so long, I feel exhausted thinking about writing more than a sentence about each one. Thanks to Streetsblog for going into the details in many of these so that I don't have to; you can donate here. Also thanks to Ben Kabak, Yonah Freemark and Alon Levy for taking the time to call bullshit on Cuomo's AirTrain proposal, and Ben again for calling bullshit on de Blasio's ferry proposal.

Driving to the walkway

Among the many crazy things about the new Tappan Zee Bridge, one of the craziest is the way that some environmentalists seem to melt into some kind of reverie whenever it's mentioned that the bridge is planned to have a bicycle and pedestrian path on it (once the original span is demolished and the second span built, sometime in the 2020s). It was one of the most effective greenwashing campaigns I've ever seen, giving liberals permission to dismiss concerns about sprawl and waste while satisfying them that they're doing "something for the environment."

Of course, there are many concerns about the bicycle and pedestrian path itself. I am very much in favor of access to bridges for non-motorized transportation, and I'm sure if nothing else it would see a ton of bike traffic on weekends from the regular cycling crowd that rides up 9W. But how many people would ride three miles over the bridge to commute or go shopping, much less walk? From Nyack to Grand Central via the bridge is over thirty miles each way, and the George Washington Bridge path is not crowded during rush hours. I've ridden and walked the roads at both ends of the bridge, and once you get away from the river towns and greenways they're really not safe or pleasant.

As Jane Jacobs wrote, "Parks are not automatically anything." What could make this a successful park? It would have stunning views, but would it be filled with deafening car noise like the paths on the George Washington and Triboro Bridges? How many people would cross when the weather is bad? How often would it be patrolled during off-hours?

But the crazy doesn't stop there. In November, the State released a study claiming that "151 total parking spaces are needed for both counties; 97 spaces in Westchester and 54 spaces in Rockland." That's right, they expect that more than 150 people would come by car during peak times and want to park and walk across the bridge - or maybe bring their bikes on racks on top of the car. But don't worry, the state planners say, we can just knock down the South Nyack Village Hall for parking - or maybe convert it to a "comfort station." Some day you might be pissing in the Mayor's office!

To be fair to the state planners, they based their estimates in part on projects like the "Walkway Over the Hudson," a similar project that took a valuable piece of transportation infrastructure and turned it into a tourist attraction where people drive from miles around to go for a walk.

The planners did consider the possibility (alternatives C1 and C2) of using meter and permit regulations to discourage tourists from parking on the streets of South Nyack, and constructing a sidewalk next to the three blocks of buildings and gardens that have been constructed in between the end of the Esposito rail-trail and the underused parking crater in downtown Nyack, allowing tourists to use that parking - and shop at local businesses while they're at it. That seems like far and away the most sensible approach, maybe too sensible for this project.

So there you have it, folks: a three-mile "shared-use path" that would not provide meaningful transportation options for more than a handful of people, that will probably be empty 90% of the time, and in the other 10% would attract 150 cars, for which the State may well bulldoze a historic town hall. And you know what? As a tourist attraction, it's probably okay. It's active and outdoors. Just don't try to tell me that it would be "environmentally friendly," or provide any meaningful contact with nature, or justify the money or the sprawl.

Where is the roads and bridges settlement?

It was a big con game, and many of the biggest con artists believed their own hype. "It can never go down!" they cried. They delivered something valuable to people who couldn't afford it, told them it was even more valuable, took a hefty cut for themselves, and left their victims on the hook for billions. But the government has been slow to make them pay.

In part that's because many of those responsible are in government, and many others in government are their friends. In part it's because most of the government regulators were asleep on the job. But mostly it's because so many in the public were asleep too. A lot of them still don't think anybody did anything wrong.

Your tax dollars paid to widen the LIE and pump up housing prices on Long Island.
Photo: Doug Kerr / Flickr

I'm talking about the housing bubble, yes, but not the mortgage fraud. You see, it's hard to tell how much of the bubble came from hype about loans that pay their own interest, and how much came from empty promises of roads and bridges that pay their own maintenance.

Tales of endlessly rising demand for housing and fantasies of endlessly rising demand for driving fed off each other: the new housing pumped up traffic measurements, prompting governments to build and widen roads and bridges, and the new roads and bridges pumped up housing prices, prompting developers to build more housing. In 2008 it all crashed, and if the stimulus hadn't been so focused on "roads and bridges" a lot of it would have stayed crashed.

There's a little good news on the mortgage front: this year the state has brought in over five billion dollars in settlements with several large banks. But when will we see a similar settlement for the road-and-bridge fraud? When will the government sue the people who got us to pay hundreds of millions for these projects that left us on the hook for decades of maintenance?

The cargo cult of railyard decks

I recently wrote about a proposal to build a deck over the Sunnyside Yards. This got me thinking about these projects in general. I'm afraid that railyard decks have become part of what Ryan McGreal called "cargo cult urbanism," along with convention centers, casinos, "bus rapid transit" and a "High Line": things that have high-profile associations with rapid increases in prosperity, things that people latch onto when they're desperate for improvement but unable to think clearly about what will actually improve things, or unwilling to admit that they don't know.

There is always a high-profile example that does plausibly bring prosperity: the original High Line, the Transmilenio, Foxwoods and McCormick Place may well have done so. But in practice when people try to replicate its success, the promised prosperity often does not materialize. In hindsight, it turns out that the actual generator of prosperity was something else, like upzoning, or that there are diminishing returns as the desire for gambling or conventions or office space is satisfied.

Construction beginning on the site of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 1929. Photo from Waldorf Archive.

Everyone talks about how much money the New York Central Railroad made by decking over the Vanderbilt Yards in Manhattan and building office space and hotels. As the photo above showed, it didn't happen overnight: construction on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel started more than twenty years after the Grand Central deck. There were a few other conditions as well: the Central already owned the land and construction was relatively cheap. Most importantly, the IRT subway had just been built linking Grand Central with the existing downtown and with new housing on the Upper West Side and the Bronx. There was a huge amount of pent-up demand for new office space, and the Vanderbilt Yards development made it available. It was this new availability to pent-up demand that made the buildings sell and delivered a profit for the Central.

As Stephen Smith has observed, there is currently pent-up demand for housing, but much less evidence of pent-up demand for office space, in New York City and particularly in one decking project, Hudson Yards. And as Ben Kabak reports, the new subway tunnel bringing people to the Hudson Yards is delayed and over budget. These facts in turn mean dim prospects for office towers or convention centers on future decks, including the Sunnyside Yards.

Given the market conditions that Stephen describes, I have to wonder why city officials continue to try to push commercial development on these decks. I think the reason is that unlike when Grand Central was built, developers aren’t finding private financing for decks over railyards. I would think that the financiers might have a good reason for not lending, but the city pushes ahead with public financing, such as the 50% government financing for Atlantic Yards. How does the city make back its investment? With taxes, and office buildings pay a lot more in taxes than apartment towers, even luxury ones.

Our government needs to be a lot more careful about how it finances big projects like decks over railyards. If a deck can’t be built without full private financing, the government has to have a compelling public interest to step in. That alone would cut down on some of the most unwise projects.

For the Sunnyside Yards, I'm not convinced that there is a compelling public interest in financing a deck. I'll talk about that more in future posts.

When bike paths are not transportation

I've written before about the capacity of bike paths to move large numbers of people. A dedicated bike path performs this function best when it connects dense residential neighborhoods with dense job centers. The bike paths on the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges are great examples of this. They may not transport as many people in a day, but they don’t transport thousands of dangerous, wasteful motor vehicles either. This is why we should convert one lane of the Brooklyn Bridge to a two-way bike path.

That said, a frequent train line can beat a bike path, or even a car lane, any day. On the Manhattan Bridge one fall day in 2012, according to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council’s Hub-Bound Travel Study, one car lane carried almost five times as many people as the bike lane, but one subway track carried 36 times as many.

With that in mind, let’s turn to the Rockaway Beach Branch, and to a proposal to convert it to a bike trail instead of reactivating train service. The Trust for Public Land argues that it “will” (not “could”) fulfill a similar transportation function:

Using the QueensWay to connect to subway stations, commuters could save 15 – 20 minutes each way to major work destinations such as Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. Residents will also be able to use the QueensWay to connect to stores and other destinations. … Using the QueensWay to connect to subway stations, commuters could save 15 – 20 minutes each way to major work destinations such as Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. Residents will also be able to use the QueensWay to connect to stores and other destinations.

Yes, that’s nice, but how many of them would actually use it? I could save ten to fifteen minutes off my commute by biking to the subway station, but I don’t do it because there’s just a plain rack to lock it to. There is no secure bike parking at any subway station near me, and there is none proposed in the trail plan.

Even assuming that secure parking was built, or that every potential bike commuter was comfortable locking their bike up at a plain old rack (and that the city built enough additional plain old racks to accommodate them, how many cyclists are we talking about? I’m guessing it would be far below the 2,601 cyclists that the NYMTC counted on the Manhattan Bridge on that fall day in 2012.

Now let’s assume that instead we brought trains back to the Rockaway Beach Branch. Let’s assume that the service is the crappiest possible: less than once an hour off-peak and a mandatory change to get to Manhattan, like the Long Island Rail Road Oyster Bay Branch. We would still get at least 3,350 riders a day (PDF).

If instead we dug a tunnel under a few blocks of Rego Park and ran the R train out to Howard Beach, we would see a lot more riders. Even if there were only four stations and all of them had the ridership of the 104th Street station on the A train (1,736), that would still be almost 7,000 riders a day. The least popular station on the R train, 36th Street in Long Island City, saw 4,540 riders last year, and I’ve proposed adding stations at Myrtle Avenue and Fleet Street to serve large buildings that were built since the line’s fortune declined. The half million riders heralded by some rail proponents may be too ambitious, but even if the line is a dismal failure it would serve far more people per day than a trail.

If you’re still thinking of the bike trail as a transportation project, look at this quote from the Trust for Public Land:

To ensure safety and security for neighbors and park users, the QueensWay will have gates at all entrances. The QueensWay will close at dusk except during winter months, when it will remain open slightly later to accommodate commuters.

(I’m pretty sure that last part about remaining open slightly later was added after I tweeted about this.) The bike paths on the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges are open twenty-four hours. That’s because they’re transportation infrastructure, not parks.

Decking the Sunnyside Yards: the history of a fantasy

Becoming the Yards:

1643: Burger Jorrisen receives the first patent for farmland near the swamps surrounding the Dutch Kills.
1861: The Long Island Railroad builds tracks from Hunters Point along the Dutch Kills to Jamaica.
1903: The Pennsylvania Railroad begins purchasing property in the area and draining the land.
1915: The Sunnyside Yards are opened.

(Background from the Greater Astoria Historical Society and Untapped Cities, among others.)

Development proposed on decks over the Yards:

1925: Post Office building
1951: Transportation Hub
1971: Housing
1973: Sports stadium
1989: Housing and offices
1997: Olympic village
2006: Housing, stores, schools, playing fields and parks
2008: Housing
2014: A hospital, affordable housing buildings, a school, a public space or some combination of those

The problems with the yards

I live in Woodside, Queens, not too far from Sunnyside. I love both neighborhoods, but there are a few problems. Recently, urban planners and some of my neighbors have focused on a few in particular:

Photo: Daniel Schwen / Wikipedia

• The rent is too damn high. I own a co-op, but I do know people who have been displaced, and people who want to live here but are having a hard time finding an affordable apartment. Increasing the housing supply would be a big help.
• We are cut off from Astoria and Long Island City by the Sunnyside Yards to the north and west. These rail yards break up the street grid, leaving about nine ways to walk across them. All but one involve walking through industrial areas, which can have low foot traffic, especially on nights and weekends. Four of these involve crossing long, noisy, boring bridges over the Sunnyside Yards.
• We don't have big parks. We have a number of small parks and playgrounds, but no big forests or greenways. The parks we do have can get crowded, particularly on hot summer days.
• There aren't as many jobs as there could be. We've got relatively low unemployment rates, but we could use more jobs.

The planners have been talking for years about addressing these problems by building a deck over the Sunnyside Yards, but my neighbors are afraid of seeing our infrastructure and services overloaded. I'm concerned that there will be too much parking, and that whatever benefit we get won't be worth the cost. I'm pretty sure there are better solutions to these problems. I'll talk more about the proposals and concerns in future posts.

What do low Tappan Zee Bridge tolls mean for you?

• Do you drive to work across the bridge? Hooray! Your commute from your house in Rockland with the big yard to the office park in Westchester will continue to be affordable … for you, at least.
• Do you drive across the bridge for shopping or socializing, or to get to a vacation home? Woo hoo! You will still be able to spend long hours driving to and from the mall parking lot. Enjoy your time off!
• Do you drive a truck across the bridge? All right! Your business will continue to make a profit, until gas prices get too high.
• Do you sell things in a mall or strip mall in Westchester or Rockland? Yowza! Your parking lots will still be full, and you may even recoup your investment.
• Are you a politician or bureaucrat representing the area? Yippee! Pandering opportunities galore!
• Do you take buses across the bridge, or in Westchester or Rockland? Not so good. People will continue to drive and to pressure their politicians for more roads and parking. Transit agencies will keep struggling for riders and subsidies.
• Do you sell things in a walkable village in Westchester or Rockland? Sorry! The downtown resurgence you bet on is still a long way off. Hope you've got plenty of seed money to burn through before your gastropub gets out of the red!
• Do you walk in Westchester or Rockland? Yeah, welp. The sidewalks, trails and density you need will continue to be neglected by elites who drive everywhere.
• Do you breathe in Westchester or Rockland? Whoops! Why don't you take a nice drive up to New Paltz and enjoy the fresh air up there?
• Do you take trains or buses in New York State? Oh, gee, sorry! We have no money for new transit. And look at that, we have no money to maintain the subways and buses you currently use. Wonder where all that money went?
• Do you pay taxes in New York State? Wow! Those services you used to get for your tax dollars, like schools and low college tuition? Sorry to tell you, but the state is broke! We just can't afford luxuries like that any more. It's a new era!

The McCarter Highway, freeway without a future

Back in March I was honored to nominate Newark (together with Michael Klatsky) for Streetsblog's coveted Parking Crater award. I'm also pleased that Newark's nomination helped inspire Sharon Adarlo to write about how the obsession with driving and parking among Newark's elites "skewers [any] chance at revitalizing the struggling city." And I'm encouraged by the quote from Newark's new mayor, Ras Baraka, that "We are going to build up and not across. We are going to look at stormwater runoff."

Now I want to mention another aspect of that obsession that's holding the city back: its roads and streets that are designed to prioritize drivers over pedestrians.

The Congress for the New Urbanism regularly puts out a list of "Freeways Without Futures." These are usually "urban" highways that not only blight neighborhoods with noise, pollution and ugly elevated structures, but cut off neighborhoods from each other and from jobs, shopping and amenities like parks. I've suggested that the designation be extended to include highways like the Pulaski Skyway that aim a "firehose of cars" into walkable dense urban areas that are well-served by transit. That said, here's a highway that fits the current CNU criteria quite well: the McCarter Highway that leads north from Newark to Paterson, New Jersey.

Cutting off the waterfront in Passaic

The McCarter Highway was once a boulevard along the Passaic River, and still is a boulevard through most of Newark. As Steve Anderson describes, the section from northern Newark through Passaic to Paterson was "upgraded" to a limited-access highway in sections from the 1950s through the 1990s. To make room for the highway in Passaic, the old Erie Main Line was abandoned between the Passaic River and the Paterson station.

When it was being planned and built, I'm sure a lot of people saw the McCarter Highway as evidence of progress. The waterfront was either industrial, blighted or both, so most people didn't care that they were cut off from it, just as they didn't care about the West Side Highway in Manhattan or the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco.

But as with the West Side Highway and the Embarcadero, I think people didn't realize how a limited-access highway could be much more destructive than a factory or a slum. From its fifteen exits (depending on how you count them), the McCarter Highway spews cars into Newark, Belleville, Nutley, Passaic, Clifton and Paterson. It takes up some of the most valuable land in these towns and pays no rent or taxes. It spreads noise, gas and particulate pollution. Oh, and it's impervious to stormwater, Mr. Mayor.

The Passaic River may not look like much in this area, but without the McCarter Highway it could have a riverside park with a promenade and bike path. The highway not only cuts Newark and Passaic off from the river, but from towns across the river like Arlington, East Rutherford, Lyndhurst, Wallington, Garfield and Elmwood Park.

With rents rising in Brooklyn, Harlem and Jersey City, many residents find themselves having to move, and many of them are moving to Newark, Passaic and Paterson. They deserve the same amenities in their new homes that they left behind: good urban parks and good walking connections to the surrounding areas. They don't deserve to breathe carbon monoxide and listen to speeding cars, and they don't deserve to see those cars speeding off the highway into their neighborhoods.

This is why New Jersey should tear down the McCarter Highway and replace it with a calm, low-traffic boulevard, an extension of the Newark City Subway, a riverwalk and bike path, and some flood-proof apartments.

(Oh yeah, and the oppressive pedestrian environment in Branch Brook Park is a whole other post.)

Imagining desire lines

You've seen them: lines where the grass is worn down, the evidence that enough people have walked a particular route as to kill the grass. They are called "desire lines" by landscape architects, and they are used to decide where to put new concrete or gravel paths.

This is a real desire line, showing the demand for an extension of the Motor Parkway to Glen Oaks. Click here to find out more.

The key point is that these bottom-up paths represent the desires of the people - the users of the space - in contrast with the top-down concrete paths that represent the desires of the planners and architects. The use of desire lines is an acknowledgment that sometimes the “wisdom of the crowds” – the aggregate of thousands of decisions made by hundreds of people, or more – can produce better outcomes than a handful of principled decisions made by educated professionals who may never actually use the space.

What are these better outcomes? Why do we care if people are walking on the concrete or the grass? Well, concrete is expensive and takes up space that could otherwise be planted with grass, so it pays to pour the concrete where it will be used. Dirt paths can be less comfortable, and some people don’t like the way they look. In general it’s more efficient for people to go where the infrastructure is, and for infrastructure to go where the people are.

It’s important to note that desire lines don’t tell you the whole story, because the decisions that create them operate within constraints imposed by others. For example, people may leave an asphalt path and cross a quadrangle diagonally to get to a door, because the asphalt path does not lead to a convenient door. Once they get through the door, they may travel down a corridor to a point just on the other side of a wall from the asphalt path. The best solution may not be to pave the diagonal path, but to open a new door in the wall.

Last week, Michael Kimmelman invoked the idea of desire lines to support his proposal for a streetcar running near the East River waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens. I read his post looking forward to hearing about how people are already trying to get from one part of the waterfront to another. Then I read it again, and again, but found no actual desire lines.

Kimmelman writes, "Cities also have desire lines, marked by economic development and evolving patterns of travel." Evolving patterns of travel, sure, but the only evidence he gives of these patterns is the Kent Avenue bikeway. Now I love the Kent Avenue bikeway, but it is no desire line. It’s a top-down effort, the result of years of collaboration between bike activists and city planners. Its popularity is largely due to the scarcity of safe alternatives.

I took Kent Avenue to work for a while when I worked downtown, but it was a significant detour for me. The quickest way for me to get downtown is the route of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but I can’t ride my bike on it, there is no bike access on the Kosciuszko Bridge, and the parallel streets are hostile to cyclists. It is the planned concrete path. My desire line is the one traced by the young, tough, fast cyclists commuting down Metropolitan Avenue.

Similarly, the economic development invoked by Kimmelman represents not the desires of the residents, workers or shoppers, but the desires of developers and city planners, and the hate – the opposite of desire - of NIMBYs. The process of planning and zoning in this city favors people who have a lot of money, people who have fancy degrees, and people who have the time and energy to sit through community board meetings and the connections to get appointed to the community boards. That is why those buildings are rising along the waterfront.

Stephen Smith pointed out that Kimmelman is ignoring true desire lines, notably the ridership of existing bus lines. "What is the logic in investing a billion or more in upgrading a moderately-trafficked bus route in Astoria before far more heavily-traveled routes in neighborhoods like Flushing and Elmhurst?" he writes. "It’s hard to discern any motivation beyond the fact that existing high-ridership routes like the Q44 or Q58 simply don’t pass through gentrifying areas."

Other desire lines include the presence of non-government-sanctioned transit lines, like the Jamaican and Haitian dollar vans on Flatbush Avenue, or the Chinatown vans to Flushing and Sunset Park. Patterns of travel in taxis and private cars (or even bicycles, but with care) are other possible indicators. The replacement of any one of these by a faster, more efficient, less crowded train would be an improvement comparable to the replacement of a dirt path with a concrete walkway.

But the existence of housing developments and a bike path do not constitute desire lines, even if they are popular. Using these signs of the will of developers and planners to plan a train line is not like the bottom-up process of using the tracks of multiple individuals to plan concrete paths.

I'm honestly puzzled as to why Kimmelman misused the term "desire lines" in such a conspicuous way. I don't think he's deliberately being misleading, but I really expected him to know better. My most charitable explanation is that he was so excited at this idea (which he got from Alex Garvin) that he didn't really think through the idea of "desire lines" before hitting "send."

At least he's smart enough to avoid calling it "a desire named streetcar."

Strong towns don't have pension problems

Joe Nocera and Rana Foroohar were talking about municipal pension woes this morning. Or at least that's what Charlie Herman told them it was about. Really, it was about budgets and commitments. It's the same thing when Stephanie Miner talks about pensions, or Andrew Cuomo talks about taxes, or Steve Aquario talks about Medicaid, or Chris Carey talks about tolls on the Tappan Zee Bridge. It's not about pensions or taxes or tolls or Medicaid. It's about the fact that states, counties, cities and towns have committed to spend money, but the taxes and tolls coming in don't cover those commitments.

Syracuse's Central Station once received trains and then buses, and is now a television studio.
Photo: Crazyale / Wikipedia

Politicians love to do this. In fact, the system is so set up for it that people thought I was nuts when I asked if governments ever save up for big infrastructure projects. And two former mayors of Huntington, West Virginia thought Chuck Marohn was nuts when he suggested that projects should even be judged on whether they can be expected to generate enough revenue to pay off their bonds. Everyone likes to make promises for the next generation, whether it's pensions, Medicaid, infrastructure, borrowing, low taxes or low inflation.

Eventually someone has to acknowledge that the previous generations overpromised and that at least one of these promises has to be broken. There's a smart way to do this, and a stupid way, and a dishonest way. The smart way to is to openly list the promises and prioritize them. The stupid way is to notice one or two promises that you'd like to break and focus on those while remaining blissfully oblivious to the fact that other commitments exist. The dishonest way is to pretend that you don't realize about the other commitments and hope nobody points them out.

Foroohar acknowledges this in the financial sector: in her Time column, she wrote, "My worry was always that, as in parts of Europe or Latin America or even California cities that have gone bankrupt, pensioners [in Detroit] would be left holding a disproportionate share of the burden of cuts, while other creditors took less of a haircut." But it's true beyond finance, in other promises made by these states, counties and cities.

The fact is that most American cities made a series of really stupid decisions in the late twentieth century. They relocated valuable infrastructure like canals and railroads out of their downtowns, so those downtowns were no longer "on the way." They built oppressive, noisy highways through those downtowns, allowing drivers to shoot through on their way to someplace else. They copied zoning codes that outlawed mixed-use neighborhoods, and gutted the mixed-use neighborhoods that existed with highways and "urban renewal." Then they built other highways to bypass the downtowns, and subsidized development in the suburbs. I happen to be particularly familiar with Syracuse's tragic flailings in this regard, but you can see the same pattern in Albany, Buffalo or Binghamton, and all over Rockland County.

The people who ran these municipal governments borrowed money to build these highways and other infrastructure. They promised to pay it back with interest (Nocera noted that this was missing from the pension discussions). They promised their residents that no matter how far they spread out, no matter how much they drove, they could still count on roads, bridges, power, water and sewers. They promised that the government would pay for all that indefinitely and somehow keep taxes and tolls low. Oh yeah, and they promised their city workers secure retirements, and their poor people healthcare.

Of all these promises, Cuomo focuses on taxes, Miner focuses on pensions, Aquario focuses on Medicaid and Carey focuses on tolls. We may actually wind up with cheap taxes and tolls while cutting pensions and Medicaid, and that may get these guys elected to powerful political offices for many years. But you and I know that it won't actually solve the real problem: we can't afford to maintain the sprawl that's sucking the revenues out of our hollowed-out cities and towns. And we can't afford to pay back the money our parents borrowed to build that sprawl.

These four are not handling these overpromises the smart way, so that means they're either handling them the stupid way or the dishonest way. Hanlon's razor says "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," and I know of no evidence that Cuomo, Miner, Aquario and Carey are lying, power-hungry, heartless crooks. For now I have to assume that they're simply incompetent idiots with a particular blind spot for the ugly sprawl that is choking the life out of the many lovely towns of my home state.

The expense of East Side Access

The news is that the Long Island Rail Road East Side Access project, initially forecast to cost $4.3 billion and be completed in 2009 is not due to open until 2023, and it will cost $10.8 billion. Some have faulted the tunneling process and the engineers' estimates of the cost. Some have faulted the decision to run the trains into a deep cavern under Grand Central rather than on the loop tracks. I agree completely. But it recently occurred to me that a big part of the expense and delay - what makes it "the biggest " is a tunnel. Not the tunnel under the East River, that was dug 44 years ago. A tunnel through unstable soil in a filled swamp under the Sunnyside rail yards.

And why dig a tunnel? If you're building a new track that crosses an old track, the cheapest option is an at-grade crossing, but with two busy new tracks crossing lots of existing tracks - including storage tracks with trains parked on them and eight of the busiest tracks in the country - it's easy to see why the design team ruled out that option. It's harder to see why they ruled out a bridge. The yards are in a valley. Just a few blocks west, Queens Boulevard and the three tracks of very busy #7 train line have been crossing them on a double-decker bridge for over a century. There are five or six other bridges, depending on how you count.

There's no concern about blocking the sunlight because the only people in that yard are railroad employees. Sometimes a tunnel is chosen over a bridge to mitigate noise, but the trains will emerge from the tunnel close to the densest residential population, in Sunnyside Gardens. Grade elevation isn't a major concern because the yards are wide and the northernmost tracks are elevated, allowing for a relatively gentle slope, but if the grade is too steep, it would be possible to put in a bend.

Map: New York Observer.

And yet in the Final Environmental Impact Statement there is only one option considered for the Queens route: "crossing beneath the railroad yards." There's only one real reason I can think of to tunnel instead of building a bridge: a tunnel would get in the way of the convention center.

For years, developers, city planners and politicians have been quietly preparing to build a deck over the Yards and develop the area. Because NIMBYs were so successful at "protecting the residential quality" of most of the city's neighborhoods, the amount of new housing that can be built as of right in the city is not enough to accommodate everyone who wants to live here and bring rents down. Planners and developers see one of the largest uninhabited areas in the city, right next to the huge Queens Plaza station and the underused 36th Street stop, and they want to put something there. It figured prominently in the city's discussions about Olympic development, and a report from Alex Garvin and Associates to the Economic Development Corporation in 2006 called it "the city's single greatest opportunity to increase the housing supply and simultaneously improve the quality of the public realm."

Building over a rail yard is a strategy that made millions for the New York Central Railroad a hundred years ago. Railroad managers, now mostly government employees in the city, long to replicate that success. That was the idea behind the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn and now the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan, and they've got other yards in the Bronx to follow Sunnyside. Never mind that Atlantic Yards was a crappy deal for the MTA and the Hudson Yards isn't looking quite as successful as forecast. The city's elites are still hung up on the idea: in 2012 Dan Doctoroff found some interest for it at the Municipal Art Society.

If you look at the map above, the East Side Access tunnel is there, under sections B and C. If it had been built as a bridge, at least part of it would be right where the deck would go, and get in the way of some of the buildings and streets.

I don't know for sure how much the East Side Access designers were thinking about this. But if it played a role at all in their decision to dig a phenomenally expensive tunnel instead of building a bridge, then a significant portion of this multi-billion-dollar federally-funded "transit" project is actually subsidizing a possible future residential and commercial mega-project. Yay?

New transit and our goals

It's pretty much a no-brainer that anything that optimizes existing transit use will help us toward our goals. Getting people out of cars and onto existing bus runs, or out of buses and onto existing train runs, means less wasted resources, less pollution, less carnage and more transit riding voters. And as Eric Morris has pointed out, the other extreme is true: a hugely expensive, physically disruptive transit project that gets a few people out of their cars for a short period of time but continues to encourage sprawl development and driving is something that we're probably better off without.

The question then becomes: where do you draw the line? Which designs and configurations should we always say no to? If you have a limited pool of money, how do you decide between two new transit projects? First of all, we shouldn't back any project with a competing highway project. Beyond that, we can start with Alon Levy's "trip chaining" principles that I discussed in my "Carfree 24/7" post:

		Short trips
		Foot or bicycle	Car
Long trips	Transit	Transit/walkable	Commuter suburbs
	Car	Auto-oriented dense	Sprawl

When we talk about getting people out of their cars, the goal should be to get them completely out of their cars. That means transit for long trips and walking (or cycling) for short trips. Transit without walkability means that people will be driving to the store and to drop their kids off at school. Walkability without transit means that people will be driving to work, major shopping and vacations.

Transit and walkability also reinforce each other, just as local and long-distance car dependence reinforce each other. Walkability solves the "last mile" problem for transit, and people in cars tend to stay in cars.

This means that the projects with the biggest bang for the buck are ones where there is walkability without transit, or transit without walkability. We build the transit to serve the walkable community, or upzone around the transit station, to bring the transit and walkability into balance.

The next most desirable transit projects are those that build transit and walkability together. I'm often skeptical of these, especially when they're greenfield developments, and that's another principle: infill is better than greenfield, all else being equal.

We can rule out projects that are neither walkable nor transit-oriented, but simply promote 24/7 car dependence. But what about sprawl transit proposals, like the Northern Branch, the Tappan Zee transit and extensions of Metro-North, which are at best accompanied by vague promises of rezoning? What about proposals for dense, walkable villages in locations underserved by transit, if they are served at all, like the Piermont pier and the Piscataquis Village Project?

In general I would say no to projects like these. If we wait a generation, people will probably be more open to transit and walkability, and we don't want to get locked into highways, garages and single-family sprawl. But there are circumstances where they might make sense. Sometimes you need to move fast to lock down a right-of-way. Sometimes you need to spend money on transit before the road people grab it.

There's an argument that's frequently made that park-and-ride transit can function as a ratchet. Get people on transit for a little while and they'll identify as transit riders and support transit expansion. Get people walking a little and they'll demand transit. I'm not convinced. I know too many transit-riding car owners who identify as drivers first and foremost, and vote that identification. If there was some kind of explicit time limit, where termites would gradually eat the park-and-ride or something, I might consider it.

In any case, these "maybe" proposals should be lower priorities than the other ones, in terms of land, money and activist time. So to sum up:

Yes!	Maybe!	No!
Use existing capacity Build transit to serve existing walkable communities Upzone existing transit-oriented communities Infill transit and walkability	Greenfield transit and walkability Lock down an existing right of way Spend money while it's there Sunsets	Anything with a competing highway investment Park-and-rides Transit-inaccessible walkable villages Ratchet arguments Autosprawl

Who's fighting car dependence?

Earlier this month I talked about how car dependence is overdetermined, with at least seven more or less independent factors influencing it: identification, leadership, NIMBYism, corruption, the "Two New Yorks" lie, the power of drivers and rural bias. I wrote that any good campaign to reduce driving has to tackle at least two of them, and the more the better. Or we can work together to make sure that all the bases are covered. Here are some people working on these factors:

1. Non-drivers identify with drivers. People want to see themselves as empowered, autonomous citizens with freedom of movement. They need to see empowered, autonomous citizens with freedom of movement who aren't driving. Some bike organizations, like Transportation Alternatives, promote exemplary bike commuters. Blogs like Humans of New York and the Sartorialist celebrate the city's pedestrians. The Underground New York Public Library was a great project to show the erudition of ordinary New Yorkers on the subway, but it seems to have lost steam. Ben Kabak's Second Avenue Sagas helps keep the dream of good transit alive.


Marcia Kramer, windshield-perspective reporter. CBS2 via Streetsblog.

2. Key segments of the population drive at higher rates. Transportation Alternatives ran a site called uncivilservants.org for a while. Streetsblog has had great coverage of parking permits, and occasionally covers a news reporter or politician who suffers from windshield perspective. At this point I don't know of an organization that is making this a priority.

3. NIMBY arguments favor drivers. The main way to defuse NIMBY arguments is to remove parking requirements. Streetsblog has been covering this, too, and there's nationwide pressure from Donald Shoup and his followers, but there's no organization that's focused on taking parking requirements out of the zoning code in New York.

4. Corruption favors road capacity. New York is full of "goo-goo" groups who have been fighting corruption for over 120 years, and they tell us that any day they'll start making some headway. Reinvent Albany, with connections to Streetsblog and Transportation Alternatives, is probably the most promising. In the transportation area, Alon Levy, Drunk Engineer and a number of other railfans around the country have been putting the screws on inflated railroad costs. StrongTowns has been leading an amazing nationwide movement for efficiency in transportation and development, mostly roads. As far as I know, there is no local organization fighting transportation corruption.

5. The "two New Yorks" narrative favors drivers. Not enough people are working on this.

6. Drivers have more political power. The big heroes in this are StreetsPAC, the newly-formed campaign fund for pedestrians and cyclists. I personally know and respect nine of the fourteen board members, and the others by reputation.

7. Rural bias favors driving. Reinvent Albany is mostly focused on corruption, which is fine, but someone should tackle the conceptual side of things. Even Jim Kunstler, who detests sprawl, talks a lot about gardens and agriculture. The best bet for breaking the "upstate=rural/suburban" myth is Duncan Crary and his Small American City podcast. He's doing a great job, but he's just one guy.

As you can see, Streetsblog, Transportation Alternatives, Reinvent Albany and StreetsPAC are probably the strongest organizations in these areas, and they definitely deserve your support. But their efforts are a bit light in many of these factors, especially leadership, "two New Yorks" and rural bias.

Can we afford to ignore these three factors? Is there an organization or blog that I'm missing? Do you know of a city or region that has successfully overcome challenges like these?

Regardless of what everyone else is doing, I hope that you will take the time to think about all seven of these issues, and then blog, tweet, Instagram or otherwise generate content about each of them.

Will "Willets West" relieve Flushing Meadows's parking curse?

One of the least pleasant things about Flushing Meadows is the sheer amount of parking, as I've helpfully highlighted for you on the Google satellite photo below. Unfortunately the photo doesn't do justice to the enormity (and I do mean enormity) of the situation. Even the smallest of these parking lots, like the one behind the Hall of Science, is depressing. The Citifield lots are just soul-crushingly huge; the Mets organization says there are 8,500 parking spaces available.

This parking doesn't just waste space that would be better used as parkland or even swamp. It ruins everything around it, because as we know from study after study, more parking means more driving. The parking is why it's almost impossible to walk anywhere in the park without some self-righteous asshole in a minivan forcing you off the walkway. It's why the only entrance to the park that's at all pleasant for pedestrians is the number 7 el that carries you over most of the parking and connects you to a boardwalk that crosses high above the rest. It's why even the other entrances near the Botanical Garden and the Hall of Science are still pretty nasty.

Citifield is actually a minor improvement over Shea Stadium in that it's relatively close to 126th Street, making the walk to the bay a little less oppressive. These parking lots are much more of a blight than the auto body shops of Willets Point, which do after all constitute a functioning business district. I think on some level the Wilpon family realize that - and of course they're getting a lot of pushback from the Willets Point business owners.

This probably explains why the latest proposal to develop the area involves putting a giant mall entertainment complex on the site of the parking lot. In theory, this could be a very good thing for the pedestrian environment. It will replace the parking on the entire west side of Citifield with mall façade, which may actually interact with the pedestrian space more than your typical mall. It's hard to tell for sure from the rendering below, but it may also make that stretch of Roosevelt Avenue less of a hellscape.

One thing that's kind of puzzling in all this is that I haven't seen any mention of floodproofing. The entire valley flooded during Hurricane Sandy, like salt marshes do, and will probably flood again every year for the foreseeable future. It should be possible to build this mall in a way that is less vulnerable to flooding, but all the EDC says is that it's "necessitating a significant increase in grade," meaning that they'll dump some rocks or dirt and build on top of them.

The biggest improvement, in theory, could come from reducing the amount of parking in the Flushing River Valley. People are driving less and taking the train more, and new development means a chance to change old travel habits. This would not only make for more pleasant places to walk, but also remove a number of the worst-behaving drivers from the streets.

"In theory," I said. But even the current plans are disappointing. Before a shovel is dug in "Willets West," they call for a twenty acre parking lot to be paved where there are now auto body shops in Willets Point. Willets West itself will contain 2,500 parking spaces. It's not clear that there will be any net reduction in the amount of parking available, and the planners seem to be pushing right ahead with their plans to open new exits off the Van Wyck Expressway.

Another thing that isn't clear is who all is going to drive to this "entertainment complex." Another mall, Atlas Park, has been dying a slow death because of the economic troubles and because it's not near any subway lines. (Yes, I know, it's a "lifestyle center" and not an "entertainment complex," but it's close enough.) This mall will probably survive because it'll be right under a major subway station and near a Long Island Rail Road station, but then who will want to park? (Yes, I know, the LIRR station is only open when there are major sporting events. They'd be stupid not to stop the trains there when the mall opens, which will be another improvement for park users.)

All these deals are laid out behind closed doors (it's not clear whether the rooms are still smoke-filled), but it may be possible to amend this one with public pressure. Save Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is urging people to testify against the plan at the Community Board 7 meeting tomorrow night (Monday, April 8), and on May 13. The project is not on the agenda, but CB7's Buildings and Zoning Committee will be discussing it Thursday night with no public comment, so tomorrow is your chance to frame the issue for them.

I hope that some of you will attend the meeting and speak about the benefits of reducing the parking in the area and elminating the new highway offramps. I hope that some will also talk about more thoughtful, proactive ways to deal with the flooding. Have fun!