Stop romanticizing the country

Recently on Twitter I attacked the practice of transferring resources from city dwellers to country dwellers. One of my followers tried to defend it on the grounds of "equitable growth" because some people need to live in rural areas for farming, mining and other natural resources management purposes. My response was "fuck 'em" - not the people who actually do farm or mine or maintain parks and reservoirs, or who provide the goods and services for them, but the people who just want a big house in a picturesque area with lots of land, and feel entitled to government subsidies for that.

The specific example we were discussing was the building of new government facilities in remote areas, particularly facilities like universities and administrative offices that have no direct connection to rural activities, but there are many other examples of this kind of transfer of resources. Elected officials can keep taxes low in the country while raising them in cities. They can subsidize credit, transportation, utilities or other expenses of living and working in the country more than they do in the city. They can impose restrictions on cities that impair their efficiency but don't have the same effect on the country, like minimum parking requirements and restrictions on density.

There may be good reasons to encourage people to live in the country. Farming, mining, and other rural activities can be difficult in themselves, and the isolation of the country can make them even less attractive. Financial incentives, improved transportation and resources like broadband and cheap electricity can increase the labor pool and the number of people willing to invest in farms and other rural businesses.

When these incentives are targeted to a real public need, everything is great. But often they're simply targeted at people living in a specific place, or at "rural areas" in general. This can happen when people don't take the time to target initiatives well, or when there's a general hostility towards city life - or city dwellers - or when politicians exploit country dwellers for power. There is also a strong tendency for people to romanticize rural life.

Every mistargeted incentive is an opportunity for free riding, and incentives for rural living attract a lot of free riders. For all the disadvantages of country life that I mentioned above there are many incidental advantages like access to outdoor recreation, pleasant views, cheaper land and lower levels of certain types of pollution.

Many people prefer to live in the country and do something other than farming or mining or resource management, or providing services to farmers or miners or resource managers or tourists. There's a long tradition of artists, writers and philosophers moving to the country for inspiration or contemplation. There's another long tradition of wealthy people buying country houses for recreation and to escape poor people in the cities.

I want to point out here that this practice is largely restricted to white wealthy and middle-class people. In most cities there are creative and scholarly communities that are open to poor and nonwhite people. Rural communities where artists and writers live can be racist and exclusionary. They can also be remote and difficult to access without cars, which can constitute a barrier for people with low incomes. Poor and nonwhite people frequently move to the country for farming or mining, but less frequently to retreat for creative pursuits.

It's also important to note that the incomes of most of these country dwellers are dependent on cities. The farmers and miners are producing food and materials that will mostly be consumed by city dwellers. The artists, writers and philosophers are also producing art, writing and philosophy mostly for consumption by city dwellers. The tourists who rent hotel rooms and buy things in the country come mostly from cities. The wealthy people who buy summer, weekend and retirement houses in the country do it mostly with money they've made selling things in cities.

This pattern of earning money in cities and spending it in the country, and often paying taxes in the country, can be a legitimate exchange for real rural value, particularly when it comes to agricultural produce or mined resources or accommodation in pleasant or interesting places. When it's a country home it represents another transfer of wealth from the city to the country.

When an artist or writer or philosopher produces something in the country that they could have just as easily produced in the city, and receives subsidies intended for farmers or miners, that represents a transfer of wealth with nothing in return. When a worker could earn a living in the city but can't find work in the country, and chooses to live in the country and not work, any public assistance they receive constitutes a one-way transfer of wealth.

A transportation improvement that helps farmers and miners get their goods to market provides value to the producers and the buyers, so it's good for people in the city and the country. A transportation improvement that helps tourists and vacationers is probably valuable too. A transportation improvement that just helps people to make money in the city and live in the country is not a great value for taxpayers in general, and actively bad for city residents,

The absolute worst is when politicians spend tax money to "create jobs" in rural areas. I'm talking about factory, office, academic or entertainment jobs, jobs that are not specifically rural, and could be located anywhere. Jobs that would be much more efficiently located in or near cities.

First of all, this kind of economic development spending is a zero-sum game. It's possible to not spend it at all, and that's often the wisest course, but any jobs created in the country are jobs that are not going to city dwellers. That means that they are more likely to go to white people and people from higher-income backgrounds.

Second, putting office, academic and industrial jobs in the country is inherently less efficient, so we're wasting taxpayer money providing the infrastructure to support these activities beyond what they would cost us in the city.

Third, creating jobs in the country encourages more people to move to the country. They often leave efficient, walkable apartments and move to remote, car-dependent houses. They frequently buy cars, and those with cars typically drive more. They then add to the constituency of rural drivers demanding more and wider roads.

Subsidizing jobs in the country also creates a constituency for more jobs. We see it all over rural New York State: a politician can't get a factory in Plattsburgh without another politician wanting one in Elmira. Nelson Rockefeller built a SUNY campus in every State Senate district, regardless of how little housing there was for faculty and staff nearby, or how much a remote location added to the cost to transport students and supplies.

When farms or mines or rural factories close because the land is exhausted, or because other areas have more subsidies or less worker protection, or because we've subsidized transportation or water or energy, there are often jobs in the city. People used to move to the city for jobs, and they are again, more and more. But sometimes they don't want to leave the country. I get that. It can be hard to leave the place you know, and family.

I'm not blaming the people who don't want to leave the country, I'm blaming the politicians who pander to them by locating and subsidizing office, industrial and academic jobs in the country. Migration is a normal state for humanity. People have been doing it throughout our history.

That brings me to another element that has been underlying this whole dynamic: a romantic view of the country shared by many in power, and pandered to by many more. It is an old view, at least as old as the angels' visit to Sodom in the book of Genesis. In this view, cities are dirty places full of violence and evil people, while the country is clean, quiet and full of honest people.

The view of the country as inherently good helps explain a lot of the counterproductive subsidies I've discussed. Why wouldn't politicians want to subsidize writers and artists and teachers and factory and office workers living in the country, if the country is inherently good? Why wouldn't they want to make it easy for city people to get to the clean country as quickly as possible, so they can become virtuous country folk, or at least benefit from the country's virtues? Why wouldn't they want to help country people get in and out of the dirty city as quickly as possible, to minimize the harm and contamination?

Of course the city is not inherently dirty and sinful and violent, and the country is not inherently safe and friendly and clean. The country is a great place to grow food and collect water and quarry gravel. It's also a great place for city dwellers to experience natural beauty and to get some quiet and solitude and exercise. It's not a great place for factories or offices or bedroom communities. It's not a good place for a school, unless the school is essentially a city in itself. And it's really not a good place to shop, especially if we take into account the cost of transporting goods from where they're made to the shop, and from the shop to the home or business where they'll be consumed.

The city is a shitty place to mine copper. It's also a shitty place to grow food, despite what urban farming advocates may tell you. It's not a great place to get quiet and solitude. But as managers have discovered over and over throughout the centuries, despite everything they may want to believe, cities are great for offices and schools. They're not too bad for factories and bedroom communities, contrary to all the twentieth century rhetoric about light and air and noxious uses. And they're ideal for buying and selling things.

The romantic view we have of the country is doing real damage to both the city and the country. It's making them both less efficient, less safe, less healthy, less inclusive and less fair. We need to use the city for what it's good for, and we need to use the country for what it's good for.

There is no neutral transportation budget arbiter

Recently I had another Twitter argument with a transit budget hawk. You know, about how slow and expensive the MTA has been at delivering new subway infrastructure, and how some fantasy busway would not be slow or expensive to build at all, and would magically deliver results comparable to a train line.

(Some other advocates, like Alon Levy, have brought up high construction costs not as an argument for busways, but to argue that we can build more trains if we can build them cheaper. I disagree with this argument in part, but it's a different argument, and deserves a separate post.)

Over the years I've given different counterarguments to this. The biggest is that it's not about how much total transit capacity we can roll out. Our goals depend on rolling out transit infrastructure that can be sustained and used equitably for long after we run out of cheap fossil fuel, and on getting people out of cars, and both of those in turn depend on the Cycle.

Busways are never as cheap or quick to roll out as their advocates claim, and they can drain budget dollars and political energy away from trains. In this recent argument, as usual, a busway was raised as an explicit alternative to a rail proposal. Busways can also interfere with rail by occupying valuable corridors, as we see with the Orange Line in Los Angeles.

I finally figured out another big thing that's wrong with these arguments: they're not aimed at convincing me that a busway is better than a train. They're entirely based on political feasibility. I know the political system, says the busway advocate. They will never approve this expensive rail project. But they will approve this cheaper busway. You should abandon your quixotic campaign for rail and throw your lot in with my busway.

The problem is that these busway advocates do not necessarily know the political system, not any better than you or I do. They're typically either repeating something they heard from someone else, or they're responding unthinkingly to a high cost figure. They have no special knowledge as to whether the politicians will fund the rail project, and they have no special knowledge as to whether the politicians would fund the busway, or allocate road space for it.

Instead, their appeal is based on an idea of legislatures and political executives as neutral budget arbiters, dispassionately weighing the relative costs and benefits of proposals. Their only concern is the return on investment for each project, as expressed by its ability to support ridership numbers.

This vision is laughable if you've read even one day of my Twitter feed. Every day I get examples of politicians deciding whether or not to support transportation projects, and costs and ROI are the bottom criteria. The top predictor of whether a politician supports a project is the prospect of a glamorous ribbon cutting. The next is whether it would ease a frustration in a trip they regularly take, or that of someone who they listen to. The third is probably whether it would get them a lot of angry calls from powerful people who have some idea, however loony, that the project might bring, crime, gentrification, congestion or historical desecration. Then some of them might be interested in the possibility of getting credit for Bringing Down Spending.

The typical American politician drives and doesn't know or care about any transit riders. This is something we're trying to change, and we're making headway here in New York, but we've still got a long way to go. They will be biased against any transit project, and they will be further biased against any project that would take road space from drivers.

The politicians are also making their decisions based on biased information provided by bureaucrats, who drive at a higher rate than the general public. Allocation of funding and land is dominated by transportation and planning departments, which tend to be focused on building roads and parking, and swayed by fads like diverging diamonds, rail trails and "BRT." Many of them will have a vested interest in the money and land going to roads.

All of this is to say that there is no guarantee that anyone in the process will be neutral, honest or focused on moving the largest number of people for the lowest amount of money. They're focused on ribbon cuttings, or their friends' commutes, or avoiding angering the Community Leaders, or getting their road project funded.

My top two strategies to get transit built are to focus on the potential for glamorous ribbon cuttings, and to get people elected who commute by transit, and who care about transit commutes. Decision makers are not interested in cost figures for their own sake, and neither am I.

When ridership doesn't matter

In the past couple of years I’ve noticed something that would be baffling in a lot of contexts, and is still kind of hard to believe when you see it. It’s called a pass-up, and it’s when a transit vehicle is so full that it can’t fit any more people, and leaves riders standing on the platform or the curb.

Photo: Oran Viriyincy / Flickr

It’s bad enough when there really is another bus coming along in a minute. It’s bad enough when the city doesn’t have enough track capacity or enough train cars to move all the people who want to ride. But what I’m really talking about is when you can’t get on a bus and there isn’t another bus for ten minutes or more, or when one bus or train after another is uncomfortably packed.

It’s possible that the MTA, with its heavy debt service burden and its large employee benefit obligations, is incapable of bringing in a profit on any route at any time, no matter how many people ride it, so that it never helps the bottom line to add buses. But that would be a very different story than they told in 2010 when they cut service.

If you asked some of the people waiting for the M60 how they feel about the prospect of a fare increase, they would probably complain and tell you they couldn’t afford it. But if you asked them whether they’d pay fifty cents more to get a seat on the bus, or to just ensure there would be room for them on the next bus that came, they might say yes.

On the face of it, it makes no sense. These are paying customers; why wouldn’t the agency want their money?

We know it usually works in the other direction: transit providers don’t get enough riders, so they raise fares and cut back service, which drives away some of the remaining riders, in what is known as the Transit Death Spiral. We’ve put measures in place to protect transit systems from that. The problem is that those measures also remove most of the incentives for actually serving passengers.

The Transit Death Spiral is in fact a perfectly normal outcome for anyone who is selling something but is unable to compete. They sell less and less, and with less income they are unable to maintain the quality of their product. Customers give their money to the competitor, who can use it to improve the competing product.

Transit advocates knew there was a public interest in keeping transit around, so they got the government to subsidize it. But the reason transit was losing market share was that the government was subsidizing competing roads. There was a powerful popular consensus in favor of gas, roads and parking, and a popular distrust of railroad companies and “the traction interests.” There were also powerful undemocratic forces attacking transit, like Bob Moses, car companies and road lobbyists.

Transit advocates tried to promote an “all of the above” strategy, but rarely achieved “parity,” let alone more than 20%. They then largely fell back on charity arguments, which are inherently self-limiting because they implicitly accept the idea that nobody would take a bus or train unless they can’t afford to drive.

Then came transit advocates’ deal with the devil, the mistake that we’re still paying for today. After failing in both market competition and popular subsidies, transit advocates tried to beat road lobbyists at their undemocratic, competition-stifling game. They turned to public authorities.

Even today you see transit advocates arguing with a straight face that they can’t improve transit without a regional authority. Public authorities are the tools that Moses used to achieve power without a popular mandate. They allow elected officials to maintain a degree of control, but give the appearance of independence, protecting transit bureaucrats from all accountability to the voters or the market.

The result of this is that now, when there are plenty of passengers, the transit managers seem to have no interest in increasing frequency to serve the people who want to ride. What’s in it for them? They don’t get punished for leaving money on the table, and politicians don’t complain about crowded buses.

There are people who want to serve those people and take their money. But the city blocks them, and self-righteous bloggers spew bombast about “privatization” and “stratified transportation systems.” The state could serve them well, but the governor finds more political value in spending city money to build roads in the suburbs and the country. And on this the social justice advocates are silent.

The Uberpool/Lyftline experience

I wrote last year about how the current challenge for transit in cities is not building ridership but making room on transit for all the people who already want to ride, but are getting passed up or squeezed on. A lot of people have been paying attention to Uber and its competitor Lyft, and their Uberpool and Lyftline services may already be reducing car ownership. I've tried them both multiple times over the past couple of years, and they've gotten more promising.

Photo: Jazz Guy / Flickr

When I first tried Uber, all they offered were big SUVs, that you had all to yourself. It was more convenient than trying to find the number for the local car service and wait on hold, but it was too expensive for me. The smaller Uber, and Lyft vehicles and the ability to share rides with the Uberpool and Lyftline brought the price down to where it was a potential splurge for when I was tired of the subway.

After decades of taking taxis rarely, if ever, I was actually underwhelmed by the taxi experience in general. People pay so much more than for a subway ride, but the ride is often a lot slower and less smooth. Basically, you're stuck in traffic in a car with at least one stranger, who controls the radio and the heat, doesn't necessarily know where they're going, and sometimes really wants to talk. How is that relaxing?

Sometimes it is definitely worth paying for a taxi, to have a guaranteed seat, a one-seat ride, or door-to-door service. For places and times where the buses and trains run at low frequencies it can be a lot quicker.

I was interested to see how well these sharing services work. For the first several months I had the vehicle to myself, even if I took advantage of Lyftline's offer of waiting ten minutes for a lower price. But recently I've had a few shared rides. One couple was on their way to LaGuardia, and taking us home must have added at least fifteen minutes to the trip. I hope they left plenty of time!

One thing that can't come soon enough is services like "Uberhop," currently in pilot in Seattle, where you can get quicker and/or cheaper service by walking to a point chosen by the software. Last year I was waiting for a Lyftline to twist through a maze of one-way Greenwich Village, and noticed that my fellow rider was being picked up a few blocks away. I texted the driver, and was able to get to the car right as the other passenger was getting in. I saved all three of us another four-block loop on congested streets.

A promising application of this technology is when there is an unexpected outage on the subway, or even a skipped bus run, and a surge of SUVs (or even vans) come and whisk the waiting passengers away. Cost is a potential factor, but I think if people could be confident that a car would come quickly and get them there with minimal delay, a lot more of them would do it.

More observations on this issue coming soon.

No, e-carpooling will not replace fixed-route buses

A lot of people have been talking about "microtransit" lately - sometimes meaning shared e-hailing services like Uberpool and Lyftline, but also some larger services like Bridj, Via and Leap, and even dollar vans. I've read some wise things, and other things that are ...less wise. I think this is going to be a few posts, and I'm going to start with the question of whether electronic taxi-sharing services like Uberpool and Lyftline will, or even can, drive public buses out of business, and the role of pricing.

Photo: dibaday / Flickr

Last August, Timothy B. Lee wrote,

In the short run, these services will be a way for yuppies to pay a little less for their taxi rides. But they're also starting to blur of the line between taxis and buses. In the long run, that line is likely to disappear altogether, as all conventional buses are replaced by smaller and nimbler just-in-time transportation options.

No, "flexible" transportation services are not going to replace buses, ever, as long as they're competing on a level playing field. Jarrett Walker had the ultimate takedown years ago, and then reprised it again and again when people kept repeating the same nonsense:

You can spare yourself a lot of confusion about flexible service by keeping in mind the physical facts of the matter: Driving a special routing to respond to a customer request takes more of a driver's time than picking up a customer along a fixed route. Since we pay for service mostly in hours of labor, we have to care about how many passengers we'll serve with each labor hour, so flexible service is intrinsically limited on that important score. That's why when flexible routes near their (very low) capacity limits, we usually try to turn them back into fixed routes.

In February, Uber analyzed its data from Los Angeles and concluded that many people were using it as feeder service to get to the Metro, leading Chris Plano to reiterate Timothy Lee's speculation in March:

On the other hand, ride-hailing could actually be stealing riders from transit. If the same trip can be completed in less time with an Uber or Lyft than using the Metro, some riders will choose the speedier option. However, at the moment, it is unlikely that hordes of people will abandon transit for ride-hailing simply because transit is still less expensive.

Jarrett himself, in a comment on Plano's post, mentions that Uber and Lyft executives "are often quite explicit about wanting to draw people away from public transit," and seems to believe that because the e-hailing services are less regulated than the public transit agencies, they might actually succeed.

I'm not convinced at all. I'm guessing that these are actually people who might have driven to the Metro station, but even if they switched from riding feeder buses, Plano is dancing around an important point: these are people who are willing to pay a premium price for a faster trip. Let's say they're spending five dollars for an Uberpool to the train station. They would probably be happy to pay four dollars to ride a public bus, and for four dollars a pop (no free transfer), LACMTA would probably be able to run the buses frequently enough to satisfy them. But because LACMTA charges a consistent $1.75, and would probably be bitterly attacked if they tried to charge more in some neighborhoods, this leaves an opening for Uber. I really doubt that Uber could make that work, even with driverless cars, for less than a bus fare.

Stay tuned for more!

Autonomous cars in the advanced city

Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, said this to Yonah Freemark last month:

Would you prefer what we have today, [where] only poor people use [most transit service] and it sucks, or would you rather that poor people use the exact same thing that everyone else is using?

This brought to mind a quote that Chase has no doubt heard from Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá:

An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.

Peñalosa's quote highlights the false dichotomy that Chase has set up: there are other ways to provide access for poor people besides (a) sucky transit and (b) the exact same thing that everyone else is using. (And really, Chase ought to know that everyone else won't use "the exact same thing." How long did Zipcar offer a single model of vehicle?) As Yonah points out, there are also other options for the non-poor besides autonomous cars that only hold a few people at a time.

Both Chase and Peñalosa make other good points, and both are wrong on other points, but on this point the Strong Towns movement has gathered abundant evidence to back Peñalosa's position. We simply cannot afford to have an advanced city, let alone an advanced society, if we are spending our resources moving so many single individuals long distances at high speeds.

The most important post of 2003

Josh Barro is not alone in being stuck in the mindset that transit always needs more riders. It seems to be a hard thing to grasp, but sometimes you have enough riders to fill your buses and you have to create more capacity so that you can take more people out of their cars. These people must have a hard time going on weekend trips with tiny purses and briefcases, or buying large sodas when they're really thirsty.

Photo: Bonnie Natko / Flickr

You might think that Barro would be familiar with crowded transit since he lives in Sunnyside, where the 7 train has been crowded and unreliable for the past few years. At least some of our neighbors have figured out that we need more capacity, and organizing a Facebook campaign that has attracted over 800 members in just a few weeks. Some of their anecdotes and photos, on top of my own experience, have convinced me that the NYMTC's capacity estimates are inaccurate, out of date, or otherwise unrepresentative.

So what can we do to increase capacity on the 7 train? Some people say that once the MTA finishes installing the new Communications-Based Train Control signaling in 2017, we will have more trains. At the very least, CBTC will help things run more smoothly. But there are reasons to be skeptical.

As Capt. Subway and Alon Levy have taught us, a train line requires both trunk capacity and terminal capacity to function properly. CBTC may help increase our trunk capacity (but keep reading), but how much use is that if we're still constrained by our terminal capacity?

Well, the MTA actually tested that almost exactly thirteen years ago: they spent the morning of Saturday, April 13, 2002 trying to run thirty trains an hour on the 7 line. I remember when they did it, but didn't hear much about the results. If you're wondering why, here's a report by an independent observer named Stephen Bauman (still posting today) who watched the test from the 111th Street station and compared it with his observations of the normal rush hour on the previous day.

Bauman calculated that the MTA was able to increase the number of trains per hour from 25 to 28. Since they were running ten cars per train instead of the normal eleven, that represented a decrease in capacity. With more train cars and newer ones, they might be able to run 28 eleven-car trains today.

A bigger concern that Bauman conveyed was that the MTA was simply not up to the task, organizationally. As he observed, the dispatcher's clock in Main Street didn't even show seconds, the published timetable is vague and the internal timetable may not be any better, the trains were likely not timed right leaving 111th Street, the conductors did not wait for a signal before closing the doors, and "they ran out of trains around 8:30."

There was one train that sat in the station for six minutes. Bauman writes, "I would definitely catagorize the delay of nearly 6 minutes in getting operating personnel to operate a departing train to be part of the TA's lack of operational ability. There were about 5 supervisors on the Flushing bound platform. There weren't any on the platform where the trains were supposed to leave for Manhattan."

Some of these shortcomings are self-correcting: if the MTA tried this on a weekday the passengers would prevent the trains from leaving early. Others may just be kinks that could be ironed out over time. But overall the outcome is discouraging. We should expect and demand more, but we may not be able to get more any time soon. That means we'll have to look into other improvements, like bus lanes on the bridge and the tunnel, and increased frequency on the Long Island Rail Road.

Ferguson, Missouri is not a Strong Town

A lot of people have had a lot of insights about the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri. I want to highlight a few that I think are particularly important, and add a few thoughts that I hope will help focus them on our goals.

Last week, Doug Henwood had a great interview with political scientist and former Missouri state senator Jeff Smith, who expanded on his op-ed about how economically bankrupt the entire Saint Louis area, and in particular suburbs like Ferguson, have become. Combine that with municipal fragmentation and the mismatch between the city’s majority black population and its mostly white government, and you get a heavy dose of "for-profit policing," where the town relies on traffic stops for a large chunk of its revenue. It’s not hard to see how that in turn leads to the kind of anger that erupted after Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, a black resident.

First a word about "revenue generation" through traffic enforcement and other police actions. It’s gotta stop, period. Giving government officials a financial incentive to ticket and arrest people is a recipe for disaster – the kind of disaster we’ve been hearing about for days. Obviously, even if Michael Brown stole a few cigarillos (and it’s not at all clear he did), the police response was nuts and completely out of control.

That said, many politicians go too far in reacting to this abuse of the system. Many of our city council members here in New York act as though no tickets are ever warranted, even if the driver is putting lives at risk by blocking a hydrant, speeding or running a red light. The response to overzealous policing is not to make our streets a free-for-all for reckless drivers. People who want to stop "revenue generation" need an alternative way to keep us safe, whether it’s a cap on fines or replacing them with jail time.

Second, I have to point out how this shows up the "Chocolate City" triumphalism of the 1970s. Much as I love George Clinton, much as I support true local control and self-determination and Black Power, and much as I have sympathy for any separatist movement that just wants to get away from the oppressors, at this point it’s clear that when black people gained control of the governments of major cities it was at best a short-lived victory.

Cities are not self-contained little systems. They are porous regions of much larger systems, connected and interdependent with other cities, with their hinterlands and with their suburbs. When we integrated the buses, white people shifted to private cars. When we integrated the schools, white people moved their kids to "Christian Academies" and suburban districts. When black people took control of the cities, white people moved their wealth to the suburbs. Now black people are finding themselves pushed out of the Chocolate City into suburbs controlled by white people. It’s likely that one day Ferguson and other majority-black suburbs will elect black mayors, but what is really important is for everyone to have a fair say in the government of the entire region.

Chuck Marohn took this screen capture of the Google Street View of the Ferguson Market and Liquor Store.

Listening to Smith I couldn’t help thinking, as I had several times in the past week, "Ferguson isn’t a Strong Town." No, it is not. Chuck Marohn has the numbers, and you have to wonder: if the town had retained its walkable and transit infrastructure and built on it over the past sixty years instead of sprawling, how much less desperate would it be? What if the entire Saint Louis region had bucked the trend and stayed dense, walkable and transit-oriented? What would it take to make it strong again?

Finally, as Megan McArdle noted, this is part of the "Great Inversion" or the "suburbanization of poverty," the final step in the growth ponzi scheme where those of us who are aware and affluent enough move to walkable urban neighborhoods. Because we refuse to build more walkable urban neighborhoods, that displaces the poor and powerless to the inefficient, isolated, dangerous, rotting suburbs. What can those of us who care about our fellow humans do about this?

I’m guessing that as more and more people come to grips with the idea that poor black and Hispanic people are living in the suburbs now, some short-sighted person will propose an aid program where we dump massive amounts of money into the suburbs with the goal of bringing their standard of living up to the level of the wealthy inner cities, but with no attempt to make them more efficient. At that point some wiser person should point out that that’s exactly what we did for the past sixty years, and that that’s why the white people left the suburbs in the first place.

Five migrations in gentrification

In a recent post I noted that the demand driving up rents and prices ("gentrification") in big cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago is a result of at least three distinct migration streams. Thinking about it now, I can identify five major streams. It's important to keep them straight, because they do not have the same cause, and thus the actions we can take (if any) to reduce or redirect the flow of migrants is different in each case.

How many New York City residents are refugees from Rochester's parking crater, winner of Streetsblog USA's Parking Madness 2014?
Image: Google Maps via Streetsblog.

The best and brightest have been migrating to cities since time immemorial, seeking fame and fortune. So have rural misfits – heretics, gender and sexual minorities, people with mixed ethnic, religious or class backgrounds, people with disabilities, anyone who has been shunned by small, close-knit communities. Some of them migrate from small cities to larger cities, searching for a better opportunity, more anonymity, more tolerance.

Immigrants often wind up in cities, because that is usually where the entry points and crossroads are, and where there are the most opportunities. They come through Ellis Island or Kennedy Airport, across the Rio Grande at El Paso or San Diego, and find their way to East Los Angeles or Chinatown or Washington Heights. Maybe they eventually wind up in a small town, or even start out picking berries in the Central Valley or tobacco in the Coastal Plain, but many families spend at least a generation in a big city.

Those two migration streams – the best and the misfits, and international migration – have been going on for as long as we’ve had cities and nations. Recently, what’s been capturing a lot of people’s attention is the white return – the repudiation by Anglo, Jewish, German and others of their parents’ search for comfort and tranquility in the suburbs, supposedly safe from the nonwhite people they feared and hated. I’m part of a similar migration, Back to the City, where the children of hippies and beatniks realized that communing with nature isn’t quite as spiritually uplifting as our parents thought – and it’s not all that great for the environment, either.

The fourth big migration stream that has been getting attention is the move of the white-flighters and back-to-the-landers themselves. Baby Boomers and other people who are now elderly have realized what we knew when we were fourteen: that life sucks in Amityville or Great Barrington if you can’t drive wherever you want to go. They’re buying small apartments in the city themselves, many of them in neighborhoods that they couldn’t afford in 1972.

There’s a fifth migration that I think doesn’t get enough attention: the small city exiles. These are people who are not the best or the brightest, or complete misfits, but they’re pretty bright, mildly kinky or noticeably nonconformist. Or maybe they can’t drive because they’re blind or epileptic (I learned about this last one from Sally Flocks), or they just don’t want to. Eighty years ago they’d have been pretty happy in Rochester or Knoxville or Omaha or San Luis Obispo: reasonably normal, functioning members of society, with enough peers to have a stimulating intellectual and artistic fellowship.

Today, those towns have hardly any jobs at all, especially within walking distance of downtown, shopping and services are sprawled out across the area, and transit between them is inconvenient. With this fragmentation, they can barely sustain a monthly open mike or an Indian restaurant, let alone a poetry slam or a regional Thai place. Our heroes – somewhat large fish in not-so-large ponds – see the grim desperation in the faces of their older neighbors and head to the bigger cities, where there are more opportunities, not just for jobs but for dinner after 8PM.

This is why rents and prices have been rising so drastically in New York, Washington and San Francisco, and to a certain extent in Boston and Chicago. In addition to the eternal migration of the ambitious, the misfits and immigrants, we’re on the receiving end of the White Return and the Back to the City – both the old and the young. On top of all that we’re getting the moderately bright and kind of weird who can’t make a home in the small cities.

Any solution to the problems of rising rents and prices will have to address all three of these new migrations. We can build more big city for them: taller buildings, more transit, upzoning around transit. But the returning retirees and the small city refugees don’t need big cities. They’d be perfectly happy if we could make the existing pedestrian and transit infrastructure of Scranton and Pueblo and Fort Smith work for them again, rebuild what was lost and thrown away, and find a way to make those towns relevant again. They’d be happy if they could live in prewar suburbs like Bethpage and Whiting without having to own a car for every adult family member. This is what the Strong Towns movement is about, and what Duncan Crary says about Troy.

You may say that it’s a tall order, that these towns are never coming back. But I ask you: if we rebuilt the rail connections, rebuilt the housing and shopping and offices where now there is just parking, and tore down the bypasses that made those downtowns irrelevant, don’t you think some of them would start to sputter back to life? Is that really any harder than trying to build whatever mind-numbing amount of "affordable housing" we need in New York to accommodate all these people, and the subways we will need to move them around once the elites admit that “Bus Rapid Transit” will never suffice?

Infilling the subways

Commenter threestationsquare pointed out that I made an error in the chart I posted about overcrowded subways. He also noted that it's Table 20 of the NYMTC Hub-bound Travel Study that gives floor space per passenger during morning rush in 2012. Here's a bar graph based on it:

At the uncrowded end of this chart are the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road commuter trains, and this makes a lot of sense. First of all, they have more seats. They run long distances, and people should be able to sit all the way from Speonk or Purdy's. But they're also premium service. There's a very good argument to be made that they're oversubsidized, but if we want to cut the subsidies the place to do it first is in station parking.

The other big group of uncrowded trains are the #7 and the trains that run through downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights (the 2, 3, 4, 5, and R), and a major factor in this is that there are alternatives that get people where they're going faster. A lot of people transfer from the #7 to the N or Q at Queensboro Plaza, and from the R to the N at Pacific Street or the B at Dekalb Avenue. Many people who can walk to these trains will walk a block or two further to get a quicker ride to Midtown on the B, D, E, M, N or Q.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it makes room for infill development, bringing new riders who fill up the train afterwards. It has already been happening for years on the #7 train, for example, where people get off in Jackson Heights to transfer to the Queens Boulevard trains. The space they leave is filled up by people who live in Woodside and Sunnyside. When those people get off at Queensboro Plaza, their space is taken up by people coming from the new developments in Long Island City. Something similar happens with the R in Downtown Brooklyn, but to a lesser degree.

The new buildings in Long Island City use that space on the #7 train to help get people out of their cars, by increasing the amount of carfree housing available in the area so that moving to the suburbs and buying a car seems less attractive. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that completely. Even though LIC's zoning does not require developers to build parking, it encourages parking construction by allowing them to build taller if they build parking. The result is the blight of garages lining Fifth Street.

In Downtown Brooklyn, particularly near the R station at Metrotech, the 2/3/4/5 stations at Hoyt and Nevins, and the big transfer station at Borough Hall the city has pursued a single-use vision of office construction and bent over backward to discourage residential development. Senator Schumer, who lives up the hill in Park Slope, recently reiterated that party line. In addition to use and height limitations, this is also accomplished with minimum parking requirements. The residents of Brooklyn Heights have fought reforms in these areas as well. The result is that residential development has been pushed to Dumbo, Fort Greene and Boerum Hill, which are a long walk from most of the stations on the 2/3/4/5 and R.

In a future post I'll talk about potential extensions for other lines. But these areas have transit capacity to meet the demand for walkable, transit-accessible living space a short distance from Manhattan. They just need to be zoned to allow it, without requiring parking that will compete with the trains and add more cars to an area that already has way too many.

If you're hub bound, there's room for you

Recently I posted that there seemed to be no room left in the subway tunnels and bridges leading into Manhattan. Threestationsquare, who had made the updated chart I used in that post, pointed me to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council's Hub Bound Travel Study. And it turns out I was wrong. There is room - and the places where there is room have interesting potential.

The NYMTC is an arm of the New York State Department of Transportation that is responsible, among other things, for coming up with wildly inaccurate predictions of traffic volumes to justify bigger highways. But their underlying data is more sound, and a lot of it is online. The Hub Bound Travel Study is full of fascinating data for transportation nerds, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

For our purposes, the relevant table is Appendix I, Table 6, "TOTAL RAIL TRAINS ENTERING AND LEAVING THE HUB ON A FALL BUSINESS DAY." Kind of poetic. (But it's trains going to the hub, not The Hub). If we look at the morning rush data for 2012, here's what we get:

There's a pretty wide spread between the #7 train, which manages to cram 23 trains per hour through the Steinway Tunnel, and the R train, which only sent eight trains an hour through the Montague Street Tunnel. In between we can see clusters in the low 20s, in the mid-teens, in the low teens, and then a few stragglers.

The busiest tunnels are the Lexington Avenue Express, the PATH, and the 60th and 53rd Street Tunnels to Queens. The uptown Broadway Express and the Cranberry Street Tunnel are also doing pretty well.

There is significant room on the Manhattan Bridge (as Threestationsquare mentioned) and the uptown #6 Local and Central Park West Express, and the Clark Street Tunnel to Brooklyn. Even the 14th Street Tunnel has capacity, despite promises that CBTC would improve things. We knew the Williamsburg Bridge had capacity, but it turns out, so do the locals on the Upper West Side.

The Montague Tunnel is currently closed to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy, but it's seen eight trains an hour since the M train was rerouted uptown in 2010. They ran 27 trains per hour in 2002, before the N was rerouted over the Manhattan Bridge. The R is just not a high-demand train in this area, because it crawls through Lower Manhattan. The two tunnels for the F (Rutgers Street and 63rd Street) see more trains, but they have plenty of room.

So there you have it! Looking forward to your fantasy maps...

We don't want a Frackin' Zee Bridge

Environmental advocates are doing a great job educating people on how horrible hydraulic fracturing is - in particular, it means hundreds more big, dangerous trucks on the roads - and building an ever-growing movement against this technique for extracting natural gas.

Image: Marcellus-shale.us

Unfortunately, current projections are for our energy use to grow, not shrink. Many fracking opponents also want the government to shut down nuclear power plants like Indian Point, which will further increase the unmet demand for energy. And many environmentalists support converting to vehicles powered by electricity and natural gas. Where will those come from?

Some of this demand can be satisfied through less destructive, renewable sources like wind and solar, but not enough. As long as the demand increases there will be pressure to frack, and we will not necessarily be able to resist forever. To really head off hydrofracking we need to reduce our demand for energy.

We can do some of this by switching to more efficient forms of electricity generation, lighting, heating and cooling, but those measures only go so far. We need to tackle one of the top areas of energy inefficiency: transportation. If people keep driving at anywhere near the rate they're doing now, in a few years most of that fracking gas is going to go right into the power sockets of our electric cars.

We could make a huge dent in our energy use if we shifted most of our freight and passenger trips from cars and trucks to trains, buses and boats. We can cut it even more by shifting those trips to walking, bicycles and elevators. To make the most of it, with convenient walks and transit trips, people would need to move their homes, jobs and stores to within walking distance of train stations.

It's at this point that someone usually brings in a Joel Kotkin-type argument about people really wanting to live in the suburbs or the country and avail themselves of "the freedom of a car." It's nonsense, of course. People also want to live in town with the freedom of walking. People want all kinds of impossible and incompatible things.

People respond to economic incentives. If you build lots of free or low-cost highways and parking and fight massive wars to keep the price of gas low, then people will drive. If you let people deduct part of their housing costs from their taxes, then big houses on big lots out in the suburbs or the country look great. If you make streets big and sidewalks narrow or nonexistent, people won't walk. If you limit the size and number of apartment buildings and require lots of parking to be provided for every home, business and transit station, people aren't going to build walkable communities, and the walkable communities that exist will be expensive. More driving, more fracking.

Now, as gas gets more expensive for people and roads get more expensive for governments, people are cutting back on their driving. Driving has been declining for the past few years. If it keeps declining, we may well see an easing of this pressure to frack.

One of the biggest incentives to drive is wide, low-cost highways. Since it was opened in 1955, the Tappan Zee Bridge has been an incentive to live far from transit and drive everywhere. Governor Cuomo is planning to widen the Tappan Zee Bridge, but he has pledged to keep the tolls low, increasing that incentive to drive. More driving, more fracking.

If you really care about hydrofracking, you won't just tell Cuomo to stop the fracking. You'll tell him to stop the Frackin' Zee Bridge.

Valley Transportation Myopia

The San Jose Mercury News has an article about the 25th anniversary of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority's light rail system, quoting a few supporters and one critic. The supporters are VTA transportation planning manager Kevin Connolly, "the train's godfather" Rod Diridon, and a few riders, all of whom have Spanish last names and say that they ride the trolley because they don't own cars. The single critic quoted is Tom Rubin, an accountant who gets paid as a "transportation consultant" who mostly gets paid to attack transit. Sometimes Rubin will make arguments that seem "pro bus" in order to attack rail, but when there's no rail involved he's happy to attack buses.

On Twitter, some transit advocates did criticize the VTA. They're probably right. I've never been to Silicon Valley, but it sounds like it was relatively badly planned. It also sounds like there's a zoning issue behind the fact that many of the farms bordering on the lines haven't been built up with dense, walkable neighborhoods. That said, there's a bigger factor at play, one that I've touched on many times in the past: transportation myopia.

In the twenty-five years since the first VTA trolley ran, the federal, state and county governments and the VTA have widened four competing highways and built numerous interchanges and other "improvements." Here are a few that I could find details on:

CA 237	Convert to "freeway standards"	1997
I 880	Widen from US 101 to Montague Expressway	2004	$76.3m
CA 17	Add auxiliary lanes	2007	$28.2m
CA 87	HOV lanes south and north	2007	$121.9m
I-280	Ramp Metering and Widening	2010	$5.5m

As you can see, just about every branch of the VTA light rail system has seen millions of dollars invested in competing roads. Add to that the cost of constructing the 101, 280, 680 and 880 to begin with, which only happened within the previous twenty-five years. Those wouldn't have affected the design of the system, and thus the "Cost to run a light rail vehicle for an hour," but they have definitely sapped ridership, which affects all the other indicators mentioned.

Rubin is actually half right when he says "I think the original concept was very seriously flawed." Whatever the flaws of the original trolley concept and zoning, they pale in comparison to the flaw in the concept of building a trolley system at the same time as you expand the competing road network.

What you need for a good bus bridge

It's my hope that New Yorkers will remember three events from the recovery from Hurricane Sandy. The first is the gridlock and chaos that Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens experienced on Wednesday, October 31, the day after the storm. The second is the difficult but functioning system in place on November 1 and 2. The third is the hours-long waits in commutes to and from New Jersey the following Monday and Tuesday, November 5 and 6.

The differences between the three events tell us the importance of three factors to good bus service: (1) having enough buses and drivers, (2) having enough street space and (3) managing how and where people will board the buses.

On Halloween in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, the first two factors were absent. The MTA was running most of its regular bus routes, but did not add any buses to accommodate increased demand from people who couldn't use the subways. Lots of people drove.

On the next day, the City instituted the HOV-3 rule, which drastically cut the number of cars on the streets. The DOT and the MTA instituted the "bus bridge" from Brooklyn to Midtown, putting hundreds of additional buses to use. They planned to keep a lane on Third and Lexington Avenues clear for the buses, but it turns out that the HOV-3 restriction took care of that. They had factors 1 and 2, but not 3. There were gigantic mobs waiting for buses at Jay Street and Atlantic Terminal, but in general people were understanding.

Photo: MartyJGardner / Twitter

On Monday, New Jersey Transit sent hundreds of buses to it eight park-and-rides to pick people up and bring them to the ferries. A lot of people couldn't or didn't want to drive to the park-and-rides, so they formed long lines at train stations and bus stops. The situation going home from the Port Authority Bus Terminal was worse: commuters tweeted picture after picture of Port Authority corridors filled with passengers waiting on line. A gasoline shortage kept some people off the road, and the Holland Tunnel was only open to buses, but there were no HOV restrictions on or near the Lincoln Tunnel, and the only dedicated street space is the morning rush XBL. That meant that NJ Transit didn't have factor 1 (buses) or 3 (terminal management), and very little of factor 2 (street space).

On Tuesday, NJ Transit shut down four of the eight park-and-rides and used the buses to supplement existing routes that were overloaded. Over the past few days, New Jersey has gotten loans of hundreds of buses, and deployed them on these routes. Tomorrow it will start additional service from train stations to the ferries. By using more ferries, it shifts passengers from the overloaded Port Authority terminal to the relatively uncrowded (I hope) ferry docks. So now it has factor 1 (buses) and 3 (terminal management) but not factor 2 (street space). Already people are tweeting that there's improvement; we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

There are a few lessons we can take away from these three incidents. First of all, private cars can't provide anything remotely approaching the capacity of a good subway or commuter rail system. I hope I don't hear the words "surface subway" out of anyone's mouth for a long time.

Second, at this point it seems clear that in order to run a bus system at anywhere near the capacity of a train, you need all three factors: (1) buses, (2) street space and (3) terminal management. You might be able to get away with two out of the three factors if passengers are patient, but not indefinitely.

Why I hate Eric Morris's latest post

Eric Morris is only the most recent wannabe transit expert to discover that empty buses aren't very efficient. His analysis is strikingly reminiscent of Tom Rubin's, but he brings to the topic a splash of condescending Freakonomics overconfidence, and that special ignorance of real-world transit that only someone who's driven to Brian Taylor seminars can pull off.

Back in 2009, Kevin Libin used Rubin's numbers (with proper credit) for a National Post transit hit job. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.

Of course, Morris and Rubin are right that it's dishonest to compare the efficiency of a single-occupant car with that of a full capacity bus. But the report that they criticize (PDF, page 4) is careful to give figures for buses with one, five, eleven, forty and seventy passengers, and in the Reason "debate" the authors insist that they were not making such a comparison.

Morris and Rubin quote figures from the National Transit Database that the average bus in the United States has ten people on it (about forty people can sit on a bus, and seventy can fit on if some people stand), for 25% occupancy, and light rail has 24%. Morris acknowledges that heavy rail (metro) systems have 46% occupancy, but he doesn't mention that rail systems are much more energy-efficient than buses.

25% occupancy is also not normal for a bus outside of this country. In places where transit is more widely used, there are more than ten people on average. For example, in Zurich and other Swiss cities (PDF) there are 14 on average (35%). Trams carry 53 people on average, and if you assume that each tram can seat 100 people, that's 53% occupancy. In the Czech Republic and in major African cities (PDF, bus occupancy ranges from 63-80%.

There are actually quite a few systems right here in the US that have higher average occupancy rates than 25%. In fact, there are twenty with rates over 40%, including Morris's own LA County MTA and Brownsville, Texas. Here's a graph of the occupancy from 2007 (given in passengers, not percentages, so you have to divide by 40) with the farebox recovery ratio:



So Morris has three straw men here: the report that compares a single-occupant car to a fully loaded bus, picking on the inefficient bus, and using US bus occupancy figures. But he actually admits that 25% occupancy is not destiny, even in the US, in the second half of his post: "Given its current low load factors, transit generally has plenty of capacity to absorb new customers with practically zero additional energy expenditure."

There's a lot more to say about this post. The funniest thing is that Morris's general thrust is actually the main point that I've been hammering at for years: you can accomplish more of your transit goals by restricting or pricing car use than you can by building more transit. He's right: I hate his post. Not because I disagree with his point, but because he does such a sloppy, condescending job arguing it.

Amtrak ridership update

People have been talking about the gross numbers of Amtrak carrying more riders than at any time since its founding in 1972. I have a couple of thoughts on this.

First, we now need a new benchmark to measure Amtrak ridership by. It's tricky, because Amtrak didn't take over all the passenger trains in the country. Commuter services were often retained by the railroads, eventually being taken over by state-run agencies or authorities like Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, Metra, the MBTA and Caltrain. When they are reinstated, they are often controlled by state agencies or authorities like Sound Transit, Valley Metro or Denver's RTD.

We could compare Amtrak ridership with pre-Amtrak ridership on all non-commuter trains, but now Amtrak runs some routes that primarily serve commuters (the trains to Lynchburg and Newport News in Virginia, for example), and some current non-commuter routes are run by other organizations, such as the LIRR's Montauk service, the Alaska Railroad and the Grand Canyon Railway. So it would be nice to see the ridership on all pre-Amtrak long-distance trains compared to all Amtrak long-distance trains, for example.

My second point is that there are some very interesting specifics in the data, particularly on Pages C-1 and C-2 of the July Monthly Performance Report (PDF). Last July, there were only four services that ran an operating surplus from January to July: the Acela and Northeast Regional, the Lynchburg service and the "Non NEC Special Trains," whatever they are.

This year all four of those are making a larger operating surplus, and so are the "NEC Special Trains," the Washington-Newport News service ($3 million surplus), the Pere Marquette (Grand Rapids to Chicago, $100,000) and the Carolinian (Raleigh to Charlotte, $700,000).

Even more interesting, many of the "state sponsored trains" are close to breaking even. The Ethan Allen Express has a year-to-date loss of less than $100,000. The Piedmont, which goes from Washington to Charlotte, has a year-to-date loss of $300,000. Kansas City-Saint Louis service is down $1.4 million. All three of them earn a significant chunk of their revenue in the fall, presumably from leaf-peepers and skiers, and all three will probably run a net surplus for this year.

The following trains all have year-to-date operating losses of less than three million dollars: the Adirondack ($2 million), the Heartland Flyer (Fort Worth to Oklahoma City, $2.2 million), the Maple Leaf ($2.3 million), the Illinois Zephyr (Chicago to Quincy, $2.4 million), the Downeaster ($2.5 million), the Vermonter and the Hiawathas ($2.6 million), and the Blue Water (Chicago to Port Huron, $2.8 million). Of those trains, only the Blue Water had an annual operating loss over a million dollars in 2011. Most of them will probably make a slight operating profit this year.

The question then is what to do with these services. I don't know the details of Amtrak's agreements with the states. It may make sense for the states to shift their contribution from operating to capital and buy more rolling stock. If we get a congress that wants to invest in Amtrak, it may buy the rolling stock, leaving the states with money to invest in new routes.

The most profitable routes, like Washington-Lynchburg, may be of interest to private companies. What makes the most sense would be for the host railroad, in this case Norfolk Southern, to take it back and maybe extend it to Danville and Greensboro. In any case, it's good news.

Can we push for more buses AND trains?

Alon Levy has posted a nice long response to my posts about bus service on the Northeast Corridor. Now, Alon and I are friends and we could probably hash this out over coffee the next time he's in New York. But I think it's helpful to air this discussion on our blogs so that you all can join in, and of course get the benefit of our tremendous knowledge and wisdom.

The Megabus stop in Secaucus. Photo: Charles F. / Yelp.

First, some clarifications. I really, really don't want you to start loving the bus. I don't particularly like them myself. Even if they weren't smelly and cramped, they're always going to lurch. I would love it if we had enough passenger train capacity that I could go wherever I wanted to go by train.

I am advocating investment in bus stations at various locations around the metro area, but not government investment. Of course, where there are existing government-owned bus stations, like in White Plains, the intercity buses should be offered space. Similarly, they should be allowed to use municipal lots and garages, like those in Flushing and Williamsburg, for pickups and layovers. And in Chinatown, as in most of Manhattan, land may be so expensive that none of the bus companies can afford to build their own terminals.

That said, it seems likely to me that if we provide a reasonable amount of curbside pickup space in places like Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Bay Ridge, a bus company will eventually be able to accumulate enough profit and/or credit to build a terminal. That also assumes that there would be the necessary zoning and/or waivers to allow such a terminal to be built in a convenient location.

Alon is probably right, in part at least, that what's motivating me to advocate expanding the bus network is "desperation" and "defeatism" about the likelihood of reforming Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration - or about getting another train tunnel dug under the Hudson. Part of my motivation is also that we may have extra advocacy hours beyond what we need to get rail improvements, and we should spend those on expanding the non-car, non-plane mode share. But that's not all.

It's also that the timeframe for bus improvements is shorter. If we get the FRA to relax its regulations, and then get Amtrak to buy more train cars, we still need to get Congress to pay for the new cars, and then it takes a few years for the cars to be built. A new tunnel would take even longer.

We should absolutely do all of those. But what do we do in the meantime with all the people who really want to go to Boston without driving? Let's satisfy that demand over the short term with buses, warehouse it, and then when Amtrak gets their new train cars it will free up a bunch of bus capacity, which will then be available to absorb the next wave of transit demand. This process can be repeated when the new tunnels are completed, and again when the Poughkeepsie Bridge is reactivated.

The question, I guess, is how much time anyone's putting into these goals, besides just writing about it on blogs. If someone spends half an hour writing a letter to Steve Levin asking for his support in putting a bus stop in Williamsburg, is that a half hour they wouldn't have spent writing to Nydia Velasquez asking for FRA reform?

The right to free parking in 1940s New York

As I wrote on Sunday, around 1947 the ban on overnight curbside car storage became untenable. The New York Times reported that there were so many cars in the city, and so many of their owners felt entitled to park on the street, that it would have required a huge increase in the police force to ticket them all. The NYPD had no choice but to ignore a large percentage of the illegal street parking.

Pitt Street, NYC, 1948. Photo: Lou Bernstein.

I feel like I should take some time to address the entitlement issue. First of all, as "Old Urbanist" Charlie Gardner commented on my first post in this series, the streets were too wide to begin with: "If the carriageway is excessively wide for the needs of traffic, as many American residential streets are, you may as well park cars along it." In the middle of the night, that was certainly true of every street north of 14th, and most of the ones south of it. The drivers saw it as wasted space, and it was. They needed space to store their cars, the city had it. Why not put it to use?

Honestly, I agree with that. The real issue is not why the curbside lanes were used for overnight parking, but why it's free. That's an issue of middle class entitlement.

At first most of the car owners were wealthy, and it has been scientifically proven that wealthy people find ways of justifying their advantages in society. After World War II, rising prosperity and greater efficiency put car ownership within the reach of less wealthy Americans, and governments were flush with cash and made it a priority to provide more and better roads and parking for this segment of society. Car ownership was seen as increasing mobility and thus a gateway to middle class status.

This conception of the benefits of car ownership has always had a huge bait-and-switch component to it. In New York City in the 1940s it was no exception. When people looked at the price of a car, they didn't figure in $20-35 per month in garage rental. When they got their cars, many couldn't afford to pay and took their chances on the street. Garage owners now had to compete with free street parking and lowered their rates accordingly, which meant that they didn't have enough income to expand their facilities, and resorted to bribing the police.

These social-climbing drivers felt cheated, but they didn't take their anger out on the car dealers. No, they felt that the city owed them the free parking necessary to make their cars as affordable as they thought. To be honest, I still don't quite understand that thought process, but it pervades the city to this day.

Up to now I haven't mentioned a significant presence in this whole affair: the Automobile Club of New York, the local chapter of the American Automobile Association. The Automobile Club are still around today, spreading misinformation about the not-so-historical Bronx end of the Bronx River Parkway in order to grab more of our tax dollars for road projects.

The Automobile Club's fingerprints are all over this one. They pop up in a lot of these old New York Times articles, constantly pushing the idea that drivers are uniquely entitled to free street storage for their personal property. We'll see how that plays out in the next post.

Why streetcars don't work anymore

Many people, including Jarrett Walker, have written skeptically about the value of streetcars over buses in mixed traffic. They're right to be skeptical, but they don't explain why we can't just go back to the way things were. I've often wished we could go back to the time when there were trolleys on the streets of Long Island City and interurbans serving places like Hoosick Falls (minus the sexism, racism, and so forth). But as James Howard Kunstler is fond of saying, history is not symmetrical. There are good reasons why streetcars won't do what they did in 1912 unless we change other things.

Suppose that next year, instead of restoring passenger service on the Northern Branch, New Jersey Transit rebuilt the North Hudson County railway along Broad Street in Palisades Park and Leonia. Would people jump back on the trolleys and ride them to the ferries to the city?

Judging by the number of photos out there, these streetcar tie-ups are fairly common in Toronto. Photo: windsordi / Flickr.

Some, probably, but most would either keep driving to work or keep catching the Red and Tan buses that take the Turnpike and the XBL to the Port Authority. The simple reason is that any suburban streetcar or interurban built today would face a lot more congestion than its ancestors in the golden age of streetcars. In 1912 there were hardly any cars, and people didn't own horse-drawn carriages at anything like the numbers that they own cars today.

If we go back to our goals (see above), the reason I at least support streetcars is that they allow people to access goods and services without driving their own cars. But mixed-traffic streetcars have never competed well. They were preferable to walking or horsecars, but whenever people could take elevated or underground railroads they did. When cars and even buses came along, they abandoned the streetcars for those as well.

I am not saying that we should all love the bus. Buses lurch, they're expensive to operate, they keep losing their rights-of-way, and they are no easier to install than trains. But until private cars are few and far between, mixed-traffic streetcars will be a waste of effort. We need to be pushing for transit that can compete with cars, and that means transit with its own right-of-way. In cities, that means subways, elevateds or green tracks trolleys.

Of course, here I'm talking about transit that operates in mixed traffic for its entire length. A line that operates in mixed traffic for a segment of its route may turn out to be worth it. It all depends on how well it can compete with cars.

Why you should care about the Cross-Harbor rail freight tunnel

For years, people have been talking about a cross-harbor rail freight tunnel, but it hasn't caught on in the public's imagination. Look, already with you! You're thinking, "Geez, do I really want to read some post about a freight tunnel? I don't ship freight. What do I care?" But you should, so don't close this window! Here's why: less carnage, saving tax money, no more highway hostages. Read on for details.

Ever since the Poughkeepsie Bridge was closed, freight trains going from west of the Hudson (New Jersey, most of upstate, most of the rest of the continent) to east of the Hudson (New York City, Long Island, Westchester, New England) have had to go all the way up to Selkirk, a tiny hamlet south of Albany, to cross the river.

There are two alternatives to the "Selkirk hurdle": put the rail cars on a barge across the harbor, or transfer the goods to trucks. A lot of shippers have been using a third alternative: sending the stuff on trucks the whole way. And of course that means more trucks and bigger trucks.

How do trucks get across the Hudson? On the Verrazano, George Washington and Tappan Zee Bridges, and through the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. How do they get from Brooklyn to Queens? On the BQE. How do they get from Queens to the Bronx? Over the Queensboro Bridge and on Manhattan streets.

The proposed Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel would allow trains from west of the Hudson to travel through Jersey City and Brooklyn to points east. They would connect to yards in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Long Island where goods could be loaded onto trucks. The estimate is that a million trucks would be removed from the region's roads. Because the trucks would be doing short distribution runs, they could be smaller. Here are some reasons why that's a good thing for us:

1. Carnage. Smaller trucks are safer in an urban environment. The safest truck, of course, is no truck at all.

2. Road maintenance. The amount of damage that a vehicle inflicts on a road is proportional to the fourth power of that vehicle's weight. Getting this heavy freight off our asphalt roads and onto steel rails would save a lot in maintenance.

3. No more hostages. If you're like me, you've come up with a great argument against a wasteful road project, when some smart-ass busts out, "Well, you may not drive, but your groceries got there by truck! You'll be paying more for cereal if the roads get congested!" They're holding your food hostage to get their road. With this project, you'll be able to smile sweetly and say, "Actually, my groceries come by train, so fuck off!"

So keep this in mind if you care about saving lives by getting big trucks off the road, or about saving money on road maintenance and construction: you like the Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel. Tell your representatives!