The symbolism of congestion pricing

Since Governor Hochul announced her "indefinite pause" on congestion pricing on June 7, I've been one of several people who pointed out that it would have improved almost everyone's lives. The people who currently walk, bike or ride transit would have a lot less cars to deal with, and a lot more funding for the transportation modes they use. The people who would pay the toll would spend a lot less time stuck in traffic than they do now. The people who wouldn't pay the toll would have a better commute by transit than their crappy current driving commute. And people who don't commute would benefit from cleaner air, less noise, less carnage and less wasted space.

So it's kind of puzzling why there's a group of people who really hate the idea of congestion pricing. And they're not all just upset about losing their discounted trip at taxpayer expense. Some of them are intensely, viscerally offended by the very idea, and desperate to stop it at almost any cost.

The people who are intensely offended are completely immune to reason on this. You and I may know that their business would save money by not having its workers stuck in traffic. We may know that the subway is way less violent than the highways. We may know that everyone's long term prosperity will be much greater if we're not wasting money, space and fossil fuels transporting three-ton easy chairs around with every individual. But they won't hear it.

They are intensely offended by the idea that they should pay extra every time they want to bring a large, heavy piece of machinery with them into Manhattan, just as they are offended by the idea that they should pay to leave that vehicle on the street overnight, that they should not be allowed to leave the vehicle in the middle of the street blocking a bus, or on the sidewalk, that sometimes a bus full of people or a person on a bicycle might be moving faster than them.

Why are they so offended? Because they were taught for years that cars are a mechanism for prosperity. Not only that by buying a car they raised themselves up in the social hierarchy, but that our government, and in fact all of our society, is aimed at helping them to prosper through their cars.

For these drivers, the government raises them up through free parking, or at least cheap parking. Powerful government figures give them free parking on holidays, free parking on residential streets, in the suburbs, at their country houses. These patrons do what they can to keep the tolls cheap, gas prices cheap, and parking cheap when it isn't free. They provide parking placards to hardworking civil servants and to people who do favors for them. And they look the other way when drivers double park, park on the sidewalk, go faster than the speed limit, and maybe even kill somebody once in a while. Because these drivers were just trying to take care of themselves and their families.

This free parking, cheap parking, cheap gas, cheap tolls, free sidewalk parking, and the occasional free killing are all aimed at lifting people up. Not lifting everyone up, but just the people who deserve it. And they know who deserves it because those people have bought into the system by buying a car and busting their asses to make the car payments, insurance payments, repair bills, gas, tolls, tickets.

Of course that's all bullshit. Of all the possible ways you could lift people up and generate prosperity, subsidizing driving is one of the most dangerous and destructive, and in a lot of ways it's just fucking mean. The fact that someone owns a car doesn't make them any more deserving of anything. The way cars enable people to bully other people is hugely problematic. See the entire rest of this blog for details.

And this is why a certain group of people is so deeply offended by congestion pricing. It calls them on this bullshit. Like bus lanes, bike lanes, open streets and pedestrian plazas, congestion pricing says that there is nothing about owning and using a car that makes a person any more deserving; in fact, they're causing damage, destruction and death everywhere they pilot the thing. And so many of them have built their lives around owning a car as their ticket to prosperity.

Congestion pricing offends drivers the same way that tearing down Confederate statues offends my cousins in Texas. The same way that providing decent housing and food for people who just got here from South America offends some people. Congestion pricing is an official recognition by the government of the State of New York that driving is an antisocial activity. And that's why it would be such a victory for humanity, decency and compassion if it happens, and such a setback if it doesn't.

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.)

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.

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."

Light rail in New York City?

Last week I talked about the practical differences between light rail, streetcars, subways and commuter rail. We have light rail right across the river in Hudson County, and there have been several proposals for streetcars and light rail here in New York City. I want to mention a few possibilities and discuss their technical and political feasibility.

As I pointed out last week, the lower construction cost of streetcars and light rail comes primarily from shorter, lighter trains and lack of grade separation. These in turn limit your capacity and speed, meaning that if you build the wrong system you can wind up with overcrowded trains and frustrated passengers, and not get as many people out of their cars as you could with a heavier system. The consequences of this in turn are that if you can afford light rail, don't build a streetcar. If you can afford a subway or an el, don't build light rail.

With that in mind, consider Raanan Geberer's suggestion, "How about light rail on the old Rockaway line?" Geberer is clearly a supporter of transit and he's trying to be helpful, but the old Rockaway Beach Branch is completely grade-separated. It should be returned to Long Island Rail Road trains, or connected to the subway, along the lines of Capt. Subway's proposal, to take full advantage of its potential.

The Lower Montauk Branch in Glendale. Photo: Jim Henderson / Wikipedia.

Some of the supporters of rail on the Rockaway Beach Branch have mentioned the possibility of running light rail from Rockaway Park or Ozone Park onto the old "Lower Montauk" branch to Long Island City. The problem is that there are at least two freight trains a day that use those tracks. Because of the Federal Railroad Administration rules, the only way to run light rail would be to limit the freight trains to overnight hours. Unfortunately, I don't see enough potential ridership to justify that time separation. It might be more feasible to run a short diesel-multiple-unit shuttle, especially if it could be done without paying a lot of conductors.

So why do people like Geberer seem to think light rail would be so much better than subways or commuter rail? They are claimed to be quieter, but this is not really true. Yes, the heavier the train the more noise it makes, but that's a relatively minor factor. The noise is primarily a function of the supporting structure. The #7 train is elevated on reinforced concrete in Sunnyside and plain old steel everywhere else. You can have a conversation under the el in Sunnyside, but not in Woodside or Corona. This would not change significantly if you ran light rail trains on the same structures.

The main argument given by proponents of light rail on these lines is that it is somehow more modern than subways or commuter rail. This is nonsense: many of the tracks of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail saw trains long before subways ran in New York City, and many of the cars in use on the New York subway and the Long Island Railroad are newer than the cars on the HBLR.

Sadly, this seems to be another case of what Ryan McGreal called "cargo cult urbanism": if it works in Jersey City and Phoenix and Seattle, it should be the hot new thing here in New York. (Cyclists who promote "BRT" as a panacea seem to have a similar shallowness of thinking.) In part, it's because many of the most ambitious new train lines are being built as light rail in places like Salt Lake City and Charlotte.

The thing is that those lines are being built as light rail for two reasons: (1) freight railroads have been abandoning their less-used lines all over the country, and (2) any new rail lines have faced such stiff competition from new highways that ridership projections haven't justified grade separation. Neither of those apply here in New York City. There is still a market for freight trains on the Bushwick, Bay Ridge and Montauk Branches and the Oak Point Link in the Bronx. None of these railroads are going to be abandoned any time soon. And there is such demand for transit that we could pack any new light rail trains that are run.

So I've pretty much ruled out mixed-traffic streetcars and legacy-freight light rail here in New York City. The one area where light rail or streetcars would make sense here is if we can dedicate lanes to them. If we can dedicate lanes to buses, we can dedicate them to streetcars or light rail. I looked at this issue almost six years ago, but it might be time for a re-look soon.

Where does this bus go?

"Where does this bus go?"
"Where do you want to go?"

If I know my readership, most of you have had that conversation. You're in a strange town, or a strange part of your own town. There's something about that bus that looks intriguing. Maybe it doesn't have a sign on it, but there's a long line of interesting-looking people getting on. Maybe it's got different markings, or it's pointing in an interesting direction. Maybe it's just the first bus that's come along in a while.

You're imagining taking that bus - where? Through a bustling neighborhood filled with an immigrant population you had no idea existed - the Finnish slum in Tegucigalpa, maybe. Past a dramatic waterfall or through the shadow of a nuclear power plant. Down a lush boulevard lined with Victorian mansions. To a trailhead in the foothills, or the best working-class takeout, or a great concert. Or maybe it connects to the end of the new subway, or the old trolley line. But you have no idea, really. You just see the bus, full of possibility.

You can probably picture the look on the driver's face. Where does this bus go? What kind of question is that? It goes home. It goes to work. It goes to the mall. It goes to the park-and-ride. You obviously don't have a car in the park-and-ride. Are you going home, or to work? Do you really want to shop in that mall? Why? Don't they have malls where you come from?

Why don't you take a taxi? You can afford it, and a taxi driver will take you right where you're going, wherever that is. Or a tour bus? All the other tourists take the tour bus. It'll take you past the Ancient Wonder and the Modern Marvel and even make a stop at the Mega-Event. There's even a tour bus that goes to the new mall where the rich people shop. It's much better than the one this bus goes to. It has a Cinnabon and a Lush and an Armani Exchange.

But mostly, it's going to bring people home. And that includes the ten other people waiting to get on the bus, grab their seats and snooze all the way home. You're holding the driver up; a couple more minutes and the bus will be officially Late, and the driver will have to floor it on the straightaway to make up time.

So make up your mind. Are you on or off?

Listening - skeptically - to NIMBYs

So Kaid Benfield's post "Mitigating the environmental paradox of smart growth: softening urban density" got the snazzier title "The Case for Listening to NIMBYs" when it was reposted on the Atlantic Cities. There are several parts of the post that I'm uncomfortable with (e.g. the idea of "nature" and "density" as monolithic things that always have the same effects on people), but I want to highlight the part that the editor (Richard Florida?) highlighted with the new headline.

Benfield quotes two planners, Susan Henderson and Lisa Nisenson, who make some pretty decent recommendations for better community engagement and more sophisticated placemaking. But he frames them in a false dichotomy:

All too often, I think smart growth advocates seek to ignore NIMBY opposition (“we’re right and they’re wrong”) or simply seek to overpower it politically. (Wise developers, to their credit, often negotiate with opponents, frequently succeeding in getting to a “yes” by making concessions that, in the long run, will save them time and money compared to legal battles. Urbanist policy advocates generally lament these concessions.)

Some pro-development commentators are starting to suggest a different strategy: acknowledge that NIMBY fears are frequently well-founded and address them with changes in design, policy and process that respect their concerns.

Yes, it's a bad idea to ignore NIMBY opposition. This is Bob Moses thinking, and it was wrong when he did it. On the other hand, it's also wrong to simply accept NIMBY claims. And it's often a bad idea to horse-trade with NIMBYs; I personally do lament some concessions. O woe of the half-assed height variance!

Sheepshead Bay residents listen to a proposal for a group home in their neighborhood, 2008. Photo: Gerritsenbeach.net / Flickr

Here's the problem: NIMBYs lie. They don't all lie, and they don't lie all the time, but enough NIMBYs lie often enough that you can't just take their word for things. They don't just lie to other people, they lie to themselves. Of course, developers lie, too, and planners lie. We're all people.

NIMBYs are also irrational. Just like developers and planners and crazy anonymous transit geeks. We're all people.

Seriously, how many NIMBY Predictions of Doom have you heard? Things that made absolutely no sense? But when you looked in the person's eyes as they stood at the mic in the community center, you knew that they really believed that removing two parking spaces would lead to gridlock, chaos and honking twenty-four hours a day. And then the two parking spaces were removed, and there was no increase in gridlock, chaos or honking, but the person has never admitted that they were wrong. Somebody, somewhere should make a catalog of these crazy predictions.

We should listen to NIMBYs, not because that's how you get things done, but because they're people. People deserve respect, and one of the best ways to show respect is by listening. But listening and acknowledgment do not necessarily mean acceptance or agreement. We need to listen skeptically.

Yes, NIMBYs sometimes lie and they're often clueless. Even more often, they're engaging in at least one of these types of irrational behavior:

• Escapism. Some people lead lives of quiet desperation. Some people are less quiet about it. One way to console themselves about their days in the office is to spend their nights as the Defender of the Neighborhood against the Oversized Tree Pits.
• Inertia. Things are pretty good the way they are. Why would I want to change that? Besides, I'm looking to sell next year and I don't want anything that might bring the price down even temporarily.
• Status anxiety. If my neighborhood gets a bad reputation, it could rub off on me.
• Overgeneralization. If this thing has happened more than once before, it will probably happen again. Prejudice is a form of overgeneralization.

You may have noticed that people don't like it if you tell them they're being irrational. So what do you do if you think they are? Make them justify, rationally, their concerns and their Predictions of Doom. In other words: listen, but be skeptical. In the long run, listening without being skeptical doesn't do anyone any favors, including the NIMBYs.

Gay men, zoning and the High Line's real source of power

You probably already know how annoyed I get by all the people who want "our very own High Line" for whatever little town they live in. As I wrote last year, "If you've got anyone like that in your town, you should print them out a copy of Witold Rybczinski's excellent discussion of the economics of the High Line, and why it probably won't turn your run-down industrial neighborhood into West Chelsea unless you've got (a) dense commercial and residential development nearby, (b) a subway two blocks away, (c) lots of well-connected gay men and artists living and working within a short walk, and (d) LOTS of money, more than your town can really afford to spend."

I'll add two data points to the ones from last year:

Photo: Professor Bop / Flickr

First, some documentation of the gay fundraising network that bankrolled Friends of the High Line. Here in New York we've got gay men with power and money! Is your town willing to give that much clout to its gay men? Think you can do it without them? Good luck!

Second, since 1982 there have been no minimum parking requirements in Manhattan south of 96th Street. In 2005 the city approved the Special West Chelsea District (PDF) zoning amendment. It did not add any minimum parking requirements. Would developers building around your "High Line" wannabe have to provide lots of parking?

The zoning amendment also capped any density limitations at a floor-area ratio (FAR) of 5.0. Does your town allow that much density around its "High Line"?

If anything, the High Line is a symbol. It's a symbol of a town that gives power to gay men walking among tall buildings, instead of wasting all its land and money on highways and parking lots. It's a symbol of a metropolis.

If your town doesn't do that, it's not a metropolis, and any "High Line" you build will be an empty symbol. And yes, that goes for you, Rego Park.

(I know, we still have too many highways and parking lots, even in Chelsea. The sooner we get rid of them, the better off we'll be.)

Selling transit with Glamour or Value, or both

Ever since April of 2009, when Human Transit blogger Jarrett Walker posted a review of Darrin Nordahl's book My Kind of Transit, the transit world has been divided between the pragmatic Walkerists and the hedonistic Nordahlists. Or something like that. From what I can tell, Jarrett (who I've had a fair amount of email and blog contact with over the years) and Nordahl (who I've never been in contact with) are both nice guys. They like each other, and get along well despite their differences of opinion. They've each got new books out, and treat each other with the same respect in those books. The bottom line is that they both want to see more transit in the world. If only all disputes could be so civilized.

Photo: ykanazawa1999 / Flickr

I'm not the first blogger to try and reconcile these two. Lloyd Alter goes and name-checks Vitruvius, summarizing the differences between Walker and Nordahl's philosophies as expressing the contrast between "commodity" and "delight." Tom Vanderbilt can't beat that, but he cites Charles Leadbeater on the difference between "system" and "empathy." I'll go one further: Jarrett and Nordahl are both right, and both wrong. And I'll bring in two experts to back me up: Michael Kemp and Virginia Postrel.

First, Kemp. In 1973 he pointed out that "given the initial decision to travel, transit riding will be higher when the relative prices of substitute modes are at their highest." What are those "substitute modes"? Walking, cycling, taxis and of course, private cars. The success of transit is dependent on the failure or cars. In fact, as I pointed out in 2008, of all the benefits advertised for transit, all but one come from getting people out of their cars. Jarrett and Nordahl both ignore that (possibly out of a desire to be taken seriously), but the result is a difficulty in maintaining perspective in transit discussions.

Now, Postrel. When people choose transit (as opposed to one of the substitute modes like cars), they don't just make the choice once. A person who has any transit available, and any car available, is faced with a choice between transit and driving over and over again. But there is not even one kind of choice between transit and car (or bike or walking). There are four kinds: Single Trips, Habits, Investments and Subsidies.

It is a very different kind of decision to take the bus, or the train, or the tram, or the cable car, or a private car, for one Single Trip than it is to choose to take one mode on a regular basis. If we take the bus once and it gets stuck in traffic, then we can take something else on the next Single Trip. But if we've made a habit of taking the bus, then it's harder to change. Investments are even harder: if someone buys a house in some desolate part of Lattingtown with no transit, that constrains their options. Subsidies are also different: because Andrew Cuomo decided to build a jumbo-sized Tappan Zee Bridge, and because Kate Slevin decided not to challenge him on the size of that bridge, a lot more people will find it easier to make Habits out of driving than if a jumbo-sized bridge is not built.

There are four factors that affect our mode decisions: Availability, Value, Amenities and Glamour. This is where Postrel comes in, because Glamour is her specialty. Glamour is when someone makes a decision based on a fantasy, usually some kind of escape fantasy. One great example she gave was a book called Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House. Of course life will not be perfect no matter what house you live in. But we all have these yearnings, some of us more than others.

It is essential to note that these factors affect the different kinds of decisions to differing degrees. Availability is of course the baseline, because you can't chose a mode at all if it's not Available. Glamour and Amenities count much more for Single Trips, while Value counts for Habits. Glamour also counts for Investments and Subsidies, like the magical house that just might be out in Lattingtown somewhere, or the bridge that will somehow make commuting by car to an office park in Purchase bearable.

That's why Jarrett and Nordahl are both right. Jarrett is talking about Habits, and of course the most important thing for Habits is Value. Nordahl is talking about Investments and Subsidies, and getting people to take that first Single Trip, and Glamour and Amenities are hugely important for those choices. They both agree on Availability, of course.

So if you're trying to get people to ride transit (which means getting them to choose transit over driving a car), who should you believe, Jarrett Walker or Darrin Nordahl? That entirely depends on what kind of decision you're trying to get people to make. If it's a Single Trip, go with Nordahl. If it's a Habit, go with Jarrett.

If it's an Investment or a Subsidy, it's more complicated. You need both, because Glamour will sell the apartment, but Value will keep them in it. Glamour will sell the subway line, but Value will keep people riding. Glamour without Value leads to abandonment as soon as the next glamorous project comes along. Value without Glamour will never sell, because there are tons of shallow people out there that are incapable of making an Investment or Subsidy decision on the basis of Value alone.

For transit in general, and specifically for the Investment and Subsidy decisions, we need a balance of Glamour and Value, of empathy and system, of delight and commodity, of Nordahl and Walker. And for God's sake, we need to keep in mind that transit doesn't exist in a vacuum, and at the end of the day the main reason we want more transit is to get people out of their cars.

Saving the Manhattan Terminal

A transit advocate looks at abandoned transit infrastructure and thinks, "Imagine if we reactivated that!" Certain other people (if they have a name, I don't know what it is) look at abandoned transit infrastructure and think, "Imagine if we turned that into a park!" And you know what? That made sense for the High Line. With its multiple twists and its passages through buildings, even with a brand-new driverless electric metro it probably would have been too noisy and inconvenient to be worth reviving.

This is not the case for several other pieces of abandoned rail infrastructure in the New York area. I've already expressed my frustration with the Walkway Over the Hudson (squatting on the perfectly functional Poughkeepsie Bridge) and the North/South County and Piermont trails (preventing anyone from reactivating the incredibly useful Putnam and Erie lines). Even though the "Tappan Zee Park" proposal was to use road infrastructure (not yet abandoned), it was still a pretty shitty idea, and was exploited by the Governor to divide and conquer his environmentalist opponents.

Unfortunately, these proposals just keep coming. I try to ignore them, but some people seem mesmerized by anything that sounds like a park. There's the "Queensway" proposal to turn the abandoned Long Island Rail Road Rockaway Beach Branch into a trail, which is a bad idea and shouldn't be encouraged. But tonight I want to talk about a much worse one: the "Low Line" proposal to turn an abandoned underground trolley terminal into a park, lit by sunlight piped down by futuristic fiber optic cables.

For the moment, forget about whether anyone would enjoy hanging out underground the way they do in Bryant Park, even with copious amounts of light. Forget that there's a 46-acre park a few blocks away. Let's talk about the transit infrastructure that would be sacrificed for this project. The Manhattan Terminal is a 60,000 square foot underground station with eight loop tracks for trolleys:

Image via Joseph Brennan

The MTA's Real Estate department, spurred on by the "Low Line" people, has posted a video of the space, which is definitely worth watching. The tracks and the trolley wire guides are still in place.

So we could turn this space into a park or a disco. Or we could take advantage of its strategic location at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, the crossing of two subway lines and the gateway to Lower Manhattan and return it to its intended use: as a transit terminal.

Funny how not one of the Chinatown bus kvetchers has suggested actually providing a terminal for the buses. Would the full-size intercity buses fit? I don't know; Peter Hine doesn't mention the clearance. Certainly the Chinatown vans would all fit.

The diesel and gas fumes might be a challenge, but if the "Low Line" people can talk about piping sunlight down from above, why can't we talk about a good ventilation system? The Port Authority Bus Terminal is a little stinky, but seems to be able to avoid asphyxiating its passengers.

If this were connected to an exclusive bus lane across the bridge like the one in the Lincoln Tunnel, they could really improve transit access.

It's heartening to me that on every breathless news article or blog post about the "Low Line" there were several comments suggesting that the space could be restored as a trolley or bus terminal. I hope that the next time some idiot proposes turning good transit infrastructure into a park, someone will set up a Kickstarter page offering to pay them to go away.

Aspirational marketing in black communities

On Friday I was talking about cycle chic that sends an affirmational message: "You can be just as chic as you are ... on a bike!" Tonight I'll write about marketing that sends an aspirational message: "You're not chic now, but you could be ... on a bike!" These have the potential to be dishonest and manipulative, but we need something to counter the dishonest and manipulative car ads.

And now I think I'm ready to address Elly Blue's tweets about cycle chic, inspired by the meetings about North Williams Avenue in Portland, Oregon.

I'm more & more convinced that PR/branding campaigns to make cycling look chic & attractive do more harm than good. Watching bicycling get tangled up w/gentrification & race in PDX is what's convincing me. It shouldn't be exclusive. ... Branding bicycling as upscale *is* exclusive, offputting. Do the (relatively) rich really need our scarce advocacy resources & energy?

Well, yes. As always, it comes down to your goals. If your only goal is access for all, then you don't want to spend anything on the rich. Even then, getting the rich to give up their cars often ends up providing more support for transportation that poor people can use. But if your goals include preserving our resources, keeping our water clean and our children safe, building stronger societies and combating obesity, then you need to get everyone out of their cars, even Mike Bloomberg.

Beyond that, though, Blue makes an excellent point that also came up in relation to another Portland bike lane project: that people tend to support government projects that they feel are for "us" (or "future us") and withhold support from projects for "them." People who think of cyclists as "us" (whether they ride or not) tend to support bicycle infrastructure, while people who think of cyclists as "them" tend to oppose it.

Blue is arguing that the concerns about the North Williams project come from the black residents thinking of cyclists as "them." Based on Maus's posts, I'm not convinced that it's happening in this instance. There are other instances, though, where black people have spoken out against bike lanes, and also bus lanes, not to mention the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. So there are definitely black people who think of cyclists as not "us," or at least not "future us."

The next point in Blue's argument is to say that black people don't think of cyclists as "future us" because cycle chic marketing has associated it too strongly with upscale culture, thus white culture. Again, this seems like a stretch to me. There are plenty of things that rich white people have that black people want, like big houses and SUVs. What is stopping black people from looking at a nice bicycle, seeing something valuable and desiring it? Nothing that I can think of.

On the other hand, it couldn't hurt to market cycle chic specifically to black people. Courvoisier went from being an old white guy's booze to a trendy "urban" drink after being the subject of a rap song. It's not like the car makers aren't working in this market. If black people can't see themselves riding a bike around like Katy Perry, what about Corinne Bailey Rae? Or does she not count because she's English?

There are a lot more white people than black people among the rich, but there certainly are a number of rich black people who are treated as role models by middle-class and working-class black - and white - people. A few are gangsters, but most are athletes, entertainers and businesspeople. It probably wouldn't hurt for cycling advocates to look at the most visible of these role models, find out if they ride bikes, and whether they do it visibly. If they don't ride, why not? If they do, why not do it publicly to an event or two?

In any case, I don't think the answer is to stop marketing cycle chic, but to broaden the image of cycle chic to include black people.

The value of cycle chic

The concept of "cycle chic" has been controversial almost from the moment it started. Libby Maxim, "Biker Chick" of West Chester, Pennsylvania, totally missed the point and hated it. So did Kati Nolfi in Bitch Magazine.

Today, bikonomist Elly Blue added a new twist to the debate when she tweeted, "I'm more & more convinced that PR/branding campaigns to make cycling look chic & attractive do more harm than good. Watching bicycling get tangled up w/gentrification & race in PDX is what's convincing me. It shouldn't be exclusive."

Blue's point is much better than Maxim's or Nolfi's, but it'll have to wait because I want to deal with those first. The most important thing here is to get ourselves grounded again in our goals. I want to get people out of their cars, for the reasons stated above. That means that I only care about cycle chic to the extent that it gets people to choose not to drive as a habit, or to drive less, or not to buy a car (or to sell one they have), or not to fund car infrastructure (or to fund bike, transit and pedestrian infrastructure).

It's also important to point out that blogs like Copenhagen Cycle Chic and its imitators (Massapequa Cycle Chic, perhaps, someday) are not primarily sending aspirational messages. They're aimed at people who already consider themselves to be chic, and the message is, "You can be just as chic as you are ... on a bike!"

Some of the target audience may drive already. Some may be young adults who've been getting the message their whole lives that Real Grownups Drive Cars, and they're getting to the age where they may become Real Grownups. They're also constantly bombarded with ads that say, "you can be just as chic ... in this car!"

Many of them are also familiar with bike marketing and peer pressure that says that Real Cyclists wear shiny spandex and bike jerseys and those weird shoes. Maybe they think that's attractive, maybe not, but they don't identify. It's not them. If they manage to envision themselves as cyclists, it's looking uncomfortable and out of place in clothes that are tight in the wrong places.

The main content of the Cycle Chic blogs is candid shots of people on the street. Originally it was almost entirely women in skirts and high-heeled shoes, but they've branched out a bit. These people aren't dressed up to sell bicycles or cycling, they're dressed up to be attractive, and the bicycle is either an accessory or simply a way to move their attractive selves around town. They primarily send the value message: Look at these ordinary chic people. They're riding bikes, but they're clearly still getting laid. You're a chic person just like them. You can continue your chic lifestyle without a car.

BicyclesOnly has done the same thing with New Yorkers from all walks of life, including bike commuters (like this guy), families going to school, shoppers, women and people riding in the snow, with the stated goal of debunking the stereotype of cyclists as "fringe weirdo daredevils."

That's what Libby Maxim and Kati Nolfi get wrong. The people who want to dress like Katy Perry and Russell Brand are already doing that. Women who want to wear blue minidresses will do it whether they're on a bike or not, no matter how much Maxim and Nolfi scold them about the impracticality. If they don't ride a bike in their minidress, they might drive a car. Which would you rather see them doing?

My apologies to anyone who came here wanting to see pictures of women in skirts and heels or minidresses, or Russell Brand. Just follow the links.

The glamour of the High Line

If you're from a city like Chicago, Philadelphia, Jersey City or Saint Louis - or possibly San Francisco or Wilmington, California, Toronto or Vancouver, Canada, or Sheffield or Manchester, England - or maybe even Harlem or my home borough of Queens, or a host of other cities - you've got an old railroad or car viaduct in your town, and at least one person is saying, "what if we turned it into a linear park, like New York's High Line, or Paris's Promenade Plantée?"

If you've got anyone like that in your town, you should print them out a copy of Witold Rybczinski's excellent discussion of the economics of the High Line, and why it probably won't turn your run-down industrial neighborhood into West Chelsea unless you've got (a) dense commercial and residential development nearby, (b) a subway two blocks away, (c) lots of well-connected gay men and artists living and working within a short walk, and (d) LOTS of money, more than your town can really afford to spend.

Oh, and if your town didn't fight a major freeway revolt just a couple blocks of your wannabe High Line, it's probably too car-oriented to get anything like the High Line.

Finally, show them the great slideshow embedded in this Greater Greater Washington post about "Freedom Park" in Arlington, Virginia's Rosslyn neighborhood. Rosslyn does have art and a metro station and is fairly walkable, but it also has three large highways nearby, and the density is nowhere near as high as in Chelsea. The result is a pleasant place to have lunch, and I'm sure it's a tremendous improvement over the elevated highway that used to be there, but it's no High Line.

If you want a true pedestrian revitalization you need to challenge the dominance of cars in the city. Everything else is just an empty escape fantasy. You can't become Kim Kardashian by buying her "signature scent," you can't become Mary-Kate Olsen by wearing her "celebrity clothing line," and you can't become New York or Paris by putting up an elevated walkway to nowhere.

Obama's rail strategy

In 2009, the President announced that the stimulus package would include eight billion dollars for high speed rail construction. Since then, he has budgeted additional funding for rail and chosen specific corridors to spend the money on. This high-speed rail plan has been widely derided as a boondoggle, even by many rail advocates. They argue that what was really needed were targeted upgrades to corridors that already had high ridership. Furthermore, they felt it would be preferable to get these corridors upgraded to "normal speed rail," because the benefits of high speed rail would not be worth the expense.

Those rail advocates may be right about the best things to build. If Obama were absolute dictator, maybe that's what he should have done. But he's part of a political system, and each of these projects requires support from several partly independent actors in the system. In that light, the rail plan was based on a relatively sound strategy, and is starting to look better and better.

Remember that there are four kinds of mode choices that people make: single trips, habits, investments and subsidies. Habits are predominantly chosen on the basis of availability and value, but the other three are often made on the basis of glamour, and occasionally amenities.

Subsidies, in particular, are decisions about the future. At the current pace of passenger rail construction in the United States, many of the politicians making decisions about passenger rail will be old or dead before a rail system could be of practical value to most of their constituents. They're making decisions for generations to come, which puts a lot of the discussion in the realm of fantasy and glamour.

Roads have a definite glamour to them. Although there are plenty of train songs and movies, and some about buses, ships, airplanes, spaceships, airships, bicycles, walking and even dogsleds, most of the media fantasies in the past sixty years have focused on cars. The dubious connection between driving and freedom is hammered into us in almost every half hour of television, every magazine. The road builders and airlines have a hand in this too. Visions of the future often involve wider roads, faster cars, faster planes and even flying cars and jetpacks.

The road plans currently being promoted all involve expanding the road network. Even if it's only a modest expansion like the Kosciuszko Bridge, it's still a step on the way to Tomorrowland. In contrast, the pragmatic vision of many rail advocates is a step on the road to the rail network we had in 1960. A lot of transportation geeks would be happy to have that back, but to the general public it's not exactly an inspiring vision. We had that back in 1960 and people chose to drive instead. Now the road network is vastly bigger than it was in 1960; why would people choose rail?

Obama and LaHood needed a vision of the future that would compete with the car vision, while still being in reach. The only thing that can do that is high-speed rail, with at least one demonstration corridor.

A gift from Randal O'Toole?

So I was having this Twitter exchange with Virginia Postrel, whose work I've found very helpful in the past. It started with a column she wrote for the Wall Street Journal on the glamour of wind turbines and high-speed rail. I responded:

capntransit: @vpostrel Of course, highways have NEVER been oversold with glamour. And they always pay their own way. Right? http://t.co/pFVkwh8

vpostrel: @capntransit Highways were glamorous in mid-20th century, w/ the self-deception that implies. But they're funded by gas taxes.

capntransit: @vpostrel No, highways are not completely funded by gas taxes. http://www.cnu.org/node/2329

vpostrel: @capntransit Gas taxes + tolls=not subsidized. Sounds like Wisc isn't consistent, but the TX example doubly proves the pt.

capntransit: @vpostrel I don't think taxes + tolls covers it. Maybe in Texas, but definitely not here in NY.

vpostrel: @capntransit In CA, where I live, they haven't built non-toll highways since the 1970s.

So I went looking for figures about California and came up with this one from a guy named George Crissman almost $7 billion in 2004. The funny thing is that it's part of an anti-transit campaign. As far as I can tell, the reason he went to the trouble to compute it is that he divides it by vehicle-miles to get 2¢ per vehicle-mile, and then by 1.6 to get 1¢ per passenger-mile. Still, wow, 6.9 billion dollars in highway subsidies in 2004.

It gets weirder though: this guy got his formulas for calculating subsidies on the basis of Federal highway statistics from Randal O'Toole! That's right, one of the biggest road-widening apologists in the country has given us this formula in connection with his self-published 2000 book, The Vanishing Automobile. O'Toole writes:

Get all the data you need to calculate highway subsidies in your state from Highway Statistics. For any given year, you will need to download tables HDF, SF-1, LGF-1, LGF-2, and VM-2. From table HDF, add together the following for your state:

* The amount of federal highway user fees that are diverted to mass transit;
* The amount of federal highway user fees diverted to (from) other states or for general purposes.

These are the diversions. Ignore state diversions because they are accounted for in table SF-1. Then add together the following:

* Appropriations from state general funds from table SF-1;
* Other imposts from table SF-1;
* Miscellaneous from table SF-1;
* Federal funds from other agencies from table SF-1; and
* Total dispersements by local governments from table LGF-2.

From this sum, subtract the following from table LGF-1:

* Motor fuel and vehicle tax revenues;
* Tolls;
* State highway user imposts; and
* Federal FHwA funds.

What is left are the supplementary funds. Subtract the diversions from the supplementary funds. If the result is less than zero, there is no subsidy: Road users are subsidizing something else. If the result is positive, there is a subsidy. To calculate the subsidy per vehicle mile, divide the subsidy by the total number of vehicle miles driven in your state shown in table VM-2. To get the subsidy per passenger mile, divide again by 1.6.

So I've taken all those tables and put together a spreadsheet that calculates the subsidy for each state. There are some interesting figures in there! According to the 2008 numbers, the biggest total road subsidies come from California ($11 billion), Texas ($8 billion), New York ($8 billion) and Florida ($5 billion). Tennessee pays for 91% of its road expenses with user fees, mostly gas taxes; no other state comes close. In actuality, $260 million in federal gas tax money is diverted to other states or uses, but that's made up by $522 million in local government funding. Tennessee is followed by Indiana (66%), Ohio (65%), South Carolina (63%) and Maryland (62%).

Again, I'm still not quite sure why O'Toole wants to help us calculate the billions of dollars that subsidize roads. He seems very fond of the per-vehicle-mile and per-passenger-mile figures, probably because those measures favor a system that involves lots of long trips. I'd like to see a figure of subsidies per trip, but I can't find a figure for trips in the National Highway Statistics. Table HM-62 gives weighted average daily traffic per lane on principal arterials, but it doesn't tell us how many lanes of principal arterials there are. I could probably figure it out, but I'm just about ready for bed.

The other thing that I'm not sure about is that O'Toole tells us to get the motor fuel and vehicle tax revenues from Table LGF-1, but Crissman gets his from Table LDF. These are very different figures, and I don't know which to go with and why. The spreadsheet that I've linked to uses LGF-1.

You do get some interesting figures per capita, though. In big empty states like Alaska, Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota, roads are subsidized to the tune of more than $500 per person. Good ol' frontier self-reliance! Sadly, New York isn't far behind South Dakota at $403 per person. The lowest subsidies per capita are Tennessee, South Carolina, Ohio, Maryland and Connecticut.

For those of you who are more familiar with this data than I am, is there a reason why I've never seen this before? Is the data suspect, or the formula?

Twas ever thus...

R. Crumb
Planetizen recently linked to a Times article about an odd development battle in Jersey City. There is an old Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct that many want to rebuild as a pedestrian walkway, like the High Line in Manhattan and before it the Promenade Plantée in Paris. However, the actual bridges across streets are gone; all that remain are a series of six block-long, hundred-foot-wide stone embankments. In order to build a walkway the entire railbed would need to be rebuilt on top of the embankments.

Those plans are opposed by the developer, Steve Hyman, who bought the property from Conrail for three million dollars and wants to subdivide it and build housing. The coalition has a long archive of newsletters and articles detailing their fight with Hyman over the past ten years. According to one 2005 Times article (Word doc) he once wanted to simply knock down the embankment, the rendering in the latest article suggests that he is willing to at least preserve the outer appearance of them, but maybe hollow them out for parking.

Now here's the part where I slapped my forehead in disbelief. Hyman has visited both the High Line and the Promenade Plantée and claims to be a supporter of both, "But Jersey City is not New York or Paris," he told the Times. "The embankment is not located in an area filled with shops and commerce like those places have."

Well you know what? Ten years ago the area around the High Line wasn't filled with the kinds of shops and commerce Hyman is thinking of, it was filled with meat packing plants and hookers, and it was not a pleasant place to hang out in if you weren't interested in meat of one kind or another. Twenty years ago the area around the Promenade Plantée was a shabby nowheresville.

In fact, the Jersey City embankments are not very far from shops and commerce: the eastern end is right across the street from a Bed, Bath and Beyond, a block away from the Newport Mall, and a few blocks more from all the development along the waterfront. It really wouldn't be hard to develop this if someone had the desire and the resources.

Hyman does talk about resources: "And there is no money here to build a High Line. It cost $150 million in New York — and about a third of that was contributed by celebrity philanthropists." In Paris there was a similar story, described by the Boston Globe, but the money came from the city instead, and I don't think Jersey City or Hudson County have that kind of money, and I wouldn't bother asking Chris Christie for it.

Hyman's right about the resources, but he's totally off about the history. He could just be lying, but I've heard this from other people who were being completely honest. They go to Paris or Manhattan or Copenhagen and they see something they like. Then they either think it was always there and always fabulous, but it wasn't, once upon a time it looked just as crappy as Jersey City or Queens. Or else they think this stuff just happens magically, because it's Paris, or Manhattan, but it doesn't, it takes time, money and effort.

The value of glamour

I just discovered that a couple weeks ago Cyclelicious ran a summary of my series on glamour and transit. But Engineer Scotty's discussion of glamour made it clear that my original definition ("Everything non-tangible that affects mode choice: status markers, fantasies, the presence of attractive people (or conversely, their absence)") was not an accurate description of this concept as I use it.

Scotty's inclusion of things like aesthetic, status and self-actualization under the category of "glamour" are consistent with my previous definition. They're not wrong, but they don't fit the category as I actually use it. In fact, I'm using glamour in a very technical sense. I'm building on the concept as it's been developed by Virginia Postrel. Her best explanation to date is probably her Weekly Standard article "A Power to Persuade," and her best discussion of glamour in transportation is "Up, Up and Away" in the Atlantic Monthly. You can read more in Postrel's article archive, and at her Deep Glamour blog, which has frequent guest posts.

The understanding that I've gotten from Postrel's writing is that glamour is an illusion, and therefore it is unobtainable. It vanishes if you try to grasp it. Despite the multiple attempts by Postrel and her guest bloggers to pin down what's glamorous and what's not, I've come to the conclusion that it's an incredibly personal thing. Like anything personal, it may be shared by millions, but it may not.

Most critically, and I'm not sure that Postrel has come to this conclusion yet, I'm convinced that glamour is an escape fantasy. Her review of a book called Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House makes it clear how glamour's effect on people is proportional to their yearning for a different life.

Another important aspect that doesn't always come through in Postrel's writings is the distinction between having glamour and being dazzled by glamour. Glamour is a tool for marketing and advertising, whether you're selling computers, houses, cars, bus rides, government subsidies, politicians - or yourself, as a potential friend, mate or sex partner. By tapping into people's escape fantasies, you can harness that longing they feel inside and attach it to your product.

I would argue that it's a rare person who doesn't have some escape fantasies, so you shouldn't feel guilty about being susceptible to glamour. You should also keep in mind that eventually glamour wears off and reality sets in, and if you don't have some underlying value you're going to be facing some problems.

It seems to me that there are four ways that people can interact with glamour:
attraction, fascination, emulation and creation. If it helps, you can think about people being attracted by the glamour of Lady Gaga, fascinated by what makes people pay attention to her, trying to emulate her, and then Gaga herself creating the glamour. If you don't get Lady Gaga, pick your own glamorous woman: Marilyn Monroe? Marlene Dietrich? Danica Patrick?

In terms of transportation, let's take vintage streetcars. There's the attraction that many people feel to streetcars, and the fascination that some people have for streetcars. Just as with a glamorous icon like Marilyn Monroe, people have varying degrees of success when trying to emulate vintage streetcars, from heritage systems to modern streetcars to the tourist "trolleys" sometimes described as "transvestite buses." And just as Madonna created her own, new glamorous image while incorporating elements of Marilyn Monroe's image, the Portland Streetcar has built on elements of the old trolleys to create its own glamour.

In terms of the clusters of factors that influence people's choice of transit over cars, Glamour only refers to the attraction that people feel. The fascination that people feel for trolleys is only relevant to mode choice if it makes them feel attracted. We can emulate the glamour of other forms of travel, or create new glamour, in order to attract more riders and subsidies.

The effect of travel modes on people's personal glamour is actually not a Glamour factor, but a Value factor. It's fairly well-known that customers, friends and dates tend to be attracted to different degrees if they see someone on foot, on a bicycle, in a beat-up car, in a fancy car, on the subway, or on a bus. Who gets attracted to what is, again, personal and context-dependent.

The key is that the people who choose their travel mode in order to impress others are doing it not because they're attracted to the glamour (they may or may not be), but because they find value in it. Saying "I'll be so cute riding this bike" is about Glamour; saying "Guys will think I'm so cute riding this bike" is about Value. The Value of Glamour.

Glamour and honesty

In my last post, I echoed Ben Kabak's criticism of Commissioner Sadik-Khan for the use of the term "surface subway." I think the phrase is dishonest, and if it gets more people to support Select Bus Service, then many of those people are going to be disappointed when they find out that it only brings a 10% reduction in travel time. This could fuel a backlash that could be exploited by status-quo politicians.

But hold on! I've been talking quite a bit about glamour lately. Glamour involves an escape from reality, so it is inherently dishonest to use a glamorous frame to sell something real. Doesn't that mean that I'm telling transit advocates to be dishonest?

To some degree I am. First of all, I think everyone should be aware of glamour, not necessarily that everyone should use it. Secondly, this is politics. Everyone is dishonest in politics. The real question is where honesty fits in our priorities.

I can definitely respect someone who makes honesty their top priority, but I don't think they'll find it very easy to get things done. In any fight you're going to be up against professional liars and dissemblers, and sometimes you need to fight fire with fire.

With glamour in particular, everyone has escape fantasies, and if they're not compatible with your goals they will hinder you. We need to get people fantasizing about high-speed rail so that they stop fantasizing about cross-country road trips.

At some point the reality diverges from the fantasy, and that is where we can draw the line between an honest PR campaign and a scam. If you take away the fantasy, is the person left with something of value? Something that they would agree is valuable?

For a non-transportation example, imagine a woman who is thin because she's on a unsustainable diet. A man notices her and they start dating. She goes off the diet and gains a lot of weight.

If she's a generous, caring person, or fun, or good in bed, and her boyfriend isn't a shallow jerk, he may stick around. He was drawn in by the glamour, but stayed because he saw value in her. On the other hand, if she's mean or crazy or a wet blanket he may dump her. He probably should have figured that out in the first place, of course.

For a transportation example, a lot of the seating on the TGV is cramped, and you can't open the windows. But it still gets you where you want to go quickly at an affordable price. People aren't switching from Ryanair for the glamour.

And now back to Bus Rapid Transit. If Select Bus Service promises a "surface subway" - a 75% reduction in travel time - but only delivers an 11% reduction, people are going to be pissed, or at the very least stay away. But if there is physical separation, bus cameras and/or signal prioritization, the reduction in travel time could be closer to 40%. I think that's substantial value.

How the "surface subway" can hurt the real subway

A year and a half ago I called Aaron Naparstek out for using the phrase "surface subway" to describe bus rapid transit. Now the News is reporting that on Monday Commissioner Sadik-Khan used it to describe the plans for Select Bus Service on First and Second Avenues: "We are basically building a surface subway for the 54,000 riders who use this route every day," she told Pete Donohue.

On Wednesday, Ben at Second Avenue Sagas took the Commissioner to task for calling it a "surface subway." He pointed out that the main features that distinguish Select Bus Service from the existing M15 Limited are offboard fare collection and dedicated lanes. The dedicated lanes are not physically separated, though, which means that any jerk with a car who thinks he/she is more important than a bus can park there. Maybe they'll get a ticket, maybe they won't. There is no signal prioritization and no camera enforcement. The result is that while it takes 22 minutes to get from 125th Street to Houston on the Lexington Avenue line, Select Bus Service will only reduce the time on the bus from 90 minutes to 80. Finally, even the best Bus Rapid Transit can't transport anywhere near the number of people that a subway can, because the vehicles are just that much shorter.

In the comments to Ben's post, Marty Barfowitz defends Sadik-Khan:

“surface subway” is a metaphor. it’s a sound bite. it’s a fast, easy way to explain and sell a new transit concept to a public, a political establishment and a local press that barely pays attention to this stuff. [...] it’s, frankly, a bit ridiculous to suggest that the use of this term is “cheating” new yorkers. as if anyone is going to step aboard the SBS and think: hey, this is supposed to do everything a subway does! rip-off!

I have to disagree with the honorable Mr. Barfowitz on several counts. First of all, any poet will tell you that a metaphor is more than just a comparison. It involves an analogy between something that exists in one domain and something that exists in another. We already have surface subways, they're called trains.

Secondly, I think that people are going to do just that: step aboard and discover that it's just a bus with a few extra features that don't save nearly enough time. And they are going to shout "rip-off!" If the News can make such a big deal out of the "farebeating" on the Bx12 even though revenues are up 30%, they're going to make a big deal out of the disappointment over the "surface subway."

What is especially troubling is the fact that several people over the past few years have pointed out the apparent contradiction in spending billions on the Second Avenue Subway while cutting bus service for lack of funding. Some have suggested canceling the Second Avenue Subway yet again. Portraying Select Bus Service as a "surface subway" instead of as important bus improvements feeds into that argument. If we can have a "surface subway" at a fraction of the cost, what do we need to dig a real subway for?

The answer, of course, is that for a fraction of the cost you get a fraction of the benefit. But while Pete Donohue might get that, don't expect Steve Cuozzo to get it, and don't expect greedy Assemblymembers to refrain from using it as a handy excuse to steal more from the MTA budget.

The key to successful ferry service

Last Friday, Times City Critic Ariel Kaminer and Second Avenue Sagas blogger Ben Kabak both hopped ferries and filed reports on their experiences and ferry politics in general. Both end up heartily endorsing the prospect: Kaminer says "If a few hundred thousand more New Yorkers could commute to work with the sun on their faces and the wind in their hair, we might be so much less stressed that we wouldn’t even recognize ourselves." Ben says "If even enough people for a few boat rides a day find the taxis cheaper and more convenient than their current commutes, the ferries will have paid off."

I read Ben's blog regularly, and I consider him a comrade in arms, so it pains me to say that he's wrong here. We need to provide more access to underserved populations and get people out of their cars, and ferries can do that. But they will only have paid off if they're the cheapest way to accomplish those goals, and I'm not at all convinced that they are. We have a number of other ways, including buses and trains, that may be cheaper and more effective.

Both Kaminer's article and Ben's post attracted an uncommonly large amount of thoughtful and insightful comments, many of which pointed to problems with the proposal. One reason they're so insightful, and yet so critical, is that we've been through this so many times. I know I've seen at least three ferry services fail, and probably more, over the past fifteen years. And yet, politicians keep proposing new or restarted ferry lines, studies keep being published, and pilot projects keep being funded, only to die out when the initial funding dries up. They don't seem to ask why.

Kaminer's article contains this particularly bizarre section:

Right now, with the major exception of the Staten Island Ferry, all the city’s routes are privately operated, mostly by the NY Waterway (which gets a boost from Goldman Sachs, whose employees commute in from New Jersey) and the New York Water Taxi (which receives subsidies from the city).

It’s hard to imagine ferry service expanding very far unless it becomes a public initiative, an integrated system with coordinated schedules and MetroCard access.

Well, no. If New York Waterway is privately operated and makes a profit, why is it so hard to imagine other services making a profit? Why not examine the differences between the services and at least take a stab at what makes the difference between a profitable ferry route and an unprofitable one?

What is especially interesting is that the New York Waterway ferries are not just profitable. They have the highest operating surplus of any true transit provider: fares pay for 139% of operating expenses for NY Waterway, and 115% for BillyBey (I'll explain the difference in a minute). The only operations that make more are the inclined planes of Chattanooga and Pittsburgh, which are essentially tourist rides at this point.

These routes are so profitable that until 2005, NY Waterway paid the Port Authority $600,000 per year in rent on the land for its docks. That did eventually become too much of a burden, so Waterway sold some of its routes to a new company, BillyBey, which negotiated a new agreement where it would pay ten cents per passenger instead of that rent. (The BillyBey routes are still marketed under the New York Waterway brand.) But Waterway still makes an operating profit of almost ten million dollars a year (PDF, and BillyBey still makes over a million (PDF).

So what's going on here? Why does the same company make millions crossing the Hudson, but be unable to do the East River run without massive government subsidies? Well, I explained some of it back in 2007: sidewalks, buses, trains, hourly service, reasonable fares. But there's another reason: bridge tolls.

Is it any coincidence that the profitable ferry routes parallel the only profitable buses in the country? As I observed with the Lincoln Tunnel buses, the situation at the tunnel weeds out two classes of commuters: those who don't want to pay the toll, and those who don't want to sit in traffic. They take the bus, the train or the ferry. On the East River, those who don't want to pay the toll can take the Queensboro Bridge, and those who don't want to sit in traffic can take the Midtown Tunnel. None of those people wind up taking the bus or the subway, let alone the ferry.

There's one thing that will make the East River ferries profitable again: put tolls back on the four "free" bridges. If you're not willing to fight for that, stop wasting my money on ferry services that will fail after a few months.