Is it worth the parking?

Joe Cortright had a nice piece recently where he showed that 83% of the amount of driving in cities can be explained by the cost of parking (and possibly other factors that are correlated with it). I’ve made similar connections between the lack of free parking and the “density” that so many urbanists credit with high transit use.

Was all this nasty parking worth ... whatever they did to the Montclair Terminal?

It’s hard to figure out causation amid several correlations. Cheap parking is also a proxy for the political strength of the motorist community in a city. How much driving is actually encouraged by the cheap parking, and how much is encouraged by free, wide roads or transit subsidy cuts demanded by those drivers?

It might be possible to disentangle these factors eventually, but it seems likely that we’ll find that cheap parking is directly responsible for at least some driving. There are several implications of this:

First, anyone who’s fighting any of the negative externalities of car use should spend some of their time fighting cheap parking. That means people fighting against pollution, carnage, resource depletion and economic insolvency.

Second, there are some people who see cheap parking as a social justice issue, viewing it through the narrow lens of poor drivers vs. rich drivers, ignoring poor non-drivers. Others see it as an economic development issue, ignoring the economic costs of cheap parking. We need to find ways to present that broader picture for these advocates in hope of bringing them over to our side of this issue.

There are several ways to fight cheap parking. The most straightforward ones are simply to institute pricing on existing free parking and raise prices on cheap parking. That means parking meters, gates on lots and garages, and permit systems. Some cities may be tempted to outsource this to a private corporation, the way Chicago did, but advocates seem to agree that this has been a disaster.

Parking prices, like most prices, are influenced by supply and demand. Another tactic is to fight the expansion of parking supply. Minimum parking requirements, subsidized government parking, zoning variances and zoning and tax policies that make it unprofitable to build anything but parking lots: all these are points where advocates can push back on parking.

Among the most important places we can have an impact, though, are projects that we support. I’ve written before about how dense housing, transit, and even bicycle and pedestrian projects are often built with obscene amounts of parking.

There are several projects that I’ve been tempted to support because they would provide alternatives to driving. But I’ve kept my mouth shut, or even argued against the projects in their current form, because they include too much parking. I’ve concluded that we would be better off without a Tappan Zee Bridge bike path, or an expansion of Metro-North to Rhinecliff, or a housing complex on a deck over the Sunnyside Yards, than with those projects and the parking that people want to build with them.

I hope you’ll do the same. If something comes along that you think would be really good, but it includes lots of parking, please ask yourselves, "Would this be worth all the parking?" And then act on that.

New transit and our goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many Jakriborgs is that?

Earlier this year, the Small Streets Blog introduced us to the planned community of Jakriborg, founded in 1990 on 12.5 acres of farmland between the cities of Malmö and Lund in southern Sweden, next to a frequent commuter rail line and a bus stop. It has "parking on the outside," as planned for the Piscataquis Village Project in Maine, but there are very few - I count less than a hundred spaces for a population of over 500 families.

(There's also a disturbing lack of people on the street in most of the photos you see of Jakriborg. Maybe the photos were taken in the height of winter, but I always thought the Swedes were out getting fresh air in the height of winter.)

Building on my post criticizing park-and-rides, the Small Streets crew imagined replacing part of a park-and-ride with a dense, walkable village like Jakriborg or the Czech town of Telč. They astutely observe that if you build at Jakriborg densities, you get more riders than if you used the land for a park-and-ride, and these riders all live within walking distance of the station.

Phil LaCombe from Small Streets takes the example of the park-and-ride in Greenbelt, Maryland, which holds 3,399 parking spaces. Those 37 acres can fit almost three Jakriborgs, which can house over 4,000 people in total, including children. That's a net gain of 701 people over the park-and-ride. If the 701 additional people are children they probably wouldn't pay taxes, but their parents would pay taxes and shop at the local stores.

Inspired by Phil, whenever I see a large parking lot near a train station, I think to myself, "How many Jakriborgs is that?" The Metro-North parking lot at Croton-Harmon is 1.3 Jakriborgs, I believe. The parking lot planned for the North Tenafly station on the Northern Branch is 0.68 Jakriborgs.

I thought of this today when I read that the New Jersey borough of Dunellen has been accepted into the state's Transit Village incentive program. Acceptance is based on a detailed application where the municipality specifies land within a quarter mile of a transit station that can be developed into walkable housing and shops.

It would be really nice if the state put all of its accepted applications up on its website so that we could see what's being planned. We could then monitor the progress of the various municipalities and see how much they live up the the hype. No such luck.

Mayor Robert Seader, however, specifically mentioned the 19-acre Art Color site, a printing plant right next to the train station that was abandoned in 1968. That's a Jakriborg and a half right there.

All across New Jersey I've seen shitty "condo" developments where you can't go anywhere without walking across endless parking lots, like this garbage across the tracks from the planned North Tenafly parking lot. That's not transit-oriented, and its walk appeal is zero. With no train service I can kind of understand them building these parking lots, but otherwise no. I hope that whatever goes in the old Art Color site is more like Jakriborg and less like Daibes Park Residences.

Another quick note: Dunellen was originally formed from the township of Piscataway. Piscataway, in turn, was founded by Quakers and Baptists who didn't want to live under the Puritans along the Piscataquis River in Maine. So if Dunellen builds a Jakriborg-type carfree village with small streets on the Art Color site, it could end up being a Piscataway Village Project. And as I said, Really Narrow Streets need good trains. Of course, then it would help if the Raritan Valley Line were as frequent a train as the line that serves Jakriborg.

Why we shouldn't extend Metro-North on the Hudson Line

Mid Hudson News reports that Metro-North is still no longer considering extending service to northern Dutchess County. I'm not sure who was asking, but there you have it.

Many years ago, there was a proposal to extend service past Poughkeepsie, with stops in Hyde Park, Staatsburg, Rhinecliff and Tivoli. There was significant NIMBY opposition, and I was all ready to cuss out those transit haters, but the more I looked at it, the more their objections made sense.

It was the same problem I had with the Northern Branch plan, but even more so, because the planners expected almost every rider to drive and park. None of those stations have anything resembling the walkable suburban downtowns of Englewood and Tenafly.

To generate enough walk-up demand for the service, you'd essentially need to rezone the area to create a whole new Tarrytown, Irvington, Dobbs Ferry and Hastings. Which might be nice, but do we really need that development eighty miles from Manhattan?

We need to look at what our goals are, and how a Metro-North extension might serve them. If people are driving too much in Dutchess County, replacing a small number of large lots with new walkable suburbs will not make the existing residents drive less.

There are small things we could do. Extend some trains to Marist and Hyde Park, and maybe the CIA, to capture some of the student and tourist travel. But that's a relatively small segment of the market; would it be worth running ten-car trains?

The largest existing town without train service in Dutchess County is Fishkill. Emily from IRidetheHarlemLine.com thought it was funny that someone would want to ask Metro-North President Howard Permut about restoring passenger service on the Beacon/Maybrook Line that the railroad owns, but it's not such a strange question. Of all the potential Dutchess County service expansions it's the one that would have the greatest ridership. It runs through the most densely populated parts of Beacon and Fishkill.

At this point it might not be worthwhile running trains all the way to Derby, Danbury or even Brewster, but a local group has proposed a shuttle from the Beacon Station to Matteawan and Fishkill. You could also run a shuttle from Croton, timed to connect with the incoming local from Grand Central.

The State is planning to upgrade the Hudson Line to improve Amtrak service. Dutchess County could use more intercity service, and restoring service to Pittsfield through Amenia, Millerton and Chatham, perhaps run by Amtrak, would capture a significant portion of the weekend crowd that currently drives up the Taconic Parkway.

Emily actually asked Permut about service north of the current terminus in Wassaic, and he mentioned that he was involved in planning the current service. "If I remember correctly, the rail trail was already in existence to Millerton, so we would have had a huge obstacle," Permut said. "How do you de-map a rail trail? There would have been significant opposition." More proof that rail-trails are not good for transit.

Of course, my question for Permut, which Emily did not ask, was "If you could tear down one highway in the region, which one do you think would increase Metro-North ridership the most?" Dutchess County actually doesn't have many highways. There's one interstate (84), plus the Taconic Parkway. There are some relatively short limited-access sections of Routes 9, 44 and 55.

I would probably first get rid of the "Arterials" in Poughkeepsie, a horrible plan where two neighborhood avenues were turned into three-lane segments of a one-way pair, simultaneously killing both the pedestrian environment and commerce on Main Street. I'm baffled that the arrangement has lasted as long as it has, and I can only surmise that that's because no New Urbanist has ever visited Poughkeepsie. Restoring the Arterials to neighborhood streets, and restoring Main Street to east-west traffic, would make a lot more people want to live within walking distance of the train station. Green tracks trolleys on the former "Arterial" streets would bring more people to the train without driving.

All that said, if we really want to reduce driving in the metropolitan area, it's probably better to focus on other areas than Dutchess County. According to reports compiled by the EPA, Dutchess only accounts for two percent of the region's vehicle-miles traveled. Meanwhile, Nassau accounts for 8% of VMT, and Suffolk 13%. If only they had train service...

The missed opportunities of the Northern Branch

I had to admit that New Jersey Transit isn't planning to pave paradise for the parking lots on the Erie Railroad Northern Branch. They want to take over some existing parking lots, build on top of some others, and tear down some warehouses that are unremarkable and kind of shabby. It still makes me unhappy, though, because of what they're not planning to build there: walkable suburban downtowns.

There are a string of dense, walkable towns lining the western slopes of the Palisades: North Bergen, Fairview, Ridgefield, Palisades Park, Leonia, Englewood Tenafly, Demarest, Closter, Norwood and Northvale. They didn't happen by accident, nor did they spring fully formed from the head of some central planner. They grew up around the Northern Branch, and the New York Central's West Shore Line, and the trolley lines of the North Hudson County Railway. But after the opening of Route 46, and Route 4, and the New Jersey Turnpike, and Route 80, and the Palisades Parkway, it got harder and harder for the trains and trolleys to compete.

Now New Jersey Transit is planning to bring back some of the railroads. They're not talking about restoring passenger service on the West Shore, or rebuilding the North Hudson, but they are talking about restoring service on the Northern Branch, in the form of a Hudson Bergen Light Rail extension to Tenafly. As I've mentioned before, I'm concerned about the amount of parking. One reason is that I think it will encourage local driving and lead to more sprawl.

Another reason that the parking bothers me is the opportunity that is being missed. While Englewood, Tenafly, Cresskill, Demarest and Closter all grew up around the Northern Branch, the centers of North Bergen, Fairview, Ridgefield, Palisades Park and Leonia were all along Broad Avenue or even further east on Bergen Boulevard or Anderson/Bergenline Avenue. What developed along the Northern Branch in these towns was largely industrial. Since then much of the industry has been replaced with commercial development, but it has been sprawling, car-oriented development.

If we're not going to bring back the Broad Street trolley, but we are going to restore passenger service, people will be traveling from compact, walkable downtowns to rapid transit through a sprawling, car-oriented mixture of industrial and commercial buildings. You can see why many of those who have cars would prefer to drive.

If I were designing this, in the tradition of Jane Jacobs and Andres Duany, I would first rezone the areas around the stations for dense, pedestrian-oriented mixed-use development, no parking required. I would then look at likely commute paths from the downtowns to the new stations, including 91st Street in North Bergen, Edgewater Avenue in Fairview, Ruby Avenue in Palisades Park and Fort Lee Road in Leonia. I would widen the sidewalks on those roads, run shuttle bus service from the downtown to meet each train both ways, and rezone the properties on either side for the same kind of mixed-use development. For each of these towns, this would essentially allow a secondary downtown to grow around the new train station, extending it and the old downtown to meet each other.

Such a plan would allow these towns to return to their old transit-oriented pasts. Instead, New Jersey Transit has decided to lead these towns further down the car-oriented dead end, by building more parking and making it easier to drive and hard to walk. No wonder the leaders of these towns are upset. The planners didn't even try.

They paved some crap, and put up a parking lot

There's too much parking in New Jersey Transit's plans to restore passenger service on the Northern Branch of the Erie Railroad. There are many reasons why it's too much, but in this post I want to focus on one reason that doesn't apply: they aren't going to pave paradise to put up these parking lots.

I had been all ready to lead, months ago, with stories of beautiful old buildings and verdant glens bulldozed for parking lots. And if I had less scruples, like some NYU faculty and Greenwich Village NIMBYs, I might just have gone ahead with that. But I believe in supporting my opinions with facts, so I actually went to see the places where the new stations will be built.

Some parts of Bergen County are actually pretty paradisaical. I found some beautiful old buildings and verdant glens, but they're not anywhere near the planned parking lots. Many of the lots will just take over existing parking lots that are currently used for something else. There are a few buildings that the New Jersey planners want to tear down, but I can't get excited about any of them.

Tenafly North

New Jersey Transit plans a 570 space surface lot on 8.6 acres of land that currently holds an auto body shop, a couple of crappy strip malls and a bunch of small parking lots.

Tenafly Town Center

There would be a 40 space lot for kiss-and-ride and "handicap" parking on the site of a 15-space municipal lot. How they're going to shoehorn the 25 spaces in there I don't know, but this is already an ugly parking lot.

Englewood Hospital

No additional parking. I think they figure that anyone who wants to drive will drive to the Route 4 or Tenafly North station.

Englewood Town Center

The station will be next to an existing 500-space municipal garage. The planners basically say that downtown Englewood is overparked. "Within one-third of a mile from the station there are approximately 1,003 on-street parking spaces and 708 off-street parking. Two municipal lots that currently provide 138 permit spaces, 27 metered spaces, and 43 free public spaces are located near the station site. An approximate 500-space parking deck completed construction after the survey was conducted. The spaces were added to the capacity totals. Observations indicate that time-limit on-street parking restrictions are prevalent near the proposed station. Of the 1,711 spaces that exist in the area, 888 were occupied, leaving approximately 823 available spaces."

Englewood Route 4

This is where the most parking is planned, because the planners want drivers to just pull off Route 4 and park. If the Preferred Alternative to Tenafly is built it will be a garage with 430 spaces. If passenger service terminates at Route 4, they will build 870 spaces. The site is currently occupied by a warehouse. I couldn't see much of it through the trees, but it didn't look all that exciting.

Leonia

There is a very Nineties office-park style office building next to the station, with 172 parking spaces. New Jersey Transit plans to build a deck on top of that lot holding 550 more spaces.

Palisades Park

The plan is to knock down these warehouses and strip mally retail and build a 320-space parking lot. I was really ready to fight for these buildings until I actually saw them.

Ridgefield

This new strip mall is pretty uninspired. It would be torn down and replaced with a 350-space parking lot. I don't think anyone would miss it, as long as they could get their kimchi someplace else.

91st Street

The plan would put a 40-space handicap/kiss-and-ride lot on part of the back lot for this hideous strip mall. Parking for parking.

So New Jersey Transit isn't planning to pave paradise to put up these parking lots. But fear not, fellow park-and-ride haters! There are good reasons not to build so much parking. I'll get into them in another post. If I can't do Joni Mitchell I can at least do Donald Shoup.

Mystery models of the Northern Branch

I'm old enough to remember the days when computers were expensive enough that the only people who could afford one had either a lot of money or an IBM employee discount. Even when it got to the point that most households had a computer, there were still a lot of programs that were so complex they needed a large mainframe to run. Then there were proprietary programs that required expensive licenses, and the number of trained programmers was relatively small. Many governments, even if they wanted to keep their business open to the public, had no choice but to restrict access to their programs.

Those days are mostly over. Today, my cell phone can do a lot more than the average mainframe could in 1982. A lot of software is open source and can be downloaded and shared for free. A relatively inexperienced programmer can may not be able to delve into the depths of some programs, but can still take an existing program and create a freely accessible interface for it on the World Wide Web.

In short, in this day and age there is really no reason for a government to keep their computer programs secret. Any code that was created by government employees should be open source, and ideally should be able to be run by any citizen. Applications that analyze large databases can be opened up with a Web interface and an internet application-programmer interface so that independent programmers can connect to them.

The proposed site of the North Tenafly station. 8.6 acres (0.68 Jakriborgs) of space, including everything across the street, would be leveled to make room for a 570-space parking lot.

Unfortunately, transportation modeling has not moved into the twenty-first century. Case in point: the Northern Branch Corridor Project in New Jersey, whose managers would "prefer" to plop 2,310 parking spaces up and down the train line. I combed through the Draft Environmental Impact Statement - it's pretty readable as these things go - looking for New Jersey Transit's justification for building that many spaces, and the best I could find was this section from the Executive Summary (PDF):

ridership for each of the Build Alternatives was projected to the year 2030 using the North Jersey Transit Demand Forecasting Model (NJTDFM, the model). The model was used to estimate total LRT riders by zone to each station. NJ TRANSIT then used data from the model (such as percentage of people that would walk, drive, carpool, be dropped off, or take the bus based upon distance from each station, and the type and density of development) to estimate how riders would travel to each station. This produced an initial parking demand at each station. The station locations were then reviewed to determine the maximum amount of parking spaces that could reasonably be provided at each location, without overwhelming the communities. The model was then constrained with these maximum parking numbers, and a second iteration of the forecasting model was run. This resulted in adjustments to individual access modes to each station and a final, revised parking demand at each station

So, why build that much parking? Because our computer model says that there will be that much demand. Why does the computer model say that? Does it take into account the effect of parking lot capacity and price on the demand for parking? Does it account for the effect of zoning changes (for example, to allow dense development without accessory parking adjacent to the stations) on parking demand and drop-offs? Who knows.

I emailed one of the senior transportation demand forecasters at New Jersey Transit last week, and asked him these questions. I also asked about public access to the NJTDFM. If I hear back, I'll let you know.

The transportation-land use cycle, illustrated

The transportation-land use cycle, illustrated by the Village of Piermont, NY and its environs:

The road builders say, "Everyone wants to drive, and a road will create jobs. That's why we have to build a big road!"


The employers say, "There's a big road, and everyone wants to drive, and I want to work near my house in the suburbs. That's why we'll build an office park!"

The town planners say, "There's a big road to the office park, and everyone wants to drive, and we're afraid they'll take our parking. That's why we need to require parking for everyone!"

The retail developers say, "The town requires parking, and everyone wants to drive, and it will boost our rents. That's why we need to build parking!"

The residential developers say, "The town requires parking, and everyone wants to drive, and it will boost our sales prices. That's why we need to build parking!"

The residents say, "There's all this parking, and everyone wants to drive, and it will be more convenient. That's why we need to buy a car!"

The transit planners say, "Everyone who lives around here owns a car, and everyone wants to drive, and it will bring more passengers. That's why we need to build a park-and-ride!"

The road-builders say, "Everyone is driving to the park-and-ride, and a road will create jobs. That's why we have to build a bigger road!"

Photo: Kate Hinds / Transportation Nation

When does it end?

Image: Transit Nerds (Jeff Wood) / Flickr

(FYI, the older parts of Piermont are a bit more progressive on parking.)

The cost of new riders

Some nice person Reddited my post on park-and-rides. So far it's only gotten one comment, but that comment is extremely insightful:

This article leaves out the obvious reason that has long been the reason park and rides are added to projects I work on in the AA phase - goosing up ridership. Federal funding rating has long been based on cost per new rider, and if you can't get costs down, you can always get ridership up (in the models, at least) by adding park and rides.

FTA has now published new guidelines (PDF) that emphasize transit supportive land use at the same level as cost effectiveness (which is also no longer based on cost per new rider, as well) so hopefully we'll start to see a shift in the next few years as projects conceived and developed under these new guidelines move into engineering and construction.

This may be more important than the congestion-fighting mentality I've described in recent posts in accounting for the proliferation of park-and-ride lots and garages in transit systems new and old. Both ideas flow from, and reinforce, the Kotkinist idea that the ideal commute is a solo drive in a personal car from the driveway of a single-family home to a parking lot.

I've heard the complaints over the years about the cost-benefit requirements for various Federal transit capital funding programs. In principle I'm in favor of cost-benefit analysis. Who wouldn't want to know whether they're getting their money's worth?

The main complaint I heard was that there was a double standard: transit projects were being asked to justify their funding in ways that most road projects would have completely flopped. And yeah, it's hypocritical *and* idiotic to care about one set of costs but not another.

I had thought that that was the only real problem with these cost-benefit analyses, and it seemed like it had been fairly well covered by other bloggers. I assumed that the "benefit" part of the formula represented something that more or less corresponded to an actual benefit. Boy was I wrong.

The metric was referred to as the "cost per new rider," but that's a bit vague. The official term is "incremental cost per incremental rider." To estimate it, a transit planner comes up with ridership estimates for the entire system if the project is built and for a no-build scenario, and divides the difference by the amortized cost of the project.

Does this make sense to anyone but a bureaucrat? When would you ever do a return on investment analysis where the "return" was simply providing a service? If you're deciding whether to build a factory, would you base your decision on the cost per unit? No, you'd look at the cost per dollar of profit. If you're a sane government official deciding whether to build a soup kitchen, would you look at the cost of providing a meal? No, you'd look at the cost of keeping people from going hungry.

Similarly, if you're deciding whether to build a transit facility, why would you give a shit how many people use it? Your ultimate goal is not to get people to ride the thing. It's to reduce pollution, or carnage, or to increase efficiency, improve society or provide access. If your project can do all those things without anyone actually riding it, that's better!

In general, yes it's true that a commuter who's on a train isn't driving, and therefore not polluting, using gasoline or running people over. But that's where the park-and-rides come in. If a commuter is only on your train for half their commute, they're still behind the wheel for the other half, polluting, burning gas and putting lives in danger the whole way. And if they then stay in the car for errands on the way home, that's more driving, plus they're shopping at car-oriented stores.

What's worse is that a park-and-ride can induce more driving, because it can make a car-oriented suburban life affordable and convenient for people who work downtown but wouldn't pay to drive all the way downtown, either in pure dollar terms or in convenience cost. If a park-and-ride encourages someone to move from an apartment in a walkable neighborhood to a house in a car-dependent suburb, that may make Joel Kotkin happy, but it sucks for the environment.

That's what's missing from the Federal metric. What is the incremental cost per incremental rider in terms of transit trips still half driven? What is the cost in terms of induced driving for errands? In terms of induced driving by spouses and children? Nowhere.

So what about these new guidelines? Well, I'm not too impressed. They talk a lot about parking - presumably from the point of view that the more parking there is at transit stations the better, but it's actually ambiguous.

What I'd like to see is some attempt to quantify how much less driving people would do with the project in place than without it. Of course, you'd also have to take into account competing road projects that are being funded at the same time.

Park-and-rides and congestion

One reason I've been talking so much about congestion is that it's key to the thinking that goes into these massive park-and-rides. What's baffled me for so long, but what I could never put into words, was the double standard applied to commuting and local trips.

Transit planners wanted to get people out of their cars on Route 17, the New Jersey Turnpike and the Lincoln Tunnel, so they built a park-and-ride (PDF). Now people can take the train from Ramsey to Hoboken or change for trains to Manhattan. But they're still getting in their cars to go to Ramsey, sometimes for many miles. Why don't the planners see it as part of their mission to get them out of their cars door-to-door?

I've already covered the Kotkinism behind this double standard, but now I'm examining the question of how it can be justified. The answer is congestion. At the beginning at least, suburban roads were less congested than urban streets. Since then the constituency for widening suburban roads has been stronger with a broader base, while opposition to widening urban streets has been weaker and less organized. In general, people get more upset about the government knocking down their houses than about it taking away their front yards.

The congestion is also more concentrated as commuters approach the urban core, especially in a centralized city. This makes transit a more obvious and more cost-effective solution for core commutes and less obvious for the "last mile," or ten, or fifty, to home.

If we make "congestion mitigation" the top mission of government transit funding, it's not actually surprising that we get so many Kotkinist park-and-rides, allowing the suburbanites to stay in their cars until the last possible moment. That way the transit planners can take credit for fighting congestion without actually having to worry that some potential riders would be inconvenienced by having to walk to the train, god forbid move to a denser neighborhood.

What if, instead of worrying about congestion, transit planners and their government funders actually thought about reducing pollution and carnage, increasing efficiency, improving society and providing access for all? Would they be building, maintaining and subsidizing them at anywhere near the scale they do now?

Carfree 24/7

Alon just put their finger on something I've been trying to get at with my posts about park-and-rides: that we want to be planning communities where it's easy to be car-free all the time. I've touched on this before, but that was almost three years ago. Alon sums it up with this great table:

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

I've changed Alon's wording and layout around a bit, but I'm still not satisfied. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. In any case, the worst places are like Armonk or Accord, where there's nothing to walk to and no way to get to anything without driving, and the best places are like my neighborhood in Queens where you can walk to everything you need on a daily basis and take the train into Manhattan for work.

Alon's point is that you can also have these wonderful villages with Really Narrow Streets where people can walk to the coffee bar and maybe even the supermarket, but if transit is absent or impractical for trips to work or to the doctor (as in the proposal for Piscataquis Village in Maine), most people are going to own cars and drive. Most small towns in the country used to be walkable with a bus or train to the city, and then they went through a period like this. Over the past thirty years, since the vast majority of people drive anyway, the walkable downtown shops and restaurants have been driven out of business by Best Buy and Applebee's.

As I've been saying about the park-and-rides, you can have commuter rail to the city every half hour, or even light rail every ten minutes, but if there's nothing to walk to (as in Scarborough or Harriman), most people are going to own cars and drive. Too much new transit is like this, and too much old transit has been turned into it.

Transit planners, sprawl and "quality of life"

In my post on the Law of Transportation Inertia (people in cars tend to stay in cars), Joel Azumah captured the thinking of many transit planners when he commented, "I love park-and-rides. They aggregate commuters that want a better quality of life." Joel may not have a formal degree in transit planning, but as one of the most innovative transit providers in the country I would say he is certainly doing transit planning. I disagree with his statement here, but I can understand how he gets to it.

By saying that suburban drivers are "commuters that want a better quality of life," he is channeling another Joel - Joel Kotkin. The idea that suburban park-and-rides are anything but a necessary evil is permeated with Kotkinist ideas: the suburbs offer better quality of life than the cities, the suburbs are the dynamic future, the car brings freedom. Most of all, Americans want the suburbs, they want to drive.

Of course, I've got a lot of problems with Kotkinism, mostly because it's incompatible with my goals. Other transit advocates may have less of a problem, maybe because they have different goals, because they know something I don't, because I know something they don't, or because they haven't thought things through.

A Kotkinist transit planner believes that transit is good, but so are cars. Any government action that makes it harder to drive is social engineering and must be avoided. Thus, the Kotkinist transit planner's job is to allow the suburban driver to partake of the benefits of transit, without challenging his or her suburban lifestyle in any way.

While people like Joel Azumah actively believe that transit is compatible with sprawl, others may adopt this kind of Kotkinism as a purely practical stance. Someone who believes in transit may go along with the cars because they feel that any transit is better than no transit, and maybe that the cycle will take care of the cars eventually. A hardcore Kotkinist may go along with the transit to keep the masses quiet and to co-opt the transit advocates.

Why do transit planners love park-and-rides?

Park-and-rides are not the answer because of the Law of Mode Inertia: people in cars tend to stay in cars. Parking lots and garages will not get people out of their cars, at least at the parking end of the line, and thus they will do nothing to revitalize walkable neighborhoods or build a constituency for walking and local transit. So why do certain transit planners seem to love putting park-and-rides in their projects? Why have they shown up along the Northern Branch of the Erie Railroad and the North Shore segment of the Staten Island Railroad and the "transit-oriented development" for the Tappan Zee Bridge? Why was so much stimulus money spent on a huge garage at the Botanical Garden?

There are a few reasons that come to mind. The first is a fear of empty trains. When you introduce a new product, it rarely catches on right away. There is almost always some adjustment period while people find out about the new product, try it out and change their routines. The sensible thing is to have enough money saved up so that you can keep providing the service until it catches on.

Public transit planners don't often have that luxury. Government budget hawks are ready to swoop down a the sight of Empty Trains, and the climate makes it hard to ask for operating assistance. They want the thing to be successful from day one, which means catering to everyone who might conceivably want to take that train, including some people who live more than a short walk away and don't want to take a bus.

The others have to do with goals. For many years, planners didn't appreciate walkable neighborhoods, and if they do now they don't recognize the value of transit in delivering the pedestrians who would walk in those neighborhoods. This relates to the Law of Mode Inertia: somehow they haven't figure out that every commuter who gets off the train and drives home is one less shopper at the walkable stores, and one less diner at the walkable restaurants.

These planners also don't seem to understand the self-identification correlate of the Law of Transportation Inertia, and its role in the transportation cycle: park-and-riders tend to identify as drivers, so that every park-and-rider is another driver who's going to fight for subsidies to drivers at the expense of transit.

One of the big goals they do have, however, is to "eliminate congestion," and park-and-rides are very good for that.

People in cars tend to stay in cars

I've been thinking a lot about park-and rides and mode shift lately in the context of the Northern Branch restoration project, and I've come up with a new generalization. I even thought of a catchy summary for it, like Isaac Newton: people in cars tend to stay in cars.

Of course I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here. Donald Shoup found (PDF) that on average, when parking is free, drivers will prefer to spend three minutes circling for a close parking space than three minutes walking from a further space. Retailers fear any reduction in parking capacity or increase in parking cost out of fear that their driving customers will choose a competitor with easier or cheaper parking.

This extends to mode choices as well. In an illuminating report, "Guaranteed Parking, Guaranteed Driving" (PDF), Rachel Weinberger and her colleagues found that car-owning Jackson Heights residents who owned off-street parking spaces near their houses tended to drive more than car-owning Park Slope residents who had to circle for on-street spaces. I find this to be true when I walk, shop and eat in my own neighborhood: my car-free neighbors tend to be more visible and available than those with guaranteed parking, and those who have cars but no guaranteed spaces are in the middle.

In my view, park-and-rides have a similar effect. When I take the train or the bus, I walk past all the neighborhood shops and restaurants, and I know that if I need groceries, hardware, medicine, a haircut or a cup of coffee, I can stop on the way. If I need something I can't get near my apartment - a suitcase, a television, a kabob or a bagel - I can get off the train at a nearby station and walk a little further. If I need something that's not available at all in my neighborhood - a hair dryer, a package of frozen dosai, quality clothes, books - I can take the train or bus to Manhattan or to another part of Queens.

My neighbors who drive to work or for social trips know that they will probably not be able to find parking near any of the neighborhood stores or restaurants, so they stop at places with abundant parking on the way home. If they have guaranteed parking and they need something from outside the neighborhood, they are more likely to drive to a "cheaper" car-oriented store like Costco or Target than take the train to Manhattan.

None of my neighbors commute via park-and-rides, but the pattern seems pretty clear. If you need something, you can buy it right near your job downtown, or there might be somewhere to buy it near the train station or bus stop. Chances are, though, that you'll get off the train and immediately drive to a store with easy parking. What's least likely is that you'll drive home, park and then go to the store. So park-and-rides are bad for business at the transit stop, and near the homes of the parkers.

There is one more way that this works: in self-identification. You might think that transit riders would identify as transit riders and drivers as drivers, but it's not that simple. There are people who drive to the park-and-ride, people who drive when they're off work, and people who only occasionally drive up to the mountains for a weekend. Whenever they're not riding, they tend to be on foot or on transit. We might therefore expect them to identify at least partly as transit riders, but in my experience they all identify as drivers first, even if they hardly drive.

This leads me to my Law of Transportation Mode Inertia: on a given trip people in cars tend to stay in cars. But note the word "tend." Obviously there are plenty of people who transfer from car to foot or bus or train in their commutes, but there are particular conditions for these transfers, and most drivers will resist doing it more than once.

It is because of this principle that I get so frustrated with mainstream American transit planners' love of park-and-ride facilities, as seen most recently in the Northern Branch project. More on that soon.

The problem with the Northern Branch project

For a months now I've been telling people that the "transit" proposed for the bridge is just sprawl transit, and it's true. There wouldn't even be a stop in Nyack; if commuter rail is chosen the nearest station would be near the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, more than two miles away, and if "Bus Rapid Transit" is chosen the nearest station would be at the western end of Nyack, at the top of the hill where Main Street crosses the Thruway, a mile from downtown. The Thruway people would build huge park-and-rides at these stations, and park-and-rides are not the answer. People who drive to park-and-rides think of themselves as drivers, not transit riders, and they will vote accordingly.

Instead, I've suggested that Rockland County can improve its connections to jobs in New York City and New Jersey by rebuilding its rail network. There are four railroads that connect Rockland to Hoboken, but only two (the Erie Main and Pascack Valley lines) still have passenger service, but the trains run on the slower and more sprawly Graham Line instead of the Main Line between Harriman and Otisville, and the Pascack Valley trains terminate in Spring Valley instead of Haverstraw or New City. The Erie Northern Branch used to run to Nyack but now only sees freight as far as the New York State line in Northvale. The New York Central West Shore Line is currently owned and operated by the Chesapeake System as a high-volume freight line between North Bergen and Selkirk, but most of the second track has been removed, and if it were restored there would be room for commuter rail service.

For much less than the five billion dollars that Cuomo and friends want to spend doubling the width of the Tappan Zee Bridge, we could restore passenger service to Nyack, West Nyack, New City, Stony Point and Haverstraw. This would require restoring track in some places, re-acquiring the right-of-way in others, double-tracking and eliminating grade crossings here and there, and electrification. We might even have enough money to rebuild the old Erie Main through the Orange County villages of Goshen and Middletown. If we can ever build a new tunnel (which would cost a lot more than five billion but would move more people than the proposed bridge), the trains could go straight into Manhattan.

Believe it or not, there is movement in this direction. New Jersey Transit has just released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for their plan to reactivate passenger service on the Northern Branch between North Bergen and Tenafly. At this point I would love to be able to point to this as an example of success that could be extended right up to Sparkill and Nyack. But there are problems. And by problems I mean parking. Way too much of it. This is from the executive summary of the DEIS:

Yes, that's right, 2130 or 2310 parking spaces! I tweeted about this a couple of weeks ago, and @majormajor42 replied, "what do you think of the Ramsey Rt17 station parking garage?" I think that's an excellent question, and I will try to give it the thoughtful answer it deserves in another post soon.

In general, park-and-rides are not the answer, because they make people transit commuters but drivers for everything else, so they should have sunsets and market-clearing prices. The Route 17 station is not the answer, but it's not too bad as far as park-and-rides go.

Slaying the parking dragon

Streetsblog is reporting that the New York City Economic Development Corporation is trying to build a "vibrant downtown" next to the ferry terminal at Saint George on Staten Island, but undermining that goal by swamping it with parking.

Yet EDC wants the island’s transit center and would-be downtown to make room for a sea of parking, which will draw more traffic to the neighborhood streets, eat up space that could be used for housing or offices, and degrade the pedestrian environment. At this stage in the development process, it’s not clear exactly how many spaces the new development might contain. But all the spaces in the enormous surface parking lots would have to replaced one for one, ensuring at least a full floor of parking almost by definition. On top of that, EDC expects that additional parking be provided for all "the expected demand produced by the proposed development." With 14 acres up for development, that could be quite a lot of spaces indeed.

First I want to point out that this much parking will also drive up the cost to build the development. It will reduce the profitability of the development, and thus drive up the cost to the city.

This is not surprising for the EDC, which has a record of overbuilding parking, as documented by Streetsblog. One anonymous commenter attributed the parking appeasement to EDC President Seth Pinsky and City Planning Director Amanda Burden, and called on Bloomberg to override them. But to give them some credit, the EDC has facilitated the parking-neutral Fordham Plaza redesign and the parking-negative Queens Plaza project. Noah Kazis points out that it may be the Mayor himself who is trying to appease the parking dragon: "The potential to develop these sites while maintaining the availability of parking," he said, "combined with projects at the Homeport, Howland Hook, and at the Ferry Terminal – will be a catalyst for the further revitalization of the North Shore, as well as the entire island."

Whether this comes from the EDC or Bloomberg, if livable streets advocates could get the EDC to reduce the number of planned parking spaces, it is not clear that Staten Island politicians would be happy about that. Think about the Flushing Commons plan, where the developer wanted to build a relatively sensible number of parking spaces, but was met with fierce resistance from the area's business and political elite. The EDC and the City Council then put in money to build more parking.

Any effort to reduce the amount of parking at Saint George needs to either go through the local business and political establishments (Kenneth Mitchell in the Council, Matthew Titone in the Assembly and Diane Savino in the Senate), or else to be done with such force as to crush the opposition. Good luck on either of those.

Oh, and the less parking you have at Saint George, the higher ridership will be on the buses that go there, and the lower the subsidy they require.

Transportation myopia for commuter rail

Jeff "Pantograph Trolleypole" Wood has a post questioning the value of building new commuter rail lines, as contrasted with light rail or streetcars. He points to several new lines where ridership is well below expectations, and argues that such tiny numbers do little to further our goals.

It has always been acknowledged that these new commuter rail lines are oriented towards relatively affluent park-and-ride commuters, so they won't increase access for underserved communities. The claim was that they would get people out of their cars for at least a portion of the trip, leading to greater efficiency and less pollution and carnage. In addition, some people claimed (or at least hoped) that they would attract relatively well-connected passengers, who in turn would have an interest in lobbying for the maintenance and expansion of the transit system. Jeff argues that such small numbers do very little to help us reach any of those goals.

Everyone seems to agree that these commuter lines are a miserable failure, but there is disagreement over why exactly they failed, and how to avoid failures like this in the future. Jeff takes a technical approach, saying that the problem is that the lines tend to be located in old freight rights-of-way far from residential, job and shopping centers and served by large park-and-ride lots. Significantly, these lines all tend to be relatively low frequency, sometimes only a few trains a day. He recommends that agencies pursue light rail through urban areas instead, and contrasts the ridership numbers on these commuter rail lines with numbers from new light rail lines.

Yonah Freemark expands on Jeff's post, but argues instead that the problem is a political failure, due to a futile attempt to distribute funding across metropolitan regions, hamstrung by bad zoning.

I think they're both confusing correlation with causation. Both of their explanations are probably true to some degree, but in fact only one could, or none; we don't know. There's another factor at work that I think plays a role. I don't have any proof, only a similar causation, but that is enough to require more support for Jeff and Yonah's claims. Both bloggers are suffering from transportation myopia, because for every one of the commuter rail lines that Jeff lists, there was a major road project that improved car travel and took riders away from the commuter rail lines.

Northstar commuter rail	I-94 third lane
Capital Metro	US 183 toll road
RailRunner	Big I reconstruction
Music City Star	I-40 widening
Utah FrontRunner	I-15 Ogden-Weber Expansion
Portland WES	Oregon 217 Modernization
Oceanside Sprinter	CA Route 78 HOV Improvements (planned)

Now I know some of the readers are going to jump in and say, "but that highway project outside of Portland is only one lane in one direction for a few blocks!" Yes, but there are numerous other highway expansion projects going on in the area. You can quibble with the details, but I think you'll agree that the overall picture is sound.

If you regularly commute from Maple Grove to downtown Minneapolis and keep getting stuck in traffic jams on I-94, you might consider switching to the Northstar trains. But then if MnDOT adds a lane to I-94 and traffic moves smoother, you might stay in your car. This is partly a failure of commuter rail, partly a failure of regionalism, but mostly a failure of transit advocates to realize how much of a threat competing road projects can be to the train lines they so desperately want to see.

Guest post: the source of the Long Island Bus crisis

Here is another guest post by regular reader George K.

For those of you that don't know, Nassau County officials have been neglecting to pay the MTA for providing the service run by Long Island Bus. As a result, the system has been in danger of either facing steep reductions by the MTA or facing privatization.

The situation has recently been resolved in the following way: The State Legislature has given the MTA $8.6 million on behalf of Nassau County to continue operating the bus service at the current levels. However, after January 2012, the system would be turned over to a private company to operate with a subsidy.

A small portion of the blame for the high cost of these routes is poor practices on the MTA's behalf. There are instances where buses deadhead very long distances when they could be making a revenue trip for a portion of that run, and there are several route restructurings that could be considered. For instance, combining the N24 and N51, would give riders along Merrick Avenue access to the Mineola LIRR station. Although this probably wouldn't generate enough ridership to save the N51, it would make it more cost-efficient in the interim.

Although part of the blame for these reductions lies on Nassau County executives for shortchanging the MTA, part of the blame lies in the fact that many of the people in Nassau County have an anti-transit attitude, similar to the attitude that can be found in many other parts in the country.

For instance the N22 and N73/N74 could've gotten more ridership if they were extended from the Hicksville LIRR station to the Broadway Mall, which is a short 1/2 mile trip. Since the routes end at the Hicksville LIRR station, riders must either walk or transfer to the N20, N48, N49, N50, N80, or N81 routes. Although it may appear at first that there are a lot of routes to transfer to, those routes run at a low frequency. At the height of rush hour those routes run roughly 8 buses per hour, which results in a frequency of approximately 8 minutes (though buses tend to be scheduled in pulses, to meet with LIRR trains). Off-peak frequency can range from 2-6 buses per hour. In any case, making a transfer when carrying shopping bags tends to make transit a very unattractive option, and in this case, the transfer could've been avoided by a short extension.

However this wasn't done because the owners of the mall didn't feel that it was worth the cost to maintain a bus station within the mall and residents in the community felt that the buses would attract the wrong type of people to shop at the mall.

Another part of the problem is that the wide roads in Nassau County entice people to drive, and many of those roads (particularly in Eastern Nassau County) have poor transit service, with buses running every 60 minutes without Sunday service. Here in NYC, we have some wide roads, but they generally have good transit nearby: A train, or at least a frequent bus route serves the corridor.

Another problem is the fact that park-and-rides were built to accommodate too many cars. Park-and-rides are not the answer. Stations like Hicksville have more parking spaces than daily commuters. Had there been fewer parking spaces, there would've been more of an incentive for people to buy a UniTicket and use the local bus to commute to the LIRR station, rather than driving. This program idea has been fairly successful at the other end of Nassau County in Great Neck, where, although the surrounding areas are fairly affluent, the ridership on the buses that feed into the Great Neck LIRR stations is relatively high for the simple reason that parking isn't as easy to find.

Overall, although Long Island Bus is saved for now, the reality is that Nassau County cannot go on maintaining the status quo. The fact that Long Island is more spread out means that the private operator is likely to be stingy with the service it provides, and the fact that people have an anti-transit mentality is what caused this situation in the first place. Ideally, we should encourage the building of higher density housing closer to LIRR stations, and locate office parks closer to these stations for reverse commuters from NYC. Residents would be lured to these dense developments, and would provide more support for transit subsidies rather than road subsidies.

As a result, Nassau County will become more sustainable in the face of rising oil prices. Residents working in Manhattan would be able to walk (or take a bus) to the LIRR rather than drive, and residents working in the office parks located near the LIRR would either be able to take the LIRR or take LI Bus as a crosstown service to access their jobs, and the service would run more frequently as a result. Low-income workers would no longer be faced with the financial burden of owning a car, and would be able to use the frequent east-west bus service (the dense housing would provide enough demand for transit that it could be split with the LIRR and LI Bus running in the same corridor) to access their jobs.

Some people may feel that the areas near the LIRR stations would become too ”urban” for them, since there would be more dense housing there to support the transit services in the area, and they would want an area that is quieter and more spread out. However, they can buy a larger house or apartment in a walkable area away from the LIRR, along a frequent bus route. The route doesn’t have to be as frequent as the Manhattan crosstown routes, but a headway of 10 minutes during peak hours and 15 minutes during off-peak hours would be sufficient to maintain a quiet lifestyle while still not having to own a car.

The development of more dense housing surrounding the LIRR can be done in a gradual manner. First, the price for parking in LIRR stations can be raised to a point where people find it more economical to take LI Bus to the LIRR station (some people might find that it isn't worth owning a car at that point, since they won‘t even be using for their commute). Then, when the demand for parking spaces is lowered, the land can be sold off and converted into residential units or office space.

Although we could potentially see some progress with projects such as the LIRR Main Line 3rd tracking project being designed, this cannot come quickly enough, and, as a result, everybody will suffer. People will remain stuck in traffic on the LIE, while low-income workers will be faced with the choice between purchasing an automobile or relying on infrequent buses that may not be there the next day.

A simple solution to the commuter parking crunch

Today, Ben at Second Avenue Sagas linked to a Wall Street Journal article about the MTA's plans to raise parking fees at its commuter railroad stations. He ends on a note of concern that commuters who are priced out of their parking spots will drive all the way to the city instead.

I can reassure Ben here that this will not increase the number of commuters driving to the city. The article's author, Andrew Grossman, also could have reassured Ben if he had provided some important additional information.

The key here is that parking is in high demand along Metro-North and Long Island Railroad stations. Most stations have wait lists for their parking permits, at some stations customers can wait eight years. Fees vary from $200 a year to almost $1000. Some stations have implemented valet parking to try and squeeze more cars into lots.

I don't blame Ben for not knowing this, but I do blame Grossman for not putting it in his article. Don't tell me there's no one at the Wall Street Journal who's on the wait list for a parking spot at a Metro-North station. Grossman didn't bother to ask, possibly because it suited him and his boss, Rupert Murdoch, to have a story about the MTA vs. the unions, possibly because he was under a tight deadline and went with the simplest frame.

There's something else that Grossman left out. He is a transportation reporter, but he works at, you know, the Wall Street Journal, so you'd think that when he's writing an article about money he would ask someone who knows about money. Like WSJ economics reporter Conor Dougherty, who did a nice article three years ago about Donald Shoup and parking pricing. He might have been able to inform Ben that it's possible to set parking prices to keep the lots about 85% full, so that there is always a space for people who want to park.

Sure, some people will be unable to afford the more expensive fees, and maybe they will drive to the city, or maybe they will walk or take a bus to the train station, or even take a bus all the way to the city. Maybe they weren't even using the spots: the Times quotes Rye City Clerk Dawn Nodarse as a witness to all kinds of market distortions:

The problem fuels itself, she said: As the waiting list gets longer and longer, people who have changed jobs or even retired become increasingly reluctant to relinquish their permits, in case they need them again.

“Maybe they go into the city twice a month, but they know that it takes so long to get the permit, so they hang onto it,” Ms. Nodarse said. “We can’t force people to give up their permits.”

Whatever they do, their spots will be taken by those on the waiting list, who may be driving to the city today. At worst, there will be no change in the number of people driving to the city. At best, it may decrease the numbers. And in all cases, it will bring the subsidy level for the commuter railroads down a bit, closer to the level of NYC transit.

Of course, in the end park-and-rides are not the answer, and should have some kind of sunset provision. Maybe the MTA should just keep raising the parking fees past the Shoupian ideal, using the extra money to subsidize local jitneys and building transit-oriented development on the space that gets freed up.

Appreciating sunsets

Photo: Mhilsenrad / Flickr
There's a particular theme I've been noticing more and more lately: strategies that are either praised as universally good or condemned as universally bad, but that are in fact neither. Some are quite good in the short term but unsustainable; others are generally bad but tolerated as necessary evils.

Borrowing money at interest is the ultimate unsustainable good. It's nice to have the cash flow, but in addition to the expense of debt service you sacrifice some long-term autonomy.

Park-and-ride lots are a good example of a necessary evil. Long term, they are not the answer, but in the short term they may be necessary to build a constituency for transit.

What these unsustainable goods and necessary evils have in common is their term limits. In the long term we want to see them go away.

There are two dangers here. The first is that we may not realize that something good is unsustainable, or that a necessary thing is actually evil. Then we might keep borrowing after the need is gone, or keep building park-and-rides that aren't necessary. The person who started the borrowing or the park-and-ride may know that it's not sustainable, but fail to pass that information on to those who are in charge later.

The second danger is that many short-term solutions have a way of sticking around. Someone can divert the borrowed money into something that doesn't actually help increase income. Or the park-and-ride can develop its own entrenched constituency that resists any attempt to remove it.

Here's what we can do about this: first, be mindful and recognize when strategies are unsustainable. Second, make sure that everyone else knows it. Third, when implementing an unsustainable strategy, develop a complementary sunset strategy. Take out a loan with a fixed term, and dedicate part of the income to repaying the loan. Rent the land for the park-and-ride from someone who will have an incentive to redevelop it with transit-oriented businesses or residences.

In future posts, I'll talk more about unsustainable goods, necessary evils, and ways to sunset them.