AirBnb can be really useful sometimes

In the past several years I've seen a number of posts attacking the company AirBnb, which is fine, but often they go further and attack the general concept of short-term housing rental outside of hotels. These posts have struck me as oblivious at best, and sometimes even callously indifferent. I rarely hear arguments in favor of short-term housing rental outside of travel industry promotion, so I wanted to give my entirely uncompensated argument for why I like them.

This is not an argument about the merits of AirBnb or any other company, or of tourism in general. It's about why short-term housing rental should be allowed wherever hotels, long-term rentals and vacation home ownership are allowed, and should not be restricted as a kludge to limit tourism overall.

I've stayed in plenty of hotels, inns, bed and breakfasts and youth hostels, and they can be great, but they're not always enough. Sometimes there simply are not enough hotels in a town, or a neighborhood.

Let's use the city of Northampton, Massachusetts as an example. There is exactly one hotel in downtown Northampton: the Hotel Northampton, a classic institution, almost a century old, with 106 rooms. That's a tiny amount for a small city with a college, a hospital and a large number of tourist attractions. There are at least two smaller hotels, three motels and a bed and breakfast within the city limits, as well as six across the river in Hadley and five in Amherst.

You could say that the people who can't afford the Hotel Northampton simply pay with longer trip times. That's not fair to begin with, but beyond that, only four of the other hotels are within a comfortable walk of the city center and Smith College. I believe they are all on bus routes, but those buses do not always run frequently, and there are some times when no buses run at all, such as early Sunday morning. Many of the motels, particularly in Hadley, are in areas that are dangerous and hostile to pedestrians.

Thus the price structure of the hotels discriminates against people who pay less, not just by imposing a time penalty and the cost of taxis when buses are not running, but by imposing a higher risk of death or injury.

If we look at AirBnb, there are rooms and apartments for rent near downtown, but they're available at rates comparable to the motels in Hadley, or even cheaper. No cost penalty, no time penalty, no car or taxi or extra bus trip required.

There are some towns that have no hotels at all. If someone wants to visit those towns, the only hotel may be miles away, with no transit at convenient times. But those towns may have a few short-term rentals where a visitor may even be able to arrive by transit and walk to their destinations.

Another benefit I've gotten from short term rentals is the experience of staying in a house or apartment that's integrated into a residential neighborhood. Sometimes it can be nice to stay in a hotel in a commercial or entertainment district, but those districts are often empty on weekends.

Many short-term rentals are in architecturally interesting places, and staying there overnight can give visitors a better opportunity to appreciate them. It can also allow visitors to live like locals in ways that hotels don't offer.

There are costs and risks to short term rentals. I don't want to dismiss them. I'm just frustrated with discussions of short term rentals that talk exclusively about the downsides without mentioning the reasons why people might choose them over hotels, or why they might even help people make trips that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

I'm often surprised when people don't mention these positive aspects. Have they never enjoyed staying in a quirky apartment in a quiet neighborhood and shopping with locals? Have they never been stuck in some shitty motel in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere, where they can't get to a restaurant without driving? Or paying through the nose to get snotty treatment from a stuck-up desk clerk at a downtown motel in an office district that's deserted on a Sunday night?

Local knowledge, global bullshit

In my neighborhood, on a narrow block zoned M-1 next to the Long Island Railroad main line, is a parking lot. A few years ago, the owners of the building across the street put forward a plan: the City would rezone the block for residential, and they would build a ten-story apartment building. The City Council member for this district said he had concerns but wanted to hear more.

After a few contentious meetings, stories emerged in the news and on Facebook, and were eventually published in a change.org petition and a website: the rents would be sky-high, the new building would be massive and out of context, and it would dump hundreds of new riders on the already overcrowded elevated train and neighborhood schools. The street was not adequate to handle the traffic. The entire community was against it. Eventually the City Council member declared that he was against the project, and it was dropped.

Last week I heard someone on a podcast talking about the value of local knowledge in city planning, crediting Jane Jacobs for it. Certainly, Jacobs catalogs a number of clear cases where planners came into an area with little or no knowledge of it, and royally messed it up. She might have declared the defeat of this project to be a triumph of local knowledge.

The problem is that all the stories I listed above were false. The existing building is run by a nonprofit specifically dedicated to providing affordable housing, and their plans for the site specified that the vast majority of the rents would be below market. The existing building, built in 1931, is a superblock with 472 units. Less than a block away are two more complexes with over 400 units each. Two blocks away is a row of four twelve-story towers-in-a-parking lot on top of a hill. This building would fit in completely with the existing context.

The impacts on transit are similarly overstated. First of all, some people won’t be commuting to Manhattan anyway. They could be retired, or telecommuting, or working elsewhere. And unfortunately, some won’t be commuting by train. In 2008, Rachel Weinberger wrote a great report called “Guaranteed Parking, Guaranteed Driving,” demonstrating that if you include parking with housing, people are much more likely to drive. The plans called for 220 units in the new building, and about as many parking spaces, which sounds dreadful. Based on Weinberger’s research we can predict that those 220 spaces would induce a lot of driving.

Of course some people will take the train no matter what happens, and that number will probably increase as more people realize that driving is a pain in the ass. So let’s imagine that these 220 apartments produce a really high number of transit commuters to Manhattan, say 330, or an average of 1.5 commuters per apartment, including two-bedrooms, one-bedrooms and studios. According to the MTA, on the average weekday in 2016 there were 6795 Metrocard swipes at the closest station, less than five percent of the daily total. Even if all 330 commuted to Manhattan between 7:30 and 8:30 AM, that would add an average of three people per 167-person subway car.

Schools were overcrowded ten years ago, no doubt. But the city has recently opened two new schools and two new additions to existing schools, and plans to continue building more. The claim that the street was inadequate for the traffic is similarly false. It handles all the cars and trucks for the existing lot, and the proposal includes plans to build the missing sidewalk on the south side of the street.

A common theme was that “the entire community” was against this project. I was not opposed. I was slightly in favor, despite the oversupply of parking, because I found all the reasons for opposition incredibly thin, and I figured it would modestly increase the housing supply and thus help to bring down rents. I never heard any enthusiastic support, but there were plenty of people who were not opposed. I occasionally disputed some of the more outrageous stories with my neighbors on Facebook, in a respectful and neighborly way, and they got very upset. Some of them unfriended me.

So basically, the rents were going to be relatively affordable. The building was not going to be particularly large or tall for the area. It wasn’t going to increase overcrowding on the subway to any noticeable degree, and the neighborhood was not united in opposition. All the "local knowledge" was completely false.

I was originally going to write a post about how local people lie, similar to one I wrote back in 2012. I don’t think these neighbors of mine are lying, exactly. It’s more what’s been called “bullshit”: a propaganda soup mixed up without regard for truth. But I realized something else about this particular bullshit: it isn’t local.

There is one specific piece of local information: many tenants of the existing complex are not happy with the way the nonprofit has managed their buildings. Everything else is generic boilerplate about a “large real estate developer” looking to build a “massive apartment building.” These are the same things we read in stories from Morristown to Minneapolis.

My neighbors are almost certainly not in the pay of a large multinational corporation dedicated to opposing new housing construction. But they don’t just live in a local world. They read Jeremiah Moss and maybe Jane Jacobs too. They’ve seen at least half a dozen movies where the villain is a large real estate developer looking to build a massive apartment building. They’ve seen people protest new construction on TV, heard it on the radio and read about it in the New York Times. Many of them have friends in other neighborhoods and other cities who are engaged in similar struggles.

Some of them are afraid of the City's plans for Sunnyside Yards, which do sound like the kind of crazy, destructive thing Robert Moses used to do. Never mind all the differences, never mind that they've quietly acquiesced to the much more wasteful and destructive Kosciuszko Bridge replacement; they see this 200+ unit apartment building as the thin end of the wedge

They need no coaching; they know the script. Out of context, massive traffic jams, casting shadows, destroying the character of the neighborhood. The transit angle is something you don’t get everywhere, but these days you hear it wherever there’s a train. The rest of it is just a re-enactment of the same story they’ve heard dozens of times, with them in the role of the Local Heroes who Band Together. That’s why they unfriended me: I was saying the wrong lines.

These residents appear to display local knowledge (“we have a parking shortage”) but it is fake local knowledge disconnected from local reality, a prop to brandish during their performance. Similarly, “the community” is a prop, a fake community with fake unity, standing in for the real communities that inhabit the neighborhood, barely aware of each other, each with its own corrupt decision-making process and its multitudes of alienated minorities.

This is actually the opposite of the often-repeated fable of the Wise Locals against the Clueless Planner. The planner might not live in the neighborhood (though some of my neighbors are planners), but with some careful observation they could come up with more reliable local knowledge than anything produced by the opponents of this project.

The real lesson to take from the failures of central planning is not the value of local knowledge, but the value of humility. And the lesson we should take from the failure of this project is that local residents can be just as bereft of humility as anyone else, with consequences that are just as dire in the aggregate as the consequences of Robert Moses's hubris.

Do New York's "manufacturing zones" promote driving?

I read on YIMBY that some people who live or work in the Jerome Avenue corridor in the Bronx are concerned that rezoning the area to allow residential development could price out many of the auto body shops and other car-related businesses that operate in the area. I sympathize with the concerns, but I think things have to change. And the more I think about it, the more important it seems to me.

A walkthrough of the Jerome Avenue area conducted by the Department of City Planning, January 2013. Photo: Gerard Flynn.

It seems pretty clear that allowing residential uses will price out auto-related businesses. There is a tremendous demand for housing, and housing is displacing auto services wherever they are allowed to compete, from the gas stations of the East Village to the garages of the Upper West Side to the used car lots of Woodside. I am not including Willets Point in this: there is no competition there, only government fiat.

As a business owner, I am not exactly happy about small businesses being unable to survive. My brother-in-law is an auto body mechanic, so I also appreciate the value of good technical jobs that do not require a college degree. And yet, there is such a thing as a job that costs too much. I have argued that the costs of each Tappan Zee Bridge construction job, in terms of sprawl, pollution and yes, death and destruction, are too high. I would say the same thing is true for auto related jobs along Jerome Avenue, and elsewhere in the city.

We have driven away many of the port jobs and the manufacturing jobs, and auto related jobs are a good chunk of what is left. As my friend Stephen Smith, who used to write for YIMBY, has observed on Twitter, the vast majority of businesses in M zones around the city are not involved in manufacturing anything.

Every time I have heard about a gas station closing or a parking garage converted to apartments, I have smiled inside. I smiled because I remembered the difficulty of crossing in front of these gas stations and garages. "Difficulty" is too nice a word: I remembered the dread I felt trying to walk in front of the gas stations as drivers cruised in and out across the sidewalk at high speeds. I remembered the humiliation I felt when garage customers parked across the sidewalk, forcing me out into traffic. I smiled at the thought that nobody else would feel that dread and humiliation again.

I and many other pedestrians have been similarly threatened and humiliated in front of car dealerships and repair shops in "industrial zones" across the city. Some have been killed. You will forgive me if I am not horrified at the prospect of losing an industry with such little regard for safety.

But we still have millions of cars stored in our city, and millions more that come in for the day. Where will their owners buy and sell them, and bring them to be serviced, if not on Jerome Avenue, Northern Boulevard, Jamaica Avenue or Atlantic Avenue?

Well, if they had to they would go to Hempstead Turnpike, or Kennedy Boulevard, or Boston Post Road. But that makes me think: if these businesses can't survive on Jerome Avenue or 21st Street without being protected from competition from housing, that means that we are essentially subsidizing the cheap rent, and thus the cheap repair jobs, with our expensive apartments. My mom is paying more every month so that the guy who cuts her off in the crosswalk can pay less to have his oil changed.

And that makes me wonder: what if we didn't have these bogus "Manufacturing" zones? What if we allowed people to build apartments wherever they thought they could rent them? Would the rents continue to rise? Would there be the same pressure to waste public money on railyard decks? Would we still have as many cars clogging Queens Boulevard every day? Would we still have Levels of Service that make our traffic engineers loath to build real crosswalks? Would we still have community boards packed with parking-obsessed NIMBYs?

Please, let's find some jobs for these people so that we can shut down the M zones.

Could we build another Park Slope?

Do you like the modern towers of the Upper East Side?

Photo: Peter Cigliano / Flickr.

How about a nice gigantic Upper West Side prewar apartment building like the Ansonia?

Photo: wallyg / Flickr.

Or the brownstones of Park Slope?

Photo: Beyond My Ken / Wikipedia.

Or is all that too dense and urban for you? Maybe you'd prefer the lovely Victorians of Irvington, NY?

Photo: June Marie / Flickr.

Gorgeous places to live! Of course, you and I are not the only ones who think so. These are some of the most desirable locations in the country. There are millions of people who would love to live in places like these.

So why don't we build more?

Why not buy up a block of crappy 1960s Stately Homes in Woodside and replicate the Ansonia? Or raze some raised ranches in Massapequa and build a block of brownstones? Build a new Victorian main street leading down to the Croton station, where now there are strip malls?

It turns out that there are some attempts to do this. Andres Duany is involved in a project in Jersey City that looks pretty cool. If you know of any others in the New York area, please let me know!

Unfortunately, those projects are a drop in the bucket. Zoning rules across the region make it next to impossible to build big modern towers on the Upper West Side, or a new Ansonia in Park Slope, or a block of brownstones in Irvington, or a new Irvington in Scarborough. The Municipal Art Society's recently released zoning envelope map confirms that the massive downzoning conducted across the city by Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Burden reinforced this prohibition. And people wonder why rents keep going up...

New transit and our goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's fighting car dependence?

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

Trainwreck at the edge of the water

Today I took a little trip up to the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater, New Jersey, and picked up some Pocky, instant iced green tea, and river views. This large Japanese supermarket, with in-house cafes and nearby bookstore and chatchka shop is definitely worth a visit; I've been going every few years since 1996, when it was called Yaohan. The Kennedy Boulevard jitney providers have taken over the shuttle service, which now costs three dollars each way and leaves from Gate 51 of the Port Authority Bus Terminal every half hour on weekends. But do yourself a favor and wait upstairs, because the jitney drivers don't shut off their engines when they're in the terminal.

It made me sad to look out the window as the van went down River Road, though, sad for what is and what might have been. Of all the missed opportunities for urbanism, this is one of the most extreme that I know.

I'm not sure what was at the foot of the Palisades when the Dutch arrived in the area; probably just some scree like in the Palisades Interstate Park further upriver. Ferry docks were built at strategic points, and the railroads dug tunnels through the ridge to the docks. In this stretch of the river, the West Shore Railroad had a tunnel through to Weehawken, now used by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, and the New York, Susquehanna and Western had a tunnel to Edgewater, now abandoned. Tracks were built connecting the mouths of the two tunnels to the terminals of other railroads further south, and a series of piers were built along that railroad to ship various materials.

As the railroads cut back in the 1950s and 1960s, the shipping business migrated to other parts of the port area like Newark, or other parts of the world. Many of the piers were abandoned for years. Since the 1990s the area has experienced a huge construction boom. I'm sure there were several factors involved, probably including a significant rezoning, but it was also in part due to Arthur Imperatore's successful revitalization of the commuter ferry service, and the arrival of the light rail line.

Much of the ride down River Road in 1996 looked similar to what you might have seen in 1966, but it's unrecognizable today. Almost every pier, every plot of waterfront land, hosts either a shopping center or luxury housing. Many of the old buildings further inland have middlebrow stores and restaurants on their ground floors, and are being infilled with other shops and gas stations.

So this is infill development, really close to Manhattan, instead of way the hell out in Suffolk County or the Highlands. Why does it make me sad? Because it might as well be in Suffolk County. There are almost no walkable streets in the area. River Road has hardly any pedestrians and you can't blame people because it has wide car lanes, too many of them, and narrow sidewalks, and virtually none of the shops, restaurants or residences engage with that sidewalk. There is a semi-continuous riverwalk, but it zigzags around the piers and buildings, past windows and terraces that do not interact with it. Despite all this development, River Road does not make the frequent network map because you're very likely to wait more than fifteen minutes for a bus.

River Road is one of the reasons I'm so skeptical about "density" being an important factor in transit use or walkable streets. It's got density, or something resembling density. I don't know the numbers, but all of this new construction is apartments and townhouses, with no detached single family houses that I could see. But all that development was designed for driving.

Vela Townhomes. Photo: Hobokencondos / Flickr (be sure to check out the photostream for more waterfront goodness)

Every housing complex has tons of parking, often obscured by an overhanging apartment or townhouse ... structure (it's hard to call them buildings because the architecture is so fragmented). Sometimes the parking is in its own big ugly building, and sometimes it's designed so that it's immediately adjacent to the apartment or townhouse of its occupant. The new shops and restaurants are all the same kind of strip development, overloaded with surface parking that would be equally at home in Scottsdale, Arizona as on Tonnelle Avenue on the other side of the Palisades.

So here we have dense infill development a short distance from one of the most walkable job centers in the country, and still it's just as car-oriented as Phoenix. I'm guessing that the two biggest factors involved are the zoning code and outdated standards followed by the New Jersey Department of Transportation, which together have built one of the densest driving-oriented suburbs I've seen.

I call this a "trainwreck," because I've been watching it for years, powerless to stop it. Of course I didn't have this blog back in 1996, and I was only just beginning to grasp connections between transportation and land use. I had no way to talk coherently about this, and nobody who would listen to me if I had. So I've had to just sit and watch for sixteen years, as one unwalkable waste of space went up after another.

Individual mandates for transportation

This morning I was listening to Chana Joffe-Walt and Alex Blumberg talk about the Supreme Court healthcare ruling, and they gave a good explanation of the rationale behind the individual mandate: increasing the pool of insured customers - especially by adding healthy young people - reduces the risk that an insurance agency will wind up with a high percentage of sick people on their rolls, and paying out more than they take in. This in turn makes it palatable for the insurers to give up the right to deny people on the basis of preexisting conditions. Between that and the expansion of Medicaid, we should see a lot more efficiency in healthcare because people are not relying on unpaid emergency room visits to keep themselves alive.

As I listened, I realized that the situation in transit is very similar. All transportation infrastructure and services require a critical mass of users. We sneer at empty lanes and empty trains, and rightly so. They mean that the concrete and steel that have gone into the infrastructure is sitting unused, and if we have to put more resources into maintaining them we are getting relatively little use from those resources. The time of the train operators, conductors and station crews are also being wasted, as is that of the highway patrol officers, toll collectors and maintenance staff.

How do you get that kind of security? Just like in healthcare, you can't rely on people making a choice for each event. There are in fact at least four kinds of transportation choices: the Single Trip, Habits, Investments and Subsidies. Because we're creatures of habit who buy things and have government infrastructure spending, Single Trip choices determine a small minority of our transportation use.

I'd love to know if there are studies that show how many trips flow from each kind of choice, but even without one I think we can all agree that it doesn't make sense for a transportation provider to orient their strategy around Single Trips. Imagine if a supermarket ignored the Habits people develop around bread and milk, or Investments like microwave oven sales, or Subsidies in the Farm Bill. A supermarket that didn't sell milk, or microwaveable dinners, or corn products, would lose customers to those that did.

But going back to the comparison with healthcare, what if there were an individual mandate to purchase transit? Would we see a more stable, better funded transit agency that can offer more frequent service? Well, if we look at the National Transit Database, we see that the bus companies and agencies that have more than a 50% farebox recovery ratio, there are two groups: (a) ones that use the Lincoln Tunnel XBL and (b) ones that serve college towns. In the (b) group, the colleges usually pay the transit agency an annual fee drawn from tuition, and the student IDs function as bus passes. In some places, like Amherst, MA, the routes serving the colleges are free when college is in session. This is an individual mandate on a local scale.

We could do this in other places too, and there's a whole "free public transit" movement that argues for just that. But a lot of people hate individual mandates, and I have to agree with them in part. I'm uncomfortable with the idea myself, and if healthcare wasn't such a bullshit choice I would probably care more. In practice, the only people who have any real choice when it comes to health insurance are the very rich and the suicidally insane.

The good news is that an individual mandate may not be necessary for transit. Before I go pushing some big new expensive thing for transit, I always like to see if there's some way we're fucking up the transportation system as a whole. And whadya know, we have an individual mandate for driving. Almost every new building in this country is mandated to provide space for people to park their vehicles. Cities set aside large amounts of curb space for free vehicle parking. If you don't have a vehicle, then you're paying a premium on your rent, mortgage, shopping, government services and taxes for free parking that you don't use.

Today Josh Barro wrote, "Transit advocates aren’t incorrect when they grumble about road subsidies. But if they really want American mass transit to work better, they’re missing the key target. A much smarter approach would be three-pronged: reduce subsidies, allow looser urban zoning, and get transit costs down." And he makes it clear that "looser urban zoning" includes getting rid of those minimum parking requirements. Don't let that one out of your sight.

Not all housing is equal

Last weekend I read Matt Yglesias's concise 76-page critique of housing policy, The Rent is Too Damn High. I agreed with pretty much everything he says, and I think everybody who's interested in these issues should read it. I want to pick up on a couple of the points Yglesias made, but then to go in a different direction. Yglesias is mostly talking about the average price of housing relative to average incomes, and that's important, but I want to talk about the distribution of housing prices: how and why some houses and apartments are more expensive than others, and what that means for access (and therefore for justice and equal opportunity), for society, and for our other goals: increasing efficiency and reducing carnage and pollution.

Suppose that tomorrow there's a revolution in New York City. Zoning and rent control are abolished, and every member of the City Planning Commission and the community boards is sent off to the reeducation camps. Spreading out from the Empire State Building, developers cover the New York area in parking-free high-rises until there's enough housing for everyone, at affordable prices. Sounds great, right?

Almost. But all housing is not created equal. Some apartments are bigger, some have better views, some have are more conveniently located. Some come with relatively superficial amenities like pools and package services. Some are dangerous or bad for your health, from crime, pollution, bad construction or neglect.

Some housing differences are a matter of taste, like neighbors who play loud salsa music or cook Indian food. Some people choose their housing out of racism, moving out if a Black family moves in. Some people want to live near people like them. Some people want to live where there is ethnic diversity, with no single group dominating.

All these factors affect the price of the housing. People who can't afford higher rents will necessarily have to put up with some undesirable features, like bad views, loud music, crime or a long commute. And that's where issues of fairness arise.

Even though I sometimes talk about market solutions to various problems, I am not a libertarian. I believe that some people are poorer than others through no fault of their own - including twentysomethings and creative types as well as members of stigmatized minority groups - and therefore need something to balance out the inequality of opportunity that comes with inequality of wealth. I also believe that some people are less wealthy than others because they've chosen a career that benefits society in some way - like teaching or cleaning toilets - and society should compensate for that. I believe that it's good for people to live near others of different economic backgrounds, and for kids to grow up with other kids who come from different walks of life.

One way of accomplishing this is through a top-down program like subsidized artist housing or Section 8 vouchers. A similar method is the "inclusionary housing" programs, which are very problematic. There is a more market-oriented solution, though: build more cheap housing. And cheap housing is bad housing. The next question is: bad in what way?

If the only determinant of an apartment's price is its distance from job centers, then the poor and the young will all wind up living on the outskirts of town, paying for their poverty with long inconvenient commutes. If the only determinant of price is proximity to a hazardous waste dump, or neglected housing stock, or gang activity, then the poor and the young will wind up in substandard housing, exposed to toxins and victimized by gangs. If the only determinant of price is proximity to "the right people," then the poor will wind up clustered together, having little contact with other social classes.

To prevent segregating the poor into inconveniently located bad housing with crime and pollution, we need to make some safe, solid housing available closer in, integrated with the rich people's housing. that is still affordable. In order to do that, we need to allow housing that's cheap in the non-dangerous, non-segregated ways. That means housing that's small or ugly, with crappy views and no doormen. Maybe housing that allows loud music if it doesn't bother anyone else. Regardless, it should still be well-built and well-maintained, and safe from pollution and crime.

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.)

From tragedy to farce in Bushwick

Today Streetsblog had a post about a few blocks immediately to the east of the Knickerbocker Avenue el station in Bushwick, where development is hostile to pedestrians.

Sprawl development in Bushwick. Photo: Christopher Taylor Edwards.

I was curious, so I pulled up the zoning for the area on City Planning's handy new ZOLA map (also on this PDF). The block with the military recruiter is zoned R6 with a C2-3 overlay, and the equally sprawly Burger King across the street is in a C4-3 commercial district. The C4-3 zone allows a floor-area ratio (FAR) of 3.4. The C2-3 overlay only allows a commercial FAR of 2.0. Both allow a residential FAR of up to 2.43, depending on setbacks. The developers could have built taller on both blocks.

These two zoning categories have identical parking requirements, and if the Burger King qualifies as "Refreshment stands, drive-in," it would have to have one parking space for every 400 square feet of floor area, with no waiver (PDF). The Burger King is about 5000 square feet, meaning that it's required to have thirteen spaces. In the parking lot there are about sixteen. The phone store is a bit more of a mystery, because when the amount of parking required is less than 25 spaces per lot, it is waived, but the developer built the parking anyway.

Noah Kazis writes, "Zoning may not be the chief culprit here. Head a block west along Knickerbocker, or follow the elevated subway tracks along Myrtle, and you’ll find vibrant commercial corridors with stores facing the sidewalk, not a parking lot. Even so, this seems like a location crying out for an intervention from New York City’s planners and economic development officials."

So if the zoning created that sprawl to the east of the el, why is there multistory mixed-use urban development under the el and to the west? The key is that the zoning code only covers new development, and all the buildings to the west were built in the 1930s, before the current zoning code was adopted in 1961.

The All Hands Fire. Photo: FDNY.

The next question is, why were the block with the Burger King and the block with the phone store new construction? What happened to the buildings that were there before 1961? To find that out, I found the area on the Digital Tax Map, and plugged the Block Number into ACRIS. There were some records referring to a "Bushwick II Urban Renewal Plan." And that led me to the fire. In 1977 the All Hands Fire was started by three boys playing in an abandoned knitting factory. It destroyed several blocks of stores and apartments. For years, not much was built except the ugly sprawly police station.

I haven't found much about the history of the Burger King block specifically, but the block with the military recruiter and the phone store was sold by the City in 1983 to a guy named Ralph Goffner. The deed contains the interesting clause that "The development and use of the subject property is limited to off-street parking purposes only, and any successor in interest shall not use the premises for any other purpose." Clearly, Goffner is now using the premises for other purposes as well as parking. I'm assuming that the City relaxed that covenant at some point, but I haven't found documentation. If so, they may have required that Goffner continue to use some of it for parking.

The bottom line is that it's not 1961 in Bushwick, and it's not 1983. It's 2011, and we now know that large curbside parking lots are anti-urban and anti-pedestrian. Single-use single-story buildings are pretty out of place next to a train station as well. The City should rezone the area to allow for denser development without required parking - C4-5A or something like the R6N district that I proposed in July with a C2-5 overlay.

Overpriced real estate and its underpriced access

Last week Andrea Bernstein interviewed Alex Marshall of the Regional Plan Association about the profitability of Jay Walder's new employer. After only 32 years of operation, Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway is able to offer Walder a million dollars a year while constructing a large system expansion, all without direct financial subsidies from the government. Walder's old employer, our own Metropolitan Transportation Authority, gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the government for operating costs, and billions for capital programs, and it still has been required to cut service and borrow billions to balance its budget. It could barely afford to pay Walder $300,000 a year, and some critics have demanded that that salary be reduced for the next MTA chair.

The MTR and the MTA are the largest transit providers in Hong Kong and New York, respectively, two very large, fairly dense cities, so why the difference in their financial shape? That's what Bernstein asked Marshall, and Marshall responded that the Hong Kong MTR makes money on real estate and uses that money to subsidize its transit facilities.

On the face of it this sounds a little odd; you could equally imagine the government running a frozen yogurt stand and using the profits to fund interplanetary exploration. But transportation and real estate are more directly connected than that. The real estate cry of "location, location, location!" is really about access. Housing properties with access to jobs, shopping and entertainment command higher prices and rents. Workplaces that are convenient to housing can attract better workers, and thus pay higher rents to property owners. Commercial properties that are on the way from home to work also attract higher rents.

As Jarrett has pointed out, transit systems - and transportation systems in general - are more about access than about mobility. In other words, they provide the real value in real estate. Without access there is no demand for property. That is why Google runs buses to bring workers to its suburban campuses, why condos in Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey run buses to bring residents to the train, and why Ikea runs buses to bring customers to its Red Hook store.

It makes sense, therefore, for the transportation system to receive some benefit in exchange for that value. This is Marshall's point, which he also lays out in a blog post: in New York the City and the railroads own just enough real estate to run the transit system, and they sell it whenever they can, as the New York Central and the Long Island Rail Road have sold the air rights over their yards. They have minor concessions in their stations, but just enough to keep the passengers from rioting.

By contrast, in Hong Kong the MTR keeps ownership of the areas around its station and develops shops, offices and apartments on that land. They use the rent from those developments to subsidize the trains. In essence, the property is overpriced and the access is underpriced, so the MTR is packaging the property and its access as an integrated product.

Here in New York, the MTA could do some of that. Stephen Smith just yesterday tweeted about a property right next to the Prospect Park subway station that is being built with an unnecessary underground parking garage. The MTA owns several surface-level stations in the outer boroughs, and could build on or near those properties to bring in additional revenues from those train lines - assuming that the zoning and the NIMBYs would allow them to build enough, without adding too much parking.

I've got more to say about Marshall's interview and blog post; stay tuned.

No-minimum zoning

As I wrote the other day, in New York City outside of Manhattan and Long Island City, every possible zoning district has minimum parking requirements. If you want an area where developers can choose to build without parking, you can't just get that area rezoned. Instead, you have to get it included in a "Subject Area," like Long Island City, which would open you up to the charge that you're "turning the neighborhood into Manhattan." The only other option is to get the City Council to pass a change to the Zoning Resolution. As far as I know, no council member has sponsored any such change, let alone getting it to pass.

The city allows districts to become Low Density Growth Management Areas, which are sort of the evil twin of Subject Areas like Long Island City, but they also contain anti-density provisions. I want this to be neutral with regard to density. There's no area of the city that's too sprawled out to support transit; there are just areas where people drive too much.

I have another proposal. I want the Council to create a set of no-minimum R4N, R5N, R6N, R7N, R8N districts that are identical to the R4B, R5D, R6B, R7X and R8X districts but without minimum parking requirements.

There is a legitimate case to be made that a developer who adds residential capacity has an obligation to provide transportation capacity for those residents. To address that, we could also (or instead) have a series of Transit Contribution districts R4T, R5T, etc., where instead of parking, the builder is required to contribute a certain amount to the MTA Capital Fund, perhaps earmarked for that Community District. Todd Litman estimates the cost of building a parking space in New York City at $20,326 (PDF, page 5.4-2), but that does not take into account the opportunity cost of using that floor space, so we could probably set it higher and it would still be a bargain for developers.

There would be no obligation under the law for these districts ever to be used. They would simply be an option that would be available under the normal rezoning process. It could be initiated by the Department of City Planning or by members of the community, but it would still need to go through the normal review process where the community boards, the borough president, the Planning Commission and the City Council all get to review it.

So what do you think? The first person who can get a zoning text amendment with these districts sponsored in the City Council gets a free Cap'n Transit T-shirt! Get it passed, and I'll give you a tote bag and a free lifetime subscription to this blog.

You can't not have minimum parking requirements

I've been against minimum parking requirements for a long time. These requirements, embedded in the zoning code, have a host of problems (PDF): they drive up the cost of housing, keeping down density and decreasing efficiency. They encourage people to drive, going against all our goals listed above.

For these reasons, some have proposed a cap on minimum parking requirements within walking distance of transit. Libertarians like Stephen Smith, and liberals like Matt Yglesias, would prefer to see parking completely deregulated citywide, if not nationwide. This may be the right way after all, and I'd be open to trying it, but I think it would be a tremendous political lift unless you could manage to build a grand coalition of libertarians and radical environmentalists strong enough to overcome the entrenched alliance between short-sighted conservatives and Subaru-wagon liberal NIMBYs.

In the meantime, here in New York at least, I would like to see the ability to change things at a lower level than the city. In a city where every Democratic candidate in the past three elections has pandered to the driving minority and the media is pervaded by the windshield perspective, it may be more feasible to get a single neighborhood like Sunnyside, Park Slope or Tremont to abolish its minimum parking requirements.

There's some precedent to this. Manhattan below 110th Street on the West side and 96th Street on the East Side have maximum parking limits, as does part of Long Island City. But that's it. Outside of these areas, as Angus found out here in Sunnyside and Woodside, there is no possible zone that comes without minimum parking requirements. The normal rezoning procedure does not include a way to remove parking requirements.

Short of rewriting the zoning code the only option is to have the City Council combine the neighborhood with Manhattan and the "Long Island City Subject Area." This can add to the difficulty: there may be people in the neighborhood who are indifferent to parking requirements, but afraid of "turning the neighborhood into Manhattan."

Manhattan - and Long Island City - parking maxima

Today I tweeted about a plot of land for sale in Long Island City, right on top of the ditch for the Long Island Railroad East Side Access project. It's around the corner from the Queens Plaza subway station (E, M and R trains) and a couple blocks from the Queensboro Plaza el station (N, Q and 7 trains). It wraps around "Clock Tower Plaza," the very nice 1927 Art Deco Bank of Manhattan building; you can see in this Forgotten NY page that there used to be a very forgettable modern three-story building at that location. And if you made the April 1st bid deadline, that land can be yours for only $9,500,000!

What got Stephen Smith interested (I'm assuming it was him tweeting @MarketUrbanism) was when I mentioned that there is no parking required for this land. Stephen didn't know that most of Long Island City has no parking minimum, and asked about other parking minima and maxima in the area. If Stephen doesn't know about it, a lot of other people probably don't. You can look it up in the Zoning Resolution (PDF), but a lot of people get intimidated by zoning documents, so I figure I'll read it for you and put it all down here for handy reference.

First of all, there is an area (is it the only area in the United States?) where there are no parking minima (except for public housing projects). This includes Manhattan Community Districts 1 through 8, meaning everything south of 110th Street on the West Side and 96th Street on the East Side (except Roosevelt Island, which is its own beast). It also includes the "Long Island City Subject Area," in the core of LIC, essentially everything in Queens west of 29th Street and south of 41st Avenue.

As Stephen asked, there are in fact parking maxima for these areas. In Manhattan south of 60th Street it's one space for 20% of the new dwellings. North of 60th Street it's one space for 35% of new dwellings. In the part of LIC northwest of the Sunnyside Yards it's one per 50%, and in the rest of LIC it's one per dwelling unit.

In practice, in Long Island City the developers always seem to want to build more apartments than they're allowed as of right, so they keep going to the community board for variances, and the community board demands lots of parking. I'm pretty sure that's how all the parking along Fifth Street got built. And of course there was the recent freak-out over the size of parking to be built at the new building on the south side of the plaza.

All things considered, though, I think this zoning has been very good for LIC. I'm surprised we haven't seen similar districts in other high-density, transit-rich areas outside Manhattan, like Downtown Brooklyn, Jamaica or the Bronx Hub, or north of 96th Street like 181st Street in Washington Heights.

Getting rid of minimum parking requirements

In many circles, minimum parking requirements have been accepted as part of zoning laws without question for years. Of course there have always been those who disagreed, but the conventional wisdom goes like this: people will have cars, if there's no off-street parking they'll park on the street, off-street parking is in high demand as it is, so we need to force developers to create on-street parking. As I wrote back in May, there is no corresponding mandate in favor of transit expansion, so these constitute an implicit subsidy to driving.

Clearly, parking minima should be phased out, but there will be objections from people who use on-street parking. How do we address these objections? You could argue that anyone who depends on the city for free parking should take what they can get, and you'd probably be right, but those people have more power than us, so we can't just tell them to suck it up. You could also argue that the best way to deal with scarce on-street parking is to start charging for it, and I'd be happy to support you on that, but we should be realistic about your chances of success there.

Some of my neighbors have a proposal. Since the argument for parking minima often rests on the idea that adequate transit is not available, why not eliminate or cap these minima in areas where we know transit is available? That's already what's done in the zone (PDF). The proposal is to eliminate or cap parking requirements within a quarter mile of transit.

One of the members of the group asked how to define transit. Does it include subways and buses, or just buses? It's a very good question: while many people can justify car ownership even if they live above one subway station and work above another one on the same line, I think most people would agree that a lot of the apartments within a quarter-mile of a subway line that goes to Manhattan don't need space for a car. But what about buses?

Well, it's clear that people use the buses. There are many bus routes in Queens that carry more than 10,000 passengers a day, round-trip. Most of those do not go to jobs in Manhattan, but rather they connect to subways. People seem satisfied with them. But those are for commuting; in order to live without a car, you need frequent service around the clock, seven days a week. Fortunately, I've already made a frequent bus network map for Queens. Most of the borough is within a quarter mile of a frequent bus or subway.

Someone could argue that these buses are not as reliable as the subways. If the MTA can cut any bus route, what's to stop them from cutting the Q46? Suppose a developer builds an apartment building without parking along the Q46, and then it gets cut? Then everyone in the building would buy cars, and fill up the streets!

There are a couple things to keep in mind here. One is that these frequent routes are not like the abandoned routes that have been given to the van companies. They have high ridership, and it would be hard to drive that many riders away. Most of them have very high farebox recovery ratios, and if they were abandoned it would be possible for lower-overhead jitneys to make a profit.

The other is the principle of induced demand. If developers aren't forced to build parking, residents will find it much easier to take transit, and that in turn will mean higher ridership for those transit lines. It will also mean more political support for transit subsidies, and less for driving subsidies.

I would argue that it is reasonable to eliminate or cap parking requirements for any building within a quarter-mile of a transit line (of any mode) that has service at least every ten minutes between 6AM and 10PM, seven days a week.