Twas ever thus...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cap'n's Bookshelf: Tepper Isn't Going Out

When I first started reading rave reviews for Tepper Isn't Going Out, Calvin Trillin's 2003 novella, I wasn't impressed. A story about parking regulations and the New Yorkers who live by them? How interesting could it be? In the end, I'm glad I decided to give it a chance, and I recommend it to anyone who's involved in the ongoing war for transportation resources here in New York.

The book's protagonist is Murray Tepper, a marketing executive in search of a list of people who will buy anything. Like many upper-middle-class New Yorkers from the Baby Boom generation, Tepper owns a car and has spent years doing the complex dance of parallel parking, alternate side cleaning rules and meter feeding necessary to store his car in Manhattan's publicly subsidized facilities. He finally masters the system just at the point where he can afford to rent a space in the garage attached to his building, and presumably pay full price for parking wherever he goes.

Tepper doesn't always use his garage space. He spends most of the book parking his Chevy Malibu in various free and metered spots around the city. Often, he just sits there and reads the newspaper, to the frustration of many other drivers, who see him in the car and assume he's "going out," hence the title of the book.

The frustration and puzzlement of the other drivers gets so intense that the paranoid mayor Frank Ducavelli, clearly a caricature of Rudy Giuliani, gets involved. He is convinced that Tepper is up to no good, and has the city attorney give Tepper a summons under an obscure law from 1911. But sympathetic stories about "SIMPLE GOOD SENSE FROM AN OLD-FASHIONED GUY" appear, and Tepper is deluged with letters of support. The judge dismisses the case, and Tepper gets a sudden change in fortune that allows him to retire.

At the end of the book, a character named Ray Fannon, a columnist for the Daily News, visits Tepper and lays out an alternate explanation for the events described in the book. I won't give away the ending, but his speculations were provocative.

For a while I thought that Fannon was right, because I noticed something in the book: nobody actually uses their cars for transportation. I mean, they go places; Tepper regularly drives down to Russ and Daughters' to buy a nice whitefish. But it's not clear that he's driving in order to get fish, as opposed to just driving in order to get to a good parking spot, and picking up a nice whitefish because the spot happens to be in front of Russ and Daughters'. It's not just Tepper; nobody in the entire book drives to get anywhere. What clinched it for me is that there were two times when Tepper actually did have to go somewhere. Once he caught a cab, and the other time he took the subway.

In Tepper Isn't Going Out, driving and car ownership are entirely symbolic activities. Owning a car is a marker of your status, and meter-feeding and the alternate-side dance are things you do to display that status. Tepper understood that, which is why he continued to park long after he began renting the space in his garage. Ducavelli went after Tepper because he saw that Tepper's parking interfered with the transportation functions of the city, and felt threatened. All the people who defended Tepper did so because they felt that status was more important than transportation, and respected his right to display his status at the expense of people who actually wanted to go somewhere.

My elegant theory was somewhat dashed by reading a Times profile of Trillin that came out as he was finishing the book. According to the Times, Trillin actually owns a car in Manhattan and drives it down to Russ and Daughters' on a regular basis. So maybe Fannon was wrong after all, and Tepper simply wanted to be left alone.

Should the MTA Board be elected?

One of the stupidest ideas to come out of the Left recently is that the MTA should be run by an elected board rather than an appointed one. If you think the system we have now is crazy, you don't want to see it with an elected board.

Now don't get me wrong: the current setup is definitely dysfunctional. The board is packed with real estate speculators and "transit advocates" who spend a lot of time protecting underpriced parking. Most of them don't even ride the trains.

One result has been a series of sweetheart deals, where the MTA has sold off the air rights above its rail yards to well-connected developers for below-market prices, with plans to build large, money-losing parking facilities that will draw customers away from the MTA.

The sweetheart deals are disgusting, but they're minor, one-shot deals, and the amount of money involved is tiny compared to the MTA's total debt. The MTA can only get back on a sound financial footing if the Legislature restores some of the money it has siphoned off in the past fifteen years.

We want to fix this, but a directly elected board is not the way. Even worse would be Howie Hawkins's proposal to have two-thirds of the board elected by the public and one-third by the MTA employees. Why would this be such a bad thing? It's democracy, right?

Let me give you a little illustration. Many years ago, I was in an officer of a small student political group in a distant city, and I got a call from a bicycle activist I knew. He wasn't a member of our organization, or even our political party, but he was running for election to an obscure municipal board that just happened to have influence over bicycle policy. I helped this guy reach out to the student body in a way that clearly violated campus rules, and he won by a small margin, quite possibly entirely due to that outreach. Now that city has over four hundred miles of bicycle facilities.

Sounds great, right? The results are impressive, but the whole thing was completely undemocratic. A tiny, dedicated group was able to sway an election to represent a fifth of the city. Only a small number of people were informed enough to know who they were voting for when they went into the booth. If you want democracy, you want the issues and agendas to be disclosed and debated well in advance. The only reason I feel comfortable with this is the knowledge that the pro-car people were pulling the same kinds of tricks. It was a dirty fight, so we fought dirty.

I'm pretty sure that this kind of dirty politics is not what Hawkins has in mind when he talks about a directly elected MTA board, but that's what we'll get if his plan gets put into place. It's also the kind of thing that regularly happens on school boards around the country. If you've been paying attention for the past year and a half, you'll be well aware of the number of people who haven't. Very few people know who their State Legislators are, and of those people, a tiny proportion know that these legislators have been redirecting money "dedicated" to the transit system for other purposes. Would you trust these people to vote for a representative to the MTA board?

In general, there were way too many candidates on the ballot this fall. The Federal government has a nice clean system of checks and balances where we vote for a President, two Senators and a Representative, and that's it. Everyone in the Federal government is accountable to the President or the Congress, or else they're members of the judiciary.

In New York we voted for Governor, Comptroller, Attorney General, Senator, Assemblymember and a whole bunch of judges. I was having trouble keeping all those races straight, and after I came out of the voting place I wasn't entirely sure whether I had actually cast a vote for an Attorney General candidate. I would be happier if we just voted for a Governor and a single legislator. People would be much more likely to know who they're voting for if they only have to keep track of two races.

The most democratic way to run New York's transit system is to have it be an executive agency just like the Department of Transportation. Sure, a Governor or an Assemblymember with a lousy transit platform might get elected on the basis of some other issue, but it's not like that doesn't happen for everything else. I really don't think we need to vote every year for our representatives to the transit board, the school board, the park board, the utility board, the insurance board, and so on. In fact, it might not have been as easy for Cuomo to duck the question of transit funding for as long as he did, if it had been clearly spelled out that the Governor controls the subway system.

That's my spiel, but I know that there are places that actually do have elected transit boards. There was some news in this election about people running for the BART board in the Bay Area. If anyone reading this is familiar with elections like that, please tell us what you think.

The problem with not borrowing

We've heard a lot about the evils of borrowing in the recent election cycle, but I don't think enough attention has been paid to the evils of not borrowing. In other words, to the problems of not having money when you need it.

Obviously, if your income goes down and you don't borrow, you can't spend as much as you used to. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you don't need to spend as much money. For us, though, it is. Accomplishing our goals will require a massive shift from personal cars to transit, and we will need to spend lots of money to develop the necessary capacity.

If your income is down and you don't borrow, you miss out on investments that could increase your income down the line. Worse, deferring maintenance can mean bigger expenses down the line, as with the Manhattan Bridge. The worst is when you spend money for infrastructure that doesn't get used for 73 years.

It may be better to borrow if it will increase your income later, if it will avoid much bigger expenses, or if it will allow you to put previous investments to use. You just need to be fairly certain that the costs won't exceed the benefits. Of course, you can never be completely sure: nothing about the future is a hundred percent certain. It's important to be careful and not take big risks. But it's also important to take small risks to avoid major expenses.

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.

Learning from the failure of the livery van program

Earlier this week, Taxi and Limousine Commission Chair David Yassky acknowledged that the Commission's plan to run vans on five abandoned local bus routes was failing, and took responsibility for that failure. I don't think it's quite dead yet, and I'll have another post soon on ways to save it, but for now I'd just like to give some reasons why it's failing.

First of all, please send this to every uninformed loudmouth who tries to tell you that they need to run the MTA like a business, man. There are some runs that can never make a profit without radical changes that are beyond the control of the MTA and most potential bus operators. There are also many differences between running a private business and running a public agency. These differences show in the case of the vans.

It's very admirable of Yassky to take the fall for this project, but he's a government guy who spent eight years in the City Council. I don't get the impression that this was his idea. I don't know if he has any business experience, but he's never been a big pusher of privatization. At least some responsibility should rest with the person who told him to do this but didn't give him any resources with the necessary business expertise. Maybe Bloomberg, maybe Goldsmith, maybe both.

So now here are some points to take away from this whole debacle:

Jitney service is qualitatively different from scheduled government bus service. It really seems as though Yassky's (and Bloomberg's) big mistake was thinking that the "dollar vans" are profitable because they're smaller and non-union, and would therefore be able to succeed where the MTA failed. Unfortunately for this program, that's only part of the story: they can be profitable when they operate in thick markets (to use the term introduced by Klein, Reja and Moore (PDF), but will not automatically be otherwise.

Admitting ignorance is the first step on the path to wisdom. Bloomberg, Goldsmith and Yassky have never run a jitney operation. Ricketts and Haqq have never run a transit service for middle-class white people. None of them seem to have read Klein, Reja and Moore, even though I found it by just googling around. Maybe they should have looked to people who had at least some experience or knowledge in those areas.

Consider the customer's perspective. I don't really see any evidence that anyone involved in running this pilot ever imagined what it would be like to be a former passenger of any of these bus routes. Your bus route gets cancelled, so you find other transportation. Three months later, the city gives some guy permission to run fifteen-passenger vans with non-working seatbelts on the route, but you can't use your Metrocard or get a free transfer. You figure you'll give it a try, so you show up at the bus stop one day. There is no schedule, and you can't find any information on the TLC website. Maybe you wait fifteen minutes, maybe an hour. The van never shows up. Nobody is there to explain anything to you. You call a number on the sign, and nobody answers the phone. You're late to work or class. How many times would you go back?

Transit is in competition. People have different ways to get there.

Thin markets need an anchor. If you've got enough competition, you will need some kind of anchor to keep people showing up at the bus stops. You can't do it half-assed.

Sometimes marketing can help. In thick markets, everyone knows about the transit service and the operators compete on the basis of value. In thin markets, knowledge is scarce and marketing becomes much more important.

Gaps in service can kill your business. Wouldn't it be bizarre if all the Q74 riders had simply stopped going to classes, if the Q79 and B39 riders had stopped shopping, for three months, just waiting for someone to come along and put up a small, cryptic sign? They didn't; they found other ways to get where they were going.

Take constructive comments seriously. The TLC has been completely defensive and unwilling to entertain reasonable suggestions. Isn't that the point of a pilot, to gather feedback?

Well, I'll have another round of suggestions coming up soon. Gotta keep the hope alive! Or something like that.

Muddle-headed transit advocates

Every so often we get a new study that examines some aspect of transit politics and comes up with counterintuitive results. This is generally a good thing, because it's always important to reexamine your assumptions, but anti-transit forces will often inflate their conclusions in order to undermine transit advocates. Usually there's some theme of, "Oh, you muddle-headed transit advocates! You really mean well, but a bus with only two people on it is more polluting than a single-occupancy car. Don't you see that transit will never stop us from polluting the air?"

The latest such study, "Maintaining Equity in Transit-Rich Neighborhoods" (PDF), comes from Stephanie Pollack, Barry Bluestone and Chase Billingham of Northeastern University. I'm sure that Garyg or some other troll will be linking to it from the Streetsblog comments in no time: "Oh, you muddle-headed transit advocates! You really mean well, but transit lines only wind up increasing the percentage of people in the neighborhood using cars! Don't you see that transit will never be a real alternative to driving?"

Just reading through the reports on the article, I began to have some doubts, and after flipping through the PDF, I've got some real concerns. But before I get into the article, I'd just like everyone who reads it to imagine how much easier it would be to read if the authors had done a global search and replace of "TRN" with "transit-rich neighborhood." Done? Okay, let's move on.

The report is based on the Census data, and deals with a number of outcomes, including median income, racial diversity and attempts to estimate population displacement, but the outcomes we're concerned with are transit use for commuting and motor vehicle ownership. The authors studied the neighborhoods around 42 transit stations that had opened between 1990 and 2000.


So first, here are the big news findings: in 19% of these 42 transit-rich neighborhoods, the percentage of people commuting by transit increased at less than 80% of the rate for the metropolitan statistical area as a whole (and in 31% of them, the increase was more than 20% higher than the metropolis). In 26% of these neighborhoods, car ownership rose more than 20% faster than in the surrounding metropolis (and in only one neighborhood was it less than 80% of the rate for the metropolis). The authors' explanation is that transit-oriented development can lead to gentrification, bringing in wealthier suburbanites who keep their cars.

It's a prospect that's worth watching out for, and Pollack, Bluestone and Billingham recommend several possible measures to prevent it, including bundling transit passes with housing, unbundling parking, and reducing parking requirements. Those are a good idea in any area well-served by transit, whether the transit is old or new. But the effects they report are not very large, and it is important to connect them to our overall goals.

In terms of access for all, these results are largely irrelevant. The access is there, because the transit has just been built. There may be a long-term cyclical effect if the transit is not well-patronized; I will discuss that later.

In terms of increasing energy efficiency and reducing pollution, we want to see worldwide change. In terms of asthma and carnage the effects are local, but they are per area, not per capita. In terms of obesity and carnage, we are concerned not with increasing transit use but decreasing car use; walking and bicycling are as good for those as transit, if not better.

Why do we care about local effects as opposed to metropolitan or global effects? Because if people get displaced, they go somewhere. If poor, transit-dependent nonwhite people are forced by gentrification to move to a less transit-oriented suburb, they will not be any more likely to afford cars there than they did in the city, so they will bring their transit-dependent ways to the suburb. This means more business for the suburban transit lines, and more political pressure for transit expansion in the suburbs, if they can organize enough to overcome the inevitable opposition. The result could very well be a net decrease in car ownership and car use across the metro area.

The effects measured by Pollack and her colleagues are only directly relevant for one of our goals, improving society. Unfortunately, that's the goal that's been the hardest to pin down. Walkable neighborhoods, more face-to-face interaction, walkable businesses are all part of it. Car ownership definitely brings these down, as do car commutes, but it's hard to know how much.


Of course, transit use is a feedback loop, and if these car-owning yuppies demand wider roads it will set back the cause of transit. However, since there were overall population increases in many of these neighborhoods, there has been an overall increase in raw numbers of transit riders, and since there is gentrification, these transit riders tend to be wealthier and more influential, and thus more effective advocates for transit expansion, and more likely to be seen by potential transit funders as "us" than as "them." A racist state legislator is more likely to vote to fund a transit project if his friend's daughter lives in the neighborhood than if there's nothing there but "those people." And you thought the Cap'n couldn't do realpolitik!

All in all, this is something to be mildly concerned about, and if the report gets more people working to bundle transit passes with leases and to eliminate parking minima and unbundle parking, that's a good thing. But the analysis is so sketchy and so distantly related to the goals of transit advocacy that at this point it's a wash. Keep that in mind, all my muddle-headed transit advocates!

P.S. Also, check out Charles Siegel's comment on the Streetsblog DC discussion of the issue. It's true: the best way to bring down the price of anything is to produce a lot of it!