Cassandra on the street

I've never been a huge risk-taker, but when I was younger I used to ride bikes and roller skates in traffic, for miles, on a regular basis. I did this on the country roads of New Hampshire, on the stroads of Westchester and Long Island, and on the streets of Manhattan, New York, Chicago and other cities. I crashed more than once on country roads when I was a teenager. I knew that I could get hurt badly, even killed. But I practiced defensive cycling and skating, keeping my eyes open, going slow when I needed to.

I also drove occasionally. I owned a car once when I was a teenager, but couldn't afford to maintain it. I like to think I was careful, but only relative to other teens. No way I could afford a car phone, but I did let myself get distracted by eating and listening to tapes. Sometimes I sped, but usually when everyone else was speeding too. I was already aware of many of the problems with cars, but I still enjoyed driving them, and I liked the idea of long drives.

That all changed several years ago when I saw a cyclist get killed by an inattentive driver. I stood there and watched the life drain out of the man, knowing that I and those around me had done all we could do to stop it. A few days later I found out that he had a wife and kids who would never see him come through their door again. The main thing I did after that was to move back to the city where I would never need to own a car, but my experience was not over.

In Greek mythology we hear the legend of Cassandra, the princess of Troy. Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but then out of jealousy cursed her that she would never be believed. She spent the rest of her life foretelling the Trojan War, the horse that the Greeks used to enter the city, and the sack of the city. One disaster after another she saw coming, but she could do nothing to stop them.

Since I saw that man die, I have been sensitive to the dangers of cars. When I see objects of a certain weight moving at a certain speed, that sensitivity activates knowledge from the physics courses I took way back in college, and I can predict what their impact would be. Often they don't collide, because one stops or the other one swerves, but the impact is narrowly missed. I am also aware of the dangers posed by cars driving on sidewalks, even at low speeds, and by cars parked on sidewalks forcing pedestrians out into traffic.

You could call this the gift of prophecy. But when I try to tell people, they don't believe. Who can blame them, really? As Upton Sinclair used to say, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Many of these people have built their whole lives around their cars. How are they going to get to work? How will they get the kids to school? How will they get milk, and underwear, and sheet rock? How will they ever get laid? So they deny that there is a problem.

That is my curse. For years I tried to tell people when they were doing something that would put me or others in danger. Nobody wanted to hear it. I gave that up long ago, but still I see crashes that could happen. I keep them to myself, and just hope that this time will be more like other times, and that the cars will miss. That curse isolates me from people. When they're having a good time together in their cars, I stand by wailing about the destruction to come.

These Zones of Freedom!

I came across this notice taped to the window of a Red and Tan bus last week:

I apologize for the blurry words. Let me transcribe them:

In accordance with the "Zone of Rate Freedom" provisions of N.J.A.C. 16:53D-1.1 and N.J.A.C. 16:53D-1.2, the undersigned has filed a tariff with the New Jersey Department of Transportation for an increase in all its regular one-way intrastate fares effective May 1, 2012 as follows: All present fares are increased 10¢ per ride.

School ticket book fares per ride will be 66% of the increased regular one-way adult fares and senior and handicapped citizen fares will be 50% of the increased regular one-way adult fares so long as the state reimbursement programs for such reduced fare rates continue.

The increased fares are within the "Zone of Rate Freedom" established by the Commissioner of Transportation of the State of New Jersey.

Further information may be obtained at the company's office, 201-263-1254, or by contacting the Office of Regulatory Affairs, Motor Vehicle Commission, 225 East State Street, PO Box 162, Trenton, NJ 08666-0162.

Rockland Coaches, Inc.
180 Old Hook Road
Westwood, New Jersey 07675

This tells us at least two interesting things: (1) There is something called a "Zone of Rate Freedom" that constrains rate changes by private bus operators in New Jersey. It sounds like those "Free Speech Zones" at protests that remind you how much freedom you have by limiting it. (2) New Jersey has a reimbursement program providing low fares for students, seniors and "handicapped citizens."

I should make it clear that this relates to intrastate fares, in other words for trips that do not cross into New York, Pennsylvania or Delaware. There's a transportation lawyer who has a nice little history (if a little dated) of bus regulation in New Jersey. The Zone of Rate Freedom for interstate bus fares has been limitless since the 1980s (PDF).

Back in 2002, Tri-State had trouble finding out what the Zone of Rate Freedom was (PDF). It's determined every year by the New Jersey DOT, but it's not on the DOT's website. It is available, as they say, from Lexis-Nexis, so here's the latest edition for your reading pleasure. If you don't feel like reading through all that legalese, here's the Plain English summary: ±10%.

TITLE 16. TRANSPORTATION
CHAPTER 53D. ZONE OF RATE FREEDOM
SUBCHAPTER 1. GENERAL PROVISIONS

N.J.A.C. 16:53D-1.1 (2012)

§ 16:53D-1.1 General provisions

(a) Any regular route autobus carrier operating within the State, which carrier seeks to revise its rates, fares, or charges in effect as of the time of the promulgation of this rule, shall not be required to conform with N.J.A.C. 16:51-3.12, Tariff filings that do not propose increases in charges to customers, or 3.13, Tariff petitions that propose increases in charges to customers, provided the increase or decrease in the rate, fare, or charge, or the aggregate of increases and decreases in any single rate, fare, or charge is not more than the maximum percentage increase (10 percent for 2012) or decrease (10 percent for 2012), upgraded to the nearest $.05.

1. For illustrative purposes, the following chart sets forth the 2012 percentage maximum for increases to particular rates, fares, or charges and the resultant amount as upgraded to the nearest $.05:

Present Fare Percent of Increase Increase Upgraded To
Nearest $.05
$ 2.00 or less 10.0% $.20
$ 2.05-$ 2.50 10.0% $.25
$ 2.55 upward 10.0% $.30+


2. For illustrative purposes, the following chart sets forth the 2012 percentage maximum for decreases to particular rates, fares, or charges and the resultant amount as upgraded to the nearest $.05:

Present Fare Percent of Decrease Decrease Upgraded To
Nearest $.05
$.50 or less 10% $.05
$.55 to $ 1.00 10% $.10
$ 1.05 upward 10% $.15+


3. Except as may be provided in the Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity, changes to student, senior, transfer, interline and other unique rates, fares or charges for a regular route shall not be subject to the requirements of this chapter, provided they remain less than the current or adjusted regular route fare applicable to the route.

I love how they give you little examples in case you have trouble figuring out what ten percent of two dollars is. Yeah, I know that the ZORF could potentially be set to 17.3% and the fare could be $2.38, but still. Based on the history given in the Chapter Notes, it looks like it's been ten percent since at least 1984. But every five years they have a hearing. Those must be fun.

You know what else is funny? Coachusa doesn't even list the intrastate fares on their website.

The state budget's bogus parity

Every once in a while the debate over the New York State budget turns briefly to transportation, and we see where our leaders have their priorities. Back in January, Streetsblog reported that the Governor had allocated $150 million to the MTA Capital Plan for next year, 5.7% of the budget for that plan, while requiring the MTA to borrow six times as much. Even this paltry amount was blocked by the State Senate, until a budget deal was hashed out by the infamous "three men in a room": Governor Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Silver and Senate Majority Leader Skelos.

DeFrancisco, Libous and Skelos: making sure drivers get as much as possible.

State Senate Budget Committee chair John DeFrancisco made his priorities clear to Glenn Bain of the Daily News: "DeFrancisco also expressed concern that funding for upstate road and bridge projects were being treated fairly," wrote Bain. "We don’t have too many MTA trains going to Syracuse," DeFrancisco told him. When the deal was finally announced, Dana Rubenstein of Capital New York surmised that "what the Senate Republicans might have been holding out for, in this case, was more money for non-city road and bridge projects."

Republican Senators, in particular Tom Libous of Binghamton, the Deputy Majority Leader, were also concerned that there would be "parity" in road funding between upstate and downstate, and last week State leaders produced a "memorandum of understanding" that would send "$751 million to the upstate regions north and west of the Hudson Valley. ... the Hudson Valley, including Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Ulster and Dutchess counties, would get up to $158 million, Long Island would get up to $291 million, and New York City would get up to $415 million."

It's not clear what the actual basis is for the "parity" demanded by Libous and DeFrancisco. Are there the same number of drivers in the Hudson Valley as transit riders in New York City? As many drivers Upstate as in the City and the Island combined? Or is it based on land area, or taxes paid, or political contributions, or spiedie consumption? I don't have figures for those criteria, but let's take a look at the commuting population and how they get to work, from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey:

Region	Total commuting population	Drove alone, carpooled, taxi, bicycle or motorcycle to work	Public transportation to work
Upstate	3,029,501	2,841,155	11,399
Hudson Valley	1,003,833	797,964	122,356
Long Island	1,067,230	796,873	191,913
New York City	3,618,690	1,119,412	1,998,795
Total	8,719,254	5,555,404	2,324,463

Let's combine the public transit commuters from the Hudson Valley, the City and Long Island as the total constituency of the MTA. Some of them may only use their local county bus systems or even private buses like Red and Tan, but I'm guessing that most of the commuters from outside the city ride Metro-North or the Long Island Rail Road. We have to exclude Upstate transit commuters, because those transit agencies apparently got zero capital support from the State budget. You could say that people who walked to work benefited from State DOT money, but the state DOT spends so little of its money on pedestrian infrastructure it might as well be zero. True, everyone indirectly benefits from roads because they get things delivered by truck, but the enormous inefficiencies of truck freight would probably cancel out any indirect benefit.

Constituency	Commuters	Percentage of commuters	Capital funding	Percentage of capital funding
Upstate car/bike commuters	2,841,155	36.1 %	$751,000,000	32.2 %
Hudson Valley car/bike commuters	797,964	10.1 %	$158,000,000	6.78 %
Long Island car/bike commuters	796,873	10.1 %	$291,000,000	12.5 %
New York City car/bike commuters	1,119,4125	14.2 %	$415,000,000	17.8 %
MTA riders	2,313,064	29.4 %	$150,000,000	6.44 %
Total	7,868,468		$1,765,000,000

You can see that something's off there. Needless to say, bicyclists are a tiny share of commuters, but none of the percentages match. Now what if we allocated it differently, based on population?

Constituency	Percentage of commuters	Capital funding approved	Capital funding by population	Favored by budget
Upstate car/bike commuters	36.1 %	$751,000,000	$637,308,123	$113,691,876.61
Hudson Valley car/bike commuters	10.1 %	$158,000,000	$178,993,733	($20,993,732.96)
Long Island car/bike commuters	10.1 %	$291,000,000	$178,749,007	$112,250,992.57
New York City car/bike commuters	14.2 %	$415,000,000	$251,098,712	$163,901,288.03
MTA riders	29.4 %	$150,000,000	$518,850,424	($368,850,424.25)
Total		$1,765,000,000

So there you have it. The Upstate drivers, led by Tom Libous and John DeFrancisco, and the Long Island drivers, led by Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Transportation Chair Charles Fuschillo, each got over $112 million more than they would if it were based on simple commuting numbers. City drivers, led by Republicans Marty Golden and Andrew Lanza and Independent Democrats Jeff Klein and Diane Savino, got $163 million more. A tiny bit of this ($20 million) came from Hudson Valley drivers, but the vast majority, $369 million, came from city transit riders.

There is no "parity" here, even for drivers. The formula is simple: the more powerful "legislators" get more money for their constituents, and every driver is worth as much as 4.5 transit riders.

Keep this in mind next time you hear Skelos, Fuschillo, Golden, Lanza, Klein and Savino complaining about MTA cuts. They may act like they care, but when the money's on the line they're not fighting for transit riders.

Why I care about transportation in the suburbs

If you read my posts you'll notice that I live in the city, but I talk a lot about transit and roads in suburban counties like Rockland and Bergen. You might be wondering: why do I bother? Why not just let them have their roads and parking lots, and focus on my own transit and sidewalks?

Sometimes I even ask myself that, but I actually do have a good reason, with several consequences. The fact is that we live on one planet, in one country, and in one region. Within that region, I live in one state with lots of suburbs in it. New York City is not hermetically sealed off from these suburbs. They affect our lives, in terms of carnage, pollution, resource consumption and socialization. And of course, they affect our lives politically.

Of the cars that drive through my neighborhood, polluting and killing, many come from Long Island. Many more would be on the Long Island Expressway if it weren't full of people driving in from Long Island. Many of the teachers, police officers, firefighters, merchants, doctors and bureaucrats who work in my neighborhood live on Long Island and drive in. Some live even further, in Staten Island, Westchester and Rockland.

The air and water pollution from suburban cars gets borne by wind and water currents and winds up in my lungs and on the beaches I go to. Every gallon of gas burned in one of those cars is one less gallon that will be available to my grandchildren for energy, for plastic or for fertilizer. Every ounce of steel and rubber is one more ounce that will not be accessible without energy-intensive recycling. And of course, when they want "parity" for their roads, it's our tax dollars that go to build them, and rebuild them, and widen them....

The suburbs also affect our lives culturally. In my neighborhood in Queens, the non-car-owning half of the population primarily looks to Manhattan and its streets, while the car-owning half mostly looks to Long Island and its malls. But there is a large middle chunk of the population that looks both ways: drivers who take the subway in to see a Broadway show and walkers who bum rides to Roosevelt Field and Costco. It's especially noticeable as a parent of a small child, because many other parents, and magazines like Queens Parent, orient their lives around car-dependent destinations like the Alley Pond Environmental Center and the Long Island Children's Museum.

Most importantly, they affect our political lives, which means that they exert control over the laws and budgets that affect transit and walking. The leaders of the fights against congestion pricing and the Ravitch plan were legislators from Westchester and Long Island, but also from eastern Queens, the northern Bronx, southern Brooklyn and Staten Island. Drivers from the fringes of the city have provided critical margins for Rudy Giuliani, Christine Quinn and George Pataki.

It's true that there are plenty of politicians in the City who drive and who pander to those who drive. But many of them are on their way out, and others are changing their tunes. We need to make sure that the suburbs change their tunes too. We can't let the suburbs do what they (or at least their leaders) want. Their decisions affect our money, our air, our water,our culture and our safety.

Price drops aren't always forever

A few months ago I came across the notion of "filtering" on Charlie Gardner's Old Urbanist blog. It's an idea that's fairly well established in real estate economics, based on the observation that a lot of cheaper buildings are old and run-down. The theory is that the older a building is, the harder it is to maintain. The owners don't maintain it all that well, so it deteriorates, and no longer fetches as high a price or rent. The notion is usually the basis of an argument that adequate affordable housing doesn't require subsidies or mandates; we just have to wait for the housing to age and the market will take care of it.

As Charlie pointed out, this doesn't make any sense. Filtering is a very nice theory, but it really doesn't seem to match the data very well at all, and I expect that it will match it less and less well as time goes on. Charlie suggests that "the process of filtering, at least for initially high-income older neighborhoods, was a temporary result of rapid suburban dispersal in the 1940-1970 time period, and since that time has been steadily reversed."

Take the Grand Concourse in the Bronx for example. It was "the Park Avenue of the Bronx" when it was built, lined with large luxury Art Deco apartment buildings. Real prices and rents declined after World War II, and in 2000 you could get a two-bedroom apartment with hardwood parquet floors and a sunken living room for under $800 a month. Now those apartments go for $1500-2000.

It's true that most of those buildings were not well-maintained, but the causation is more likely the other way around: the landlords didn't put a lot of money into them because they didn't bring in much rent. So why were the rents so cheap? I'm guessing that there were several related factors: racism, city services, crime, noise, fads and the suburban ponzi scheme.

First, there are a lot of racists out there who don't want to live near black and Puerto Rican people, and if anything there were more fifty years ago. That reduces prices and rents anywhere near where black and Puerto Rican people live, which can be a good deal if you're not a racist. The problem is that the city was run by racists and by people who spent money where the rich and powerful people lived, and when the rich and powerful people moved away from the South Bronx, the city cut back on street sweeping, garbage pickup and other services. Most notably, it cut back on policing. At the same time the drug booms fueled by crack and other substances brought money and power to criminal gangs that lived in those neighborhoods. Some people (usually poor) seem to mind less when there's a lot of noise around from amplified music and other activities, but when the people who do mind move away, that lowers home prices and rents even more.

Finally, at that time it was "the thing to do" to move to the suburbs and buy as big a house on as big a piece of land with as big a car as you could afford. The suburban ponzi scheme described so well by the StrongTowns crew made housing cheaper in the suburbs than it needed to be to cover the amount of services that the municipalities were providing. All those factors made housing cheap in the Bronx, in Harlem, in Williamsburg and in Fort Greene.

Now those factors are reversing one by one. The suburban ponzi scheme has mostly burnt itself out. "The thing to do" is now to move back to the city and live in an apartment. The drug boom has subsided, and crime is much more under control. People may be less racist. So middle-class white people move back to the city, the noise levels go down, the city starts spending more money in the neighborhoods and the black and Latino people can't afford to live their any longer. Prices go up.

A lot of the anger over gentrification comes from the fact that the poor black and Latino people who lived in these neighborhoods for fifty or sixty years thought that the change was permanent. They thought that this was now their territory. Sure, they had to put up with crime, noise and dirty streets, but they got big apartments with parquet floors in Art Deco buildings on the Grand Concourse, and brownstones in Fort Greene and Harlem. They never thought anyone but them would want to live there again.

Is it fair that poor black and Latino people can't afford to live in these neighborhoods any more? Probably not. It wasn't fair when the neighborhoods were built and their grandparents couldn't afford to live in them. But the solution is not to keep the neighborhoods dirty, noisy and dangerous. As Matt Yglesias says, the best way to bring down the price of housing is to build more of it. And as I said last month, the best way to make sure that we have affordable housing that isn't dangerous or inaccessible is to build lower-quality housing alongside the high-quality housing.

When mobility is the enemy of commerce

For many years, Icelandair has been offering flights between Europe and North America, connecting in the main Keflavík airport. A friend who flew through there in the sixties pointed out that somehow there was always engine trouble or something else delaying the connecting flight, leaving travelers with time on their hands and nowhere to go but the Icelandic gift shops...

Engineer Scotty left a long and thoughtful comment on my recent post about vehicles for roads, streets and country roads. The whole thing is worth reading, especially for short-term recommendations, but I want to focus on this part:

But we still have need for intra-city mobility of the sort that cannot be accommodated with streets alone. Even if SOVs were banned, trucks and busses still need some way to get around to serve medium-distant trips. Cities need arterials of some sort to function.

I think that when he wrote that, Scotty hadn't yet read my subsequent post where I argue that trucks and buses will always kill and intimidate, and the only way to transport large loads and large groups of people without disrupting the street is by train.

The problem with urban "arterials" of any kind is that they don't work the way everybody seems to think they do. As I argued back in 2008, the nucleus of a city is a transportation pivot of some kind: a crossroads, an intermodal transfer point like a port or a railroad station, the entrance to a pass or a valley, or even just a rest stop.

It is the very fact of having to slow down, stop or rest that makes a city what it is. If the travelers and drivers don't stop, they won't spend money, and there is no reason for businesses to set up there. If there are no businesses, there are no jobs and thus no reason for anyone else to live there.

Bypasses kill cities in two ways. They can simply remove any reason to slow down or stop at all, so that every customer just goes flying by, and all the commerce goes to another city. Or they can move the crossroads away from the old downtown to a new place on the outskirts, which becomes the new downtown (if you can call it that).

Yesterday, the Urbanophile tweeted links to a Detroit Free Press article about the vast open spaces in that city, and a Chicagoist post about similar developments on a smaller scale in Chicago's South Side. My reply was simple: both places have been bypassed. They're no longer at any kind of pivot point on the way to anywhere. They no longer have access to anything useful. So why would anyone want to live or make anything there?

Of course, Scotty isn't talking about a bypass, but some kind of moderate arterial where through traffic is prioritized over local side traffic. This is the same problem, just to a lesser degree. The easier you make it for traffic to pass through the city - the more you facilitate mobility - the less commerce you have. In cities, mobility is the enemy of commerce.

I'm simplifying, you understand. A city can't be a complete bottleneck to the point where people make their own bypasses, for example by going through other cities. The people who sell things to travelers, well they have to get those things somehow. Sometimes you need to go outside easy walking distance to another neighborhood, and you don't want that to be too difficult.

That kind of wider access can be provided by transit. The ideal urban transit is the subway, because it's mostly invisible, but you can get a lot with elevateds and "green tracks" trolleys. Bicycles, of course, are a great way of providing medium-range mobility.

In the past the push for bypasses came from two directions: the shippers and travelers who didn't want to be slowed down, and the neighbors who didn't want traffic. But the reason the neighbors didn't want traffic was because the traffic was dangerous, noisy and polluting. Cities like Detroit and neighborhoods like Bronzeville will never come back until through traffic can cross them at a safe, human scale.

The key is to balance mobility and access with commerce, comfort and safety. Speed can be mitigated by the use of rails instead of tires, and lightweight vehicles like bicycles and pushcarts. Separate faster rail traffic from slower foot traffic if you must, but if you make your city too easy to go through or around, then you risk making it irrelevant.

The right way to connect roads and streets

As I wrote yesterday, we have trucks and buses for highways, feet and pushcarts for streets, and pickup trucks for country roads. A lot of the problems we have come from people using trucks and buses on streets.

One common workaround is to create hybrid vehicles that can operate on some combination of highways, streets and country roads. Panel trucks, sedans, sport-utility vehicles and pretty much any vehicle that I didn't mention in the previous paragraphs are examples. Even bicycles. Versatility is good, right? Well, most of these vehicles aren't actually all that versatile. Cars and trucks of all sizes still disrupt street life. Fast cars and trucks disrupt country roads. Bicycles, compact cars and pushcarts can disrupt highways.

Some of this comes from my Law of Transportation Mode Inertia: people in cars tend to stay in cars. Beyond that, there's another widely observed law of inertia: that people driving at high speeds tend to want to keep driving at high speeds. As long as we have connections between highways, streets and country roads, people are going to keep driving big trucks, buses and other dangerous vehicles on the streets. They will slow down, but not as much as they should. They will keep pushing and pushing the envelope, and it will take all our efforts to beat them back. Is that really what we want to do with our time?

Another workaround is to build hybrid ways that have some of the features of streets, highways and country roads. Chuck Marohn calls these "stroads," and he's talked a lot about how wasteful and dangerous they are. They're all over America, and they satisfy no one. In fact, the Strong Towns approach is to undo those hybrid stroads, by examining each one and deciding whether we want it to be a road or a street (or maybe a country road). If we want it to be a road, we close off the driveways and intersections and make it into a limited-access highway, as proposed by New Jersey Future for Route 1. If we want it to be a street, we add intersections and pedestrian infrastructure, institute traffic calming measures and encourage walkable businesses. If we want it to be a country road, we depave it to gravel or dirt - as many governments are doing anyway, for financial reasons.

Depaving country roads to gravel also helps with the problems of hybrid vehicles. It's a big help in getting cars and trucks to slow down, and it saves money too. On streets, some have tried or suggested restoring cobblestone or Belgian block surfaces for the same reasons; Hoboken is planning this.

The best solution is one that Chuck only hints at in his critique of "forgiving design": roads can be railroads. What if we had no bus bigger than a 30-passenger cutaway, and no truck bigger than a pickup? Everything else has to go by train.

One of the biggest safety features of railroads is their predictability: trains very rarely leave their tracks, unlike steered vehicles. If we keep the big loads and fast trips on trains, then they can't come barreling down our streets and country roads when we least expect them.

Trains also take care of the problem of driver inertia. Instead of an amateur driver rushing off the Interstate with his or her head full of speed, or a stroad driver enraged by stop-and-go traffic, the average pedestrian would encounter nothing but country drivers on gravel roads and local drivers on Belgian blocks. With no highways to drive on, people would buy cars for durability and efficiency, not speed - and probably less people would even buy cars.

Obviously, this is a long way from what we have now, but we have to keep imagining a better world.