Friday, January 18, 2013

We don't want a Frackin' Zee Bridge

Environmental advocates are doing a great job educating people on how horrible hydraulic fracturing is - in particular, it means hundreds more big, dangerous trucks on the roads - and building an ever-growing movement against this technique for extracting natural gas.


Unfortunately, current projections are for our energy use to grow, not shrink. Many fracking opponents also want the government to shut down nuclear power plants like Indian Point, which will further increase the unmet demand for energy. And many environmentalists support converting to vehicles powered by electricity and natural gas. Where will those come from?

Some of this demand can be satisfied through less destructive, renewable sources like wind and solar, but not enough. As long as the demand increases there will be pressure to frack, and we will not necessarily be able to resist forever. To really head off hydrofracking we need to reduce our demand for energy.

We can do some of this by switching to more efficient forms of electricity generation, lighting, heating and cooling, but those measures only go so far. We need to tackle one of the top areas of energy inefficiency: transportation. If people keep driving at anywhere near the rate they're doing now, in a few years most of that fracking gas is going to go right into the power sockets of our electric cars.

We could make a huge dent in our energy use if we shifted most of our freight and passenger trips from cars and trucks to trains, buses and boats. We can cut it even more by shifting those trips to walking, bicycles and elevators. To make the most of it, with convenient walks and transit trips, people would need to move their homes, jobs and stores to within walking distance of train stations.

It's at this point that someone usually brings in a Joel Kotkin-type argument about people really wanting to live in the suburbs or the country and avail themselves of "the freedom of a car." It's nonsense, of course. People also want to live in town with the freedom of walking. People want all kinds of impossible and incompatible things.

People respond to economic incentives. If you build lots of free or low-cost highways and parking and fight massive wars to keep the price of gas low, then people will drive. If you let people deduct part of their housing costs from their taxes, then big houses on big lots out in the suburbs or the country look great. If you make streets big and sidewalks narrow or nonexistent, people won't walk. If you limit the size and number of apartment buildings and require lots of parking to be provided for every home, business and transit station, people aren't going to build walkable communities, and the walkable communities that exist will be expensive. More driving, more fracking.

Now, as gas gets more expensive for people and roads get more expensive for governments, people are cutting back on their driving. Driving has been declining for the past few years. If it keeps declining, we may well see an easing of this pressure to frack.

One of the biggest incentives to drive is wide, low-cost highways. Since it was opened in 1955, the Tappan Zee Bridge has been an incentive to live far from transit and drive everywhere. Governor Cuomo is planning to widen the Tappan Zee Bridge, but he has pledged to keep the tolls low, increasing that incentive to drive. More driving, more fracking.

If you really care about hydrofracking, you won't just tell Cuomo to stop the fracking. You'll tell him to stop the Frackin' Zee Bridge.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

The benefits of density come from less space for cars

There's been a lot of good talk about density lately. Last week I pointed out that a lot of what some people object to about "density" is actually less space for their cars. The flip side to this is that a lot of what we want from "density" is actually less space for cars. Let's go back to our goals (see above):


Reducing pollution and increasing efficiency: Density can mean less need to drive places, lower construction costs per unit, and more efficient utility networks and goods distribution. Surface parking and wide streets undermine all of these.

Reducing carnage: Density can mean more people walking or taking transit instead of driving, and drivers that are moving slower and paying more attention to pedestrians. Surface parking and wide streets undermine all of these factors.

Improving society: Density can mean enough "eyes on the street" to make it really safe without the need for intensive policing. It can also facilitate more face-to-face contact with neighbors, and more chances for small positive interactions. As Eric Fischer pointed out in the comments to my previous post, Donald Appleyard documented the negative effects of wide streets with fast-moving cars on social networks. Parking lots are almost always unpleasant to walk through, let alone across.

Access for all: Density can mean a more efficient transit network, with higher ridership and thus less need for government subsidies. Spreading out transit destinations with roads and parking lots make transit less efficient and less desirable. The more money you put into a parallel road and parking network, the more you undermine transit ridership.

The thing is that you can have all these problems with high density. Multi-storey parking undermines construction savings and utility network efficiency. Making it easy to drive undermines any effort to reduce pollution and carnage or to save energy or increase transit ridership. The street level facades of multi-storey parking, can also make life unpleasant for people in the area.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Priority bus lanes on the Pulaski Skyway

Last month I told you how much the Pulaski Skyway degrades our urban environment just by carrying 30,000 cars into Manhattan, and observed that Chris Christie is planning to rebuild it using $1.8 billion that had been dedicated to building the ARC train tunnel. Now the New Jersey Department of Transportation has announced that for the first two-year stage of the rebuilding they will close the Manhattan-bound half of the highway beginning "after the Super Bowl" in February 2014.


I'm going to let this comment by Jeff Tittel, longtime director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, pass without comment for now: "There are ways to fix the Pulaski Skyway without creating a traffic nightmare. They should just build a new parallel span to replace the Skyway."

In my opinion it's great that they're shutting down the Skyway; if they would only leave it closed we would be making progress. But what about New Jersey residents who need to get into the city (or into Jersey City)? Janna Chernetz of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign hits it on the head: "To mitigate this transportation nightmare, Port Authority, New Jersey DOT, the Turnpike Authority and NJ Transit will need to work together to minimize the impacts to motorists and transit users," she told the Star-Ledger. "This can be done in the short term by increasing NJ Transit rail and PATH service and expanding bus service — with priority bus lanes — on area roadways."

I expect that we won't see too many people shifting to trains, because the trains are already full during rush hours, but there will probably be a decent increase in ridership on Manhattan-bound express buses. After the highway is reopened we'll probably see most of those people shift right back, depending of course on how long Christie manages to prop up the other components of car dependence like low gas prices and cheap parking.

So where to put those priority bus lanes? Well, we could always use another Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane. Or the shoulder lane that the New Jersey DOT is planning to open on the Newark Bay Bridge could be buses-only. But the best place to put the buses is on the Skyway itself.

If you think about it, there's no real good reason to have the Skyway functioning in only one direction. Instead of using the two north lanes for outbound cars, the New Jersey DOT could make them a two-way exclusive busway. It's true that both buses and trucks are currently banned from the Skyway, but that's not a weight issue, it's because they had too many crashes with cars. If there are only professional bus drivers using the road, the chance of a collision goes way down.

The question remains how best to accommodate all those buses in Manhattan. There's been a lot of criticism of the New Jersey Transit managers who left trains in the flood zone, with good reason, but another spectacular failure of management was the state government's bungling of the emergency bus/ferry system that replaced the disabled commuter rail and PATH lines. It illustrates the importance of terminal management.

The buses could just drop people off at the Liberty State Park ferry docks, like they did during the hurricane. They could go into Manhattan and park, further angering the crazy NIMBYs that have the ear of Daniel Squadron.

The best place to store these buses is in Brooklyn: to have them go right down West Street or Broadway and through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to Red Hook and Spring Creek. They could even make a few stops along the way, adding transit service for people in those areas.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

How much of "density" is just less space for cars?

There are many benefits from living and working in dense environments, but there are plenty of people who are against density, and come out in large numbers to protest any large development or increase in zoning allowances. Today, for example, David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington wrote about a full-on NIMBY freakout over small houses in alleys. Often this is couched in some half-baked argument about "quality of life" or "preserving the character of the neighborhood." As I wrote before, it's worth listening to NIMBYs, but NIMBYs are people, which means that you can't take everything they say at face value.


When I first heard phrases like "quality of life" and "the character of the neighborhood" I had no idea what they meant. I couldn't understand why Rudy Giuliani claimed to care about quality-of-life issues, but didn't seem to care that hot dogs come in packages of ten while hot dog buns come in packages of eight.

I got a lot of help understanding the anti-density mentality from StongTowns's Ian Rasmussen, who laid out his "party analogy" in this podcast with Chuck Marohn. Ian points out that at some parties, the guests bring more than their share of alcohol (and food, I would add), so every guest increases the fun.

In recent years, however, urban development has been more like a bad party full of stingy guests who don't even bring enough alcohol for themselves. "Every time someone shows up at the party, the party gets worse," Ian says. In the experience of residents, "Virtually every time a shovel went in the ground in the last fifty years, things got a little worse."

How did things get worse? Kaid Benfield talks a lot about access to "nature," and how often "dense" developments reduce the amount of parkland per capita. Others have talked about similar competition for resources like schools. While schools and parks are definitely important, I'm not convinced that they're the primary motivators for most NIMBYs. I think racial and social prejudice is definitely a factor for some people, but I'm not going to go into that in this post.

Ian Rasmussen paints a picture of the first arrivals at a new suburban development who are "fifteen minutes to downtown, fifteen minutes to the lake." But as more people arrive, congestion increases on the roads, and our suburbanites are now "more removed from the nearest pasture because there's another ring" of development beyond theirs. Both Benfield and Rasmussen point to congestion as a big factor. Others talk about competition for parking.

I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that in a lot of cases "density" just means less space for cars. A comment from "Bob" on Alpert's post lays it all out:

So, if these dwelling units become matter of right and are located where garages usually are, where will new residents park their cars? More vehciles flooding onto the streets? I know a family in AU Park that has a sub rosa 2 story ADU on an alley with several adults living in it. (Looks a lot like the photo, actually). Trash flows into the alley because there's no place to put it and the number of people living there. Plus 5 or so vehicles now squeeze onto the street in front of the house from this one property. And I thought that all ADU hipsters walk, bike or use Zipcar....

As in most cases, the threat from these cute little houses has nothing to do with parks or schools. It's about the value of allocating land for parking and driving. For David Alpert and most of the Greater Greater Washington readership, parking is a nasty scourge that separates people's homes from each other and from businesses without adding anything pleasant or interesting. For Linda Schmitt and Bob, parking is a scarce resource that is being gobbled up by the unwelcome new residents.

For the most part, "density" is an unhelpful, unenlightening way of thinking about neighborhood conflicts. Most conflicts about "density" are really conflicts about parking or road space. Try it yourself. Next time you're thinking of using the word "density" in this context, try replacing it with "competition for parking" or "competition for space on the road." I bet you'll find it clears some things up.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Will transit riders be represented in the 113th Congress?

Bill Shuster, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has named the majority-party members of the committee, who will join the Democratic members announced a few weeks ago. With Chuck Marohn, I'm skeptical about what role the Federal government can play in achieving our goals, so take this for what you think it's worth.

I looked over the list of Republican committee members, and I thought, "wow, these guys (all but two of them are men) are really from the middle of nowhere. How many of their constituents even ride transit?" So I looked up the American Community Survey figures from Table B08141 for the percentage of carfree households, and the percentage of households where the primary commute is by transit.

Unfortunately, the ACS only has figures for the pre-2010 districts, but I tried to find districts that matched the ones that actually elected these representatives.

NameStateDistrictHometownPrevious districtCarfree %Transit %
Sam GravesMO6Tarkio5.95%6.51%
Frank A.  LoBiondoNJ2Ventnor City5.05%4.23%
Richard HannaNY22Barneveld245.89%3.83%
Patrick MeehanPA7Drexel Hill2.71%3.78%
Lou BarlettaPA11Hazleton3.18%2.03%
Gary MillerCA42Diamond Bar441.58%1.82%
Duncan HunterCA50Lakeside521.81%1.69%
Daniel WebsterFL10Winter Garden82.59%1.64%
Don YoungAK1Fort Yukon5.72%1.46%
Trey RadelFL19Fort Meyers1.88%1.44%
Thomas MassieKY4Garrison2.19%1.30%
Shelley Moore CapitoWV2Glen Dale2.80%1.28%
Blake FarentholdTX27Corpus Christi3.04%1.14%
Andy HarrisMD1Cockeysville1.63%1.08%
Steve DainesMT1Bozeman1.98%0.93%
Roger WilliamsTX25Weatherford172.25%0.90%
Jeff DenhamCA19Merced2.13%0.88%
Steve SoutherlandFL2Panama City2.39%0.84%
Scott PerryPA4Carroll191.99%0.79%
Reid RibbleWI8Sherwood1.77%0.72%
Tom RiceSC7Myrtle Beach12.79%0.67%
Rodney DavisIL13Taylorville191.61%0.66%
Larry BucshonIN8Newburgh2.40%0.56%
John L. MicaFL7Winter Park2.19%0.56%
John J. Duncan, Jr.TN2Knoxville1.73%0.43%
Thomas E. PetriWI6Fond du Lac1.72%0.41%
Candice MillerMI10Harrison1.56%0.39%
Bob GibbsOH7Washington184.52%0.34%
Mark MeadowsNC11Cashiers2.20%0.32%
Bill Shuster, ChairmanPA9Hollidaysburg2.67%0.31%
Markwayne MullinOK2Westville1.99%0.27%
Rick CrawfordAR1Jonesboro2.43%0.21%
Howard CobleNC6Greensboro1.67%0.17%
Average2.67%1.32%

Now the Democrats:

NameStateDistrictHometownOld DistrictCarfree %Transit %
Jerrold NadlerNY10New York863.66%53.97%
Eleanor Holmes NortonDC1Washington26.03%38.02%
Michael E. CapuanoMA7Somerville825.75%34.30%
Albio SiresNJ8West New York1326.16%33.29%
Donna F. EdwardsMD4Fort Washington5.77%17.82%
Elijah E. CummingsMD7Baltimore10.86%13.51%
Daniel LipinskiIL3Western Springs3.50%10.92%
Sean Patrick MaloneyNY18Cold Spring192.93%7.47%
Dina TitusNV1Las Vegas5.73%5.46%
Eddie Bernice JohnsonTX30Dallas4.98%4.53%
Grace F. NapolitanoCA32Norwalk382.86%4.36%
Timothy H. BishopNY1Southampton2.12%4.10%
Janice HahnCA44Los Angeles363.20%4.03%
Rick LarsenWA2Lake Stevens2.01%2.73%
André CarsonIN7Indianapolis3.66%2.39%
Steve CohenTN9Memphis4.73%2.37%
Elizabeth EstyCT5Cheshire2.87%2.07%
Peter A. DeFazioOR4Springfield2.95%2.06%
Timothy J. WalzMN1Mankato1.96%1.48%
Lois FrankelFL22West Palm Beach2.10%1.20%
Cheri BustosIL17East Moline2.82%1.11%
John GaramendiCA3Walnut Grove101.69%1.08%
Rick NolanMN8Crosby2.04%0.97%
Ann KirkpatrickAZ1Flagstaff2.87%0.57%
Nick J. Rahall, II, Ranking minority memberWV3Beckley42.71%0.47%
Michael H. MichaudME2East Millinocket2.01%0.38%
Corrine BrownFL5Jacksonville31.56%0.28%
Average8.13%9.29%

So what do we take away from this? Well, a lot of Democrats do represent cities, and transit-commuting suburbs, in contrast to the Republicans. But does that translate to actual support for transit? Jerry Nadler is the only member who represents a district with a majority of carfree, transit-riding households, and I like him a lot, but I haven't heard of much that Holmes Norton, Capuano, Sires, Edwards, Cummings or Lipinski have done for transit riders. Sean Patrick Maloney is definitely one to watch: if he can get an FRA exemption for Metro-North, that would be huge.

In terms of transit-commuting population, the top twelve districts are all here in New York City, including the 14th, where I live. There are seven districts with more transit riders than Nadler's, and twelve with more riders than Holmes Norton. They're not directly represented on the committee. Meanwhile, Howard Coble's district is in fact the district with the absolute lowest percentage of transit riders.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013