Really Narrow Streets need good trains

I've written before about the concept of Really Narrow Streets. I got an email (and I know some of you got it too) about a project to build a new village in Maine with Really Narrow Streets. Conspicuously absent from the sales pitch was any explanation about how people would get to and from that village - except for one sentence saying that parking would be restricted to the outskirts of town. The proposed location is over a hundred miles from the nearest train station, and even buses don't go any closer than Bangor, more than 35 miles away.

The village sounds like a wonderful place, but if you want people to live there or even visit, they have to be able to reach it. And no matter how wonderful a place is, people sometimes have to leave. A village-sized community in particular will have some people who live there working outside, some people who live outside working there, and people leaving for shopping and services that a village of that scale is unable to provide, such as specialized medical treatment.

A couple weeks ago Alon discussed the division of trips into commuting and non-commuting. Here's the table I made based on one he gave:

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

The Piscataquis Village project is clearly in the quadrant where short errands can be done by walking, but longer trips have to be done by car. Residents and workers will all therefore be expected to have cars and use them on a regular basis. This makes me suspicious that, as on Roosevelt Island, people will be tempted to drive their cars into the village and colonize the Really Narrow Streets for parking "just this one time," or "just because I have a mobility impairment," or for hundreds of other reasons. People are always creative at finding reasons for the rules not to apply to them.

Almost all the Really Narrow Streets on the Piscataquis Village slideshow (photos mostly borrowed from Nathan Lewis, who borrowed them from random tourists) are easily accessible by train. When I was a kid, my parents took me on vacation to a small tourist town in Liguria. I remember being enchanted by the Really Narrow Streets, in particular one that turned into a path winding up into the hills to the next town. I also remember the train station right in the middle of town; the town was easier for tourists to get to by train than by car. The streets that I showed in Boston, Quebec and Rockport are all accessible by train. So are the streets that Lewis shows in Tokyo, London, Paris and various Italian towns.

This is true not only for old Really Narrow Streets, but new ones as well. There's a great development in Sweden built right on a commuter rail stop with hourly service (PDF). Residents who need goods and services that are not available in the village can hop on the train and be in Lund in five minutes.

Some day in the future there may be enough people living carfree in Piscataquis County to support restoring passenger service on the Bangor and Aroostook line, and then a new village with Really Narrow Streets will make perfect sense. Until then, we should look to development sites that are convenient to existing transit. Ideally, we are looking for a brownfield less than an hour away from a major job site on a train or bus line with frequent service all day and evening. It would also be nice to have walkable connections to an existing street grid, so that it can "infect" the surrounding area with its walkability.

Perhaps once we've built a few of these, we can propose an entire new or revived train line, with a series of walkable villages with Really Narrow Streets right next to the train stations and comfortable walking paths connecting them. But a walkable village without transit is a village of drivers who walk every once in a while.

The cost of new riders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Park-and-rides and congestion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting congestion in perspective

So a couple of commenters went there: saying that car congestion contributes to pollution and inefficiency, and therefore reducing congestion contributes to my goals (listed above). Superficially, that's true, and that argument's been used many times to get environmentalists to go along with all kinds of shitty road projects. But we need to keep these things in perspective, and that means taking into account other impacts on our goals.

The argument is that cars use gas and pollute the air constantly, so that the longer they take on a given trip, the more gas they use and the more pollution they generate for that trip. Acceleration runs the engine faster, so that stop-and-go traffic uses more gas and pollutes more than free-flowing traffic.

The main problem with that argument is that all of the "congestion mitigation" techniques are complete failures. Widening highways just induces more driving, so that before long the highways are all full. Building transit may take some cars off the road, but that road space is just taken by other cars. The only proven way to reduce congestion is road pricing.

Okay, so what's wrong with reducing congestion with road pricing? Well, it's not so bad if it incentivizes walking and transit use, but not if it simply discourages travel. We want that economic activity; we just want it to happen on foot, by bus and by train. Cars use more fuel and pollute more per person-trip than a moderately full bus, and way more than the same number of people on foot or by bike. Of course, road pricing would also free up space for buses, and increase demand for competing transit services, so that's a good thing in itself.

The overall point is that sometimes mitigating car congestion would contribute to our goals, but not enough to pay too much attention to. In general, it's just not a productive way to think about transit. Car congestion is a problem for drivers of private cars, and when transit planners worry about it, it's a sign that they're thinking more about those drivers than about their own passengers.

Carfree 24/7

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

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

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

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

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

What is congestion?

A lot of people really care about congestion. A major source of capital funding in this country is the federal Congestion Management and Air Quality grants. Occasionally, in an argument over some aspect of transportation policy, someone will announce, "But your proposal would cause congestion!" and sit back triumphantly, thinking they've just won.

In the past I've argued for congestion pricing, but honestly I just can't get too excited about fighting congestion. If you read my list of goals above, you'll notice that reducing congestion is not on there. Congestion does affect my goals, so I do care on some level, but other factors may outweigh it.

Unfortunately, "congestion is bad" has become such an article of faith that in 2006 when Mayor Bloomberg said "We like traffic, it means economic activity, it means people coming here," he was attacked by both car activists and cycling activists. I hope that you, my readers, will be a bit more tolerant.

But what is congestion? I think it's important to distinguish a few different aspects. First of all, congestion is not confined to the movement of vehicles or even people. We can have literal congested arteries, where fat deposits slow or block the flow of blood. We can have sinus and chest congestion, where excess mucus can interfere with our oxygen supply or our elimination of carbon dioxide. There is definitely congestion on electronic data networks, just this evening I heard a podcast where someone was talking about congestion in the power grid, and I imagine there's also congestion in aqueducts and sewers.

Back in the realm of vehicles, the most familiar form is road congestion, but we also have air traffic congestion and rail congestion. Road congestion isn't always vehicles: we can have congestion of bikes, pedestrians, roller skaters or golf carts.

What all these things have in common is trouble with flow. Interestingly, it's not all about speed. Sometimes the overall throughput is satisfactory, but the trouble is that there are stops and starts. Other times the flow is constant but it's too slow. There are also two different sources of congestion: either it comes from increased demand, or from other stuff blocking the duct. For example, in power congestion it's simply that people are trying to force more electrons through a grid of a constant size. In contrast, nasal passages and bronchial tubes stay the same width, but get blocked by mucus. Sudafed works by decreasing the production of mucus, while Mucinex works by thinning the mucus; both reduce the blockage, allowing air to flow better.

We see the same divisions in road congestion. Sometimes people get to where they're going in a reasonable amount of time, but they spend too much time stopping and starting, while other times the cars flow at a steady pace but slowly. Sometimes the traffic pattern induces a large number of cars through a road that isn't built to handle them, while other times it's a whole bunch of low-priority vehicles that block the higher-priority vehicles.

For a concrete example, we can turn to Mike Grynbaum's report from last year about the large number of off-duty taxis heading from Manhattan to Queens and back at 4PM for the change of shift. Just as it's more important for air to flow through our noses and lungs into our bloodstream and back out than for mucus to flow out, it's more important for buses, cars and trucks to get to Queens and back than taxis.

It's not that you don't need to drain mucus from your sinuses, and it's not that the taxis don't need to get to get out to Queens for their change of shift. It's just that the mucus could drain slower and leave more room for you to breathe, and the taxis could travel slower and leave more room for other vehicles. The same is true for all the entitled drivers who could be taking the train or traveling at less congested times.

So there you have it: off-duty taxis and discretionary car trips are the snot of New York's roads. Parking pricing is the Sudafed for that snot, and congestion pricing is Mucinex.

Transit planners, sprawl and "quality of life"

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

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

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

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

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